The city staff in Courage Bay were becoming experts at disaster communication, and he wished it weren’t because they’d had so much practice.

He had to cut Archie off to make it to his next appointment on time, and after that, his day was pretty much a dead run from meeting to meeting. He pulled himself together to give his speech at a luncheon for some of Courage Bay ’s oldest citizens, loading on the praise for the way they’d built this city and helped hold it together.

On the way to his budget planning session, he pulled his tape recorder out of his briefcase and dictated some notes. There were several hundredth birthdays coming up in the city, and he wanted to talk to Archie and Briana about organizing something special.

When he got back to the office at five o’clock, after spending all afternoon on the budget, Briana wasn’t there. She’d left the light on and the door unlocked, which could indicate she was returning, or maybe she’d simply forgotten. Probably she’d forgotten to close up properly in her haste to get working on that resume, he thought with a smug smile.

He was pleased she’d followed his orders and gone home, although he could still smell a lingering hint of her scent.

He didn’t want to rush the woman, but he had “for richer, for poorer, till death do us part” on his mind.

A few minutes remained before he had to leave for a dinner meeting, so he called home and chatted to both his kids. They sounded happy, fed and reasonably well-entertained with a Disney video, and he promised he’d be home in time to tuck them in.

With the phone still in his hand, he contemplated calling Briana at home, but after he’d hounded her shamelessly all day Sunday, and he’d already seen her in the office this morning, he thought calling her might be too much.

She’d left his correspondence for the day, ready to be signed and mailed. He scanned each item briefly and then signed it. Since she wasn’t in, he even stuck the things in the envelopes.

As he pulled his notes from the earlier meeting out of his briefcase, a glint of silver caught his eye. Right. He’d dictated some notes earlier that needed typing up.

The tape was pretty far advanced. He couldn’t remember what was on the first part, so he pressed Rewind, and then Play.

For a few seconds there was blank tape. Then some muffled sounds like someone fumbling around in a sock drawer. He must have left the machine on by mistake at some point. He was about to push Fast Forward when he heard Briana’s voice, as though she were talking from inside a sleeping bag, the words inaudible but the voice recognizably hers.

Then he heard his voice. “I want you so much, Briana. I want to make love with you.”

There was more shuffling and then Briana’s voice. “Are you taking off my blouse?”

A low chuckle answered her. “I’m trying, but damn it I’m out of practice.”

Patrick heard the passion in his voice, and in that second was transported back to that dark elevator, where heaven had seemed in his grasp.

He was stunned and laid the recorder on the desk, letting the tape continue. He knew what he was hearing, the entire encounter in the elevator the first time they’d made love. Now he recalled that the elevator repair guy had given him the recorder the following morning, so it must somehow have fallen out of his briefcase and turned itself on.

Then off? Why hadn’t the tape kept going to the end?

The funny thing was that he hadn’t recalled having the recorder with him the night they’d been trapped in the elevator. Usually, he kept it in the glove compartment of his car.

Probably, he was crazy. But he had a bad feeling in his belly. On a hunch, he ran downstairs and out to his car. He unlocked and opened the passenger side door and reached in. He felt as if he was moving in slow motion as he clicked open the glove compartment.

His tape recorder was there. Right where he’d left it. He picked it up and took it with him back to his office.

When he compared it to the other one, he saw they were almost identical. Same make, same model. One looked a little newer. The one with a recording of him and Briana on it.

He played the sex-in-the-elevator tape again. And this time, he got a sick sense of why she was asking him what he was doing. It hadn’t been for the erotic thrill of describing to each other what they were doing in the dark. She’d wanted to get what they were doing on tape.

But why?

Patrick returned to that night in his mind. It was easy enough, since he recalled every second and had relived it in memory many times.

For some reason, she’d had a tape recorder in her bag when the pair of them got on that elevator.

Could she have pushed the record button by accident? He closed his eyes, forcing his memory to stay sharp even as unease churned in his gut.

She’d gone into her purse for condoms, he recalled, and then again for her phone. But this had been activated much earlier. The recording began when he’d started to undress her.

Once more he picked up the tape recorder and inspected it. The On button was slightly depressed-all the controls were, presumably to avoid the thing being activated accidentally. She hadn’t even been holding her bag when he’d started removing her blouse. It had been on the floor somewhere beside them.

It seemed likely that she’d reached into her bag at some point and pushed the button to record. Okay, he told himself, maybe she was a woman who liked to record her own sexual encounters. It was a little on the kinky side, but only mildly so. He agreed that it was a turn-on to listen to them, or it would be if he weren’t fighting this feeling of disquiet.

His uneasiness only increased as he acknowledged that when she’d told him she had a cell phone in her bag the night of the aftershock, he’d been surprised she hadn’t mentioned it earlier. She’d explained that she didn’t believe it would work when the regular phones were down, but she was such an intelligent woman, he’d decided the shock must have made her temporarily confused. Now he wondered.

Had she known all along that her phone would work just fine? But she wouldn’t have wanted help to arrive, not if she were deliberately trying to seduce him.

Oh, that was ridiculous, he thought, rising and pacing around the small outer office. He wasn’t the president of the United States, he was a small-town mayor. What possible motive could she have to tape his sexual advances?

It was as ridiculous as her suggesting to him that the story and photograph that destroyed Cecil Thomson’s mayoralty campaign were fake.

He turned the recorder off, right when things were at their peak in that elevator. He wanted that moment to remain a good memory for him. Damn, he hoped there was an innocent explanation for why one of the most incredible, intimate experiences of his life was on tape.

Patrick wasn’t a big believer in conspiracy theories, but he was unsettled enough to think maybe it wouldn’t be a bad idea to do some checking up on Briana Bliss. Just so he could find out she was the woman he’d believed her to be when he’d fallen in love with her. Just to put his mind at rest.

Walking back into his office, he went straight for his computer and accessed the employment records. Briana Bliss. There she was. And there was her social security number. Five minutes and a few keystrokes later, he had her mother’s maiden name.

Thomson.

Of course, there were thousands, possibly millions of Thomsons in the States. It could be pure coincidence that Briana’s mother’s birth name happened to be the same as the only man in Courage Bay who hated Patrick.

But Patrick had been a politician long enough to know that people weren’t always what they seemed, and not to trust coincidences. He also knew that some part of him would never recover if his newly healed heart was broken a second time, this time not through tragedy but deliberate betrayal.