He was enjoying himself way too much, so she picked up her stride. "I'll bet I can max out your credit card in half an hour."

"Was it more than three million?"

"I'll tell you after I've finished shopping." She smiled at an elderly couple.

"If you lie, I'm taking everything back."

"Isn't there a mirror someplace where you can go admire yourself?"

"I never knew a woman so hung up on my good looks."

"All your women are hung up on your good looks. They just pretend it's your personality."

"I swear, somebody needs to spank you."

"You are, like, so not the man to do it."

"You are, like, such a damned brat."

She smiled and headed into the boutique. Fifteen minutes later she emerged with two pairs of sandals. Only as she put her sunglasses back on did she notice that Kevin also carried a shopping bag. "What did you buy?"

"You need a bathing suit."

"You bought me one?"

"I guessed at the size."

"What kind of bathing suit?"

"Jeez, if somebody bought me a present, I'd be happy about it instead of acting so suspicious."

"If it's a thong, it goes back."

"Now, would I insult you that way?" They began wandering down the street.

"A thong is probably the only kind of suit you know exists. I'm sure that's what all your girlfriends wear."

"You think you can distract me, but it's not going to work." They passed a sweet shop called Say Fudge. Next to it was a tiny public garden, little more than a few hydrangea bushes and a pair of benches. "It's reckoning time, Daphne." He indicated one of the benches, then settled beside her. His arm brushed her shoulder as he propped it along the back. "Tell me all about the money. Didn't you have to wait till you were twenty-one to get your hands on it?"

"Yes, but I was still in school, and Phoebe wouldn't let me touch a penny. She said if I wanted into the accounts before I graduated, I'd have to sue her."

"Smart lady."

"She and Dan kept me on a pretty tight leash, so once I graduated and she finally handed it over, I did everything you'd expect. I bought a car, moved into a luxury apartment, bought loads of clothes-I do miss those clothes. But after a while the life of a trust-fund baby lost its luster."

"Why didn't you just get a job?"

"I did, but the money kept hanging over me. I hadn't earned a penny of it. Maybe if it had come from someone other than Bert Somerville, I wouldn't have had such a hard time with it, but it felt as if he'd poked his nasty head back in my life, and I didn't like it. Finally I decided to set up a foundation and give it all away. And if you tell anybody, I swear I'll make you regret it."

"You gave away all of it?"

"Every penny."

"How much?"

She fiddled with the drawstring on her shorts. "I don't want to tell you. You already think I'm nuts."

"It's going to be so easy for me to return those sandals."

"Fifteen million, all right!"

He looked as if he'd been face-masked. "You gave away fifteen million dollars!"

She nodded.

He threw back his head and laughed. "You are nuts!"

She remembered the somersault dive she'd made off the cliff. "Probably. But I haven't regretted it for a moment." Although now she wouldn't mind having some of it back so she could keep paying her mortgage.

"You really don't miss it?"

"No. Except for the clothes, which I believe I already mentioned. And thank you for the sandals, by the way. I love them."

"My pleasure. Matter of fact, I've enjoyed your story so much, I'll add a new outfit the next time you're in town."

"Done!"

"God, it's heartbreaking to see a woman fight so hard to hang tough."

She laughed.

"Kevin! Hello!"

Molly heard a distinctly Germanic accent and looked up to see a willowy blonde hurrying toward them with a small white box in her hand. The woman wore a blue-and-white-striped apron over black slacks and a V-neck top. She was pretty. Lots of hair, brown eyes, good makeup. She was probably a couple of years older than Molly, nearer Kevin's age.

"Hey, there, Christina." Kevin gave the woman a smile that was way too sexy as he rose to greet her.

She extended the white cardboard box, and Molly spotted a blue seal on the side with say fudge embossed on it. "You seemed to enjoy the fudge last night, ja? This is a small present to welcome you to Wind Lake. Our sample box."

"Thanks a lot." He looked so pleased that Molly wanted to remind him it was just candy, not a Super Bowl ring! "Christina, this is Molly. Christina owns that fudge shop over there. I met her yesterday when I came into town to grab a burger."

Christina was more slender than a woman who owned a fudge shop should be. That struck Molly as a crime against nature.

"Pleasure to meet you, Molly."

"Nice meeting you, too." Molly could have ignored the curiosity in her expression, but she wasn't that good a person. "I'm Kevin's wife."

"Oh." Her disappointment was just as blatant as her mission with the fudge box.

"Estranged wife," Kevin cut in. "Molly writes children's books."

"Ach so? I've always wanted to write a children's book. Maybe you could give me a few suggestions sometime."

Molly kept her expression pleasant but noncommittal.

Just once she'd like to meet someone who didn't want to write a children's book. People assumed they were easy to write because they were short. They had no idea what went into writing a successful book, one that children genuinely enjoyed and learned from, not just something adults had decided a child should enjoy.

"I'm sorry you're going to sell the campground, Kevin. We'll miss you." Before Christina could drool over him any more, she spotted a woman heading into the fudge shop. "I have to go. Stop by the next time you're in town so you can sample my cherry chocolate."

The minute she was out of earshot, Molly turned on him. "You can't sell the campground!"

"I told you from the beginning that's what I was doing."

True, but it hadn't meant anything at the time. Now she couldn't bear the idea that he would throw it away. The campground was a permanent part of him, part of his family, and in a strange way she couldn't analyze, it was beginning to feel like part of her.

He misunderstood her silence. "Don't worry. We won't have to stay around that long. The minute I find someone to take over, we're out of here."

