Tom stuck it to them mercilessly. "From now on, I need you to be inseparable. Whenever you leave this estate, you go together, and you go with a cell phone. You see anyone suspicious, you stay out of sight. You follow them-if you can-and you call me. No heroics."

"Do you want us to go over to the hotel, set up surveillance in the lobby?" Charles asked, enjoying this immensely. "If this Merchant's in town, he's got to be staying somewhere."

"I'll get the chess set," Joe said. "It'll be the perfect cover. This terrorist will never suspect that two old men playing chess in the hotel lobby are really looking for him."

He disappeared into the other room, and Charles stood up, too. "Better get my hat."

Tom watched him shuffle from the room, his oxygen tank forgotten. And for the first time in his life, he found himself thinking, thank God for the Merchant.

After hearing at the farm stand that Mrs. Ellis had seen her father and Joe playing chess in the lobby of the Baldwin's Bridge Hotel, Kelly had been in a real rush to get home. But now that she was here, she paused just outside the door. She could see Tom through the screen, sitting at the kitchen table, surrounded by piles of papers and file folders.

He was wearing reading glasses, half glasses that made him look completely paradoxical-the intellectual warrior, or the thug librarian-and he rested his forehead in the palm of one hand. As she stood for a moment, holding the bag of fresh fruit and vegetables she'd picked up, he closed his eyes and rubbed his forehead as if he still had that terrible headache.

She shifted her weight slightly, and the brown paper of the bag made only the very softest sound, but he looked up, looked out into the darkness toward her, instantly alert. He was up on his feet, moving toward the door in one graceful motion. Flipping on the outside light, he opened the screen.

Kelly stood there, blinking at him in the sudden brightness.

He grabbed the glasses off his face and all but hid them behind his back.

Hi, honey, I'm home. For a few brief seconds, Kelly let herself imagine what it could be like to come home after a hard day of work to someone like Tom Paoletti. He'd meet her at the door with a soul kiss, start stripping her out of her professional doctor's clothes before they even made it down the hall to the bedroom. They'd have sex right there on the kitchen table, or up against the wall outside her bedroom door, or on the living room floor, and all the struggles and pain and frustrations of her day would just slip away.

"Sorry," he said, stepping aside to let her in. "I wasn't thinking. I should've turned on that outside light earlier."

"That's okay." Her voice sounded breathy and she cleared her throat, afraid he'd somehow know the direction her thoughts had gone. "It's not as dark out there as it looks from in here."

She put the bag down on the counter as he started to gather up his papers, having neatly made his glasses vanish into one of his pockets. He was wearing a loose-fitting T-shirt and a baggy pair of shorts that tried to hide the hard perfection of his body. But she could see most of his legs-long and tanned, lightly covered with golden brown, sun-bleached hair. His calves were muscular, his taut thighs disappearing up into the loose legs of his shorts. It didn't take much imagination to visualize the way those thighs would keep going, leading up to the sculpted perfection of his rear end and narrow hips.

"You don't have to put that away," she told him. "You can work here as long as you like."

"Thanks," he said, "but I'm pretty much done. Everything okay?"

She managed to smile. "As okay as it can be when a six-year-old has a potentially terminal illness. Betsy's going into the hospital first thing in the morning. There's a few more tests to run before we start the chemo and . . ."

Kelly realized she could hear the sounds of a baseball game coming from the living room. The living room. When Charles was alone, he watched from his favorite chair in the room he called the TV room. But he usually watched in the living room on the big screen television when he wasn't alone.

When Joe was with him.

She pushed open the kitchen door that led into the darkened dining room and moved toward the archway that separated the banquet-size area from the enormous living room. There was only one lamp on, but the light from the big screen TV more than illuminated the large room.

It flickered across Charles's and Joe's faces.

They were sitting together, in the same room, on the very same sofa, watching the Red Sox play Baltimore, discussing Nomar Garciaparra, who'd just gotten up to bat.

As she stood in the shadows and watched, Nomar hit one, and both men shouted in excitement as the ball went clear out of the park. She didn't hear what Joe said then, but whatever it was, it made her father laugh.

Charles was laughing. With Joe.

Kelly felt more than heard Tom move behind her, and she turned to face him, putting one finger up to her lips. Whatever had happened between Charles and Joe today had to have been the result of some powerful magic, and she wasn't going to risk breaking the spell. Gesturing for him to follow, she quickly led the way out onto the deck, through the dining room sliders.

Only when the door was shut behind them did she speak. "What did you do?" she asked Tom. "What did you say to them?"

"Don't get too excited," he warned her. "This thing they're fighting about-it's still not resolved."

"But they're sitting there. . . . How did you do it? Did you hypnotize them? I thought nothing short of a miracle-" Kelly's voice broke, and she turned away as her eyes welled with tears. It was a miracle.

