Deadline (Sandra Brown)

a body that arched in and out of the sand for twelve feet. She didn’t need to guess who the sculptor had been. Her sons were dancing around him like aboriginals worshiping a totem pole.
    He’d placed her in an untenable situation. She couldn’t spoil the boys’ excitement, and, damn him, he knew it. Pasting on a smile, she approached the dragon. “My goodness!” She pressed her hands together and placed them under her chin, as though completely captivated. It worked to fool the boys.
    Both were grinning up at her, their rapture apparent. “Isn’t it awesome, Mom?”
    “It certainly is! I hardly know what to say.” This last, she addressed to Dawson, whose eyes were concealed by a pair of aviator sunglasses. She sensed him watching her closely and gauging her reaction from behind the dark lenses.
    “Dawson made it!” Grant said.
    “Did he?”
    “Yeah, and he said he could make other stuff, too. We’re gonna build a battleship.”
    “And a castle for the dragon,” Grant added.
    It was all she could do to keep from grinding her teeth. “Wow.”
    Stef, who’d been carefully observing Amelia as the scene unfolded, clapped her hands. “Before all these projects get under way, we’d better put on more sunscreen.”
    The boys chorused protests, but she placed a hand on each of their shoulders and turned them toward the house. “March. The sooner we do it, the sooner you can come back.”
    Hunter dug in his heels. “Dawson, will you still be here?”
    He hesitated and looked at Amelia, but when she remained stonily silent, he smiled at the boys. “I’ll be around.”
    “Don’t leave!” Grant shouted over his shoulder as Stef propelled him up the boardwalk.
    Neither she nor Dawson spoke until the trio had topped the dunes. Then he said quietly, “I meant only to surprise them. I thought I’d be finished before they came outside. They caught me putting on the final touches.”
    “I asked you, more nicely than warranted, to stay away from us.”
    “My house shares the beach with yours.”
    “But you picked this spot for your…your dragon. What made it so ideal? As if I didn’t know.”
    “I’m not going to interview your children, Amelia.”
    Her tummy fluttered in reaction to his using her first name, and in such a low and infuriatingly reasonable tone. But she didn’t address it, not wanting him to know that she had noticed.
    He said, “I don’t see the harm in my spending some time with the two of them.”
    She dragged back a strand of hair that had defied her hat and blown across her mouth. “Well, let me tell you what the harm is. Aside from the fact that I don’t know anything about you.”
    “That’s not true.”
    “Okay, you’ve got credentials. They don’t speak to the kind of person you are.”
    “I—”
    She held up her hand to stop him. “Secondly, Grant is too young to remember much, but Hunter can recall when his grandfather died. Then—”
    “They lost their father.”
    “That’s right.”
    “So they could use a little man-time, don’t you think?”
    “Absolutely. But not with a man I know virtually nothing about. Not with a snake-oil salesman who will be here today and gone tomorrow. Not with a man who’s ingratiating himself with them only in order to get to me so he can write a big, juicy story for his magazine.”
    “That’s not why—”
    “Save it. I already know you’re a liar.”
    Angrily, he whipped off his sunglasses. “A liar? How’s that?”
    “Hey, Dawson!” The boys came charging over the dunes, toting pails and shovels. Hunter was the first to reach them. “Can we build the battleship now?”
    Grant was bouncing again. “No, I want to build the castle first.”
    Dawson, his angry gaze still locked with Amelia’s, arched an eyebrow by way of asking permission.
    She said, “What choice do you leave me?”
    He told the boys to start filling their buckets with wet sand. As they raced off, he replaced his sunglasses and said to her, “You and I aren’t done with this discussion.”
    “You’re damn right we’re not.”
    *  *  *
     
    She returned to her office and finished the e-mail even though there was no urgency to it because George wouldn’t read it until after the holiday. Attached was a proposal for a new exhibit that she’d been thinking about for a while. She expected resistance to the idea. It would require a combination of diplomacy and arm twisting to convince him and the board of directors that it would be a