A few years later she’d convinced herself she finally cared enough about a man to try again. He’d been intelligent and charming, but the wrenching sadness following the affair had taken months to fade.

She’d had a number of boyfriends since then, but no lovers, and she’d done her best to sublimate her sex drive with hard work and good friends. Chastity might be old-fashioned, but sex was an emotional quagmire for a woman who hadn’t known love until she was fifteen. So why did she keep thinking about it, especially with Kevin Tucker in the house?

Because she was only human, and the Stars quarterback was a delectable piece of body candy, a walking aphrodisiac, a grown-up toy boy. She moaned, glared at her keyboard, and forced herself to concentrate.

At five she heard him leave the house. By seven “Making Out—How Far to Go?” was nearly done. Unfortunately, the subject had left her edgy and more than a little aroused. She called Janine, but her friend wasn’t home, so she went downstairs and stared at herself in the small kitchen mirror. It was too late for the stores to be open, or she could have run out for hair color. Maybe she’d just cut it. That crew cut a few years ago hadn’t been so bad.

She was lying to herself. It had been horrible.

She grabbed a Lean Cuisine instead of the scissors and ate at the kitchen counter. Afterward she dug the marshmallows out of a carton of Rocky Road ice cream. Finally she grabbed her drawing pad and settled in front of the fireplace to sketch. But she hadn’t slept well, and before long her lids grew heavy. Kevin’s arrival sometime after midnight made her bolt up.

“Hey, Daphne.”

She rubbed her eyes. “Hello, Karl.”

He hung his coat on the back of a chair. It reeked of perfume. “This thing needs to air out.”

“I’ll say.” Jealousy gnawed at her. While she’d been drooling over Kevin’s body and obsessing about her own hang-ups, she’d ignored one important fact: He hadn’t shown the slightest interest in her. “You must have been busy,” she said. “It smells like more than one brand. All of them domestic, or did you find an au pair somewhere?”

“I wasn’t that lucky. The women were unfortunately American, and they all talked too much.” His pointed look said she did, too.

“And I’ll bet lots of the words had more than one syllable, so you probably have a headache.” She needed to stop this. He wasn’t nearly as dumb as she wanted him to be, and if she didn’t watch herself, he was going to figure out exactly how much interest she took in his personal life.

He looked more aggravated than angry. “I happen to like to relax when I’m on a date. I don’t want to debate world politics or discuss global warming or be forced to listen to people with unpredictable personal hygiene recite bad poetry.”

“Gee, and those are all my favorite things.”