Watching Phoenix as she studied the photographs one by one, Ethan was struck suddenly by a memory of her loft…its elegance, its emptiness…its loneliness. He felt his sense of dismay and embarrassment leave him, like sand running out of a sack.

Relaxed, now, quiet inside, he walked to the couch and placed the bags of Chinese food on the cushions while he cleared the coffee table of medical journals, books, newspapers and the remnants of this morning’s breakfast.

“I thought we’d eat out here, if that’s okay,” he said, setting out white cartons, paper napkins and paper-wrapped chopsticks. “The kitchen’s pretty small.” He did not add, “And very messy,” which he figured by this time she’d know was a given.

Phoenix nodded, but went on looking at the arrangement of photographs. Then, in an impulsive, uncharacteristically awkward motion, she picked one up and tilted it to show him. “This your mother?” Her voice was gruff, almost harsh.

Ethan straightened, looked and said, “Yup.” He walked toward her, breathing suspended, moving carefully and slowly, the way he might have approached an unexpectedly tame fawn in the woods.

She watched him come, her eyes never leaving his face. When he was within touching distance she turned back to the snapshot in her hands. “You look like her.”

“Well, I have her coloring, anyway. Both my sister and I got the blond hair.”

She said nothing for a while, though he sensed she wanted to; he could almost see the unasked questions hovering on the tip of her tongue. Then, abruptly, she put the snapshot back on the stereo. “Big family,” she remarked, lightly touching several of the photos as if setting them to rights.

“I guess.” Though it had never seemed so to him. Still with that feeling that he was about to attempt to pet a wild creature, he murmured, “What about you?”

“No family.” She said it lightly, blowing it away like dandelion fluff in a summer wind. She pivoted and moved away from him, a moment later pouncing on his guitar with a pleased cry, as if she’d only just discovered it.

“You did tell me you play.” She settled herself on the arm of the couch with her ankle propped on her knee, cradling his guitar across her lap. Her fingers moved on the strings, playing seemingly random chords as she looked up at him. “You said Dixie taught you, right?”

“Right.” It occurred to him as he looked at her that he ought to be feeling wonderment of some sort-this was Phoenix, sitting in his living room, playing his guitar. Instead, he felt an indefinable tenderness that was intertwined somehow with sorrow, and a frustrating sense that he was close…so close to understanding something of profound importance about this woman named Joanna Dunn.

She smiled to herself as she played; her eyes, shielded from him by the heavy fall of her lashes, were only an elusive twinkle, like stars glimpsed through a canopy of trees. No longer just random wanderings, the melody she was playing was familiar to him-a lullaby, if he wasn’t mistaken, something about a mockingbird. An odd and unexpected song for Phoenix to choose, he thought. Out of all the songs in the world, an old folk lullaby.

He hummed along, then sang a few bars very softly, and felt the quiver of a powerful but nameless emotion deep inside his chest when after a moment she joined him.

“Did your mother sing that to you when you were small?” he asked when the words he could remember ran out. Reaching…reaching with a gentle and reassuring hand toward the fawn in the forest.

Still softly playing, she said without looking up, “I don’t remember my mother.”

“No photographs?”

She shook her head. There was silence…the fawn trembled. A lump formed in Ethan’s throat. Then, with a final thump of her hand on the chords to still their vibrations, she set the guitar aside…and the fawn scampered away into leafy shadows. “Nope,” she said lightly, “not a one.”

She slipped off the arm of the couch onto the cushions and reached for a carton. “Mmm…this must be the kung pow chicken.”

“Who did you learn that song from?” he persisted as he sat on the couch beside her, careful to match her casual tone. Still searching hopefully in the shadows for the vanished fawn, unwilling yet to concede the moment lost.

She shrugged. “Who knows?” She handed him one of the sets of chopsticks and tore the paper wrapping off hers. “Could have been anywhere-once I hear a song I usually don’t forget it.” She bit her lip, concentrating on breaking the chopsticks apart.

Mission accomplished. Her eyes flashed silver, the first time she’d looked directly at him since she’d held his mother’s picture in her hands. “What about you? Dixie, I suppose.”

“Probably.” Suddenly short on breath, he snapped apart his chopsticks and dug into the nearest carton.

Watching him, eyes gleaming, she speared something that trailed long strands of vegetables and lifted it to her mouth. Her lips parted…her tongue came out to snare the stragglers…the bite disappeared. She chewed with her eyes closed, making soft pleasure sounds…

“How old were you when your folks split?”

“Beg pardon?” Ethan mumbled through a mouthful of something he absolutely could not taste.

Her eyes were studying him, glowing with the intensity of her curiosity and a purpose he couldn’t begin to understand. The question had caught him by surprise in more ways than one. For one thing, he was only just adjusting to the loss of his fawn; he hadn’t expected her to turn back into a tiger. And then, at that moment his parents in any context were the farthest thing from his mind.

Asking her to repeat the question at least gave him time to find his way out of the sensual quagmire he’d wandered into. He was moderately pleased when he was able to swallow without choking and say calmly, “My mother left when I was five.”

“Did you miss her?”

It should have been a silly question. What five-year-old child wouldn’t miss his mother? But she asked it with childlike curiosity mingled with an element of wistfulness, so that it seemed to him unbearably touching…almost heartbreaking. As if a blind child had asked him what it was like to see.

