Free The Chilling Deception by Jayne Castle

she was forced to take a hard look at her own feelings for him.
    "It’s different with you, Gwen," he finally said. He sounded very grim about it.
    She turned her head. "It is?"
    He kept his eyes on the road. "I think so."
    "You only think so?" She felt incipient panic.
    He exhaled slowly and said very steadily, "Gwen, it’s hard enough not knowing what you’re doing or who you’re with on the nights when you’re not with me. If I thought you were sleeping with someone else – It would rip me apart."
    She caught her breath at the stark honesty of the statement. "Oh, Zac. I didn’t realize… I didn’t know…"
    He ignored her. "I know you’re used to being free, totally independent. So am I, for that matter. But with me it was kind of a moot point. My social life isn’t exactly hectic."
    "Neither is mine," she said quietly. He had been honest with her. She decided it was time to take the same step herself. "Zac, I’m not seeing anyone else. I haven’t dated anyone else since I met you."
    He did glance at her then, gray eyes full of urgency. "No one?"
    "No one."
    He chewed on that for a moment. "For what it’s worth, neither have I," he said.
    "Zac?"
    "Yeah?"
    "It’s worth a lot."
    There was a great deal of silence for the remainder of the short drive, but it wasn’t an unpleasant silence. Guinevere was aware of the tentative commitment that had just been made between herself and Zac. It wasn’t exactly a formal declaration of the status of their relationship, she decided, but it was a step in the right direction. It was also a little scary, for reasons she didn’t want to consider.
    Vandyke was waiting impatiently for them when they returned. He seemed relieved to see Zac. He also had work for Guinevere. She spent the afternoon typing up some modifications to one of the proposals, which effectively destroyed any possibility of more time with Zac.
    By dinner she was resigned to the inevitability of the failure of the weekend from a personal point of view. It was obvious that Zac had reached the same decision and had decided to give the client what he wanted. He kept unobtrusively within sight of Vandyke most of the time and after dinner he followed his client into the lounge. Guinevere accompanied them, but by eleven o’clock she decided there was no point stretching out the evening any longer.
    She politely said her good nights, smiling tentatively at Zac. He gave her a long level look and shrugged fatalistically. She knew he was going to stay in his own room that night. What really bothered her was that he didn’t show any signs of inviting her to stay with him. She must have really frozen him out last night with her insistence on a dialogue.
    "Think I’ll turn in too," Vandyke announced, rising with Guinevere. "What about you, Justis?"
    "Doesn’t seem to be much in the way of alternatives. One thing about these resorts in the winter – they’re restful."
    Guinevere saw Vandyke’s brief expression of commiseration but the older man made no move to excuse Zac from guard duty. Twenty minutes later Guinevere was alone in her room, wondering where she’d gone wrong when she’d first schemed to drag Zac along on the trip to the San Juans. She sat down on the edge of the bed to take off her pantyhose.
    "Ah, well, the best laid plans – oh, damn," she finished, reacting to the bad snag her fingernails had just made in the upper left leg of the pantyhose. "Zac’s right. Nothing is going properly this weekend." She marched over to the wastebasket beside the dresser to drop them into it, but reconsidered. The snag was high on the leg. She wouldn’t risk wearing the pantyhose under a skirt but she could get away with wearing them under slacks. Guinevere wadded them up and went to put them in the left-hand side of her suitcase. The good pantyhose were in little bundles on the right-hand side, and she didn’t want to get them mixed up. In the morning she wasn’t always perfectly alert to such details as