ATE’S CELL PHONE began ringing on the bar just as Mitchell picked up a can of shaving cream in the bathroom. Absently shaking the can, he watched from the corner of his eye as she walked in from the balcony and picked up the phone to look at the caller’s number. She hesitated, biting her lip; then she raised the phone to her ear and answered the call.

With the hot water running in the sink, he couldn’t hear what she was saying, but her shoulders were stiff, her head was bent, and she was rubbing the back of her neck with her free hand. Her body language spoke of tension and apprehension. From that, Mitchell deduced the lawyer was either telling her he was planning to leave for St. Maarten, or else giving her hell for not taking his other calls. A few moments after the call began, it ended, and she put the phone down.

The call hadn’t lasted long enough for any sort of temperamental outburst—not from a lawyer. Lawyers made a career out of haranguing, and that phone call wasn’t long enough for a lawyer to even start getting wound up. The only remaining logical conclusion was that Kate’s lawyer-boyfriend had simply told her he was coming to Anguilla and, also based on the brevity of the call, Kate hadn’t attempted to discourage him. That was not the behavior Mitchell had expected from her.

When Kate walked into the bathroom, Mitchell was standing at the sink with a towel around his hips, shaving. Surprised by the sweet intimacy of the moment, she leaned against the vanity and watched in the mirror as he finished shaving his throat. His face was covered in lather, with nothing visible except black eyebrows, long-lashed deep blue eyes, and a finely sculpted, sensual mouth.

He rinsed the razor under running water and glanced at her in the mirror, his mouth quirking in a half smile at her fascinated interest; then he resumed his task. Stroke by deft stroke of the razor, his tanned face, with its chiseled jawline and strongly molded cheekbones, began to emerge from beneath the lather.

Kate watched, but thoughts of the phone call she’d just received from Evan’s secretary soon furrowed her forehead into an apprehensive frown. According to Patricia, she and Evan had worked late into Sunday night, and Evan had finally hammered out a satisfactory out-of-court settlement with the opposing counsel. He’d tried to call Kate from his office to tell her he was catching a 2:30AM flight, arriving at 12:35PM, St. Maarten time, but all he’d gotten was a voice mail message at the villa and on her cell phone. Refusing to leave a voice mail message, he’d slammed his phone down and instructed Patricia to start calling Kate on Monday morning and to keep trying until Patricia actually heard Kate’s voice. “If I were you,” Patricia had laughingly warned, “I’d meet him at the door with a soothing smile and a martini this afternoon. He’s pissed off over not being able to get through to you for two days.” Evan was going to be feeling a lot worse, Kate knew, when she met him at the door with her luggage packed.

Mitchell noted her expression in the mirror. “You look like a woman with a problem,” he observed conversationally.

“He’s on his way to Anguilla.”

“You definitely have a problem.”

“I’ll have to meet him at the villa and try to explain things there. I don’t know what I should do or say—”

“That’s a much bigger problem.”

Surprised and a little hurt by his glib responses and seemingly cavalier attitude toward a situation that was going to be very difficult for her, Kate said quietly, “You seem to have all the answers. Do you have any guidance to offer in a situation like this?”

“Since he’s already on his way here, the scenario is set and it’s too late to alter it,” he replied, rinsing off the razor again. “Assuming he and I are both gentlemen, our roles are now fixed and there are prescribed rules to follow. Assuming you plan to be with me from now on, rather than staying with him, the same is true for you.”

Vaguely surprised by his use of an indefinite phrase like “assuming you plan,” Kate watched him shave his upper lip, and then she said, “Exactly what is your ‘gentlemanly’ role?”

“I am obliged to express a willingness to bow out temporarily so that he can have whatever is left of his vacation with you, along with the opportunity to fight for you during that time.”

“What’s his role?”

Passing the razor from jaw to cheekbone on the left side of his face, he said, “As soon as he understands you’re serious about wanting to be with someone else, he is obliged to accept defeat gracefully and wish you well—thus impressing you with what a prince you’re losing while drowning you in guilt and doubt—and then to get the hell out of my way.”

“And my role is?”

“To convince him you’re serious in the shortest possible time—measured in hours, not days—and to avoid letting him get you near that nice big bed while you’re doing your explaining and convincing.”

The reason for his curt tone and his reference to the bed hit her, and Kate stared at him. “Are you jealous?”

“Not yet, but I’m heading in that direction,” he said, making short, quick razor strokes beneath his left ear.

“But why?” Kate said, trying to hide how shamefully pleased she was by his admission. “I can’t just break up with him on the telephone or meet him at the airport and tell him there. I need to be at the villa so I can talk to him and let him down easily.”

Instead of responding to that, Mitchell rinsed off his face and asked a question of his own: “How long does it take to fly here from Chicago?”

“Around eight hours, since there aren’t any direct flights.”

“It seems to me that encouraging him to fly eight hours to get here, thinking he’s going to be with you for the rest of his vacation, is a curious way to ‘let him down easily.’ ”

It finally dawned on Kate that he was under a mistaken impression, and she quickly clarified the situation for him. “That phone call wasn’t from him; it was from his secretary. He had her call me to tell me his flight left at two-thirty this morning, and lands at twelve thirty-five. I didn’t think he’d try to come down here at all when there are only four days left of our vacation. If I’d had a chance to talk to him before he left, I would never have let him come here thinking everything was going to be the same between us.”

“I’m sorry. I should have known that.”

