"Sooner or later, Meredith, you're going to have to take a risk and trust me completely. Until you do, you're cheating me and you're cheating yourself. You can't outwit fate by trying to stand on the sidelines and place little side bets about the outcome of life. Either you wade in and risk everything to play the game, or you don't play at all. And if you don't play, you can't win."

It was, she thought, a beautiful philosophy on the one hand and a terrifying one on the other—a philosophy, moreover, that was far better suited to him than her.

"How about a compromise," she suggested with a winsome smile that Matt reluctantly found irresistible. "Why don't I wade in—but stay in the shallow end for a while until I get accustomed to it?"

After a tense moment he nodded. "How long?"

"A little while."

"And while you're debating about how deep you dare to go, what am I supposed to do? Am I supposed to wait and pace and wonder if your father will be able to convince you not to live with me or to go through with the divorce?"

"I have plenty of courage to withstand my father regardless of whether he comes around and sees things our way or not," she said so forcefully that he smiled a little. "What I'm worried about is whether or not you'll try to meet him halfway if he does—for my sake?

She rather expected him to agree, for her sake, but she'd misjudged the depth of Matt's hatred, because he shook his head. "He and I have an old score to settle first, and it's going to be settled my way."

"He's ill, Matt," she warned, an awful feeling of foreboding shaking through her. "He can't take a lot of stress anymore."

"I'll try to remember that," Matt replied unanswerably. His expression softened a little, and he changed the subject. "Now, who is sleeping where tonight?"

"Do you suppose any of the reporters who saw you come up here this morning are still out there, watching?"

"Probably one or two of the tenacious ones."

She bit her lip, hating to have him leave, but knowing he shouldn't stay. "Then you can't really stay all night, can you?"

"Evidently not," he said in a tone that made her feel like a coward.

Matt saw her eyes darken with consternation, and he relented. "All right, I'll go home and sleep alone. It's nothing less than I deserve for participating in that adolescent fight last night. While I'm on that subject," he added more gently, "I'd like you to know that while I was guilty of saying something that undoubtedly caused your drunken fiance to take a swing at me, I didn't realize what was happening until after it was over. One second I was looking at you, and the next I saw a fist coming at me from the corner of my eye. For all I knew, it was some drunk at the bar who'd decided to pick a fight, and I reacted instinctively."

Meredith suppressed a shudder, a delayed reaction to the lethal swiftness, the easy brutality, with which Matt had leveled Parker... the savage look on his face in that split second when he realized he was being attacked. Then she firmly shoved the thought aside. Matt was not now, and was never going to be, like the fastidious, urbane men she'd known. He had grown up tough, and he was tough. But not with her, she thought with a tender smile, and she reached out and smoothed his dark hair back from his temple.

"If you think," he said wryly, "that you can smile at me like that and make me agree to almost anything, you're right." And then he abruptly reverted to his usual, more indomitable self by adding, "However, while I'm willing to practice extreme discretion in our relationship —read that as sneaking—I'm determined that you're going to spend as much time with me as possible, and that includes some nights together. I'll arrange for a pass so that you can get into the parking garage in my building. If I have to, I'll stand out in front and talk to the damned reporters to divert them every time you drive in."

He looked so irked at the prospect of having to pander to public opinion that she said in a voice of exaggerated gratitude, "You'd do that? Just for me?"

Instead of laughing, he took the question seriously and pulled her tightly to him. "You have no idea," he said fiercely, "how much I'd do—just for you!" His mouth opened over hers in a rough, consuming kiss that stole her breath and robbed her of all ability to think. When he was finished, she was clinging to him. "Now that you're almost as unhappy with tonight's sleeping arrangement as I am," he said with grim humor, "I'll get out of here before the reporters out in front decide to go home and say we spent the night together anyway."

Meredith walked him to the door, exasperated because he was right—after that kiss she wanted to spend the night in his arms so badly that she ached. She stood while he shrugged into his jacket and put on his tie. When he was finished, he looked at her for a moment and quirked a knowing brow at her. "Something on your mind?" he teased.

There was—she wanted to be kissed. The memory of the stormy, uninhibited hours she'd just spent in bed with him washed over her then, and with a deliberately provocative smile Meredith Bancroft reached out and caught her husband's tie. Slowly and forcefully she pulled on it, smiling daringly into his smoky gray eyes, and then, when he was close enough, she leaned up on her toes, wrapped her arms around him, and gave him a kiss that left him breathless.

When he left, Meredith shut the door and leaned against it, smiling dreamily, her eyes closed. Her lips were tender from his last stormy kiss; her hair was tousled because he'd shoved his hands into it while he kissed her; and her cheeks were glowing. She felt like a woman who had been made love to very thoroughly and who had enjoyed it tremendously. And it was all true.

Her smile deepened as she thought of the sexy, tender things he had said to her, and she could almost hear his deep voice saying them. .. .

I love you, he had whispered ...

I’ll never let anyone hurt you . . .

You have no idea how much I'd do for you!

Forty miles northeast of Belleville, Illinois, another squad car screeched to a halt behind those already parked beside a wooded stretch of lonely county road, their red and blue lights revolving with frantic eeriness in the night. Overhead, the blinding searchlight of a police helicopter moved restlessly over the pines, lighting the way for the teams of searchers and dog handlers who were combing in the dark for clues. In a shallow ditch beside the road, the coroner crouched beside the body of a middle-aged man. Raising his voice to be heard over the whistling roar of the helicopter blades, he called out to the local sheriff, "You're wasting your time with that search party, Emmett. Even in the daylight you won't find any clues in those woods. This guy was dumped out of a moving vehicle and he rolled down here."