He sat on the side of the bed and began to scribble. Since she’d already poked her nose in this far, Ripley didn’t see any reason to stop now. She angled her head to read his notes, only to be confounded when they were, again, in shorthand.

Probably in Spanish, too, she decided, and took the opportunity to study his bedroom. There weren’t any clothes strewn around. There wouldn’t have been much room for them with the books, the magazines, the stacks of paper. No personal photographs, which she thought was too bad. There was the usual pile of loose change on the dresser, along with a Saint Christopher’s medal. She remembered the gris-gris in his glove compartment and wondered how many other bases he’d covered. There was a Leatherman knife, a set of small screwdrivers, a few unidentifiable bits of plastic and metal that might have been some sort of fuse, and some kind of glassy black rock. She touched it and, feeling a low, vibrating hum, decided not to touch it again. When she turned back, he was still sitting on the side of the bed. He’d hung up the phone and was staring into space with an expression both distracted and dreamy.

She cleared her throat to get his attention. “So, you speak Spanish.”

“Mmm.”

“Bad news?”

“Huh? No. No, interesting. A colleague inCosta Rica . Thinks he may have a line on an EBE.”

“What’s that?”

“Oh, EBE—extraterrestrial biological entity.”

“A little green man?”

“Sure.” Mac set the note aside. “It goes with all the broom-riding witches I’ve documented.”

“Ha.”

“Anyway, it’s interesting. We’ll see how it goes. If nothing else it got you in my bedroom.”

“You’re not as fog-brained as you look.”

“Only about half the time.” He patted the bed beside him.

“That’s a really thrilling offer, but I’ll pass. I’m going to head home.”

“Why don’t we grab some dinner?” He took off his glasses, tossed them carelessly on the bed. “Out. We’ll go out and get some dinner. Is it dinnertime?”

“It could be. Take your glasses off the bed. You’ll forget and sit on them or something.”

“Right.” He picked them up, laid them on the nightstand. “How did you know I do that?”

“Wild guess. Mind if I call home, let my family know I won’t be home for dinner?”

“Go ahead.”

When she stepped to the phone, he took her hand, turned her, nudging her in until she stood between his legs. “I’d like to discuss that break from kissing you talked about. And I think since you’re the one who apologized, you should be the one to kiss me.”

“I’m thinking about it.” She picked up the phone first, kept her eyes on his as she called, spoke briefly to Zack, then replaced the receiver. “Okay, here’s the deal. Hands on the bed. And you keep them there. No touching, no grabbing.”

“That’s very strict, but okay.” He placed his palms down on the edge of the bed. It was time, she decided, to show him he wasn’t the only one with moves. She leaned over, slowly, letting her hands run through his hair before they rested on his shoulders. Her mouth paused an inch from his, curved.

“No hands,” she said again.

A brush of lips, a slight scrape of teeth, a hint of tongue. She nibbled one corner of his mouth, then the other, let her breath come out on a long sigh.

She eased back, a breath away—held the moment suspended. Then her fingers dived into his hair, fisted, and she plunged.

Instant heat, enough to burn a man alive from the inside out. His hands tightened like vises on the edge of the bed, and his heart spiked straight into his throat.

It was like being devoured, with merciless greed.

She took him over, pumped into his system like a fast-acting drug, one that scraped nerve endings raw rather than numbing them. He could feel . . . too much, and waited for his system to simply implode. She nearly shoved him back, nearly gave in to the need plunging inside her and pushed him back on the bed. Something happened to her, every time she was with him, that jangled her brain, shocked her body, squeezed her heart. Even now, when she’d demanded and taken control, she was losing. She felt him tremble, and her own shiver of response.

It took every ounce of will for her to end the kiss, to draw back.

He let out a ragged breath. She could see the pulse beating in his throat like a jackhammer. Yet he hadn’t touched her. That kind of control was something to respect, she thought. To admire, and to challenge.

She dabbed a fingertip at the corner of her mouth. “Let’s eat,” she said and strolled out of the room. Point for point, she decided as she scooped up her coat, they were dead even. Nine

Jonathan Q. Harding knew how to get people to talk. It was a matter, first of all, of knowing that under the veil of dignity and discretion or reluctance, people wanted to talk. The seamier or more bizarre the subject, the more they wanted to gab about it.

It was a matter of persistence, patience, and occasionally palming over a folded twenty. The story had its teeth in him every bit as much as he had his teeth in it. He started back at the cliff on Highway1 , where a desperate woman had faked her own death. It was a picturesque spot—sea, sky, rock. He imagined stark black-and-white photographs, the drama of them. He was no longer thinking just a feature in a magazine. Harding had upped the bar to a big, juicy, best-selling book.

The seeds of that ambition had been planted during his first visit with Remington. It was odd, he thought, that it hadn’t occurred to him before. That he hadn’t realized how, well, hungry he was for the fame, for the fortune.

Others had done it, turned their expertise or their hobby into a book with a glossy cover and fast sales. Why couldn’t he?

Why was he wasting his time and his considerable skill on magazine bylines? Instead of him pursuing Larry King for an interview, this time around Larry King would come to him. A voice he hadn’t known was inside him had awakened, and it continually whispered, Cash in. That’s just what he intended to do.

Gathering tidbits of information, morsels of speculation and hard bites of fact from police records, he began to follow Helen Remington’s, now Nell Channing Todd’s, trail.

He had an interesting conversation with a man who claimed to have sold her the secondhand bike she’d used as her initial transportation, and after various questions asked at the bus station inCarmel confirmed the bike’s description.