"I didn't really do much of anything," Tom said. "I just told them about a . . . well, a project I'm working on, and I said if they wanted to help me with it, their arguments and fighting would have to stop."

Kelly could feel him watching her, feel him wondering if she was about to experience emotional meltdown and burst into tears. But he needn't have worried. Ashtons didn't do meltdowns. They tried to stay as far as possible from such unpleasantly base things as emotions. She herself had been well trained. Get a grip, her father had told her without passion back when she'd been small, burying himself behind his open newspaper. Come back when you're prepared to discuss this like a rational human being. Tears of any kind-even joy-were to be avoided at all costs.

She'd learned to distance herself from her emotions-to separate and partition away everything she was feeling so she'd be calm and collected. It was an ability that had proven quite useful in her medical career. In fact, she'd used it extensively just today when talking to Betsy McKenna's distraught parents.

The only problem was, it didn't keep her from feeling all those untidy emotions. And it didn't keep her from carrying them around with her until she reached a time and a place where she could unload. Or explode.

Now was neither the time nor the place.

"Are you all right?" Tom asked, his voice gentle in the growing darkness. "Tough day, huh?"

"I'm a little . . . tired," she admitted. Ashtons were the kings and queens of understatement, too, god damn it. But why was she being so careful, so polite? This was Tom she was talking to-the closest thing to a friend she had here in Baldwin's Bridge. So she told him the truth. "Actually, I'm so exhausted I can barely see straight. It's been a complete bitch of a day."

Her voice broke again, but she no longer cared.

"Or at least it was until I stopped at the farm stand and heard that my father and Joe spent the afternoon playing chess together in the hotel lobby." Her voice wobbled as she turned to face him. "I don't know what I can say or do to thank you for whatever it was you did."

She wanted to embrace him, the way Joe had embraced him out on the driveway, but she didn't. She couldn't. She didn't know how.

Besides, she could see from the look on his face that she was scaring him to death-the same way she'd scared Gary back when they were first married, before she'd learned to hide everything she was feeling from him, too, the same way she'd scared her father when she was a little girl.

"Don't worry," she reassured Tom. "I'm not going to cry."

Of course that was the precise moment she burst into tears. But it wasn't just tears-she was laughing, too. Laughing at her perfect timing, at the comical look on his face, at the thought of all those pure Bostonian Ashtons rolling in their graves at the idea of their offspring emoting so loudly and violently.

She did the only thing she could do under the circumstances.

She excused herself-politely, of course-and ran for the privacy of her room.

Tom didn't follow.

She hadn't expected him to.

"She isn't going to show."

David glanced up from putting a new roll of film into his camera to see that Brandon still had on his jeans and T-shirt. "She'll be here soon. Get changed, will you?"

"No way, bro. Not until she's here. No point to it. I've got places to go, people to see-Sharon, that redheaded cocktail waitress who works the pool the same shift I do? She dropped a major hint that she was going to go see the Jimmy Buffett wannabe over at the Marina Grill tonight. She's definitely mine if I want her." Bran wandered over to David's drawing table. "Whoa. Is this Mallory?"

"Yeah." David had done some preliminary sketches this afternoon, from memory.

"You're using her just for her face, right? I mean, this body-that's whatchamacallit . . . artistic license, right?"

David adjusted the white sheet he'd spread out on the bare wooden floor. "Nope."

Brandon whistled. "Yow. I hope she does show."

He looked up at his friend. "Don't hit on her, Bran. She's . . ." Fragile. It was true, but no one would know that from the tough bitch facade Mallory had erected for the world to see. Most people wouldn't try to see what was behind that mask. "She's too young," he finally said. "I don't think she's even eighteen yet."

The doorbell rang.

"Please," David said, heading for the door. "Don't scare her off."

He took a deep breath before he opened it, but then there she was. Standing out on the wooden steps that led up to his top-floor apartment, trying to hide the fact that she was having second thoughts about being here.

"Hi," he said, coming out onto the little wooden landing instead of pushing open the screen door so she could come inside. If she was at all nervous, taking it slowly might help. "Did you have any trouble finding this place?"

She shook her head. God, she was young. And incredibly uncertain.

"You know," he said, "it's okay if you've changed your mind. I don't want you to do this if you're-"

Scared. He was going to say scared, and he realized just in time that that would not be a word this girl would ever want used to describe her-even it if was true.

She lifted her chin and gave him a scathing look. "I'm not, like, afraid," she told him.

"She says she's not afraid," Bran echoed from behind the screen door. "But I am-because you have completely lost your mind. You're supposed to talk her into doing this, fool, not give her permission to run away. Mallory, you gorgeous thing, come in here and see what Sully's done just from memory."

Brandon opened the door and, taking Mallory by the hand, drew her inside.

"Oh, my God, it's cool in here," she said. "You have air-conditioning."

