Kiss A Handsome Stranger. Jacqueline Diamond

in his impression of Deirdre. The honest, direct, sunny lady who’d knocked him off balance wouldn’t have left without saying goodbye. There must be a darker side to her personality. Or maybe she’d fooled him from the beginning.

      Perhaps she was married and cheating on her husband. Or so afraid of commitment that she panicked when she met a guy she might care about.

      As a family law attorney, Chance had seen how many things could go wrong in a relationship. A lot of times the problems sprang from a partner who lacked the character to stick around and stay faithful when the going got tough.

      He would like to see Deirdre again, though, at least to learn why she’d bailed out on him. And so he could stop imagining he saw her on the street, the way he’d done today and several times previously.

      As he reached the professional building, Chance wondered if his sister and her fiancé had followed his advice to get premarital counseling. People as successful as those two—Elise was a French professor, James a wealthy businessman—didn’t think they needed any preparation for marriage. But to Chance, that was like someone saying he didn’t need medical insurance because he was healthy.

      He decided to drop by her condo after work and, as her big brother, take the liberty of nagging a bit.

      “I AM NOT GOING TO WEAR a yellow dress!” declared Phoebe. Sitting on the edge of the pool, she swished her feet in the water. “Yellow looks awful on blondes. And rose will do terrible things to Daisy’s complexion! I mean, she’s a redhead, for heaven’s sake.”

      “I was thinking of the flowers,” Elise admitted. “Yellow and red roses would look so pretty in a bouquet.”

      Daisy tilted her face to soak up the lingering rays of sunshine. With her tendency to freckle, she couldn’t enjoy midday sunbathing, so this was a treat.

      “Come on, Daisy!” Phoebe prodded her with an elbow. “Back me up, here. Yellow wouldn’t look so great on you, either.”

      Daisy stretched and smothered a yawn. Not that she wasn’t vitally interested in her friends’ arrangements, but after all, Phoebe was the beauty consultant. She was also studying biochemistry with the goal of establishing her own cosmetics company, and she had a good sense of what colors looked right on people.

      Daisy’s own taste ran to the offbeat. Her swimsuit, for example, had been created by her mother, Jeanine Redford, a seamstress and costume designer in Tempe.

      A single, angled black strap continued as a diagonal black slash across the emerald green stretch fabric of the swimsuit. A geometric cutout at the waist furthered the impact. It wasn’t so much a bathing suit as a dramatic statement.

      “We could ask my mom,” she said. “She’d come up with a memorable design.”

      Elise grinned. “I love your mother’s costumes, but not for my wedding, thank you.” To Phoebe she said, “The yellow can go, but I like deep-rose.”

      Phoebe stood up, a move that displayed her impressive figure to advantage. In fact, the former actress was impressive to look at from any angle.

      “I came here to swim, not argue,” she said. “First one to reach the far end gets to pick the colors, okay?”

      She dived in, water closing over her head with scarcely a ripple. The pool looked so inviting that Daisy jumped in and swam after her friend.

      “It’s my wedding so I get to choose!” shouted Elise, and made a long arcing dive past Daisy. A few furious kicks carried her past Phoebe, as well, and she arrived at the far end first. “Deep-rose,” she reaffirmed when she could speak. “Deep rose and…something.”

      Phoebe emerged and caught her breath. “Forget rose. How about green?” she said. “Green and gold.”

      Elise grimaced. “That sounds like pom-poms at a high school football game.”

      “Purple and white?” Daisy suggested as she paddled alongside.

      “That’s for a royal coronation,” said Elise. “I don’t care how rich James is, I don’t want anyone thinking I’m turning into a princess.”

      A burst of meowing drew their attention toward apartment 1B. On the patio, a bevy of cats gathered as a fiftyish woman with unnaturally red hair filled their feeding dishes.

      “I wonder how Frannie and Bill are getting along?” Phoebe mused.

      Red-haired Frannie, with her brightly colored clothes and beehive hairdo, made an odd contrast to the soft-spoken building superintendent who lived in a nearby unit. The two had been edging toward each other for months and finally seemed to be hitting it off, but had parted after a jealous quarrel.

      Apparently Bill had also noticed the cat noises. The large, usually jovial man, returning from one of his periodic inspections of the premises, stopped near the pool and gazed wistfully toward Frannie.

      She ignored him, and after a moment Jeff Hawkin, the handyman, stuck his head out of the laundry room and requested Bill’s attention. Daisy hoped they were fixing the number three dryer, which ate quarters.

      “Pale-pink might work,” Phoebe suggested, returning to their previous conversation.

      “Pale pink with what?” Elise asked.

      “White?” said Daisy. “No, too boring. How about three colors? Pale pink with black and white?”

      “Black? At a wedding?” Elise groaned.

      “Let’s go try on dresses and figure out what colors look good on us,” Phoebe said. “That way Daisy and I can buy something we might actually wear again.”

      “What if chartreuse looks good on you?” grumped their friend. “Oh, good, here comes big brother. Let’s see what he thinks.”

      To her horror Daisy spotted an all-too-familiar figure strolling from the lobby into the courtyard. It had been sheer coincidence that had kept her from meeting Chance before that ill-fated night of the engagement party. Why couldn’t she have the same luck now?

      Frantically she gazed around for somewhere to hide. Giving up, she sucked in her breath and sank under the water.

      Chapter Two

      Chance smiled when he glimpsed his sister and her two friends lolling in the pool. He liked women and enjoyed their company, which was a good thing, since he had seven younger sisters.

      He’d scarcely cleared the lobby, however, when a strange-looking woman, standing ankle deep in cats on her patio, regarded him sharply. Her name, he recalled from a previous visit, was Frannie.

      “Be careful around those girls,” she said. “Two of them are engaged and the other one’s peculiar.”

      “Peculiar?” He wondered what had provoked this unsolicited observation. On the other hand, he had to admit that Elise’s disappearing friend Daisy did seem a bit odd. In the few seconds he’d been distracted by the cat lady, the woman he guessed was Daisy had vanished again as if by magic.

      He’d glimpsed her once in hair curlers and a globby green face mask, and another time, from the back, in a flimsy bathrobe. Both times she’d fled from Elise’s place to her next-door unit without acknowledging him.

      “She’s an artist,” said the woman. “You never see her out painting anything, though. Peculiar, if you ask me. I’d stay clear, if I were you.”

      “Thanks.” He was about to turn away when he caught Frannie’s wink. “You’re kidding, right?”

      “Just wanted to see how much you’d believe!” She chuckled. “You’re Elise’s brother, aren’t you?”

      “That’s right. And you really had me going.” The lady was quite a character, Chance thought in amusement.

      Resuming his approach to the pool, he tried vainly to figure