“Let’s get the hell out of this hole,” he said in a monotone, fighting hard against the influence of that insidious itch.

Squirming backward until he’d managed to free his shoulders, he stood up gingerly, feeling the blackness above his head for obstacles. “Damn,” he said gruffly. “Wish we had some light.”

Jane’s voice drifted up from somewhere near his feet. “I have…a flashlight, if I can just-”

“You’re kidding! You do? Where?”

“I always carry one. I grew up in California-earthquakes, you know. It’s in my bag. Just let me…okay, I’m out. Now, where did I…oh, here it is.”

She came crawling out backward on her hands and knees, kneeling on his feet, brushing against his legs. He tried to give her more room, but there just wasn’t any; his back was smack up against a wall of boxes. When he leaned over to help her up, he got a mouthful of her hair.

“Mmpf. Ptoo, ” he muttered, spitting it out.

Breathless and obviously still quivery with laughter, she whispered, “Oops, sorry,” and rose to her feet, clinging to his arms and unfolding her body along the front of his.

“Tight quarters,” he said stiffly.

“Yes, isn’t it.”

Her hair was on a level with his face again. This time, he kept his mouth closed, and discovered that he could appreciate the tickly softness of it on his lips and chin. And the smell of it…nothing he could place, just a part of that indefinable “nice-woman” smell he’d noticed before.

His stomach growled suddenly. For Hawk, that had always meant one or the other of two different kinds of hunger, and he couldn’t have sworn, at that moment, which one this was. It had been a long time since breakfast, but even longer since he’d had the sweet scent of a woman in his nostrils and her breasts brushing up against his chest like this, and her legs shifting to make room for his…

“I know-I’m starving, too,” Jane said with a sympathetic chuckle, certain she at least knew which hunger his juices were giving voice to.

“Don’t suppose you have any food in that bag of yours along with the flashlight?” He could feel his pulse in his loins.

“As a matter of fact, I do. Here-hold this.” She thrust something large and flat against his chest.

Clutching the painting, hearing the crackle of the paper it was wrapped in, Hawk’s blood pressure and temperature began a slow descent back to normal. This is it, Hawk, the game ends here, and you’ve won. He took a deep breath and let it out slowly.

“Here it is-got it!” There was a little cackle of triumph as a thin beam of light stabbed through the blackness. It danced giddily for a moment, like a sprite set free. flashed briefly in his eyes and then stabilized at chest level between them, illuminating her features-and his, too, he imagined-with ghoulish shadows.

Maybe something in those shadows gave her the inspiration, who knows; he’d stopped trying to figure this woman out. She waggled the flashlight playfully, and her face seemed to grow longer and her voice got higher, and she quipped, “Well, Ollie, here’s another fine mess you’ve got us into!”

Hawk snorted to keep from laughing-damned if he was going to let this woman make him laugh. “Carlysle,” he growled, “damned if I don’t think you’re starting to enjoy this. Give me that.” Laying the painting carefully on top of the washer-or the dryer, he wasn’t sure which-he took the flashlight from her and pointed it downward. “We’re gonna want to conserve the batteries. You say you have food in that thing?”

She had her head down, already digging in the tote bag. Her voice came muffled. “Well, not food exactly. But I still have the peanuts they gave me on the plane-Connie’s, too. And these.” She held it out to him-a package of fat-free cookies.

He sighed. “Nothing to drink, I suppose?”

She slowly shook her head, her eyes glistening, over-large in the oblique illumination of the flashlight. Her voice was calm, but with no traces of laughter in it, when she asked, “How long do you think we might be stuck in here?”

Hawk shrugged. “No telling. If this is a coast-to-coast move, it could be days before they get where they’re going. On the other hand…” Her face looked so stricken he couldn’t bear to look at it, so he thumbed the flashlight off and went on in the darkness. “On the other hand, these guys have to stop sometime-to use the john, to eat…”

“There’s no place to go to the bathroom in here.” That was pointed out in a small, horror-stricken voice.

“You noticed that, did you?” said Hawk dryly. Taking pity on her, he added, “Look, the first time they stop, we’ll bang like hell on the door and hope somebody hears us. That’s all we can do.”

“This van isn’t…airtight, is it?”

“Airtight? Hardly. Other good news is, this is a diesel, so we don’t have to worry about carbon monoxide poisoning. The bad news is, it’s probably gonna get colder’n hell in here pretty soon.”

“Well, at least we seem to have plenty of blankets.” She sounded calmer, even brisk and purposeful, as though she was quite ready to deal with the situation now that she knew what, exactly, the situation was.

Hawk was just glad she seemed to be okay again. He refused to let himself admire her spirit; he was already getting to like her too much as it was. “I think there’s room for both of us right here in this space by the door-gonna be a little snug…”

With faultless timing, the truck chose that moment to turn a corner. Jane swayed slowly and inexorably against him, weighted by centrifugal force and utterly helpless to stop herself. Her head eased in under his chin like a boat going into its slip. It would have been a pretty nice fit, Hawk thought, if it hadn’t been for her arms being full of stuff and all doubled up between them.

From the darkness came a doleful, “I knew I shouldn’t have let myself gain those five extra pounds.”

A snort burst from him, like a pressure, valve letting go. He couldn’t think of anything else he dared add to that, but he was thinking that if she was carrying around five extra pounds, they felt perfectly all right to him.

It seemed an hour or two before the truck slowly righted itself. Hawk took Jane by the elbows and gently pushed her back to vertical, muttering something like, “There y’go…”

Her contribution was a breathless whisper. “Thanks…sorry about that.”

“Don’t mention it.”

