he phone rang. Jaine hesitated, debating whether or not to answer it. No more reporters should be bothering to call, since Marci had given them their story, but considering the timing, the call was probably from someone who knew her and had just heard her name on television and wanted to talk to her, as if her fifteen minutes of dubious fame could somehow rub off on him/her by association. She didn’t want to rehash anything about that damn list; she just wanted it to die.

On the other hand, it might be Luna or T.J. or Marci.

She finally answered on the seventh ring, prepared to lapse into an Italian accent and pretend to be someone else.

“How could you do this to me?” her brother, David, snapped.

Jaine blinked, trying to shift gears. God, would he never get over not being given temporary custody of their dad’s car?

“I didn’t do anything to you. It isn’t my fault Dad wanted to leave the car here. I’d rather you have it, believe me, because now I have to park my car in the driveway instead of the garage.”

“This isn’t about the car!” he half-yelled. “That thing on television! How could you do that? How do you think it’ll make me look?”

This was getting weird. She thought rapidly, trying to come up with some way this would affect David, but the only thing she could think of was perhaps he didn’t meet all the list’s criteria and he didn’t want Valerie to know there were criteria. Discussing her brother’s physical attributes wasn’t something she wanted to do.

“I’m sure Valerie won’t make any comparisons,” she said as diplomatically as possible. “Uh, I have a pot boiling on the stove, and I need to – ”

“Valerie?” he demanded. “What’s she got to do with this? Are you saying she was in on this… this list thing?”

Weirder and weirder. She scratched her head. “I don’t think I know what you’re talking about,” she finally said.

“That thing on television!”

“What about it? How does it affect you?”

“You gave your name! If you’d ever gotten married, you wouldn’t still have ‘Bright’ as your last name, but no, you have to stay single, so your name is the same as mine. It isn’t a real common name, in case you’ve never noticed! Just think of the ribbing I’m going to take at work because of this!”

This was going a bit far, even for David. His paranoia was usually much less pronounced. She loved him, but he’d never quite gotten over his conviction that the universe revolved around him. His attitude had at least been understandable when he’d still been in high school, because he was tall and handsome and had been wildly popular with the girls, but he’d been out of high school for fifteen years.

“I don’t think anyone will notice,” she said as carefully as possible.

“That’s your problem; you never think before you open your big mouth – ”

She didn’t think now; she just did what came naturally. “Kiss my ass,” she said, and slammed down the phone.

Not the most mature reaction, she thought, but a satisfying one.

The phone rang again. No way was she answering it, she thought, and for the first time wished she had Caller ID. Maybe she needed it.

The ringing went on and on. After she counted twenty, she snatched up the receiver and yelled, “What!” If David thought he could harass her like this, see what he thought when she called him at two in the morning. Brothers!

It was Shelley. “Well, you’ve done it now,” was her sisterly opening shot.

Jaine rubbed between her eyebrows; a definite headache was forming. After the exchange with David, she waited to see where this one was going.

“I won’t be able to hold up my head in church.”

“Really? Oh, Shelley, I’m so sorry,” Jaine said sweetly. “I didn’t realize you have the dreaded Limp Neck disease. When were you diagnosed?”

“You are such a show-off. You never think of anyone but yourself. Did it ever cross your mind, just once, how something like this would affect me, or the children? Stefanie is mortified. All her friends know you’re her aunt – ”

“How do they know? I’ve never met her friends.”

Shelley paused. “I suppose Stefanie told them.”

“She’s so mortified she owned up to the relation? Strange.”

“Strange or not,” Shelley said, regrouping, “that’s a disgusting thing for you to put out there in public.”

Swiftly Jaine mentally reviewed Marci’s television spot. It hadn’t been that specific. “I didn’t think Marci was that bad.”

“Marci? What are you talking about?”

“The spot on television. Just now.”

“Oh. You mean it’s on television, too?” Shelley asked in rising horror. “Oh, no!”

“If you didn’t see it on television, what are you talking about?”

“That thing on the Internet! Stefanie got it from there.”