All the way back to the campground, Molly tried to sort out her thoughts. The only deep roots Kevin had left were here. He'd lost his parents, he had no siblings, and he didn't seem inclined to let Lilly into his life. The house where he'd grown up belonged to the church. He had nothing to connect him with his past except the campground. It would be wrong to give that up.

The Common came into sight, and her jumbled thoughts gave way to a feeling of peace. Charlotte Long was sweeping her front porch, an elderly man rode by on a three-wheel bike, and a couple chatted on a bench. Molly drank in the storybook cottages and shady trees.

No wonder she'd experienced a sense of familiarity the moment she'd arrived here. She'd stepped through the pages of her books right into Nightingale Woods.

Instead of heading along the lake where she might meet someone, Lilly followed a narrow path that led into the woods beyond the Common. She'd changed into a pair of slacks and a square-neck, tobacco-brown top, but she was still hot, and she wished she were thin enough to wear shorts. Those little white ones that had been a permanent part of her wardrobe on Lace, Inc. They'd barely covered her bottom.

Weeds brushed her legs as the trees opened into a meadow. Her toes felt pleasantly gritty inside her sandals, and some of the tension she'd been carrying all day began to ease. She heard running water from a stream and turned to look for it, only to see something so out of place that she blinked.

A chrome diner's chair with a red vinyl seat.

Lilly couldn't imagine what it was doing in the middle of the meadow. As she began to walk toward it, she saw a creek with ferns growing among the reeds and mossy rocks. The chair sat on a lichen-encrusted boulder. Its red vinyl seat sparkled in the sunlight, and there was no visible rust, so it had been put there recently. But why? Its perch was precarious, and it wobbled as she touched it.

"Leave that alone!"

She spun around to see a big bear of a man crouched in bars of sunlight at the edge of the meadow.

Her hand flew to her throat.

Behind her the chair splashed into the creek.

"Damn it!" The man jumped to his feet.

He was huge, with shoulders as wide as twelve lanes of L.A. freeway and a scowling, rough-hewn face that belonged on the villain in an old B Western. I got ways of makin' a woman like you talk. The only thing missing was a week's worth of stubble on that grim jaw.

His hair was a Hollywood stylist's nightmare or daydream, she wasn't sure which. Thick and graying at the temples, it grew too long at the collar, where it looked as if he might have swiped at it with the knife he undoubtedly kept in his boot. Except he wore a pair of battered running shoes instead, with socks that slouched around his ankles. And his eyes-mysteriously dark in that deeply tanned, dangerously lined face.

Every casting agent in Hollywood would salivate over him.

All those thoughts were scrambling through Lilly's head instead of the one thought that should have been there: Run!

He strode toward her. Beneath his khaki shorts his legs were brown and strong. He wore an old blue denim work shirt with the sleeves rolled up to reveal muscular forearms dusted with dark hair. "Do you know how long it took me to get that chair right where I wanted it?"

She backed away from him. "Maybe you have too much leisure time."

"Do you think that's funny?"

"Oh, no." She kept backing. "Not funny. Definitely not."

"Does it amuse you to spoil a whole day's work?"

"Work?"

His eyebrows shot together. "What are you doing?"

"Doing?"

"Stand still, damn it, and stop cowering!"

"I'm not cowering!"

"For God's sake, I'm not going to hurt you!" Grumbling under his breath, he stalked back to where he'd been sitting and picked up something off the ground. She took advantage of his distraction to edge closer to the path.

"I told you not to move!"

He was holding some kind of notebook, and he no longer seemed sinister, just incredibly impolite. She regarded him with all the imperiousness of Hollywood royalty. "Someone's forgotten his manners."

"Waste of energy. I come here for privacy. Is that too much to ask?"

"Not at all. I'm leaving right now."

"Over there!" He pointed an angry finger toward the creek.

"Pardon me?"

"Sit over there."

She was no longer frightened, just annoyed. "I don't think so."

"You ruined an afternoon's work. Sitting for me is the least you can do to make up for it."

He was holding a sketch pad, she realized, not a notebook. He was an artist. "Why don't I just leave instead?"

"I told you to sit!"

"Has anyone ever mentioned that you're rude?"

"I work hard at it. Sit on that boulder and face the sun."

"Thanks, but I don't do sun. Bad for the complexion."

"Just once I'd like to meet a beautiful woman who isn't vain."

"I appreciate the compliment," she said dryly, "but I passed the beautiful woman mark a good ten years and forty pounds ago."

"Don't be infantile." He whipped a pencil from his shirt pocket and began to sketch, not bothering to argue with her any longer, or even to sit down on the small camp stool she spotted a few feet away. "Tilt your chin. God, you really are beautiful."

He uttered the compliment so dispassionately that it didn't seem flattering. She resisted the urge to tell him he should have seen her in her prime. "You're right about my vanity," she said, just to needle him. "Which is why I'm not going to stand here in the sun any longer."

The pencil continued to fly over his sketch pad. "I don't like models talking when I'm working."

"I'm not your model."

Just as she was about to turn away for the last time, he jabbed his pencil in the pocket of his work shirt. "How do you expect me to concentrate when you won't stand still?"

"Pay attention: I don't care whether you concentrate or not."

His brow furrowed, and she had the feeling he was trying to make up his mind whether he could bully her into staying. Finally he flipped his sketch pad shut. "We'll meet here tomorrow morning then. Let's say seven. That way the sun won't be too hot for you."