Deaths Excellent Vacation

really, no matter how much time they had been given together. But he had wanted more time to try.
    “Far from perfect,” Tim said, staring out at the Pacific.
    “No, you’re a good guy. I can sense those things,” Diana said. “And you’re lucky, too.”
    He frowned. “Lucky?”
    The mischief returned to her eyes, and she stood, adjusting the strap of her bikini top.
    “You said you were a sound sleeper,” she reminded him. With one hand on the handle of the slider, ready to go inside, she glanced over her shoulder at him in a pose so sexy it was painful to behold. “I always have trouble falling asleep. I need someone to tire me out. The only way I can really sleep well is if I’m so exhausted that I’m a quivering mass of jelly. And with Kirk gone . . .”
    Diana glanced away, almost shyly, before looking back at him with renewed boldness. “I don’t know what I’ll do tonight.”
    Tim could not speak. He dared not move for fear that she would notice the effect she had had on him, if she hadn’t already.
    Obviously pleased by his speechlessness, Diana opened the sliding door into her room. “Enjoy your day, Timothy.”
    He managed to croak, “You, too,” before her door slid shut.
    Shaking his head in amazement, he went back to his book, the erection Diana had caused—the second in a very short time—slowly subsiding. After a few minutes he realized that his thoughts were straying and he had not understood a word he’d read, and he laughed softly at himself. Had that really been an invitation? Did she mean it?
    Not that it mattered. As arousing as it was just being in the presence of this woman, Tim knew that any sexual trysts were still in the future for him. In another life he would have climbed mountains for an opportunity to sleep with a woman like Diana, and he knew that he would remember what he had overheard last night for years, maybe forever. Maybe someday he would even regret being faithful to a woman who was now only a memory, but this trip was about him and Jenny, and he would honor that, no matter what. He wanted to start a new life, but not quite yet.
    He laughed again, thinking of Jenny. If she were alive for him to tell her the tale, she would have mocked him with love but without mercy. Men, she had often said, were pitifully simple and predictable creatures. Pavlov had used dogs to test his theories about programmed responses, but all he would have had to do was put a man in a room with Diana, and there would have been no need to experiment further.
    This final stop on his farewell tour was by far the strangest.
    How Jenny would have teased him. God, he missed her.
     
     
    THE phone woke him. In the darkness he searched for it, fingers scrabbling on the nightstand, and only managed to find it when it rang a second time. As he pressed the receiver to his ear, he saw the faint glow of the alarm clock.
    Twelve seventeen A.M. After midnight. Who the hell . . .
    “Hello?” he said, voice full of gravel.
    “I can’t sleep,” she whispered.
    It took him a moment, and when the pieces clicked together, his breath caught in his throat.
    “Diana?”
    “Hey,” she said in a sleepy voice.
    Tim had come back to the hotel around eight P.M. and eaten a late dinner alone in the restaurant downstairs. Afterward he had held his breath walking past her room, heart racing. Their conversation on the balcony that morning had stayed with him all day, and he had caught himself fantasizing about her, wondering if her thinly veiled invitation for tonight had been more than just flirting.
    It hurt his heart. This whole strange vacation had been meant to be about Jenny, and his not being able to get Diana out of his mind seemed a dark stain on pure intentions. But, Christ, he was only human.
    “Did you have a nice day?” she asked, when he didn’t reply.
    “Yeah. I guess. Do you . . . do you know what time it is?”
    Even her laugh had that soft, sleepy intimacy about it.
    “I do. I’m sorry. I told you I have trouble falling asleep.”
    They both let that hang in the air for a bit. Lying in bed in the dark, hearing her voice in his ear, Tim found his memory of the previous night returning with perfect clarity. He could practically hear the thump of the headboard against the wall behind his head, and now that he knew what she looked like, the images in his mind were more than imagination.
    “Listen, Diana, I enjoyed talking to you this morning—”
    “Can I come over there?”
    Tim