The Internet? Her headache exploded into full bloom. One of the geeks at work had probably posted the newsletter article, in its entirety. Fourteen-year-old Stefanie had indeed had an education.

“I didn’t put it on the Internet,” she said tiredly. “Someone at work must have.”

“Regardless of who did it, you’re behind that… that list even existing!”

Suddenly Jaine was fed up past the gills; she felt as if she had been walking a tightrope for several days now, she was stressed to the max, and the people who should be most concerned and supportive were giving her hell. She couldn’t take any more, and she couldn’t even think of anything scathing to say. “You know,” she said quietly, interrupting Shelley’s harangue, “I’m tired of the way you and David automatically assume I’m to blame without even asking me how this whole thing happened. He’s mad at me about the car and you’re mad at me about the cat, so you attack without asking if I’m okay with all this attention about the list, which if you thought for one second, you’d know I’m not okay with it at all. I just told David to kiss my ass, and you know what, Shelley? You can kiss my ass, too.” With that, she hung up on yet another sibling. Thank God, there weren’t any more.

“That was me at my peacemaking, mediating best,” she said to BooBoo, then had to blink away an uncharacteristic dampness in the eyes.

The phone rang again. She turned it off. The numbers in the message window on the answering machine said she had way too many messages. She deleted them without listening to any of them and went to the bedroom to get out of her work clothes. BooBoo padded in her wake.

The prospect of getting any comfort from BooBoo was dubious, but she picked him up anyway and rubbed her chin against the top of his head. He tolerated the caress for a minute – after all, she wasn’t doing the good stuff, scratching behind his ears – then wiggled free and jumped lightly to the floor.

She was too tense and depressed to sit down and relax, or even eat. Washing the car would burn off some energy, she thought, and quickly changed into shorts and a T-shirt. The Viper wasn’t very dirty – they hadn’t had any rain in over two weeks – but she liked it to gleam. All that washing and polishing, besides burning off stress, was satisfying to her soul. She definitely needed some soul-satisfying right now.

She fumed as she collected the things she would need to make the Viper beautiful. It would serve Shelley right if Jaine took BooBoo over there and left him to destroy her cushions; since Shelley had new furniture – it seemed she always had new furniture – she likely wouldn’t be as sanguine as Jaine about losing cushion stuffing. The only thing that kept her from transferring BooBoo was the fact that their mom had entrusted her beloved cat to her custody, not Shelley’s.

As for David – well, it was pretty much the same situation. She would have transferred Dad’s car to David’s garage except for the fact her dad had asked her to take care of it, and if anything happened to it while it was in David’s custody, she would feel doubly responsible. Any way she looked at it, she was stuck. After gathering her chamois cloths, pail, special car-washing soap that wouldn’t make the paint job lose its luster, wax, and window cleaner, she let BooBoo out onto the kitchen porch so he could watch the proceedings. Since cats didn’t like water, she didn’t think he’d be very interested, but she wanted the company. He settled in a tiny patch of late afternoon sunshine and promptly took a kitty nap.

The driveway next door was bereft of dented brown Pontiac, so she didn’t have to worry about accidentally spraying the thing and arousing Sam’s ire, though in her opinion, a good wash job wouldn’t hurt it. Probably wouldn’t help much, either – it was too far gone for such surface beautifying to make much difference – but a dirty car offended her. Sam’s car offended her a lot.

She settled down to industriously washing and rinsing, one section at a time, so the soap didn’t have time to dry and cause spots. This particular soap wasn’t supposed to spot, but she didn’t trust it. Her dad had taught her to wash a car this way, and she had never found a better method.

“Hey.”

“Shit!” she shrieked, jumping a foot in the air and dropping her soapy cloth. Her heart nearly exploded out of her chest. She whirled, water hose in hand.

Sam jumped back as water sprayed across his legs. “Watch what the hell you’re doing,” he snapped.

Jaine was instantly incensed. “Okay,” she said agreeably, and let him have it full in the face.

