He put his hands in his pockets. "We can't always dictate the timing of highly emotional things." He shot her a look that had nothing to do with Sara.

She shook her head. "Not now, Noah. Please."

"Then when? Tonight?"

"No."

"Tomorrow?"

"No."

"Do you regret it that much?" he asked, and there was something in his voice, not steel now but hurt, that started a vibrating inside her. He leaned in. "Was it that awful?"

"No," she cried. "It wasn't awful at all. It was just plain dumb.

And inappropriate. And ill timed. I was thinking about Mara and feeling empty, and suddenly there you were."

"It was my fault, then?"

She wished it had been, but no amount of denial on her part could support that premise.

"I was doing my part," she admitted, staring straight ahead.

"Actively," he said with what she could have sworn was a grin and a smug one at that, but when she shot him a look, his lean lips were carefully controlled.

Intent first and foremost on flight, she started off down the drive in the direction of the woods, wanting to be there when the first of the girls appeared. But there was Noah, beside her in no time at all.

"That's a very rude habit," he informed her from the edge of the umbrella.

"What is?" she said without breaking stride.

l "Turning and walking away. You do it a lot."

"You'll get poked if you stay there." The umbrella was bobbing with each step, its spiked tips perilously close to Noah's face.

"Raise the umbrella."

"I'll get wet."

"Okay, then stop walking and tell me why you can't stand still."

His saying she couldn't do it was reason enough for her to prove him wrong. She stopped walking and stood still in the rain. "I walk away because I have places to go and things to do. My life has become complicated in the past two weeks. I'm feeling stressed. Besides, I don't know how to deal with you. You're intimidating." "Me?n She stared at him.

"Okay," he conceded, "so I'm authoritative."

"And large and imposing and persistent."

"Those are qualities that get things done."

She thought of their night on the grass. He had been large and imposing and persistent then, but in incredibly appealing ways. Given her frame of mind, she hadn't had a chance.

She started walking again. He was beside her in an instant. She tried to steady the umbrella.

"I know what you're thinking," he said.

She humored him. "What am I thinking?"

"You're thinking that you were vulnerable that night and that I used those same qualities to accomplish the seduction that I'd had in mind right from the start, but you're wrong. If I'd had sex on my mind when I was driving over there, I'd have brought a rubber."

Paige glanced around nervously. "Can't we talk about this another time?" ill'd like to, but you keep shooting me down.

Tell me when, and we'll talk."

But Paige changed her mind. She didn't want to talk. She wanted to forget that anything had happened that night, and Cod willing, once she got her period she could do that. "Look," she said with a sigh, stopping again well short of the crowd waiting at the edge of the woods, "there really isn't any point in talking. What happened the other night was an aberration. It was a weak moment for me. I promise it won't happen again."

"Why shouldn't it?"

"Because," she said deliberately, "there's no future to it. My life is chock full. I have more than enough to keep me busy without juggling a relationship with you, and besides, you're here for a year, then you'll be gone, so what's the point?" She started walking, quickening her pace when a runner emerged from the woods.

It wasn't one of Mount Court's. Nor was the second runner. Or the third. Sara, who was indeed the first of the Mount Court girls to cross the finish line, was the seventh overall to do it. Annie placed second for Mount Court, eleventh overall, Merry third, fourteenth overall.

It was a dismal showing for Paige's team.

She didn't say as much to the girls. Nor did Noah, who commended eachwith enthusiasmon a fine run as she crossed the finish line.

Unable to forget what he had told herfascinated, actually, the more she thought about it Paige watched him with Sara. He asked her how the course had been, asked her where she had felt strongest and weakest, and told her no less than three times how well she had run.

She answered him in a bare minimum of words, and when he put a hand on her shoulder, she turned away.

Paige felt for him. She didn't want to, but she did.

It seemed to her one of the great tragedies of life that families couldn't get along.

"Dear Lizzie," she read later that afternoon, as she sat on the floor, rocking Sami in the portable swing, l I'm not sure when it started, I think way back when I was little and couldn't seem to do things right.

My mom wanted me to be her little helper, but I had too much energy to be cooped up in the house. I wanted to be with my brothers. They were out running around all the time, going back and forth from town. I wanted to be meeting people and seeing how the rest of the world lived, not stuck at the house.

You were lucky. Your parents were different.

You could do what you wanted Paige put down the letter. She was the intruder, the eavesdropper, the Peeping Tom on Mara's thoughts. She knew it was wrong to read another person's mail, had deliberately left the packet of letters at Mara's the night before so that she wouldn't be tempted, but it hadn't worked.

On her way home from Mount Court she had detoured to the house, which the family moving to town had adored. Preliminary papers had been drawn up. They were hoping to move in within the month, which left Paige the unenviable task now, on top of all else, of disposing of its contents. On this day, her sole conscious intent had been to take home the best of Mara's photographs, but with little more than a fast glance at the photos she had gone to the wicker basket and dug through the balls of yarn until her fingers had hit the packet of letters. When she drew it out, she found that it was a different packet from the other, these letters written on blue stationery, tied with red yarn.

On impulse she had upended the wicker basket and found four packets in all, each containing anywhere from six to ten letters. Taking a single photograph to ease her conscience, she had brought the letters home.

She would send them on, perhaps, one day when she could bear to part with them.

For now they seemed the only source of clues to the mystery of Mara.