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"What's that?"
"The stampede or crush. It was on the news. Just a minute ago."
"Oh, I wasn't listening."
Was this a test? He didn't know. He'd provided the good answer, though. She put a hand, nails red, on his arm. He supposed he shouldn't even have had the set on--not wise to be too interested in Solitude Creek. But when she'd arrived forty minutes ago, the first thing he'd done was pour some Chardonnay for her and start talking away, so she wouldn't think to shut the unfolding news reports off.
March stretched again. The luxurious inn's mattress not rocking a quarter inch. He thought of the endlessly moving Pacific Ocean, which you could hear, if not see, from the cranked-open window to his left.
"You work out a lot," she said.
"I do." He had to. His line of work. Well, one of his lines of work. March got in at least an hour every day. Exercise was easy for him--he was twenty-nine and naturally strong and well built. And he enjoyed the effort. It was comforting. It was distracting.
With unslit throat and her noncompressed lungs, Calista eased from between the sheets and, like an A-list actress, kept her back to the camera as she rose.
"Don't look."
He didn't look. March tugged off the condom, which he dropped on the floor, the opposite side of the bed. Out of her view.
Looked, however, at the remote. Decided not to.
He thought she was going to the bathroom but she diverted to the closet, flung it open, looking through his hanging clothes. "You have a robe I can borrow? You're not looking?"
"No. The bathroom, the hook on the door."
She got it and returned, enwrapped.
"Nice." Stroking the fine cotton.
The inn was one of the best on the Monterey Peninsula, and this area, he'd learned in the past few days, was a place with many fine inns. The establishment was happy for guests to take its robes as lovely souvenirs of their stay with them--for the oddly random price of $232.
This, he reflected, defined Cedar Hills. Not an even $250, which would have been outrageous but logical. Not $100, which would be the actual retail price and made more sense.
Two hundred thirty-two pretentious dollars.
Something to do with human nature, he guessed.
Calista Sommers fetched her purse and rummaged, collected from it some purse contents.
He smelled wine, from the glasses nearby. But that had been for her. He sipped his pineapple juice, with ice cubes whose edges had melted to dull.
She tugged aside a curtain. "View's amazing."
True. Pebble Beach golf course not far away, contortionist pine trees, crimson bird-of-paradise flowers, voluptuous clouds. Deer wandered past, ears twitchy and legs both comical and elegant.
Her mind seemed to wander. Maybe she was thinking of her meeting. Maybe of her ill mother. Calista, a
twenty-five-year-old bookkeeper, wasn't from here. She'd taken two weeks off from work and driven to California from her small town in northern Washington State to look for areas where her mother, in assisted living because of Alzheimer's, might relocate, a place where the weather was better. She'd tried Marin, Napa, San Francisco and was now checking out the Monterey Bay area. This seemed to be the front-runner.
She walked into the bathroom and the shower began to pulse. March lay back, listening to the water. He believed she was humming.
He thought again about the remote. No. Too eager.
Eyes closed, he replayed the incident at Solitude Creek once more.
Ten minutes later she emerged. "You bad boy!" she said, with a devilish smile, but chiding too. "You scratched me."
Hiking the robe up. A very, very nice ass. Red scratch marks. The image of them hit him low in the torso.
