Witchcraft

own foolishness, home was where you instinctively wanted to hide. And if home lay a hundred and fifty miles away, you just kept going until you got there. In spite of the lousy weather. Kimberly struggled with the tension of fighting the steady rain as well as her own inner anxiety. Refusing to spend the night with Cavenaugh hadn't been enough for her high-strung nerves. She'd needed to be alone, really alone. Kimberly didn't have any misconceptions about what would have happened if she'd stayed in the hotel. Cavenaugh would have been at her door when she opened it in the morning, waiting to see if she had gotten over her snit. And he would have continued to haunt her, arguing his case, condemning her own behavior until she finally admitted that he had been right. It infuriated her to think that she had been so blissfully unsuspecting about that trip to San Francisco. She should have paid more attention to her instincts. After all, there had been plenty of evidence that the trip wasn't starting out as a romantic jaunt for two! But she had chosen to ignore Cavenaugh's increasing silence and tension. When you were in love, Kimberly reflected sadly, you saw things the way you wanted to see them, not as they really were. Cavenaugh had been right about one thing. He was a man and he didn't think like a woman. More importantly, he didn't think the way she, Kimberly Sawyer, did. That was the bottom line. He didn't think the way she did. He might at times be able to almost read her mind, to k now what she was thinking, but that didn't mean he shared the same emotions or analyzed those thoughts the same way she did. He wasn't Josh Valerian. How many times had he told her that, Kimberly asked herself wryly. She supposed it had been his way of trying to warn her that the warm, shared intimacy that she imagined was beginning to take shape between them had its limitations. The truth was she had never confused him for a moment with her fictional male character. It would have been impossible to mistake Cavenaugh for anyone but himself. He was too real, too dynamic, too solid and far too virile to be a stand-in for Josh Valerian or anyone else. Everything about him was unique, Kimberly realized as she slowed the car to compensate for the increasing rain. The taste of his mouth, the earthy scent of his body, the feel of him as he crushed her deeply into the bedclothes. She would never forget the physical side of him. But what she would miss the most were the more intangible aspects of their short-lived affair. Damn it, she thought, there had been moments of shared understanding. She hadn't imagined them all. The night he had held her in his arms and told her he knew what it was like to be wired with tension after a frightening confrontation with violence, for instance. He had comforted and soothed her and she knew he understood exactly what she was going through. There had been other times, too, Kimberly remembered. He understood her need to be alone in a busy household. He had been quietly, deeply appreciative of the way she had interceded to establish some rules for his working hours. How could a man who seemed so in tune with her in so many instances do to her what Cavenaugh had done tonight? The answer was simple enough, Kimberly thought grimly. He'd given it to her himself.
    He was a man. More than that, he was Cavenaugh . The basic masculine arrogance in him was an intrinsic part of his nature as was his sense of responsibility. It was instinctive of him to take charge of a situation and do what he thought had to be done. That part of him would never change. Accepting Cavenaugh as her lover meant accepting the total man.
    Tonight had been one of the most difficult in her life. It had been traumatic facing the grandparents she had sworn never to meet. But on the whole, the confrontation had not gone the way she would have expected. It was impossible to hate the Marlands . Kimberly wasn't sure, yet, exactly what she felt toward the elderly couple who had been forced to beg her to acknowledge them. They seemed like strangers to her--people whom she had heard about from her mother and from the lawyers who had written to her explaining the history of the situation.
    But they were people whom she'd never actually met and on some levels they had remained unreal until now. Tonight she had learned that they were two very human people who were trying to salvage something they had once foolishly thrown aside. It was impossible to hate