“How ’bout this,” she said brightly, after a brief, mysterious silence. And then he could feel her stirring at his feet, spreading blankets. “We sit facing each other-you know, legs alongside? Come on-you sit right there, like that, and I’ll sit-” and once more he heard her huffing and scuffling around as she got herself settled “…like this.”

He thought about turning on the flashlight again but didn’t. It was bad enough imagining the close quarters; at least he didn’t have to see the legs that lay warm and firm along the outside of his, the feminine hip nudging his ankle, the slender foot-“Hey,” he said, “you took your shoes off.”

“Take yours off, too, if you like,” she said generously. “I don’t mind if they smell.”

Hawk gave a single whoop of laughter, he couldn’t help it.

But it was a struggle, trying to push off one laced-up athletictype shoe with the toe of the other. And he didn’t dare lean over too far, because he knew if he got the taste of her in his mouth again, the smell of her… Then he felt her hands, strong, no-nonsense hands. A moment later, first one foot, then the other experienced the chill of suddenly exposed, sweat-damp socks. “Thanks,” he said gruffly.

“Don’t mention it.” Her voice was as cool as his socks. “Want a blanket?” -

“Yeah, please.” He felt the weight of the packing blanket fall across his knees, felt her pull and tug it until she had it wrapped snugly around his ankles and feet. “Hand me a blanket,” he heard himself say. “and I’ll do you.”

There was a curious pain in his chest, like something stuck way down deep in his esophagus, something he couldn’t get rid of. And hard as he tried to stop the memory, it came anyway…

He and Jen, sitting on opposite ends of the old sofa in the den at her parents’ house…a fire roaring in the fireplace and half-drunk mugs of cocoa on the floor. He’d been home from college on Thanksgiving break, her parents were out for the evening at some party or other, and they’d just been rough-housing in the unexpected snow, the first fall of the season. He could hear Jen’s voice, with that bossy self-confidence he’d loved so much, saying, “Here-you do me and I’ll do you.” His icy-cold feet in her lap, hers in his…he couldn’t remember who’d started the tickling, but inevitably they’d wound up in a tangle on the rug, kissing breathlessly and with escalating passion. It had been the first time they’d made love…

“There you go,” he said as he shoved Jane’s swaddled feet back down beside him, wishing he could do something about the roughness in his hands and voice, hoping she wouldn’t read into that things about him he wasn’t ready for her to know. “Hey, how about some of that food, now, huh?”

“Okay, let’s see, which do you prefer, peanuts or cookies?”

“Oh, hell, I don’t care-you choose.”

“Well, maybe we should each have some of both-protein and carbohydrates-what do you think?”

God, she sounded like his mother. Well, okay, not his mother, but somebody’s. Like June Cleaver. “Fine. Need the light?”

“No, that’s okay. Give me your hand.”

“Come on, Tom, you get on, too! Quick, give me your hand, give me your hand!”

“Wait-I want to take one more picture… wave next time you come around, okay? Jase, wave at Daddy, now…”

He put his hand into the darkness and felt her cool fingers close around his. He could feel his heart beating.

“Ooh…I hate the way they make these dam packages of peanuts so hard to open, don’t you? I just hope I don’t lose them all in the dark…”

He took a breath. It was like dragging shards of glass through his chest. “Want some help?”

“No, that’s okay, I’ve got it now… Mmm, boy, those taste good.”

For a while, Hawk sat with his mind in neutral and listened to the sounds of her genteel munching, giving his emotions time to drift back into quiet waters. When he felt pretty sure he was back on course again, he opened his own stubborn little foil pack and downed the peanuts in a couple of greedy handfuls, figuring they’d make more of an impact on his stomach that way. The cookies he nibbled; he wasn’t much of a sweets person. Jen had been the one-

“For once I’m not sorry I have a bit of a sweet tooth,” said Jane with a sigh. The cookie wrapper crinkled softly in the darkness.

Suddenly feeling as if he had rocks under his butt, Hawk shifted and growled like a bad-tempered dog, “All right, let’s cut the crap. Out with it. Get it over with.”

He felt her legs twitch as she gasped, “I beg your pardon?” But she said it on a little ripple of laughter, and he had a feeling she wasn’t really all that surprised.

“You’re wondering what the hell this is all about,” he went on, his voice still guttural and harsh with diverted emotions. “You said I owe you an explanation. So go on. This is your chance. Ask your questions.”

There was a pregnant little silence, and then a solemn, “You’ll tell me the truth?”

He gave a short, hard laugh. “Well, I’ll try.”

Questions. Jane took a bite of cookie and chewed thoughtfully. Funny, up until the moment she’d stepped out of that taxicab in Georgetown, all she’d been able to think about was questions. And boy, had she wanted answers! She’d been feeling angry, victimized, threatened and just plain scared.

But ever since that tussle with Aaron Campbell, well, how on earth to describe it? She’d felt…exhilarated. And at the same time, calm. Right now she felt strong. Confident. And yes, Tom was right, in a strange way, she was sort of enjoying this. She was alive, uninjured, and it didn’t really matter what the explanation was for whatever it was she’d stumbled into: never again would Jane Carlysle be able to say that nothing ever happened to her!

“I’m not sure I know where to begin,” she said finally. She frowned, trying her best to inject a degree of sternness into her voice and thinking that what it reminded her of was when the girls were little, and she’d been forced to discipline them when actually she was secretly entertained by the mischief they’d done.

It wasn’t that she didn’t still want-need-answers and explanations; goodness no. But somehow the urgency was gone. She felt strangely at ease with Tom Hawkins now-this mystifying stranger she hadn’t even met before yesterday, and whose bundled bare feet were now snuggled cozily under her elbow. She wasn’t sure she could have explained why, it was just a feeling she had. The feeling she was going to have all the time in the world to learn about this man, including the answers to questions she hadn’t even thought of yet.