She looked up at the swatch of blue sky showing through her roof. “I need a carpenter, a roofer. Damn, it’s Saturday. I’ll never be able to get a carpenter out here today. What if it rains? What if word gets around about this? Degenerates and drug addicts could just drop in whenever they wanted.” She narrowed her eyes and shifted from foot to foot. “Boy, I’d just like to see them try. I’d be on them like white on rice.”

David believed her. She had that tight-lipped don’t-mess-with-me look a Doberman gets when he hasn’t eaten in three days. Her eyes were a flash of emerald green. Her hair seemed electric. She was getting hysterical, he decided. And she was magnificent. He picked up the bedside phone and dialed.

“Who are you calling?” Kate asked. “The police?”

“No, the pizza place on the corner. You look like you could use lunch.”

For the life of him, David couldn’t figure out why he wanted to feed this crazy person. Common decency, he told himself. He shook his head. That was a bunch of bull. He wasn’t all that decent. He silently groaned and grimly acknowledged that he was hooked. Now that he knew what was under the awful black coat, there was no turning back. He wanted to get rid of the gray sweats. He wanted to get rid of them bad.

Kate looked at the man standing in her bedroom and realized she didn’t know his name. Although he’d moved in three months earlier, she’d never introduced herself. She was a lousy neighbor. She probably should have baked him a cake or something. She’d practically snubbed him, and he’d still rushed over to help her when disaster struck. A nice person, she thought. And he was ordering pizza! A little offbeat, but thoughtful. “Is pizza your standard remedy for hysterical women?”

He hung up the phone and plunged his hands into the pockets of faded jeans that had a hole worn through at the knee. He was wearing a blue-and-black-plaid flannel shirt draped loose over a navy T-shirt, and he was standing back on his heels in new white tennis shoes, watching her. “No, but I thought it might be too soon for brandy.”

“You mean too early.”

“Mmmm. Too early.”