"You and me, babe," Bran said as he led Mallory toward David's drawing table, "we are going to be so freaking famous when Sul hits it big. Hasbro's gonna make little action figures with our faces on 'em. We'll go to comic book conventions and sign autographs until our hands hurt. It is gonna be such a blast."

As David closed the door, Mallory leaned over his drawings, studying them carefully. And then she looked up at him, seeming to examine him just as completely. As she did, he could not for the life of him read the look in her eyes.

Self-consciously, he glanced down to make sure his fly was zipped-to make sure he'd remembered to put pants on in the first place. But he was still wearing the bathing trunks he'd thrown on after this evening's sweatfest-when he'd cleaned and vacuumed his apartment in the oppressive heat. He hadn't turned on the air conditioner until about a half hour ago-it cost way too much to run and he was saving every penny. He'd showered after cleaning, but putting on anything more than his bathing suit had seemed insane.

He'd finally pulled on a T-shirt when he'd gone out to get a pizza for dinner. He now double-checked the logo on the front to make sure he wasn't wearing something offensive or too strange. No, it was his "Spock for President" shirt, faded and loose, with a small but growing hole in the shoulder, along the seam.

"Why don't you get new glasses?" Mallory asked. "You know, there's one of those one-hour places down on Route 1."

David wasn't sure what to say. Was she trying to feel more in control of this situation by pointing out his obvious flaws? Except why stop with his broken glasses?

"I don't have the money." He answered her as if her question was sincere. "Right now everything I've got is going toward getting Nightshade drawn and printed."

"What about your parents?" she asked. "Couldn't you call them and tell them your glasses broke? I bet if you went to visit them, the first thing they'd do would be to take you to get new glasses."

She was right, except . . . "It's one thing when they offer to help, but to call and ask for money . . ." He shook his head.

Mallory nodded solemnly. "I know what you mean."

"I'll be going home about a week before school starts," he told her. "I'll probably get new glasses then."

Her question had been sincere, not a thinly veiled put-down. She was talking to him, having this conversation as if she cared what he said, as if his thoughts and opinions were valid, as if she actually liked him. David's pulse kicked into a higher speed as he stood there, gazing into her luminescent eyes, unable to look away, barely able to breathe.

He and Mallory and Brandon were in a room together, and Mal was talking to him, looking at him, liking him.

"What's the big deal?" Bran said loudly. "They're your parents. They expect you to call and ask for money." He yanked his shirt over his head and began unfastening his pants.

His gleaming golden abs and pecs seemed to fill the room, and Mallory turned away from David to stare. The look of awe on her face would have been funny, except for the fact that it completely killed the little seed of hope that had unfurled just seconds ago in David's stomach.

And as Brandon kicked off his sneakers and stepped out of his jeans, as Mallory turned, wide-eyed, to watch him walk across the room in his boxers, David felt himself return to his normal invisible, unnoticed state.

Which was just as well, since he had work to do.

Chapter 9.

TOM COULDN'T CONCENTRATE on the baseball game. And there was no point in reading his printed file on the Merchant again. He'd read all the information five or six times, and he could recite parts of it from memory.

What he wanted to do was to get back on-line and see if WildCard had emailed him a download of additional information. But the computer was in Kelly's bedroom, and her door was tightly shut.

He stood outside her room for several long seconds, just listening. There was nothing but silence. If she was in there, and he knew she was, she was probably asleep.

What he really wanted was to be in Kelly's bedroom with her.

It had killed him earlier tonight when she'd started to cry. Not pulling her into his arms had been one of the hardest things he'd ever done. But he knew himself too well, knew he couldn't be the kind of friend who offered casual physical comfort.

He wanted this woman too much. Holding her would have pushed him over the edge. He wouldn't have been able to resist the temptation, and he would have kissed her. And she would have either kissed him back or pushed him away.

Tom wasn't sure which response would have been worse.

If he had kissed her and she hadn't pushed him away, he didn't doubt for one second that he'd be in Kelly's room, behind that closed and locked door, right this very moment. He was good with women-it was a fact. He could say that with very little ego involved.

He knew just what to do, what to say to make a woman set aside her doubts and embrace the moment. So to speak.

The problem was, when it came to Kelly Ashton, he couldn't get past his own multitude of doubts.

What if the man he'd seen at Logan and the Home Depot wasn't the Merchant?

He'd always hated the fact that the terrorist had escaped capture. That had chafed long after the other members of the counterterrorist team had accepted the fact that the man was gone. The CIA had tried to pick up the Merchant's trail, but they'd come up empty-handed again and again.

With WildCard's help getting reports and records that normally wouldn't have crossed his desk, Tom had followed their progress over the past few years-if you could call it progress when absolutely nothing happened.

WildCard had jokingly referred to Tom's interest in the Merchant as TLO-Tommy's Little Obsession. They'd both laughed about it, but Tom wasn't laughing now. Now the word obsession made him a little too uncomfortable.