He yelped and dodged to the side. She stood braced, water hose in hand, watching as he rubbed a hand across his dripping face. The first water attack, accidental as it had been, had wet his jeans from the knees down. The second one had pretty much taken care of his T-shirt. The front of it was soaking wet, sticking to his skin like plaster. She tried not to notice the hard planes of his chest.

They faced each other like gunfighters, separated by no more than ten feet. “Are you fucking crazy?” he half-shouted.

She let him have it again. She sprayed with a vengeance, chasing him with the stream of water as he tried to dodge and dance out of its way.

“Don’t tell me I’m crazy!” she shouted, putting her finger over the nozzle to narrow the opening and thus get more force, and distance. “I’ve had it with people blaming me for everything!” She got him in the face again. “I’m so damn sick of you, and Shelley, and David, and everyone at work, and all the stupid reporters, and BooBoo shredding my cushions! I’m fed up, do you hear?”

He abruptly switched tactics, from evade to attack. He came in low, like a linebacker, not trying to evade the blast of water she aimed at him. About half a second too late, she tried to dodge to the side. His shoulder crashed into her midriff, the impact driving her back against the Viper. Quick as a snake striking, he snatched the water hose from her grip. She lunged for the hose, and he wrestled her back into place, pinning her to the Viper with his weight.

They were both breathing hard. He was soaking wet from head to toe, water leaching out of his clothes into hers until she was almost as wet as he. She glared up at him, and he glared down at her, their noses only a few inches apart.

Water was clinging to his lashes. “You sprayed me,” he accused, as if he couldn’t believe she had done such a thing.

“You scared me,” she accused in return. “It was an accident.”

“That was when you sprayed me the first time. You did it on purpose the second time.”

She nodded.

“And you said ‘shit’ and ‘damn.’ You owe me fifty cents.”

“I’m putting in a new rule. You can’t incite me to riot, then fine me for rioting.”

“You’re welshing on me?” he asked in disbelief.

“You bet. It’s all your fault.”

“How’s that?”

“You deliberately scared me, and don’t try to deny it. That makes the first word your fault.” She gave an experimental wiggle, trying to slide out from under the pressure of his weight. Damn, he was heavy, and about as unyielding as the sheet metal behind her.

He squelched her escape attempt by settling even more heavily against her. Water from his clothes dripped down her legs.

“What about the second one?”

“You said f – ” She caught herself. “My two words added together aren’t nearly as bad as your one word.”

“What, they have a points system now?”

She gave him a withering look. “The point is, I wouldn’t have said either word if (a) you hadn’t scared me and (b) you hadn’t cussed at me first.”

“If we’re assigning blame here, I wouldn’t have cussed if you hadn’t sprayed me.”

“And I wouldn’t have sprayed you if you hadn’t scared me. See, I told you it was all your fault,” she said triumphantly, tilting her chin at him.

He took a deep breath. The movement of his chest flattened her breasts even more than they already were, making her abruptly aware of her nipples. Her nipples were acutely aware of him. Uh-oh. Her eyes widened in sudden alarm.

He was looking down at her with an unreadable expression. “Let me go,” she said, more nervous than she cared to reveal.

“No.”

“No!” she repeated. “You can’t say no. It’s against the law to hold me against my will.”

“I’m not holding you against your will; I’m holding you against your car.”

“By force!”

He shrugged an admission. He didn’t seem very alarmed at the prospect of violating any laws against manhandling neighbors.

“Let me go,” she said again.

“I can’t.”

She eyed him suspiciously. “Why not?” Actually, she was afraid she knew why not. “Why not” had been growing in his wet jeans for a few minutes now. She was doing her dead level best to ignore it, and from the waist up – except for her rebellious nipples – she was mostly succeeding. From the waist down, she was an abject failure.

“Because I’m going to do something I’ll regret.” He shook his head, as if he didn’t understand it himself. “I still don’t have a whip and chair, but what the hell, I’ll risk it.”

“Wait,” she squeaked, but it was too late.

His dark head dipped.

