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she would have run as far away as fast as she could. But the truth was, she simply wasn’t sure of anything anymore. Maybe the signs had been there all along and she had simply refused to see them. Her ego had been inflated by Wesley’s attentions and—given her own determination at the time to fulfill every expectation her family had ever had of her—perhaps it was possible she had just turned a blind eye to the flaws in his personality.
    She didn’t think that was the truth of what had happened.
    But she had to live with the knowledge that she would never be one hundred percent certain that it was not.
    “Afternoon, Otis.” There was a soft clatter on the stairs. “I swear, you’re one of the hardest workin’men I have ever met. Lola tells me you’re a fire fighter, and yet all your free time seems to be spent workin’ around here.”
    James looked up from his crouched position on the floor near the end of the hall. He watched as Aunie reached the top of the stairs. She stopped in the pool of light cast by the hanging trouble light and smiled brilliantly up into Otis’s face.
    James settled back on his buttocks and crossed his ankles, Indian style. He had been relying on the natural daylight pouring through the hall window to illuminate his work up until a few moments ago when the sun had abruptly gone behind a cloud. On the verge of fetching the other trouble light, he was now glad he’d held off.
    It gave him an unexpected opportunity to observe without being observed in return.
    He couldn’t get over what a looker she was. It had knocked him on his butt every time he’d run across her these past few weeks. Who would have guessed that beneath all those bruises and contusions which she’d been sporting that first day, there would be such creamy, c’mon-and-touch-me skin? The fairness of her complexion was another surprise, a marked contrast to her shiny, dark brown hair, dark brows, and sooty, tangled eyelashes. Her eyes were also a deep brown, large and exotically tilted, the whites almost childlike in their blue-white clarity. That mouth of hers, however, was anything but childlike. The upper lip was narrow and shapely, the bottom lip more lushly full. And just to gild the lily, she not only possessed deep dimples to frame her smile, there was also a tiny mole just to the right of the bow of her upper lip. Talk about a case of overkill, he thought sourly.
    Okay, okay, so maybe when he was around her he felt a little bit foolish for the way he’d overreacted the day she’d come to rent the apartment, and maybe it made him regard her with less than rose-colored approval. But he’d be damned if he’d take full blame for it. Her own attitude hadn’t helped matters. In fact, instead of graciously ignoring what had happened that day and starting all over—which is what he would have done—she seemed to go out of her way to rub it in whenever their paths crossed. Instead of letting bygones be bygones, she was all pretty, dimpled smiles for Otis and Lola, calling them by their first names, while he was still Mistah Rydah, spoken in that cool, polite manner that never failed to put his back up. Her level, shuttered glances and that damned mister business with his name could really make him feel like a mannerless clod. Which he supposed he sometimes was.
    But if she was supposed to be so fucking mannerly, then she sure as hell shouldn’t be bending over backwards to make him feel that way.
    Ah purely don’t recall Superman havin’ such a filthy mouth.
    James rolled his shoulders uneasily. He’d been hearing those words in his mind repeatedly these past few weeks, and following the casual obscenity of his thoughts, he heard them again now. At first they’d just made him defensive. Not everyone was lucky enough to be born with a silver spoon in his mouth. Some folks had to make do with the cold reality of a day-to-day scramble for survival beneath the uncaring eyes of the Housing Authority.
    In the