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her own feelings to see if there was something in her, some tiny glowing coal of desire beneath the sisterly warmth she felt for him.
    She would be surprised to find anything.
    Maybe ... maybe she just wanted to get laid.
    Well, what was wrong with that? Perfectly natural. She hadn't slept with a man since...
    She stopped. Good Lord, had it been so long that she couldn't remember?
    Was it Tom Fahey, the man she'd been engaged to for three years? No wait. There was the insurance agent—her insurance agent, who had come over to change the beneficiary on her life insurance and ended up asking her out...
    Was that after Tom and she had broken up, or before?
    During?
    Yes, during. It was during the breakup. Yes. She and Tom were just about through when she'd gone out with...
    She started walking again. What was his name? Phil. No, Stu.
    Stu Stockton! Yes. Brief fling, that. One of the few, if not the only, brief fling of her life. On the rebound, sort of. Or did it happen before Tom and she got back together for the last time?
    She laughed. She was obviously repressing all that. Better left repressed, too. Cover it up, let it lie. The dead past.
    Shudder.
    So, it had been either Stu or Tom. When? Well, that would have been, oh, almost five and a half, maybe six years ago.
    Six years! She didn't believe it. It couldn't be six years.
    But it was. She couldn't believe she had been non-valent—incapable of bonding—in all that time. Not the slightest urge to pair, not the slightest quiver of desire...
    Well, not quite. There had been some nights, some cold and lonely castle nights, when she would have liked another warm body in her bed. Not just because Perilous was cold and draughty on occasion. But because she had felt the need to share her feelings with somebody. She had wanted someone to share a life with, to be a part of someone else's life. She had wanted to touch, to be touched. To sleep with somebody's arm around her.
    And, yes, to make love.
    She wasn't a cold fish. She wasn't asexual. It was just that she was picky.
    Picky, picky, picky, her mother's voice came out of the dark ages of early memory. Eat your dinner, you're not eating. You're getting so thin. Miss Skin-and-Bones! You're too picky, Linda. A fussbudget about food. Too hot, too cold, too sour, too chewy; Linda had always had an excuse not to eat. And she had remained thin and fussy into adulthood. Picky, picky.
    And about men, too. Not just anyone would do. In high school she had had few boyfriends. She liked to think she had high ideals. Well, that was true. Maybe too high. Tom had been a wonderful guy, but he was picky, too. More so than Linda. Way too picky. Always judging, always criticizing; first everybody else, then her. She had never measured up to his high standards, and she had wearied of the constant sense of failure she had felt.
    So maybe high standards were a lot of hooey. Maybe getting laid was just what she needed, for once. Or twice. (Had Stu been just a lay? She barely remembered him. No, there'd been something more to it. Hadn't there?)
    Repress, repress.
    She reached her bedroom door and grasped the big wrought-iron door handle. The “lock” was her own: a magic spell that would admit only her.
    Something occurred to her. What if Gene came knocking? What would she do? He might have interpreted her leaving as a signal to meet later. In fact, she had had that in the back of her mind.
    Was she afraid of scandal? Afraid for her reputation? She laughed to herself. Did anybody care about those things these days? Well, maybe, but they didn't apply in Castle Perilous, at least among Guests. Whatever mores held sway among the native denizens of Perilous, she knew that her fellow Guests wouldn't bat a collective eye at a little bed-sharing. It went on all the time.
    What if Gene didn't come? She wondered how she would feel about that eventuality. Rejection? She didn't want that either. Boy, had she opened a can of worms.
    Why don't I take a little