“I did,” he said quietly. “Terribly, at first. I was only five, after all. After Dixie came to take care of us, things were much better. Eventually I hardly missed my mother at all, except after a visit, or talking to her on the phone. That would sort of bring it all back. But…the visits and the calls came farther and farther apart.”

“I take it you don’t see much of her?”

“I saw her fairly often when I was in California, since that’s where she and her husband live. Other than that…no. She calls me on my birthday. Christmas. Things like that.” He paused, chopsticks poised. “What?” Through some sort of shimmering veil, he could see her watching him the way a cat watches a particularly interesting species of mouse. “What?”

Still she said nothing. Roughly two seconds into the silence it occurred to Ethan that the shimmering veil he was having trouble seeing through was tears. And that they were present because someone had apparently ignited a blowtorch inside his sinus cavities. His body temperature, he estimated, must be somewhere near boiling.

“Holy cow,” he wheezed, staring incredulously into the carton he was holding. “What is this stuff?”

“Oh, dear me,” Phoenix said in a tiny and tightly controlled voice, “I think you might have gotten hold of some of my Szechuan by mistake.” She barely made it through the sentence before dissolving into gales of helpless laughter.

Ethan stared at her through his tears in utter disbelief. His head was on fire, his eyes and nose were running like faucets, he could barely draw breath, and she was laughing?

“Water,” he croaked, and lurching to his feet, staggered off to the kitchen.

She found him there a few minutes later, hunched over a sink piled full of haphazardly rinsed dishes, refilling a coffee mug with water straight from the tap. She went up behind him and put her hands on his waist.

“Hey, Doc, come here…let me.” Her voice felt low in her throat and still warm with the laughter. She felt warm all through her insides, in fact. As if she’d downed a straight shot of whiskey.

He drew back from the sink to give her a look of dark reproach. From the beard on his chin to the roots of his hair, his normally golden tanned skin had a distinctly ruddy cast. For some reason when she looked at him the warmth inside her seemed to gather itself into a hot ball, right in the middle of her chest.

She steered him firmly toward the kitchen table until his backside come against its edge. He leaned on it, folded his arms across his chest, closed his eyes and gave a sigh of surrender. When Phoenix heard that sound, the ball of heat in her chest melted…pooled in the lowest part of her body.

She moved closer to him. When the cold water touched his face he started and caught her wrist, his eyes crossing slightly as he focused on the wet towel in her hand. She saw a flash of dismay in their nut-brown depths before he closed them again. “You’ve been in my bathroom,” he said in a thickened murmur, and gave another small sigh. “I suppose you know, this means you have to marry me. I have no secrets from you now.”

Laughter tumbled again through her chest, and she caught her lower lip between her teeth to hold it back. Doc’s defenses must really have been laid low, she thought, for him to say such a thing. She felt sure it wasn’t the sort of joking around that came naturally to him.

“I’m sorry,” she said in an unreliable voice, left ragged by the recent excesses of mirth. “I…truly am.” A residual bubble of laughter burst from her in spite of her best efforts to stifle it.

“Oh, yeah,” Ethan said dryly, “I can see that.”

“No-really. I am. I was going to say something when you first picked up that carton, but then you started eating, and you didn’t say anything, so I thought…you…liked it…” Her voice had grown softer with each word until finally it just sort of…faded away.

Slowly, she raised the damp towel to his face. When she touched his forehead with it, just above one eyebrow, he closed his eyes. And that was her undoing. Such a small thing. Such an enormous thing-an expression of total trust. What it did to her was so unexpected, so sudden, she could neither prepare herself nor defend against it. Wanting struck her like a rogue wave, nearly knocking her off her feet. The laughter and the warmth inside her were washed clean away, leaving her cold and shivering with a need to be held, to be wrapped in his arms and pressed close to his warm, solid body.

“Like it?” he murmured, eyes closed. “I couldn’t even taste it, not at first. Next thing I know, I’ve got tears streaming down my face.”

“It does sort of sneak up on you…” Shaken, she drew the towel across his eyebrow, then pressed it, oh, so gently against his eyelid. She heard the soft rush of his breath, released in careful measures through his nose. The tender, shadowed skin beneath his eye flinched, and she felt an overpowering desire to kiss him there.

But…in another moment her hands would tremble, and she couldn’t have him know how fragile she was, how undone by his nearness. So, to keep them from betraying her, she set them in motion once more, laying one lightly on his shoulder to steady herself while the other drew the towel downward over his cheek to where the boundaries of his beard began. Framed in neatly trimmed honey-brown, his lips seemed utterly defenseless, and tempting as forbidden fruit.

So focused was she on his mouth, so steeped in the imagined feel and warmth and taste of it, that she didn’t even know at first when his hands intercepted hers. Lost in a fog of uncertainty, not knowing which way to go, afraid to take even the smallest step lest she stumble over a terrifying precipice from which she knew there would be no return, she stood helplessly while he removed the towel from her hand.

Slowly, warming her cold hand in both of his, he drew her fingers to his lips.

Fascinated, she watched her fingertips press the satiny cushion of his lips, while tears inexplicably gathered in the back of her throat and she braced herself in utter panic, certain she wasn’t going to be able to hold them off. Then…she felt his breath flow like heated oil over her fingertips, seep between them…into her palm. A glorious warmth spread over her hand and all through her, poured deep inside her-the sweetest and most intense pleasure she had ever known. The fog lifted; lightness filled her. She caught her breath and smiled.

“I meant to seduce you, you know,” she whispered.