She'd made a startled little gasp when he'd grabbed her hand, and was staring at him as if she thought he might explode. "N-now?"

"Yeah. How about a cup of coffee or something? I don't know about you, but I need to get out of here. I'd like to talk about this a little more." He hesitated, then added, "Preferably someplace quiet."

She was biting her lip, looking more like Marilyn now than Grace. After a moment she said, "Okay. How about my place?"

It was unexpected, to say the least, but he didn't show how startled he was. He stood up and said crisply, "Your place it is. I'll follow you."

As he drove behind her nondescript white sedan down a long, creepy lane completely overhung with avocado trees, it occurred to him to wonder, and not for the first time, just what kind of woman he was dealing with. The trouble was, she gave off contradictory signals. She looked like a showgirl. That was the only way to put it. She was leggy and statuesque and blond, the kind of blond whom gentlemen are said to prefer. And what was she? A social worker, for Pete's sake! A social worker who dealt with mistreated kids. Zack still had trouble believing it. It had him feeling strangely out-of-step. It would be interesting to see her place. Maybe there he'd find the clues that would help him fit her pieces together.

And then he wondered again why it mattered. He felt guilty for thinking about her, when he should have been thinking about that little girl. But dammit, Theresa was there all the time anyway, in the back of his mind, and had been for days. And now it was out of his hands. He'd done what he could, and the rest was up to the people who knew how to deal with that kind of sickness. He had to get the kid out of his mind. Forget her. He had a feeling Maddy Gordon could help him forget.

It was quiet in the grove. He could hear the rustle of dry leaves under his tires, the call of a crow somewhere in the treetops. Ahead, fingers of sunlight slanted through openings in the trees, spotlighting an oddly-shaped weathered gray building with no windows. It looked like an enchanted cottage, isolated in a sunlit glade in the middle of a dark and mysterious forest. He kept expecting an ugly little old lady to come around the corner croaking, "Nibble, nibble like a mouse, who's been nibbling at my house?" Or seven fat little men to come marching down the lane singing, "Hi ho, hi ho, it's home from work we go!"

But when Maddy unlocked the front door and stood aside to invite him inside the cottage, he realized he'd had the wrong story. "My Lord," he breathed after a moment's stunned silence. "It's Geppetto's workshop!"

From every shelf and chair and tabletop, faces peered at him; purple faces, blue faces, green faces, bright orange and yellow faces; faces with big sad eyes, faces with bright shoe-button eyes, faces with sleeping eyes, long curling lashes lying against fuzzy cheeks; animal faces, people faces, and faces born of pure imagination; faces with ears, faces with horns, faces with tufts and billows of iridescent hair. Each face was attached to a body, and most of the bodies had arms. But except for the ones suspended by wires from the ceiling, very few of the bodies had legs.

"Puppets," he said in wonder. "They're all… puppets." And then, with horrified disbelief, "My Lord-one's alive!''

For in one particularly furry, gray-blue face a pair of round green eyes had, unmistakably and oh, so slowly, blinked.

Maddy gave a delighted gurgle of laughter. "Incorrigible, you rascal, can the act and come down from there."

The green eyes closed and a pink mouth opened in a wide, insolent feline yawn.

Geez, Zack thought, is she a witch? It was becoming a matter of pride with him to appear unflappable around her, not to let her see how much she could surprise him. And so, to cover his shock and give himself a few seconds to regain his poise, he reached out and gathered up the big gray cat from his perch on a shelf full of puppets. The cat seemed momentarily nonplussed. It reared back its head to stare at him, then flattened its ears and squinted and sniffed at Zack's chin. And finally the cat went completely boneless in his arms, paws in the air, and began to purr.

"That was a test, you know," Maddy said. She was standing beside a small table that held a phone and message machine. It seemed to be the only surface in the place that wasn't covered with puppets or puppet parts.

Zack lifted one eyebrow. "Do I pass?"

"Oh, with flying colors. You're the first, I think." She smiled wryly. "Most people tend to… freak out, as a friend of mine would say, when Corry goes into his act."

"His act?"

"Corry likes to impersonate a puppet, and then frighten people out of their wits by coming to life. He's a born showman, and has faultless timing. He only does it for first-time visitors, and always when they're still in shock just from seeing the place. After that, I guess he figures they've got his number."

