Charon's Crossing

He didn't.

"Okay," she said, "okay, that's fine."

And it was. She'd asked him to get out, hadn't she?

Yes. But that was before...

Before what? He'd kissed her, but he'd kissed her many times. There'd been nothing different about that kiss except that she'd let her imagination run away with her, let herself think that... that...

Kathryn stood still. There was nothing to think. Not really. She'd gotten carried away, and so had he. It was just a good thing one of them had come to their senses in time, and embarrassing that it had been Matthew and not her.

Maybe it was a good thing he didn't want to show himself.

Maybe it was a very good thing.

Good-bye, Kathryn, indeed.

"Good-bye, Matthew," she said to the silent house, "and good riddance."

* * *

Damn, but she was such a charming, and gracious, female.

Matthew gritted his teeth as he paced the hot, still attic.

Good-bye, and good riddance?

"What a wonderful sentiment, Kathryn," he growled.

He had turned his back on what could have been a night in her bed and this was his thanks? He had given up the chance to undo almost two centuries of celibacy for this?

No good had ever come of pretending to be a gentleman, not in the real world and not in this one.

Kathryn hadn't recognized an act of decency when she'd been confronted with it. She hadn't even maintained an ongoing interest in finding out what had become of him. She'd spent, what, twenty minutes searching for him? Then she'd written him off the way a banker might write off a bad loan.

"Hell," Matthew growled, "bloody hell."

If that was what a man got for doing the right thing, he was just as glad he hadn't wasted his energies doing the right thing too many times during his life.

* * *

By the time Elvira arrived Monday morning, Kathryn was up to her elbows in Lysol and hot water, scrubbing down the old bricks on the terrace with a vengeance.

Elvira raised her eyebrows. "Hot day for that kind of thing, don't you think?"

Kathryn sat back on her heels. Her shirt and shorts were already stuck to her skin, her hair was damp and sweat was streaming into her eyes.

"Is it?" She shrugged her shoulders. "I hadn't noticed."

Elvira's brows lifted another millimeter. Oh my. Kathryn Russell was angry as a hornet. Not that Elvira was particularly surprised. Everybody from one end of the island to the other knew that Kathryn's young man had flown in Friday night and flown out again not twelve hours later, jammed into the mail plane like a sack of parcels.

Sam Patterson, who ran the airstrip, had joked about it.

"Might call it a case of returned male," he'd said.

Nobody knew exactly what had happened but here was Kathryn, on a morning where the temperature was already up to ninety and still climbing, scrubbing down the terrace with a look on her face that said, go on, just try knocking this chip off my shoulder and see what happens.

Elvira bit her lip to keep from smiling. Even after forty-something years of marriage, there were still times Hiram got her dander up so far that only cleaning her already clean house from top to bottom would get it down again.