inside him, and all his nerves and senses were converging on the source of that heat like moths to a candle flame. He tried to remind himself that this was
“Do you need a ride back to your clinic?” she asked as they approached the dark maw of the parking garage. “I can have Patrick send a car-”
“That’s okay, Tom’s got it covered.” Smiling a half smile of his own, Ethan nodded toward the Secret Service agent, who was muttering into his wrist. Moments later an anonymous dark sedan with tinted windows rolled silently up the garage’s exit ramp and stopped beside them.
“Wow, just like Dick Tracy,” Phoenix murmured. “I’m impressed.”
“Your tax dollars at work,” said Ethan dryly. Tom had opened the back door of the sedan and was waiting for him. The car’s engine idled, pumping out visible waves of heat. “About that meeting…”
“Sure. How about tomorrow? Come by the studio. After you get off work…before-doesn’t really matter, I’ll be there, working. You can meet the band.”
“The band…uh, sure.” He felt steeped in heat, his brain fuzzy. He frowned. “Working, you said?”
“That’s what I said.” Her smile was tilted, her voice rusty and sardonic. “What did you think? All us rock stars spend our days just layin’ around smokin’ pot and doin’ drugs and partyin’, right? Like I told you, I’m pretty much just a working girl. I have schedules to keep, deadlines to meet, people depending on me.”
Ethan looked at her for a long moment, seeing the perfect oval of her face sleekly framed in raven-black, and for some reason remembering the way she’d looked when he’d first seen her that morning, with all that hair rippling down her back and slapping against the back pockets of her jeans. He had a suddenly and visceral sense of what it would feel like…cool and silky against his skin. He heard himself say, “I guess there’s a lot I don’t know about you.”
“That there is, Doc.” In the murky light of the garage her eyes seemed shadowed, even sad. “A whole helluva lot.”
Yes, but her eyes were a woman’s eyes, and her mouth a woman’s mouth, and his mind kept asking him why he didn’t just lean over and kiss it. His mind already knew how it would taste…how it would grow moist and soft under his…and nothing else mattered much, did it?
But it did. Half-suffocated by her heat, with the sedan’s well-tuned engine pulsing inside his head, he said in a voice he couldn’t hear, “There’s a lot I’d like to know about you.” And then, “Starting with your name.”
How long did she stare at him in that thumping, suffocating silence, and him feeling trapped, imprisoned, helpless as a fly in molasses? He didn’t know, but when she finally spoke her words thrilled him beyond his imagining, lifted his heart higher than any words she’d ever uttered, stirred his soul more deeply than any song she’d ever sung.
“It’s Joanna,” she said. “Joanna Dunn.”
And he stood and watched her walk away down the exit ramp, her high heels click-click-clicking on the concrete.
He was barely aware of Tom’s hand on his elbow, a polite reminder. He scarcely remembered getting into the car, hearing the door slam behind him, shutting out the heat. He did know that he spoke to Carl Friedenburg as Tom got into the front seat beside him, but he had no idea what it was he’d said. And his only thought, as the sedan rolled out of the garage and joined the flow of traffic in the stifling street, like the words of a great new song playing over and over inside his head:
As he’d expected, Ruthie, Father Frank and Mrs. Schmidt were waiting for him when he got back to the clinic, lounging around the reception counter in a way that reminded Ethan of the cats in his aunt Lucy’s barn back in Iowa, the way they’d lie with bodies at ease, eyes alert, springing to life instantly at his entrance to come running, tails aloft, meowing and twining around his legs, begging.
“How did it go?”
“What did you find out?”
“What was she like?”
He laughed out loud at his vision of the barn cats, surprising them, but he didn’t try to explain. “It went fine,” he said. What did I find out?
“What’s she like, Phoenix?” Ruthie asked again, her dark eyes shy.
Ethan drew in a breath and exhaled it in a rush. “Not like anybody you or I’ve ever met before,” he said on bumps of dry laughter. Everyone nodded, then shook their heads; it was the answer they seemed to have expected. He paused, then added almost guiltily, “We went out for lunch.”
Ruthie gave an excited gasp. “You had lunch with
“Wow,” said Mrs. Schmidt, “were you mobbed?”
Ethan coughed and ran a hand through his hair-a gesture he realized he’d inherited from his father, and made a mental note to stop. “I was recognized-she wasn’t. Believe it or not. She has a way of…just sort of blending in. Practically becomes invisible when she wants to be.”
“Wow,” said Mrs. Schmidt again, shaking her head. Ruthie sighed and leaned her chin on her hand.
“Did you talk about The Gardens?” Father Frank asked in a low voice, glancing over his shoulder. The doctor filling in for Ethan, Sid Grenville, was heading their way, scribbling busily on a chart, while behind him an elderly black man wearing a hat and suit jacket with his overalls ushered his frail-looking wife toward the door.
“Didn’t have much chance,” Ethan said in the same tone. “It was mostly just…getting acquainted.”
But, when he thought back over his time with Phoenix it began to seem to him more like some strange sort of verbal fencing match than real conversation. In his memory he saw them circling each other…feinting and parrying, advancing and retreating. He remembered his one small touche. Undoubtedly she’d scored a few off him, too, but all in all he figured the score had ended up about even. She had, after all, given him her name. He couldn’t underestimate the importance of that.
“Hey, you made it,” Sid Grenville said as he joined them. Dr. Grenville was a tall, balding man with wire-rimmed glasses and kind eyes. Not much older than Ethan, he had a wife and two kids and was struggling to pay back his student loans. He couldn’t afford to spend much time at the clinic, since he’d only recently ventured out on his own and was trying to get a family practice established in offices near the downtown medical center. And since that was clear over on the other side of the harbor, Ethan knew it was a considerable inconvenience for Sid to fill in for him in the middle of a day like this.
“Sorry I’m late,” he said contritely.
The other doctor shrugged and smiled as he passed the chart off to Mrs. Schmidt and stabbed his pen in the general direction of his lab coat pocket. “No problem. How was lunch?”
“Great,” said Ethan. “What’d I miss?”
Dr. Grenville filled him in on the morning’s cases and possible follow-ups, then took his leave. The door had barely swooshed shut behind him before Father Frank got right back to business. “So. Where do we go from here?”
“We have another meeting.” Ethan just did remember not to run his hand through his hair. “Tomorrow. At her studio-which reminds me, Bibi, I guess you’d better call that business manager of hers and find out where that is.” His mouth quirked sideways with his smile. “She says I can meet her band.”
“Oh, wow,” breathed Ruthie.
Her brother glanced at her and said soberly, “Well, I guess it’s better than nothing. Sure do wish we could get her to come down here, though. She doesn’t have any idea what kind of conditions those people are living in. I don’t think we’d have any trouble getting her to do what we want, if she could just…see it. She needs to see it with her own eyes.”
“Yeah,” said Ethan, “so do I.” His old friend gave him a startled look. “Well, what did you think?” Ethan shot back angrily. “You think
