A Will and a Way

set the sneaker on the bunk and rose. “I’ll have a look in the cupboards.”
    “Let me know if you find any cookies.” He met the look she tossed over her shoulder with a shrug. “In the early stages of nonsmoking, you need a lot of oral satisfaction.”
    “You ought to try chewing gum.” Pandora opened a cupboard and shone her light over jars and cans. There was peanut butter, chunky, and caviar, Russian. Two of Jolley’s favorite snacks. She passed over taco sauce and jumbo fruit cocktail, remembering that her ninety-three-year-old uncle had had the appetite of a teenager. Then reaching in, she plucked out a can and held it up. “Aha!”
    “Again?”
    “Tuna fish,” Pandora announced waving the can at Michael. “It’s a can of tuna.”
    “Right you are. Any mayo to go with it?”
    “Don’t be dense, Michael. Uncle Jolley hated tuna.”
    Michael started to say something sarcastic, then stopped. “He did, didn’t he?” he said slowly. “And he never kept anything around he didn’t like.”
    “Exactly.”
    “Congratulations, Sherlock. Now which of the suspects has an affection for canned fish?”
    “You’re just jealous because I found a clue and you didn’t.”
    “It’s only a clue,” Michael pointed out, a little annoyed at being outdone by an amateur. “if you can do something with it.”
    He’d never give her credit, she thought, for anything, not her craft, her intelligence and never her womanhood. There was an edge to her voice when she spoke again. “If you’re so pessimistic, why did you come out here?”
    “I was hoping to find someone.” Restless, Michael moved his light from wall to wall. “As it is all we’ve done is prove someone was here and gone.”
    Pandora dropped the can of tuna in disgust. “A waste of time.”
    “You shouldn’t’ve followed me out.”
    “I didn’t follow you out.” She shone her light back at him. He looked too male, too dangerous in the shadows. She wished, only briefly, that she had the spectacular build and stunning style that would bring him whimpering to his knees. Their breath came in clouds and merged together. “For all I know, you followed me.”
    “Oh, I see. That’s why I was here first.”
    “Beside the point. If you’d planned to come out here tonight, why didn’t you tell me?”
    He came closer. But if he came too close to her, he discovered, he began to feel something, something like an itch along the skin. Try to scratch it, he reminded himself, and she’d rubyou raw in seconds. “For the same reason you didn’t tell me. I don’t trust you, cousin. You don’t trust me.”
    “At least we can agree on something.” She started to brush by him and found her arm captured. In one icy movement, she tilted her head down to look at his hand, then up to look at his face. “That’s a habit you should try to break, Michael.”
    “They say when you break one habit, you pick up another.”
    The ice in Pandora’s voice never changed, but her blood was warming. “Do they?”
    “You’re easier to touch than I’d once thought, Pandora.”
    “Don’t be too sure, Michael.” She took a step back, not in retreat, she told herself. It was a purely offensive move. Still, he moved with her.
    “Some women have trouble dealing with physical attraction.”
    The temper that flared in her eyes appealed to him as much as the passion he’d seen there briefly that afternoon. “Your ego’s showing again. This dominant routine might work very well with your centerfolds, but—”
    “You’ve always had an odd fascination with my sex life.” Michael grinned at her, pleased to see frustration flit over her face.
    “The same kind of educated fascination one has with the sex lives of lower mammals.” It infuriated her that her heart was racing. And not from anger. She was too honest to pretend it was anger. She’d come looking for an adventure, and she’d found one. “It’s getting late,” she said, using the tone of a parochial schoolteacher to a disruptive student. “You’ll have to excuse me.”
    “I’ve never asked about your sex life.” When she tookanother step away, he boxed her neatly into a corner. Pandora’s hand slipped into her pocket and rested on the can of hair spray. “Let me guess. You prefer a man with a string of initials after his name who philosophizes about sex more than he acts on it.”
    “Why you pompous, arrogant—”
    Michael shut her mouth the way he’d once fantasized. With his