"Amazing," Zack murmured, and set the cat on the floor, much to its disgust. After a perfunctory wash designed to save face, Corry made his proud, unhurried exit.

"Yes, I guess he is," Maddy said, smiling fondly after the waving plume of tail.

"I wasn't talking about him." Zack gestured at the puppets and the magical stairways of sunlight that angled down from five skylights, then walked toward her. "I mean all of it. This house, the puppets… you."

"Me?" She shook her head emphatically. "I'm not amazing." Her voice shook, and her eyes seemed to darken. He realized with another shock that she was afraid of him. He felt the desire he'd first felt the day she'd fainted in his arms in the pool, the desire to erase that fear from her eyes. To see her eyes grow luminous and soft, and finally close in complete trust and surrender…

Very slowly, he reached out and touched the nose of the large pink dragon she had gathered into her arms. To his astonishment, the dragon sneezed, then rubbed its nose with its tail.

"Gesundheit," Maddy said, watching Zack over the dragon's blue crest. She was smiling, her lips slightly parted, and her eyes held shimmers of laughter. "This is Bosley. Bosley, say hello to Zack."

The dragon muttered, "Hello." It sounded like a sulky frog.

"Bosley's nose is very ticklish," Maddy explained. "However, he does enjoy having his neck rubbed."

"Oh, yeah?" Zack murmured, and wondered if Maddy did. Feeling only a little silly, he stroked the velvet underside of the dragon's chin. The dragon made a purring sound. Zack was captivated and amused to see that its eyes had closed.

"My goodness," Maddy said, her voice sounding something like a purr as well. "I see you have a way with dragons as well as with cats and children. You must have a magic touch."

Zack didn't answer. He just looked into her eyes and slowly and with deliberate sensuousness began to stroke the dragon's neck. The dragon made delighted Mae West noises and wound itself around Zack's forearm. It rubbed its cheek ecstatically against his biceps, then rested its head on his shoulder and gazed up at him with adoring eyes.

"Hello, big fella," the dragon said in Mae West's sexiest voice.

Maddy looked startled. "Boz! You never told me you were a girl!" Her cheeks were as pink as the dragon.

"Honey," Bosley purred, "you never asked."

"You're good," Zack said softly to Maddy. "You're very, very good."

"Maybe," the dragon said, lowering her eyelashes demurely. But when I'm bad… I'm better."

"Boz!" Maddy seemed genuinely scandalized.

Zack laughed appreciatively, but even as he was doing so, he was battling intense frustration. She was good with that thing-too damn good. He knew exactly what she'd done, and knew that she'd done it deliberately. She'd used that puppet to hold him off, just as effectively as if it had been a third person-a roommate, say-instead of a toy made of velvet and papier-mache.

But Zack hadn't forgotten for one moment that under the pink fabric and paint he had caressed a soft, shapely arm. And that the dragon's head, however uncannily lifelike Maddy's skill could make it seem, was a hand-Maddy's hand. And for a few moments it had stroked his arm and shoulder and rested warmly in the hollow of his neck. His skin still tingled with his awareness of her. It was a kind of awareness he hadn't felt in a long time-hadn't even wanted to feel. And right now he knew that he wanted her hands touching his skin without the interference of cloth and cardboard. In fact, he wanted her skin touching his skin, without interference from anything at all…

But for the life of him, he didn't know how to get past her chaperones.

Four

Maddy saw that the smoky look was back in Zack's eyes and wondered if she'd gone too far. She couldn't imagine what had come over her, to use Bosley to flirt that way. Good heavens, a sensuous dragon! Who'd have thought she had it in her?

She didn't have it in her-not really. It was just the darn puppets. She was so accustomed to interacting through them in highly charged emotional situations that they sometimes took on personalities all their own. She glared accusingly at Bosley, but the dragon only returned her look of reproach with one of sleepy-eyed innocence. With a small noise of helpless dismay, Maddy plunked the puppet back onto its stand.

Now she felt naked and defenseless. Zack's presence in the huge, sunlit room made it seem too crowded, the air precious. Realizing that she was twisting her hands together in a childish manifestation of nervousness, she waved one in the general direction of the sofa and said, "Um… won't you sit down? Ill go fix some coffee-unless you'd prefer iced tea." She wondered for a moment if he needed something stronger after the shock of seeing Theresa, and was trying to remember whether she'd saved the bottle of rum Jody had brought to make eggnog last New Year's Day.