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perplexity.
    "I'm glad you find the idea so appealing," he said dryly.
    "You don't understand. It's just that I don't have you figured out yet. Are you the mayonnaise-on-the-walls type, or Monet-on-the-walls?"
    He gave her a slow grin. "Maybe I'm both. Maybe people aren't as easy to catalog as wallpaper samples."
    "I'm not trying to
catalog
you," she protested. "I'm just trying to do my job. And I can't do it if you won't give me at least a little insight about yourself. Why don't you tell me about your taste in art?"
    "Good Lord, that's not something you just spit out for social conversation. Show me a painting. I'll tell you if I like it."
    Why did everything have to be so difficult with this man? She tried again. "Well, you must know if you hate abstract art, or if impressionism is your favorite, or baroque…"
    "I'm open to anything."
    Kate drew a jagged little line across her pad. First he wanted plain white walls, now he was "open to anything!"
    "All right," she said. "Let's narrow that down a bit. What sort of house did you grow up in? What did you like about it? What didn't you like?"
    He settled back with a frosted glass of cranberry juice, his gray eyes enigmatic. But at last he began, "It was a big, rambling, drafty old house in Vermont. Ever been to Vermont?"
    "No…"
    "I think you'd like it. The mountains, all that snow. We used to go sledding every winter, straight down the hill from our back door."
    "We? How many of you?"
    "Four brothers and my sister, Allie."
    "I come from a big family, myself!" Kate exclaimed. "With me it's three sisters and three brothers. I'm sandwiched right in the middle. How about you?"
    "Tail end of the bunch, except for Allie."
    "That poor girl," Kate murmured. "Five big brothers to torment her!"
    "You know the territory, I see."
    "You'd better believe it," she said. "Never being able to use the bathroom when you want to. Your sisters always wearing your favorite clothes."
    "How about four brothers beating up on you at once?" he asked. "Driving the old Chevy that was good enough for them, so why shouldn't it be good enough for you?"
    Kate nodded, laughing. "Never having your own room or a private conversation on the phone. Oh, and those awful trips to the grocery store—buying everything in the jumbo size."
    "I know. Trying to pretend you don't belong to that crazed-looking lady who has three carts lined up at the checkout stand."
    They were both laughing now, so hard that they drew stares from other booths. Kate's sides began to hurt. She wiped her eyes with the big red-and-green bandanna she'd pulled from one of her pockets. She blinked down at it.
    "I forgot to give this back to you, and now I've used it again."
    "Keep it," Steven said. "You can give it back… whenever."
    "Thanks."
    There was suddenly a silence between them, strained and uncomfortable. Kate sipped her juice, but couldn't think of a thing to say.
    "Why did you decide to be an interior designer?" Steven asked.
    "It's something I've always wanted, I suppose. Even when I was five years old—can you believe it? The rest of my family… well, my mother just didn't have time to make our home pretty. I was the one trying to figure out how to hang the curtains better, or how to hide that awful spot on the carpet." She stopped, hesitant to reveal too much about herself. "So…why did you decide to become a lawyer?" she countered.
    He gazed at her thoughtfully, taking a moment to answer.
    "I wasn't like you—knowing what I wanted from the very beginning. I was a pretty wild kid, I guess. Studying law gave a direction to my life I'd never had before." He propped his elbows on the table; now he seemed to be talking more to himself than to her. "I saw a way to change things, to make a difference. But it's been too easy to get caught up with the business side of it all. The past few days I've been thinking about reordering my priorities. When I wrap things up in San Francisco, maybe I can get back to the grass-roots level.