The late afternoon spun away. From somewhere up the street she heard a child shriek with laughter. A car drove by. The faint sound of hedge clippers drifted to her ears. All of that seemed very far away and disconnected from reality. What was real was Sam’s mouth on hers, his tongue tangling with hers, the warm male scent of his body in her nostrils and filling her lungs. And his taste – oh, his taste. He tasted like chocolate, as if he had just eaten a Hershey bar. She wanted to devour him.

She realized she was clutching fistfuls of wet cotton fabric. One at a time, without breaking the kiss, he peeled her hands off his shirt and tucked them around his neck, allowing him to settle more completely against her, from knee to shoulder.

How could just a kiss arouse her so totally? But it wasn’t just a kiss; he used his entire body, rubbing his chest against her nipples until the friction made them stand out, hard and aching, moving the bulge of his erection against her stomach with a slow, subtle rhythm that was nevertheless as powerful as a sea surge.

Jaine heard the wild, smothered sound that erupted from her throat, and she tried to climb him, tried to get high enough to position that bulge where it would do the most good. She was burning hot, dying with heat, half-mad from the sudden onslaught of sexual need and frustration.

He was still holding the water hose in one hand. He locked both arms around her and lifted her the few inches needed. The stream of water arced wildly, splattering BooBoo and making him jump up with an outraged hiss, then splashing against the car and wetting them even more. She didn’t care. His tongue was in her mouth, and her legs were wrapped around his hips and that bulge was right where she wanted it.

He moved – another of those subtle, rolling thrusts – and she damn near climaxed right there. Her nails bit into his back, and she made a guttural sound, arching in his arms.

He tore his mouth free from hers. He was panting, the expression in his eyes hot and wild. “Let’s go inside,” he said, the words so low and rough they were almost unintelligible, not much more than a growl.

“No,” she moaned. “Don’t stop!” Oh, God, she was close, so close. She arched against him again.

“Jesus Christ!” He closed his eyes, his expression savage with lust barely restrained. “Jaine, I can’t fuck you out here. We have to go inside.”

Fuck? Inside?

Oh my God, she was about to do it with him and she wasn’t on the pill yet!

“Wait!” she yelled in panic, pushing against his shoulders, uncoiling her legs from around his hips and kicking wildly. “Stop! Let me go!”

“Stop?” he said in outraged disbelief. “You said ‘don’t stop’ just a second ago.”

“I changed my mind.” She was still pushing on his shoulders. She was still accomplishing exactly nothing.

“You can’t change your mind!” He sounded desperate now.

“Yes, I can.”

“Do you have herpes?”

“No.”

“Syphilis?”

“No.”

“Gonorrhea?”

“No.”

“AIDS?”

“No!”

“Then you can’t change your mind.”

“What I have is a ripe egg.” That was probably a lie. Almost positively a lie. She would probably start her period tomorrow, so the little ovum was long past viability, but she didn’t take chances with potential offspring. If any life was left in the bundle of DNA, Sam’s sperm would jump-start it. Some things were just a given.

The ripe-egg news gave him pause. He thought about it. Offered: “I can use a condom.”

She gave him a withering look. At least, she hoped it withered him. So far, he was remarkably unwithered. “Condoms have only about a ninety to ninety-four percent success rate. That means, at best, their fail rate is six percent.”

“Hey, those are good odds.”

Another withering look. “Oh, yeah? Can you imagine what would happen if even one of your little marauders jumped my girl?”

“They’d tie up and fight like two wildcats in a sack.”

“Yeah. Like we just did.”

He looked horrified. He released her and stepped back.

“They’d be in the sack before they even introduced themselves.”

“We’ve never introduced ourselves,” she felt compelled to point out.

“Shit.” He rubbed a hand over his face. “I’m Sam Donovan.”

“I know who you are. Mrs. Kulavich told me. I’m Jaine Bright.”

“I know. She told me. She even told me how you spell your name.”

Now, how on earth had Mrs. Kulavich known that?

“It was supposed to be Janine,” she explained. “But the first n got left off the birth certificate form, and Mom decided she liked it that way.” Jaine wished she had been a Janine. “Shelley,” “David,” “Janine”; the names all fit. Jaine was a wild card, the odd one out.

“I like ‘Jaine’ better,” he said. “It suits you. You aren’t a Janine.”

