Eclipse Bay

you.”
    “Sure it is.” He swiped a chunk of ice off the shoulder of his jacket. “I take full responsibility, of course. It’s the gentlemanly thing to do, isn’t it?”
    She sucked in her breath in a stunned gasp. “Don’t try to reduce this to sex. What happened last night is the least important aspect of this entire affair. In fact, what happened last night was so unimportant and so unmemorable that it doesn’t even register on the scale.”
    Last night had meant nothing to her. He lost what little remained of the control he had been exerting over his anger. His hands closed around the edge of the table. He rose deliberately to his feet, heedless of the fact that he was still dripping ice water. He smiled slowly at Elizabeth.
    “On my own behalf,” he said with grave politeness, “I would like to say that I didn’t know going in that I was dealing with the original Ice Princess. You should have warned me that you’ve got a little problem in that department. Who knows? With some extra time and effort, I might have been able to thaw you out.”
    As soon as the words were uttered, he regretted them. But they hung there in the air above the table, frozen, glittering shards of ice. He knew they would never melt.
    Elizabeth fell back another step. Her face was flushed. Her eyes narrowed. “You really are a bastard, aren’t you?” Her voice was low and much too even now. “You don’t care a damn about what happened in the aftermath of the Galloway deal, do you?”
    He ran a hand through his hair to get rid of some of the cold water. “No, I don’t. Business is business, as far as I’m concerned, I don’t believe in getting emotionally involved.”
    “I understand,” she said. “That’s precisely how I feel about last night.”
    She turned on one needle-sharp heel and walked out of the restaurant without a backward glance.
    Jack watched her leave. He did not take his eyes off her until she disappeared through the door.
    The twinges of impending fate that he had experienced when she had entered the dining room grew stronger. He knew that she must be feeling them too.
    They both knew the truth.
    She could walk away from what had happened between them last night, but she could not walk away from the business contract they had signed. For better or worse, for richer for poorer, it bound them together more securely than any wedding license could have done.

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    LOST AND FOUND

    The exciting new novel by Jayne Ann Krentz Coming soon in hardcover from G. P. Putnam’s Sons!

THE RANKS OF MEDIEVAL WARRIORS, FOREVER FROZEN IN their steel carapaces, loomed behind him in the shadows. Mack Easton’s face was as unreadable as that of any of the helmed figures standing guard on the other side of the office window. There was something about Easton that made him appear locked in time, too, Cady thought. A quality of stillness, perhaps. You had to look twice to see him there in the shadows. If it hadn’t been for the glow of the computer screen reflecting off the strong, fierce planes of his face and glinting on the lenses of his glasses, he would have been invisible.
    Not a youthful face, she thought. Definitely mature. But not too mature. Thirty-nine or possibly forty, a good age. An interesting age. At least it looked interesting on Mack Easton.
    The weird thing was that, even though she had never been able to imagine an exact image of him with only the telephone connection to go on, now that she was actually face-to-face with him she could see that he fit the voice perfectly. Take the serious, dark-rimmed glasses, for example. Never in a million years would she have thought to add that touch if she had been asked to draw a picture of him based on their long-distance conversations. But when he had removed them from his pocket a few minutes ago and put them on she had decided they looked absolutely right on him.
    “We have a photograph,” he said. “It was found in the museum’s archives.”
    Museum was not the word she would have used to dignify Military World, she thought. What was she doing here? She must have been temporarily out of her mind last night when she took Easton’s call. She was at home in hushed galleries, art research libraries, and the cluttered back rooms of prestigious auction salons. She mingled with connoisseurs and educated collectors.
    Military World, with its low-budget reproductions of arm and armor from various wars was very much as she had envisioned it;