Cooked Goose

like a lover. Then he squeezed, tighter and tighter, until he heard her gasp from the pain. He thought of the quiet, deserted orange grove. The rich smell of citrus in the cool night air.
    Yes, there was a lot more pain where that had come from. He could tell already: It was going to be a long, longnight.

CHAPTER THREE

    9:30 P.M.

    O nly thirty more feet to the front door, Savannah told herself as she dragged her tired body up the sidewalk to her; small, Spanish-style cottage. Once you’re inside, you can fall apart at the seams. You can scream, cry or just quietly pass out , and nobody but the cats will ever know.
    Ah... the pleasures of living alone. I
    As she stepped onto the porch and fingered the selections: on her key ring for the one to the door, Savannah tried not to notice that her house was looking as bedraggled these days as she felt.
    The chipped stucco had long ago lost its freshly painted, white glow. The bougainvillea bush, which she had named Bogey—after Humphrey—was taking over the front of the place. Any night now, a wandering tendril might snake through her upstairs bedroom window and strangle her in her sleep.
    More than once, she had wondered what it would be like to have a man around the house. A Prince Charming, enchanted sword in hand, whacking back the wayward bougainvillea, then climbing through the bedroom window to claim his prize.
    Unfortunately, most of the guys she met weren’t exactly princes, they weren’t notably charming... and she hadn’t exactly had to bar her bedroom window against marauding, lust-besotted suitors.
    Savannah had to admit: Maybe she had been a bit standoffish. Perhaps she should install a functional escalator from the sidewalk, over the porch, to that lonely, second-story window and leave it on “up” all night. Nope. There was no point in playing so hard to get.
    But the moment Savannah opened her front door, she abandoned all plans of acquiring a lover. Who needed male attention when feline affection was so readily available, unconditional and uncomplicated?
    Two blue-black, furry, live house-slippers entwined themselves warmly around her feet and ankles, vibrating better than any expensive gadget from a Sharper Image catalogue. And these two apparatuses operated, not on batteries, but on cans of salmon-flavored Kitty Gourmet.
    “Good evening, Cleopatra, Diamante,” she told the regal pair, reaching down to stroke the silky, ebony coats. They each wore rhinestone-studded black collars that glimmered in the dim porch light as they gazed up at her with emerald eyes full of adoration.
    “Yeah, yeah, and if I missed a day feeding you, you’d both turn on me like a couple of ravenous jackals,” she told them as she tossed her purse onto the cherry piecrust table inside the door. She headed for the kitchen and their feeding bowls, which she was fairly certain—judging from the feverish pitch of their purrs—were licked clean.
    They were.
    She took a tin of cat food from the cupboard and a can opener from a drawer. So much for immediate self-indulgence upon arriving home, she thought with a tired sigh as she scooped the smelly concoction into the bowls. The cats buried their faces in it, infinitely satisfied.
    There, she had done her act of kindness for the animal kingdom. And now... a warm bubble bath in the clawfoot, Victorian tub upstairs, a cup of hot chocolate with a splash of Bailey’s, a few scented candles and—
    The shrill ring of the telephone extinguished her fantasy candles and burst the iridescent bubbles of her imaginary bath. I
    Irritated, she snatched the phone receiver off the wall. “I’m not here. I never will be again,” she told her caller. “Go away.”
    “Sav-v-van-n-n-ah.”
    She wanted to hang up. Desperately. But she couldn’t pretend she didn’t recognize that tear-choked southern drawl. If it had been any of her other eight siblings calling, she would have slammed down the phone without even a nudge of conscience. Even big sisters had to get some credit for time served, now that her batch of younger sisters and brothers were almost all adults... at least legally, if not emotionally.
    But Vidalia was pregnant. Extremely pregnant.
    And as tired as Savannah was, she couldn’t be that cruel. You just didn’t hang up on a woman who was in a family way. Not one who already had one set of completely adorable, completely undisciplined, five-year-old twins.
    Besides, knowing Vidalia, she would only call back.
    “Hi,