As far as he had seen, she was grace personified.

“Now I’ve really got to run,” she said, and hurried off to take a shower.

| 29 |

On the windowsill by the back door, the house key gleamed in the morning sunlight, a mundane object yet as fateful looking as King Arthur’s enchanted sword drawn from a block of stone. It had not been there when David had gone to bed the previous night.

When he picked up the key, it was warm in his hand.

He had not given her a key.

He stepped onto the back porch where two rocking chairs stood with a wrought-iron glass-topped table between them. He overturned one of the chairs and looked at the small key box attached to the frame. He pressed the lid, and it dropped open, revealing an empty container. He replaced the key and clicked the lid shut and put the chair upright.

He had never told her where the spare key was hidden. Emily had known, but Maddison had not.

Standing at the head of the porch steps, he regarded the roses as white as innocence and as red as blood. Barely stirred by a faint breeze, the Australian tree fern in one corner of the property cast a lazily undulant shadow like the wimpling fins of a manta ray.

David crossed the yard to the man-size door that served the two-stall garage. When he peered through the window, just enough light allowed him to see that only his car was parked inside.

He walked around the side of the garage. Her vintage Mercedes wasn’t on the brick apron between the big roll-up doors and the alleyway blacktop.

When he went to the front of the house, her car was not parked anywhere along the block.

Once more in the kitchen, less because he wanted coffee than because he needed something to do, he brewed a pot. Like him, she took hers black.

In the hallway, as he carried two mugs to the master bedroom, he heard her talking softly to someone. As he crossed the threshold, she terminated the call and dropped the iPhone in her tote.

“You’re a doll,” she declared as she accepted the mug that he offered.

She wore a bra, panties, camisole, and high heels. She had dried her hair with a towel, but though it was still damp, it fell in an artful shag as black as raven’s wings. Breathtakingly erotic, she nevertheless looked vulnerable as well, and suddenly David feared for her.

She took a long drink of the coffee—“Mmmmm”—and another. She carried the mug into the bathroom, put it on the granite countertop. The yellow dress hung from a hook on the back of the door. Maddison slipped it off the hanger and shrugged into it. “Zip me up?”

As he obliged her, he realized that in the night, when she had been naked and his to explore, he had failed to look for the small, flat, golden birthmark an inch below her navel. The light had been dim, and passion had pressed out all thought of satisfying that eccentric curiosity.