Page 12 of Bedroom Therapy

Amanda stiffened her knees, then walked to the window, watching the duplicitous Mr. Grant get into his car and drive away. Then she couldn’t stop herself from looking for a white van. Which she didn’t see.

Pulling back from the front window, she turned and marched to the desk, where she picked up her phone and called New York.

“I’d like to speak to Beth Cantro,” she told the receptionist.

“Whom shall I say is calling?”

“Amanda O’Neal. I’m returning her call,” she added.

She waited, tapping her foot on the floor until her friend came on the line.

It was more than a minute before Beth came on the line, and Amanda imagined her finishing up a conference with one of her staffers.

“Amanda! How are you? Did you get the little present I sent you?” she asked.

“Are you talking about Zachary Grant?” she asked as she sat down in the desk chair.

“Yes, isn’t he delicious?” Beth asked with a lilt in her voice. “It was tempting to keep him for myself.”

“He’s good looking,” she said cautiously. “But . . . but from your phone message, I thought he’d come down here to do a magazine or a newspaper article. And he didn’t bother to set me straight. Then I found him going through my dresser drawers.”

“Oh goodness. He seemed like a nice guy. And so yummy looking.”

“His looks are beside the point. He’s not exactly ethical.”

There was a long silence on the end of the line. “Maybe by his standards he is. I mean, don’t detectives use all kinds of techniques? Haven’t you seen those cop shows where they get the suspect to admit he’s guilty by pretending they have evidence they don’t really have?”

Amanda took the receiver away from her ear and stared at it for a second as if she could see through the instrument to her friend’s face. Sometimes she wondered how Beth could have gotten to be the editor of a major magazine—when her logic could be pretty strange.

“What does any of that have to do with me?” she asked carefully. “He doesn’t think I’m guilty of anything, does he?”

“I didn’t mean that he did. I was just giving an example.”

“Okay.”

“Don’t dismiss him out of hand.”

“Didn’t you hear me? He was snooping through my stuff.”

On the other end of the line, Beth took a moment before answering. “You know I have pretty good instincts about people. He’s a good guy.”

“Oh, sure.”

Amanda put forward another argument. Beth countered it. They went on for several minutes in that fashion, and Amanda finally decided there was going to be no way to convince Beth otherwise. In fact, by the end of the conversation, she had let Beth persuade her that Zachary Grant was only doing his job.

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After his encounter with Dr. O’Neal, Zach wasn’t feeling particularly hungry, but because he didn’t want to hang around his motel room, he went down to the seafood restaurant on the St. Stephens dock. It was a large wooden building with several dining rooms, and he asked for a window seat where he could look out over the water. He’d always liked eating a meal in a waterfront restaurant. Maybe that went back to when he’d been a kid and his parents had taken the whole Grant brood for a day trip to the Jersey shore.

As he drank a bottle of Flying Duck beer, and picked at a crab cake sandwich, he looked out at the harbor, watching two swans fight a flotilla of ducks for bread crumbs being thrown to them by tourists.

He’d screwed up royally with the pretty blond sexual advice columnist. Probably because she’d thrown him badly off-balance. As he’d read through the folder he’d accumulated on her, he’d decided that interviewing a woman who gave sexual advice was going to be intimidating. Then she’d opened her door, and he’d felt his chest go tight.

She’d looked too young and vulnerable to fill the role he’d assigned her. And when they’d started talking, his impressions had done another flip-flop.

As first he hadn’t acknowledged what he was feeling. Now that he was several miles and several hours away with a beer in his hand, he could admit how attracted he’d been to her. Probably because it had been a long time since he’d let himself get involved with a woman—and the sexual context of the interview had started working on him.

He grimaced. Being turned on by her was damned inconvenient, particularly since he had a long evening ahead of him. Maybe he should remind himself that she had a lot to gain by taking over the column. But he simply couldn’t assign her ulterior motives.

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