Annie Laurance stared first at the telephone, then at the list she held in her hand.

Should she call all of them? Tell them it was canceled?

What could she say? That she had smallpox?

She took a deep breath and glared at the telephone. It was her shop, her Sunday evenings. If she wanted to call it off she …

Beneath her hand the phone rang. Annie and her black cat, Agatha, both jumped.

“Agatha, love, it’s all right,” she called, but Agatha was already streaking toward her usual hiding place.

The phone shrilled again.

Annie yanked it up, remembering at the last moment to insert a modicum of cheer in her voice.

“Death On Demand.”

There was an instant’s pause, then a familiar voice, an upsettingly familiar voice, inquired mildly, “Do you provide a choice? Defenestration, evisceration, assassination?”

“Max!”

She winced at the enthusiasm of her greeting. Determined to put that right, she repeated crisply, “Max,” the inflection pleasingly even.

“I liked the first Max better,” he said in that lazy, good-humored, oh-so-Max-satisfied voice.

“Where are you?”

“Dear Annie. Always straight to the point.”

“Look, Max, I’m busy, and I’ve—”

“No time for old friends? Dear friends?”

She could picture him, leaning casually against something, a newel post perhaps, as if it were a play. Or he might have a cellular phone in his Porsche. Max always liked to have the latest in everything. His blond hair would be rumpled, his mouth quirked in an expressive grin, and his blue eyes, those damnably vivid blue eyes, alight with laughter.

“I’ve had the devil’s own time finding you, love. You could at least ask me how I did it.”

She waited. Max never needed encouragement to display his cleverness.

“They were very friendly to me at your old alma mater, via long distance, of course. I spent enough to keep Sprint solvent for another quarter.”

“You called SMU?” She heard the bleat in her voice and winced again.

“Did you think I didn’t listen to your tales of college days?”

“You have a brain like a sponge.”

“I will take that as a compliment. When I explained to the drama secretary that I was casting director of a new off-Broadway play, and that we’d lost your number … Well, it worked like magic.”

Annie objected, “They don’t know where I am.”

“But they knew the name of your best chum, one Miss Margaret Melinda Howard, who now lives in Lubbock, which sounds like a cross between a hillock and a sick sailor. I chatted long enough with Ms. Howard to finance a major promotional campaign by Sprint. She was thrilled to tell me that you, her most favorite orphan friend, had inherited the not-quite-beneficent estate of your crusty uncle Ambrose and were now living on an island off the coast of South Carolina, which I brilliantly located on a large-scale map.”

Annie almost corrected him. She wasn’t really an orphan. Her parents had divorced when she was three, so she didn’t remember her father, and the fact that he was apparently alive and well in California wasn’t important. Margaret knew of her mother’s death, of course. Annie realized she was twiddling her mind with every extraneous detail possible to avoid responding to Max’s magnetism. It was to no avail. She felt the same old weak-kneed dizziness that swept over her every time he used to come around her tiny Greenwich Village apartment. But she had settled with that, done with it once and for all, and she wasn’t going to stand here and let it all start up again. Besides—she glanced at the antique clock above the mantel—she was running out of time.

“Look, Max, it’s great to hear from you. But I’ve got to make some phone calls, something I have to attend to.”

Unintentionally, the worry throbbing deep inside spilled over into her voice. She knew he heard it just as clearly as she did.

“What’s wrong, Annie?” The light tone was gone.

“Nothing big,” she said lightly. “Just some stuff with the shop.”

“You’re upset.”

She took a deep breath. Upset was putting it mildly, and if she didn’t get busy on the phone right this minute …

“Max, it isn’t your problem.”

“Come on, my love. What’s upset you?”

She forced a laugh. “Nothing. I just need to cancel a party for tonight.”

“Where’s the party?”

She was so obsessed with her problem that she’d forgotten everybody didn’t know. “It’s here at the bookstore.”

“Bookstore? Oh, hey, I like that—Death On Demand.”

She glanced at the clock. “Look, Max, it’s swell to talk to you.” It wasn’t swell. She steadied her voice—good, straight, crisp inflection. Good girl, Annie. Always knew there was a superb actress in you. “But I’ve got to get off the phone and cancel that party.”

“Don’t cancel it, Annie. You know I love a good party.”

She stiffened. “Look, Max, you are in New York, aren’t you?”

He chuckled. “Not by a long damn shot. See you at the party.”

The line went dead. Annie glared at the humming receiver.

He couldn’t be in South Carolina.

Max here. She looked out the front windows of the shop at the green water surging against the rock wall of the harbor. He couldn’t actually be here.

Before she could assimilate the thought and order her emotions, her heart—that untrustworthy, undisciplined, irritating member—gave a happy leap.

Annie banged down the receiver. All right. Let him come. If he’d ferreted out her new home, followed her down here, just let him come. She’d never change her mind, no matter how much he piled on his careless charm.

They were poles apart, and apart they should stay.

She was poor.

Max was rich.

She’d grown up in a shabby frame house in a Texas prairie town.

Max had lived in lots of houses: a white stone mansion high above a Connecticut river, a rambling, weathered summer home with its own tennis court on Long Island, a penthouse high above Fifth Avenue, a medieval castle near a Scottish loch.

She’d scrimped through school on a drama scholarship.

Max lounged languidly through Princeton.

She liked life to be foursquare, aboveboard, and predictable.

He delighted in ambiguities, disdained certainties, and loved above anything to puncture pretensions.

But oh how happiness bubbled inside her. Max in South Carolina.

Footsteps sounded on the wooden porch. The shop was closed on Sundays, so it couldn’t be a customer.

But it was. Annie felt a spurt of irritation and wished she had a flag just like Dell Shannon’s, complete with a striking snake and the legend DON’T TREAD ON ME, to hoist outside the main door when she wished to be undisturbed. Of course, Shannon raised her flag when she was hard at work on a new Luis Mendoza. And Annie doubted whether any flag would ward off Mrs. Brawley, who now stood with her fox-sharp nose squashed against the north window. Her snapping black eyes quite clearly saw Annie standing beside the cash desk next to the phone. Trust Mrs. Brawley. She must have followed Annie here from the early service at St. Mary’s-By-The-Sea.

Mrs. Brawley tapped on the window.

Mrs. Brawley bought books by the carload.

Resignedly, Annie moved through the foyer. She opened the door and stepped out onto the slatted wooden planks of the verandah which fronted all the shops. The smile she managed wasn’t exactly hospitable, but it would do for a Sunday morning.

“I’m sorry, Mrs. Brawley, Death On Demand isn’t open now. I’m just here to catch up on—”

Mrs. Brawley had learned early on in life that persistence might outrage, but it was effective. She ignored Annie’s opening salvo.

“Miss Laurance, you promised you would get the latest Mrs. Pollifax for me. I came by the store Friday, and here it is Sunday, and I thought it might have come in on the late ferry yesterday. Couldn’t you just check your shipments and see?”

But Annie, standing with the shop door open, wasn’t listening. Her eyes were on the tall figure striding negligently across the plaza, obviously en route to Death On Demand. A wolfish smile exposed strong white teeth as Elliot Morgan looked up and saw her discomfiture.

Elliot Morgan. The last person in the world she wanted to see right now.