“Michael’s doing fine,” he said gruffly, giving the baseball cap a tug. “His ears look a lot better. Make sure he keeps taking the medicine, though. He needs to take it until it’s all gone. And keep his ears dry-don’t want any water in there.”

Tamara was nodding, bobbing from one foot to the other in barely contained excitement. “I will-I been tryin’ to do right by him. He’s my sister’s kid, I don’t want him goin’ to no foster home. But it’s hard sometimes, you know? I got the baby, I can’t take him places like his momma did. She used to take him like, to the park and stuff on weekends-you know, to watch the ball games?” Her exuberance died like a ball running out of bounce, and she finished wanly, “I think he been missin’ his momma some.”

Some… Ethan thought, then, of the black-haired woman with magical eyes, flirting with him around a thin cigar, fencing verbally across plates of spaghetti…toying with him, he now realized. He thought of how he’d wanted to kiss her, lust ripening like summer fruit in the heat of an idling engine…and a little worm of shame coiled and curled inside his belly. This boy’s mother, the anchor of his existence, was dead. This child would never know the warmth of her love, feel her arms around him, ever again. How could Ethan have let himself forget that, even for a moment? She was a witch, that woman, a spellbinder by any name, be it Phoenix or Joanna Dunn.

He made a vow, then, that hereafter whenever he was with her he would be on his guard and no matter how she turned on the charisma, he’d think first and always of this child, Michael Parker, and his mother, Louise.

Something else came to him then, too: he realized that above all else, he wanted Joanna Dunn-Phoenix-to think of her, too.

If asked, Ethan would have denied having an impulsive bone in his body. How was it, then, that he heard himself offering to take a motherless boy to the park?

Tamara gave a little gasp. “You mean it? You’d do that?”

“Sure.” Shaken himself, Ethan shrugged and tugged on Michael’s cap. “How ’bout it, guy? You want to go to the park with me?” Michael swiped a hand across his nose and grudgingly nodded. “All right, then.” He scooped the boy up before he could object and set his feet on the tile floor, then turned back to his aunt. “Is Saturday okay?”

Tamara nodded slowly, still looking stunned. Then, recovering her senses, asked quickly in a high, disbelieving voice, “You sure you wanna do this?”

Ethan didn’t dare answer that. To be honest, his only experience with children was a pediatrics rotation during his internship, and he was scared to death by the idea. Instead he said staunchly, “How about if I pick him up, say, about ten o’clock Saturday morning?”

“You wanna come down to my place? The Gardens?” In addition to disbelief, Tamara’s face now registered panic.

“Sure,” said Ethan with what he hoped was a reassuring smile.

“Uh-huh, okay, I guess that be all right…” She was still muttering dazedly as Ethan escorted them out of the exam room. The last thing he heard as they parted company was a whispered, “Oh, man, I don’t believe this. The president’s kid comin’ to my house.”

“Hey, Michael, I’ll see you on Saturday, okay?”

Michael didn’t reply or look back.

When Ethan rejoined Father Frank and Mrs. Schmidt at the reception desk-Ruthie was in another exam room seeing to a patient-Mrs. Schmidt’s eyebrows were already raised. “Since when do you work Saturdays?”

“I don’t,” said Ethan, scowling at the chart in his hands. “I’m, ah…hmm. I’m picking Michael up. Thought I’d take him to the park…you know. Play catch, or something.”

“Ah-hah.” Mrs. Schmidt gave him a droll look and turned back to her books.

Grinning, Father Frank gripped Ethan’s arm briefly by way of a farewell. “Hey, that’s great.”

“What?” Ethan demanded; he knew that look well.

The priest paused and looked back at him, no longer smiling. “You said you had no clue how those people live? Looks to me like you’re on your way to finding out now.”


“Entrances are hard, hard, hard…

Full of butterflies and-”


With a hiss of frustration, Phoenix broke off in midphrase and twirled half around on her stool.

“You ain’t concentratin’, girl,” Doveman scolded, vamping softly, fingers tickling idly across the keys. “Somethin’ on your mind?”

She shook her head-in perplexity, not denial-and after a moment rose and walked to the windows. Part way there she lifted her hands to her hair, still in its businesswoman’s knot after her lunch with Dr. Ethan Brown, and with one deft twist and a shake of her head, set it free to tumble warm and heavy down her back.

“Your meeting today with those people-how’d that go?” Doveman’s casual tone fooled nobody.

Phoenix snorted. “Well, I know one thing. They don’t want my money. They want my blood.”

Beyond the window the city was a jeweled tapestry laid out beneath a milky canopy-a night sky turned upside-down. I wonder where he goes at night, she thought with sudden irrelevance. Does he have a warm lady waiting for him? Someone to hold him when the sirens wail…to laugh with him in a tumbled bed…

“Can’t really blame ’em,” said Doveman. The music stopped and he turned on the bench to look at her. “So, where do you go from here?”

“I don’t much like being outnumbered a dozen to one,” Phoenix said dryly. She whirled away from the windows and paced back toward the piano, stopped halfway there and flopped down on the couch instead. “So, I picked a spokesman. From now on we do this one on one.”

Doveman cackled. “Lemme guess…a guy, right? Young…good-lookin’…”

She smiled, but for some reason didn’t feel at all amused. “Well,” she murmured, “he is that.”

“But?” And there was something…an alertness in the piano man’s voice. “Somethin’ you ain’t tellin’ me.”

“He’s a doctor-his name’s Ethan Brown.” She paused, watching his face. It took him less time than it had her-all of four beats.

“What-you don’t mean-you’re not tellin’ me, the Ethan Brown? President Rhett Brown Junior?”

Phoenix nodded, smiling, feeling better about it herself, now, enjoying his reaction. “Nothing junior about him, though. Seems like the real deal-his own man, I mean. Different from his father as night from day.”