Yeah, she thought morosely. That was the problem.

“So what’s this problem you’re having with… who was it? Oh, yeah. Shelley, David, everyone at work, the reporters, and BooBoo. Why are you having trouble with reporters?”

She was impressed by his memory. She couldn’t have rattled off a list of names that had been shouted at her while she was being sprayed with cold water.

“Shelley is my older sister. She’s mad at me because Mom asked me to baby-sit BooBoo and she wanted the honor herself. David’s my brother. He’s mad at me because Dad asked me instead of David to baby-sit his car. You know who BooBoo is.”

He looked over her shoulder. “He’s the cat on your car.”

“On my – ” She whirled in horror. BooBoo was pussyfooting across the Viper’s hood. She snatched him off before he had time to evade, and indignantly returned him to the house. Then she rushed back to the Viper and bent down to inspect the hood for even the tiniest scratch.

“Don’t guess you like a cat on your car either,” Sam said smugly.

She tried out another withering look on him, though she had noticed the egg news had done a good job of withering him anyway. “There’s no comparison between my car and yours,” she growled, then gave the empty driveway a startled look. No brown Pontiac. But here was Sam. “Where is your car?”

“The Pontiac isn’t mine. It belongs to the city.” She felt weak with relief. Thank God. It would have been a serious blow to her self-esteem if she’d slept with the owner of that wreck. On the other hand, maybe she needed the Pontiac as a mental brake on her sexual impulses. If it had been sitting there, the preceding episode probably wouldn’t have gotten so out of hand.

“Then how did you get home?” she asked, looking around.

“I keep my truck parked in the garage. Keeps the dust and pollen and bird deposits off it.”

“Truck? What kind of truck?”

“Chevy.”

“Four-wheel drive?” He looked like a four-wheel-drive kind of guy.

He gave her a superior sneer. “Is there any other kind?”

“Oh, man,” she sighed. “Can I see it?”

“Not until we finish our negotiations.”

“Negotiations?”

“Yeah. About when we’re going to finish what we just started.”

Her mouth fell open. “You mean you aren’t going to let me see your truck until I agree to have sex with you?”

“You got it.”

“You’re crazy if you think I want to see your truck that bad!” she shouted.

“It’s red.”

“Oh, man,” she whined.

He crossed his arms. “Put up or shut up.”

“Don’t you mean ‘put out’?”

“I said we’d negotiate a date. I didn’t say we’d do it now. You couldn’t pay me to go anywhere near your egg.”

She gave him a speculative look. “I’ll show you my power plant if you’ll show me your truck.”

He shook his head. “No deal.”

She never told anyone about her dad’s car. For all her friends knew, he was simply paranoid about the family sedan. But it was a bargaining chip to top all bargaining chips, the ace in the hole, the guaranteed result-getter. Besides, Sam was a cop; it probably wouldn’t hurt to have him in the loop, so he would know that her garage needed protecting at all times. The car was insured for a fortune, but it was also irreplaceable.

“I’ll let you see my dad’s car if you let me see your truck,” she said slyly.

Despite himself, he looked interested. Probably her expression told him that her dad’s car was out of the ordinary.

“What kind is it?”

She shrugged. “I don’t say the words out in public.”

He leaned down and offered his ear to her. “Whisper them.”

She put her mouth against his ear and felt faint from the warm male scent that wafted to her nostrils again. She whispered two words.

He straightened so abruptly he bumped her nose. “Ouch!” She rubbed the aching tip.

“Let me see it,” he said hoarsely.

She crossed her arms, mimicking his earlier position. “Do we have a deal? You see my dad’s car, and I see your truck?”

“Hell, you can drive my truck!” He turned and looked at her garage as if it were the Holy Grail. “It’s in there?”

“Safe and secure.”

“It’s an original? Not a kit?”

“Original.”

“Man,” he breathed, already striding to the garage.

“I’ll get the key.” She dashed inside for the key to the padlock, and returned to find him waiting impatiently.

“Be careful and open the door just enough to slide through,” she cautioned. “I don’t want it seen from the street.”

