"Oh." She blinked at him. "Dangerous places. Are you working now?"

"I'm on leave," he said.

She smiled. "So what else do you have? I liked the gun."

Damn. Wilder mentally ran through the weapons he had strapped to his body, trying to figure out how he could get his clothes off without revealing them all.

"J.T.?"

"A man has to have some secrets," he told her, and turned out the light.

Lucy was halfway through the script and completely confused when Connor knocked on the door of the camper and opened it. She dropped the script and it slid off the table as he came in, smiling at her, his bulk filling the camper.

"We're good to go tomorrow," he told her, collapsing into one of the chairs. He looked beat, lines around his eyes, gray smudges under them, his five o'clock shadow making him look like a Hollywood bandit. "Late start, easy day. Nothing to worry about."

"Good," Lucy said, trying to stay businesslike. It was too much like old times, both of them bone tired way past midnight and Connor smiling at her.

Except that there was something wrong with the shoot. And something wrong with Daisy.

"Why aren't you back at the hotel?" he asked. "No reason for you to still be here."

"I was reading." A script that makes no sense. "Connor, what's going on here?"

He sighed. "We're trying to finish a movie, love. By contract it has to be done by six a.m. Friday, so we're pedal to the metal."

"No, we're not," Lucy said. "I've seen the shooting schedules. We're not even doing full days. And this stuff that we're shooting doesn't make sense. The crew is uninvolved, the actors don't care, and my sister… there's something wrong with Daisy, Connor. She's taking something, some prescription-"

"You're overreacting," Connor said, sounding as tired as Daisy. "As far as the movie goes, name me an action movie made in the past twenty years that's made sense. Don't worry about it, just finish shooting it. It doesn't have to be good, it just has to be done."

"Then why'd you get me to finish it?" Lucy said, exasperated. "You know I don't do 'good enough for government work.' If you just wanted it finished, you could have gotten any hack."

He smiled at her. "I wanted to see you." He leaned forward. "Look, I know we got off to a bad start today, but it doesn't have to stay that way. I really wanted you here, Luce. I want you back."

"Oh, Connor," Lucy said, shaking her head, but he held up his hand.

"Just hear me out, babe. I didn't appreciate you when I had you, I was young and stupid and not ready to settle down, you should never have married me. But now I'm older and I'm tired and I just want to sit on a deck someplace with a good woman and watch the sun set over the ocean. This is my last job, I'm retiring after this, finding one place to stay, one woman to stay there with."

Oceanfront property? Expensive fantasy, Lucy thought, but that didn't mean it was a bad one. Except that he must have been making a hell of a lot of money if he thought he could pay for it. Or he was working one of his schemes. Was that what was dragging Daisy down?

"And you've always been the best woman I've ever known," he went on. "Daisy said you weren't with anybody. She said you hadn't really had anybody serious since me. And I thought that maybe you still-" He swallowed hard. "I was better when I was with you. Things went better. You made my life better. You were the best time I ever had, Lucy. And I think maybe I've been looking for you ever since." He stretched his hand across the table and took hers, and she fought a sudden urge to pull it away.

"Connor. Listen-"

"I know." Connor let go of her hand. "Too much too soon." He grinned at her. "That's your specialty, rushing in too fast to fix things, and now here I'm doing it. But I have four days, well, three now, to show you that I've changed."

She bit her lip. "Look, I drove down from New York today, and then shot all night, and I'm worried sick about Daisy, so this is not the time-"

"I know, I know." He stood up and held out his hand. "Come on.

I'll take you back to the hotel and you can sleep on it and then we'll talk tomorrow."

She took his hand and let him pull her up. "I'll drive the camper. I need it to take Pepper to the comics store tomorrow."

He smiled again, his face softer than she'd ever seen it. "You're great with her. You should have kids of your own. Maybe that's something we should talk about, too."

"Kids?" Lucy said, dumbfounded.

"I want it all, Luce," Connor said. "It's time. And you're the woman I want to have it with. You make it all make sense." He leaned forward, so handsome, smiling at her, and kissed her, and she kissed him back to see what it felt like.

Nothing. Out of nowhere she thought of J. T. Wilder and shivered.

"There's a king-size bed in my hotel room," he whispered to her. "Gets awful lonely in there."

Right. Lucy thought of Stephanie and her excuse: I was helping Connor. And then there was Althea. "I find that very hard to believe," she said, and he grinned.

"Well, I'm going to be lonely in there now that you're back. There's nobody else for me from now on, Luce."

She pulled away. "Go back to the hotel. I'll follow you."

He nodded, not pushing. "Tomorrow we talk, okay?"

"I'm not going to be any less distracted tomorrow." She met his eyes. "Connor, what's wrong with Daisy?"

The light went out of his eyes. "There's nothing wrong with Daisy."

"She's taking something-"

"She's a single mother working long hours and trying to home-school her kid," Connor said. "She's just tired."

"No," Lucy said, "she's taking something."

"You know what? This is none of my business." He opened the door and looked back at her. "You shouldn't be talking about your sister with anybody, Luce. You want to know something, ask her."

"Hey," Lucy said and then he was gone. You bastard, she thought. Making taking care of Daisy sound like a betrayal. Anything to get her off his back. Yeah, we'll talk tomorrow. And not about you and me getting together, either. The last thing I need in this mess is a man to deal with, too.

J.T. Wilder came back to mind, and she tried to shove him away, thinking, How pathetic is that? If ever a man had shown no interest in her, it was Wilder. Forget him, forget all men until she finished the damn shoot and fixed her sister's life.

She began to clear off the table and saw the script where she'd dropped it. She picked it up and remembered why she'd been confused; she was sixty pages in and there was nothing in there but a basic romance plot. Where were the helicopters going to come from? The armored car? And that damn SEAL. In this script, Bryce's character was a stockbroker.

Out in the parking lot, Connor honked the horn of his van, and Lucy shoved the script into her bag. She could finish it tonight in bed, she would finish it so she'd know exactly how screwed up this shoot was. And then she'd fix it. And Daisy. And Pepper.

And Wilder, she thought and stopped, surprised. There was nothing about J.T. Wilder that needed fixing. Well, he could use a little warmth. She could do that.

No, she couldn't. He probably had a wife or a girlfriend keeping him warm. She did not need to add him to her To Do list.

She slid in behind the wheel and turned the ignition, trying to concentrate on her problems but her mind keep skewing back to Wilder and whoever was keeping him warm.

Lucky her, she thought and followed Connor's van out of the parking lot.

Lucy was still yawning when she and Pepper headed for Jax Comix at eleven the next morning with Kirsty MacColl singing "Us Amazonians" on the stereo, one of Pepper's favorites. A late night with the script hadn't made Lucy feel any better about the movie, but sunshine and Pepper beside her belting out "Us Amazonians make out all right" at the top of her lungs were going a long way toward cheering her up.