marsh dwellers. She contemplated the remainder of her night, and decided she would slide into bed and pull the covers over her head.
Halfway up the walkway to her house, she heard movement behind her. Not directly, but something that sounded like footsteps on the road. She debated between whirling to see what or who was there, and making a run for the door. With a lock between her and whatever was out there, she could peek through the window to her heart’s content.
Peek and never see a darned thing worth seeing.
She whirled, ready to cut loose with a scream if she needed to. She thrust her keys in front of her, ready to strike out with them.
“I wouldn’t want to face you in a dark alley,” said a familiar voice.
Tracy was more surprised that the man had already gotten so close than she was at the man himself. For a moment she couldn’t speak. Her heart seemed to be rooted in her larynx.
Finally she gathered herself enough to answer. “Seems like you would have picked up some pretty good self-defense skills where you’ve been, CJ.”
He smiled ruefully but looked perfectly relaxed. “If you’re not careful, that’s not the only thing you can pick up in a place like Victorville.”
Tracy studied her ex-husband until the pounding in her throat had dropped back to her chest. Then she regained control with a shrug. “Would you like a glass of wine? That is, if you’d like a break from skulking around in the dark. I hate to get in the way of a steady job.”
“Florida’s been good for your sense of humor.”
“I had to develop one or curl up and die.”
“It sits well on you.”
She turned around and started toward her door. “I have to make a phone call. But come in and make yourself at home. Just don’t plan to make it a habit.”
“Just to let you know, Marsh,” she said into the kitchen telephone a few minutes later. “CJ is sitting in my living room right now. I haven’t been imagining him. Maybe I’ll follow your example and invite him to live with me. It seems to be working so well for you.”
Then she slammed the receiver back into its cradle.
“If I’d thought I might be invited back into your bed, I wouldn’t have moved into Edward Statler’s guest house,” CJ said, from behind her.
Tracy took her time turning around.
“A sense of humor isn’t the only thing I’ve developed,” she said. “My bullshit meter is so finely tuned I can’t even watch the news, in case they interview a politician.”
“That’s a good thing to have. It can save your life.”
“For starters, it would have saved me from marrying you.”
He held up his hands. “I didn’t come all this way to dig up the past.”
Tracy examined the man she’d been married to. A little more than a year in prison hadn’t exactly agreed with CJ, but the lines imprisonment had engraved on his face sat well enough there.
CJ was a man women always looked twice at, then tried for a third if he happened to notice them. With a head of thick, curly silvering hair, expressive dark eyes and an assertive nose, along with olive skin that tanned at the slightest provocation, CJ looked more Italian than German or Dutch, as the Craimer name suggested. But while sorting family papers after his arrest, Tracy had learned that until age twenty-two and a brief court appearance, CJ’s surname had been the Lebanese “Karam,” a name that ironically meant “kind and generous.”
Of course he had been generous enough with her. For no apparent reason, he had deeded her Happiness Key.
“So why have you been skittering around the edges of my life instead of just coming right to my front door?” she asked.
“Didn’t you mention wine?”
“It’s not a vintage you’d appreciate, but considering where you’ve been, I guess you won’t spit it out.” She opened a cupboard and considered the bottle of wine Marsh had brought the night of her first CJ sighting, then nixed it. This occasion was nothing to celebrate.
Instead she found the corkscrew and opened a bottle of grocery store red, a sale wine she’d actually developed a fondness for, and set it on the counter to let it breathe.
CJ lounged, looking for all the world like somebody posing for a GQ photo shoot. Her ex-husband wore clothes as if he never gave a thought to what he put on his body, looking relaxed and elegant simultaneously. For all she knew, he’d