Free The Chilling Deception by Jayne Castle Page B

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 snags.
    That high-level decision made, Guinevere puttered around the room a while longer, changing into her long-sleeved cotton nightgown, brushing her teeth, and generally killing time preparing for bed. Then, very much aware of the empty bed, she picked up a paperback and tried reading for a while. But her thoughts kept straying to the cautious discussion she’d had with Zac in the car. Outside another high wind announced that a new storm was on its way. So much for the brief sunshine the San Juans had enjoyed that morning.
    By midnight Guinevere gave up trying to read. She put the book down beside the bed and slid out from under the covers. Switching off the light, she went to the window and opened the drapes to stare out into the darkness of the incoming storm, leaning against the window frame and contemplating the new era of relationships between men and women.
    Life was definitely not simpler in the modern age.
    Why hadn’t Zac made some attempt to convince her to come to his room tonight, if it was true he felt obliged to stay there because of Vandyke? Perhaps he felt rebuffed after last night. Guinevere winced. She hadn’t handled last night very well. It was understandable if Zac felt she had been holding him at bay—in a sense she had been doing exactly that. And she wasn’t sure she could explain quite why, even to herself.
    Restlessly Guinevere moved around the room, picking up objects off the dresser, fiddling with the thermostat, listening to the gathering wind. It was when she found herself trying to reread the same page of the paperback that she finally came to a decision. This was a new era, she lectured herself. Zac hadn’t invited her to his room, but nothing said she couldn’t invite herself.
    With a sudden sense of determination she yanked off the nightgown and stepped into her jeans without bothering to put on any underwear. She skipped a bra, too, when she reached for her wide-sleeved, oversize poet’s shirt. She wouldn’t bother with shoes. No one was likely to see her in the hall and even if someone did, the ballet-style slippers she was wearing were fine. Taking a grip on her resolve, Guinevere opened the door to her room, glanced both