Shaking his head, Doveman muttered, “You don’t say…Rhett Brown’s boy…” And then, pointing a bent brown finger at her, “You met the president and the First Lady, didn’t you? At that hunger gig down in Texas. You meet the boy then, too?”

“Uh-uh-he says he was in school out in California. Met his sister, though.”

Doveman snorted. “Must be pretty young, if he was still in school five years ago.”

“He said med school-I think that’s later.” Phoenix frowned. She didn’t like to think about how young he was.

“Well-he’s a doctor now, you say. Can’t be too young if he’s a doctor,” said Doveman, as if he’d heard her thought. “So-” he rubbed a hand over his frosting of beard stubble, making a sandpapery sound “-what you plannin’ on doin’ with this young good-lookin’ doctor? Plannin’ on havin’ things your own way with him, I expect?” Phoenix smiled and didn’t answer. The piano man leaned his hands on his knees and leveled a look at her. “Girl, I wouldn’t get too cocky, if I was you. If that boy’s anything like his daddy, he might not be so easy to get around.”

“Well,” said Phoenix carelessly, “I invited him here tomorrow, so you’ll get a chance to see for yourself. Then you can tell me what you think.” She sat up abruptly. “What are you doing?”

Still bent almost double, Doveman paused in the painful process of getting up from the piano bench to give her a look. “I’m callin’ it a night, that’s what I’m doing. You ain’t in the mood, that’s for sure. Girl, all you got on your mind right now is that young Dr. Brown, and how you’re gonna get him into your bed and wrapped around your little finger-among other things. I’ll be talkin’ to you again when you get y’head on straight.”

Phoenix said nothing, but from under her lashes watched him make his slow, stiff way to the iron and chain-link cage that connected the loft to the studio below.

Into my bed? Sure, why not?

She’d thought about it-so what? The passion was there-she’d felt it, like some powerful force rumbling deep below the surface. All she had to do was tap it. She felt a shiver of excitement, now, remembering the rasp of his skin against her fingers…the heat and vitality radiating from his body in waves as she’d stood next to him there in the garage. The strange force she’d felt then, like a powerful magnet, or a vortex, pulling her closer, pulling her…

“Doveman-” He stopped just inside the cage and turned to look at her, one hand on the lever, waiting. She drew a breath and said it. “I told him my name.”

There was a pause, then… “You don’t say,” the piano man said. Phoenix heard his Camels-and-bourbon chuckle as the cage creaked slowly out of sight.


Ethan stood in the shadowy main hall of the old warehouse, converted at who-knows-what-cost into a state-of-the-art studio, watching Phoenix and her band rehearse. He wasn’t sure what he’d expected-nothing magical, certainly, nothing like the adrenaline rush of a live concert performance with all the attendant hype and the contagious excitement of thousands of screaming fans. He felt rather like an explorer hiding in the jungle watching some mysterious pagan rite-utterly fascinated, maybe a little scared. Guilty as hell. He hadn’t expected to enjoy himself so much.

Just watching her-that was the source of a good part of the enjoyment, and most of the guilt. He told himself he wasn’t supposed to be susceptible to the woman that way, that he was on his guard now, that he knew better. It was like telling himself he wouldn’t burn when the flames touched him.

Watching her perform was like watching some incredible spectacle of nature, like an erupting volcano or a lightning storm, or a once-in-a-lifetime sunset. The breath catches, the heart beats faster, and it becomes impossible to look away. In the intervals, talking quietly with the band, she was simply poetry in white leather pants and a silver beaded tank, with her hair knotted loosely halfway down her back, swinging to and fro and now and then catching the light reflected off the silver beads in tiny flashes of blue fire. Her voice drifted to him in uneven ripples, sometimes a husky murmur that made him think of intimacies shared in tumbled sheets, sometimes a scratchy cackle that made the juices rise in the back of his throat as if in response to the smell of bacon frying on a Sunday morning. Then she’d begin to sing, and his heart would quicken and his skin prickle with goose bumps.

The number they were rehearsing was one Ethan hadn’t heard before-which added considerably to his excitement, the incredible idea of being among the very first on the planet to hear a new Phoenix song. This one was classic Phoenix, performed with her trademark driving beat and throat-tearing passion-like all of her best stuff, a little bit sad-about entrances and exits, saying hello and saying goodbye. He would like to have heard the whole song, but he wasn’t to have that chance; she seemed dissatisfied with it and kept stopping and going back over the same phrase, trying new chords, variations in tempo. Her frustration was tangible; Ethan felt it like an unscratchable itch between his own shoulder blades.

He wasn’t sure how long he watched before one of the members of the band noticed him standing there in the shadows and said something to Phoenix. She called an immediate halt to the rehearsal and motioned him over, striding out to meet him and greeting him like a lover, with an arm around his waist and a kiss on the mouth. A quick, proprietary kiss-he barely had time to register her warmth and her scent, the cushiony press of her breasts against his chest, the satin brush of her lips. To register a hot, bright stab of anger: What is this? What’s this for?

But, of course, he knew. The anger passed as quickly as it had come, and was replaced with amusement. It was obvious to him that the purpose of the kiss had been to brand him-stake her claim and state her intentions-publically. A risky move, considering how little she knew him-or, maybe not. Perhaps to someone of her massive self-confidence it didn’t seem like a risk at all.

“Hello, Doc,” she purred, “I see you found us.”

“Wasn’t that hard,” Ethan said. “I had somebody call your business manager for directions.”

“Well, I’m glad you made it.” A smile curled the corners of her mouth, for some reason reminding him of the way she’d looked yesterday in Kaufman’s office with that little cigar between her lips. She bobbed her head, looking behind him. “Where’s that tall, dark and handsome bodyguard of yours today?”