“Yeah, yeah.” He took the key from her and inserted it in the padlock.

They entered the dark garage, and Jaine fumbled for the light switch. The overheads came on, illuminating the low-slung, tarp-covered hump.

“How did he get it?” Sam asked in a half whisper, as if he were in church. He reached for the edge of the tarp.

“He was on the development team.”

He gave her a sharp look. “Your dad is Lyle Bright?”

She nodded an admission.

“Man,” he sighed, and lifted the tarp.

A low moan broke from his throat.

She knew how he felt. She always felt a little breathless herself when she looked at the car, and she had grown up with it.

It wasn’t particularly flashy. The automobile paints back then hadn’t had the shine of today’s paints. It was a kind of silvery gray, spare, without the luxuries so taken for granted by today’s consumer. There wasn’t a cup holder in sight.

“Man,” he said again, bending to look at the instrumentation. He was careful not to touch the car. Most people, ninety-nine out of a hundred, couldn’t have resisted. Some would have been brash enough to swing a leg over the low frame and slide into the driver’s seat. Sam treated the car with the reverence it deserved, and an odd sensation squeezed her heart. She felt a little light-headed, and everything in the garage began to fade out of focus except for his face. She concentrated on breathing, blinking fast, and in a moment the world clicked back into place.

Wow. What was that all about?

He re-covered the car as tenderly as a mother covers a sleeping infant. Wordlessly he fished his keys out of his jeans pocket and held them out to her.

She took them, then looked down at her clothes. “I’m wet.”

“I know,” he replied. “I’ve been looking at your nipples.”

Her mouth fell open, and she quickly clamped her hands over the pertinent portions of her wet T-shirt. “Why didn’t you say something?” she demanded hotly.

He made a scoffing noise in the back of his throat. “What, you think I’m crazy?”

“It would serve you right if I drove your truck without changing clothes!”

He shrugged. “After you let me see this, plus your nipples, I guess I owe you.”

She started to argue that she hadn’t let him see her nipples, that he had looked without her permission; then she remembered that she had seen a lot more than his nipples that morning and decided not to bring up the subject.

Like he was going to give her the choice. “Besides,” he pointed out, “you saw my cock. That has to be worth more points than nipples.”

“Hah,” she said. “Value is in the eye of the beholder. And I did tell you to cover up, if you’ll remember.”

“After you’d watched for how long?”

“Only long enough to call Mrs. Kulavich and get your number,” she said self-righteously because it was the truth. So what if she’d had to chat with Mrs. Kulavich for a minute? “And you didn’t seem to think it was important enough to cover up. No, you waved it around like you were starting a race with it.”

“I was enticing you.”

“You were not! You didn’t know I was looking.”

He arched an eyebrow.

She threw the keys back at him. “I wouldn’t drive your truck now if you begged me! It probably has cooties in it! You lech, you disgusting… disgusting penis-waver – ”

He fielded the keys with one hand. “Are you saying you weren’t enticed?”

She started to tell him she hadn’t felt even a twinge of enticement, but her tongue refused to utter what would have been the biggest lie of her life.

He smirked. “Thought so.”

There was only one way to recover the upper hand. Jaine put her hands on her hips, letting her nipples thrust against the thin wet layers of bra and T-shirt. Like a laser-guided missile, his gaze homed in on the front of her shirt. She saw him swallow.

“You don’t play fair,” he said thickly.

She smirked in retaliation for his smirk. “Remember that,” she said, and turned to leave the garage.

He slipped past her. “I go first,” he said. “I want to see you stepping into the sunlight.”

Her hands clamped back in position over her breasts.

“Spoilsport,” he muttered, and slid sideways through the narrow opening. He stepped back inside so abruptly she collided with him.

“You have two problems,” he said.

“I do?”

“Yeah. First, you left the water on. You’re going to have a hell of a water bill.”

She sighed. The driveway must be awash by now. Sam had obviously driven her insane, or she would never have been so careless.

“What’s the second problem?”

“Your yard is full of those reporters you mentioned.”

“Oh, shit,” she moaned.