And that smooth contralto voice had set the whole package off nicely.

“You guys going to stand there watching that woman’s butt all day?” Ethan wanted to know.

“Yeah, like you didn’t notice it.” Cam snorted.

“I noticed. I’m just not making a career out of it. Aren’t we going to get anything done around here?”

“In a minute,” Phillip murmured, smiling to himself when she turned the corner and disappeared. “Sybill. I sure hope you hang around St. Chris for a while.”

SHE DIDN’T KNOW how long she would stay. Her time was her own. She could work where she chose, and for now she’d chosen this little water town on Maryland’s southern Eastern Shore. Nearly all of her life had been spent in cities, initially because her parents had preferred them and then because she had.

New York, Boston, Chicago, Paris, London, Milan. She understood the urban landscape and its inhabitants. The fact was, Dr. Sybill Griffin had made a career out of the study of urban life. She’d gathered degrees in anthropology, sociology, and psychology along the way. Four years at Harvard, postgraduate work at Oxford, a doctorate from Columbia.

She’d thrived in academia, and now, six months before her thirtieth birthday, she could write her own ticket. Which was precisely what she’d chosen to do for a living. Write.

Her first book, Urban Landscape, had been well received, earned her critical acclaim and a modest income. But her second, Familiar Strangers, had rocketed onto the national lists, had taken her into the whirlwind of book tours, lectures, talk shows. Now that PBS was producing a documentary series based on her observations and theories of city life and customs, she was much more than financially secure. She was independent.

Her publisher had been open to her idea of a book on the dynamics and traditions of small towns. Initially, she’d considered it merely a cover, an excuse to travel to St. Christopher’s, to spend time there on personal business.

But then she’d begun to think it through. It would make an interesting study. After all, she was a trained observer and skilled at documenting those observations.

Work might save her nerves in any case, she considered, pacing her pretty little hotel suite. Certainly it would be easier and more productive to approach this entire trip as a kind of project. She needed time, objectivity, and access to the subjects involved.

Thanks to convenient circumstance, it appeared she had all three now.

She stepped out onto the two-foot slab that the hotel loftily called a terrace. It offered a stunning view of the Chesapeake Bay and intriguing glimpses of life on the waterfront. Already she’d watched workboats chug into dock and unload tanks of the blue crabs the area was famous for. She’d watched the crab pickers at work, the sweep of gulls, the flight of egrets, but she had yet to wander into any of the little shops.

She wasn’t in St. Chris for souvenirs.

Perhaps she would drag a table near the window and work with that view. When the breeze was right she could catch snippets of voices, a slower, more fluid dialect than she heard on the streets of New York, where she’d based herself for the last few years.