“I’m not sure whether you bring out the best in me, or the worst,” she commented.

Mitch’s eyebrows went into brief but rapid motion. “If that was your worst,” he said in a Groucho Marx voice, “I’m all for it.”

Shay tipped her head back and laughed. It was a throaty, gleeful sound, and it felt oh, so good. If she could be sure that life with Mitch Prescott would always be this way, she would have married him in a second. But in her deepest mind, marriage was linked with betrayal, with pain. She sobered, thinking of Eliott’s desertion and the fickle vanity of her mother.

Mitch lifted his index fingers to the corners of Shay’s mouth and stretched her lips into a semblance of a smile. “No sad faces allowed,” he said.

He went to dish up the scrambled egg concoction he’d made for their breakfast, and Shay sat down in a chair at the table. It was strange, having a man not only cook for her, but serve her as well. “I could get used to this,” she said as he set a steaming, fragrant plate in front of her.

“Good. We’ll get married and make it a ritual. I’ll fix your breakfast every morning and then take you back to bed and make wild love to you.”

Shay blushed again, but some vixen hiding deep inside her made her say, “Keep making threats like that, fella, and I’ll accept your proposal.”

Mitch’s eyes were suddenly serious. “Eat,” he ordered in a gruff tone, looking away.

Before Shay could say anything at all, the telephone rang. Alice Bretton had made her flight arrangements and she would be arriving in Seattle the following afternoon at two. Shay wrote down the name of the airline and the flight number and when she turned away from the phone, Mitch was disconsolately scraping their plates.

Standing behind him, Shay wrapped her arms around his middle and rubbed his stomach with tantalizing motions of both hands. “I seem to remember something about a threat,” she said softly, her lips moving against the taut flesh of his back as she spoke.

Shay was late for work that morning.

Just talking to Alan Roget over the telephone gave Mitch a creepy feeling, as though a massive spiderweb had settled over him or something. He frowned as he listened to the first accounts of the murderer’s childhood, entering notes on the screen of his computer throughout the conversation.

The night with Shay had been magical, and so had the morning. Life was so damned ironic: one minute, a man could be eating scrambled eggs or making love to a woman, the next, talking to someone who personified evil. Like most psychotics, Roget exhibited no remorse at all, from what Mitch could tell. He seemed to feel that civil and moral laws applied only to other people and not to him.

By the time Mitch hung up the telephone, he was a little sick. He immediately dialed Reba’s number in California, and when she answered, he asked to talk to Kelly.