a family creed. Wilder Women Don't Wed And They Don't Run. Biting her lip, Kitty sent a silent, guilty apology to her antecedents.
C'mon, ladies, she thought, you forgive me, right? You were never any good at following rules either.
"Well, if that's all..." she began.
From the back, one of the largest of the players half raised an arm, a souvenir passport clutched in his big fist. He was tall enough that Kitty could see the slogan "I Do It My Way" stretched across his chest, and instinct warned her not to look closely at the accompanying cartoon. There was a gleam in his eye that she recognized all too well.
"It says here the town is chock-full of descendants of the first residents," he said, waving the passport again. With a smirk, he jerked it toward the ceiling. "Any of those who worked upstairs your grandma?"
It was inevitable, Kitty told herself. Natural. And it wasn't as if that question hadn't come up hundreds of times before.
"One of the most special things about Hot Water," she responded, "is just how many of our current citizens can trace their family tree back to an early town resident." Sometimes just that one comment was enough of an answer.
But not this time. "What about you?" the rugby player insisted.
Though she wished it away with all her might, telltale heat crawled up Kitty's skin. Her undeniable feeling of discomfort - she refused to call it shame - wasn't this man's fault. He couldn't know how integrally one's Hot Water identity was tied to who one's original Hot Water ancestor had been. He couldn't know that around these parts, and it had become even worse over the past six months, she was looked upon as something of a soiled dove herself.
"Rose Wilder is my great-great-great-grandmother," Kitty said.
"Yeah?" The young man's smile was lewd. He leaned forward with new interest. "So besides passing down her genes, did your randy great-great-grandy pass down any tricks of the tra - " His yelp cut off the rest of the question.
Kitty nearly smiled, swearing she'd kiss whoever had halted the smart aleck's remark. Then the smart aleck shifted, and she could see exactly who had caused the young man's cry.
Oops. Scratch that idea. Kissing the man in black would become her second silly mistake.
But that bad kissing idea, darn it, refused to disappear. Instead, it operated like an eraser on the blackboard of her mind, rendering Kitty not only speechless but motionless until Sally hurried to the rescue. She barked orders to the players and then, hands to shoulders, guided Kitty out of the parlor and into place behind the narrow table by the front door.
When Kitty's consciousness finally reemerged, she found herself with red ink pad ready and rubber stamp in hand, prepared to mark each visitor's guest book as he exited. He! Mind once again at full alert and heart rising in her throat, she peered up the single-file line of men, dreading who might be waiting to confront her.
But her OSM wasn't there.
She checked a second time, almost unable to comprehend that she'd sidestepped the final hurdle. But there was no scary, dark-haired, dark-eyed man in line. Once again she was free! Free to pretend, as she had since she was eighteen years old, that her One Silly Mistake had never happened.
Taking her first full breath in over an hour, she motioned the lined-up rugby players forward. Thwat ... thump ... thwat ... thump ... thwat ... thump. Right hand moving mechanically from ink pad to paper, Kitty focused on the table top, stamping the books of the men shuffling past. As each one exited, she breathed even more easily.
Challenging tour completed. Man-from-the-past dodged. She'd done it!
Lost in that happy thought, Kitty enthusiastically continued her automatic stamping of the last few souvenirs. Thump. Thwat. Thump. Thwat. As a matter of fact, her thoughts were so far away and her movements were so automatic that it took her several moments to register that the very last guest book she stamped with a blood-red rose wasn't a book at all, but the back of a man's hand. The hand had slapped down, flat and commanding, on the tabletop in front of her, and she'd simply gone right ahead and stamped it.
Now she stared at that wide-palmed, long-fingered, very male hand, her panic resurging. Dylan's hand, she thought, the panic curdling into clumps of just plain fear. He hadn't left the brothel after all.
As before, she tried telling herself that the odds