Kate dismissed his worry with a smile, but she was intrigued by the flattering discovery of her feminine power over him, and fascinated by the rules of conduct that he’d recited with such absolute certainty. Deciding to put both of them to a harmless test, just for fun, she folded her arms over her chest, tipped her head to the side, and pretended to inspect her manicure. “About those rules you talked about— What would you, as a gentleman, have been required to do if I’d, well, vacillated just a little about breaking up with my boyfriend?”

The studied nonchalance in her voice instantly alerted Mitchell to what she was up to, and he suppressed a smile as he reached for a towel. A stranger to the games that tipped the delicate balance of power between male and female, he was not. “Under those circumstances,” he said mildly, “the rules are very clear, and very simple: You would be required to telephone me to tell me that, and then I would simply switch roles with him.”

“You would just accept defeat gracefully, wish me well, and then get out of his way?” Kate asked, disappointed.

Behind the towel, Mitchell’s smile widened to a grin. “Are you sure you want to play this particular game with me, sweetheart?”

“I don’t think so,” she said warily, and he laughed.

Suffused with pleasure at his endearment, Kate added sternly, “Just don’t let my Orphan Annie curls and guileless choir-girl image fool you; I can hold my own with you.”

“You have a police record; your choir-girl image is shot.”

Kate laughed and shook her head at him in feigned disgust. He lifted his brows, waiting for a verbal comeback, and when she had none, he gave her a boyish grin of satisfied superiority and turned back to the sink to comb his hair.

Kate glanced at her watch. “I don’t want him to have to watch me packing, so I need to be finished before one, which is about when he’ll arrive at the villa. It’s a little after eleven now, so I should leave in fifteen minutes.” She glanced down at the bright blue silk shirt she’d knotted at the midriff above a pair of white shorts, and decided to wear pants instead for what lay ahead of her. “I think I’ll change clothes,” she said aloud as she walked over to the closet. She took out a pair of white pants and noticed that the black dress and shoes she’d worn the night before were missing. “Do you know what happened to the black dress I wore last night?”

Mitchell paused, comb in hand, and frowned in disbelief as she walked behind him. “If that’s what you’re planning to wear while you’re doing your explaining and letting him down easily, I don’t think you’ve completely grasped the concept behind the rules we discussed.”

Kate reacted with horror, then hilarity, at his imagining she had any such intention; then she quickly lowered her eyes and slid serenely onto the chair at the dressing table opposite the sink to brush her hair. “There’s that tone again,” she mused as if thinking to herself. “Was that—yes, I think it was—the sound of a slightly jealous man who claims he would give me up without so much as a protest if I were to change my mind today at the villa.”

Briefly closing his eyes in amused resignation, Mitchell silently conceded the last verbal round to her and resumed combing his hair. “I’m beginning to understand why your father wept.” The truth was the opposite—as he watched her brush her glossy red hair, he couldn’t remember ever feeling as utterly lighthearted and content as he felt at that moment. “Diederik took our clothes from last night away while you were in the shower. He’ll return everything nicely pressed and brushed in a little while.”

She joined him on the balcony ten minutes later, where he was standing at the wall, looking out at the water. “I have to leave.”

Mitchell turned, noticed the suitcase she was carrying, and the sight of it gave him a moment’s pause before he realized she’d need it to pack her things at the villa.

The cheerful mood of a few minutes earlier turned somber as she put the garment bag on the table and walked over to him to say good-bye. “Are you sure you don’t want me to go with you and wait in Philipsburg?” he asked, slipping his hands around her waist.

Kate rested her hands against his chest and shook her head. Beneath his white knit polo shirt, she could feel his heart beating in a slow, steady rhythm, and she drew strength from that. “I need some time alone before I see him, time to separate mentally and emotionally from us and focus on him instead. I’ll meet you at Captain Hodges Wharf, right where we got off the boat yesterday, at four o’clock.”

“Depending on how he reacts, you may end up there in a lot less than three hours after you break the news.”

“Then I’ll use the time to separate myself from him and begin to focus on us.”

Mitchell smiled down into her green eyes, admiring her ethics and sense of fairness.

She smiled back, the breeze teasing her hair, her fingers splaying across his heart in a tender touch he was already associating with her.

She was absolutely right, Mitchell knew, about the wisdom of forgetting about “them” for the next few hours. “Kiss me good-bye,” he said, prepared to give her a brief, chaste kiss, but she wrapped her arms around him, molded her parted lips to his, and gave him a long, scorching kiss that made his hands flex and his fingers dig into her back.

On the beach below, Detective Childress lifted his camera and aimed it casually at the façade of the hotel; then he shifted it to the left and up, and casually snapped yet another picture of the couple on the fourth-floor balcony.

Mitchell stayed where he was, rather than walking her to the door of the suite, but his view from the balcony included the main entrance of the hotel, so he saw her a few minutes later when the doorman signaled a taxi for her and put her suitcase into the backseat. As the taxi passed below their balcony, she smiled and waved at him through the open window.

“Hurry back,” he called to her, and she nodded.

The taxi made a U-turn and drove off down the private drive toward the main road, and Mitchell watched it vanish; then he turned his head toward the beach and leaned his forearms on the balcony wall, watching a cruise ship gliding slowly across the horizon. Tomorrow, he decided, he’d take Kate for a cruise aboard Zack’s boat. In a few days, Zack and Julie would arrive from Italy, and he could introduce Kate to them. He wanted to show her the house he was building on Anguilla, too—his first house, one that was being built amid a grove of palm trees on a gorgeous stretch of pristine beach with a breathtaking view of the water.

Of all the places in the world where he could have built a home, he’d chosen on a whim a tiny island in the Caribbean where a redhead with shining green eyes and a heart-stopping smile was going to douse him with a drink, delight all his senses, warm his heart, and then steal it. All of that—in less than forty-eight hours.