Sacred Sins

up, but the knock on the door decided for her. It had to stay down.
    She hadn't expected he could look elegant. But when she opened the door, his steel-gray suit and salmon-colored shirt proved her wrong. Still, she'd been right about the tie. His collar was open. She started to smile at him, then saw the clutch of violets in his hand. It wasn't like her to be tossed so off balance, but when she looked back up at him, she felt like a teenager with her first handful of wilted flowers.

    “Peace offering,” Ben told her, feeling every bit as unsettled and out of character as Tess. He shouldn't have been, he told himself, since he was used to making grandiose or impulsive gestures with the women he dated. It was his way. Tracking down a nosegay of violets in October hadn't seemed a foolish thing to do until he'd stood there, offering them.
    “They're lovely. Thank you.” Regaining her balance, she smiled at him, accepting the flowers as she stood back to let him in. The scent reminded her of the spring that was so far on the other side of winter. “I'll get a vase.”
    As she walked into the kitchen, Ben looked around. He saw the Matisse print, the Turkish rugs, the neat petit point pillows. Soft, pretty colors, and old distinguished wood. It was a room that spoke of quiet, generational wealth.
    What the hell are you doing here? he asked himself. Her grandfather's a senator. Yours was a butcher. She grew up with servants, and your mother still scrubs her own john. She graduated with honors from Smith, and you crammed your way through two years of college before the Academy.
    Oh, he'd researched her all right. That was also his way. And he was dead sure they'd run out of conversation after fifteen minutes.
    When she came back in, she carried the violets in a small Wedgwood vase. “I'll offer you a drink, but I don't have any Stolichnaya.”
    “It's all right.” He made the decision without weighing pros and cons. He'd learned to trust his instincts. While she set the violets in the center of a table, he walked to her and took her hair in his hand.
    She turned slowly, no jerking, no surprise, and met the long silent look with one of her own.

    She smelled of Paris. He remembered the five days he'd spent there in his twenties, going on a shoestring and optimism. He'd fallen in love with it—the look, the smells, the air. Every year he promised himself he'd go back and find whatever it was he'd been looking for.
    “I like it better down,” he said at length, and let his fingers linger a moment longer. “When you had it up this afternoon, you looked remote, inaccessible.”
    Tension snapped into her, the ripe man-woman tension she hadn't felt with anyone in years—hadn't wanted to. She still didn't want to. “Professional,” she corrected, and took an easy step back. “Would you like that drink?”
    He thought about making a long, thin slice through her control. What would it be like? But if he did, he might find his aim off and slice his own. “We'll get one at the theater. There's enough time before the curtain.”
    “I'll get my coat.”

    H E seemed as familiar with the staff at the Roof Terrace as he'd been with those in the smoky little bar the night before. Tess watched the way he spoke to this one, greeted that one, the ease, the casual intimacy. So he wasn't a loner, she concluded, except when he chose to be.
    She admired someone who could be at ease with people, without worrying about impressions, opinions. To be that way you first had to be at ease with yourself. Somehow, as content as she was with her life-style, she'd never quite gotten there.
    Ben picked up his glass, stretched out his legs, and stared back at her. “Got me figured out yet?”
    “Not completely.” She picked up an almond from the bowl on the table and chewed it thoughtfully. “But I think you do. If more people understood themselves the way you do, I'd have to look for a different line of work.”

    “And you're very good at what you do.” He watched her choose another almond with long, slim fingers. An antique pearl gleamed dully on her right hand. “Class valedictorian,” he began, and watched her hand stop. “A private practice that's growing too fast for you to keep up with it. You just turned down an offer to join the psychiatric staff at Bethesda Naval, but you work once a week in the Donnerly Clinic in South East for no fee.”
    His mild rundown annoyed her. Tess was accustomed to knowing more about the people