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wrapping and carefully placed it on a padded hanger. The maneuver required care, because with no back, the tight-fitting bodice tended to fall off the hanger. At least she’d had the sense to withstand Helene’s first choice: a red silk dress cut so low that it was nearly front-less.
    Perhaps she shouldn’t have given in to the teal dress, either. She could always return it. She’d think about it tomorrow, decide rationally and reasonably whether the dress was too, well, too something, for a professor at Ashton. And then she could always wear her black sheath.
    She frowned as she folded a soft new royal blue sweater into the drawer. But perhaps some changes in style were in order, she thought as she hung up a red blazer. She didn’t want to become stagnant.
    Maybe that explained her twinge of dissatisfaction when she’d surveyed her living room while waiting for Helene. The beige of her upholstery, drapes and carpet usually soothed her, but today it seemed bland.
    She pulled three vibrantly colored pillows—red, yellow and blue—out of their bags and headed for the living room.
    These ought to fix that.
    She tried multiple combinations before settling on the red pillow on one armchair and the yellow and blue pillows layered in the far corner of the couch. She ran her hand over the texture of the blue pillow.
    Monet blue . The blue of the sky sharing the canvas with a sun-bright field of Monet tulips. The blue of a lake caressing serene water lilies... like C.J. Draper’s eyes.
    Carolyn snatched her hand away and stood up. Where had that come from? She hadn’t thought about him since he’d walked out of her office that afternoon.
    At least she’d tried not to. But Helene extolling his virtues practically the whole evening had made it rather difficult. She’d heard how C.J. Draper had charmed the alumni; how he’d formed a team under difficult circumstances; how he’d won allies on the faculty; how he’d convinced Stewart to spend a week fishing.
    Carolyn knew very well the purpose of that exercise. Helene meant to remind her, none too subtly, that C.J. Draper possessed charms her usual escorts lacked.
    Helene had unstintingly described the visiting sociology lecturer Carolyn had dated before leaving for Europe as boring with a capital B . “And that anthropology professor before him wouldn’t cause a tremor on any Richter scale of excitement, either,” she’d told Carolyn after an unsuccessful dinner. “Come to think of it, the last one worth mentioning was the redhead who hung around Liz and Stewart’s house that summer I spent here. Whatever happened to him?”
    “Tony Reilly?” Laughter and exasperation had warred in Carolyn. “I was fourteen that summer and Tony Reilly was fifteen.”
    “So? Now you’re twenty-eight and he’s twenty-nine.”
    “Yes, he’s also married with a child or two and selling insurance, I believe.”
    “He could be selling cemetery plots and he’d be more exciting than these poker faces you’ve been seeing,” Helene had insisted.
    To herself, Carolyn had admitted Helene might have had a point. Especially when it came to lovemaking. Either she couldn’t figure out what all the fuss was about, or her few ventures were far below standard.
    But the men she dated were long on academic credentials. She had concluded that if their company left her rather dissatisfied, then she must have failed, not them. Being reminded of that failing counted as one more item to chalk up against Ashton’s new basketball coach.
    What he represented was bad enough. But to call her too young! He’d tried to rile her on purpose, too. And worse, he’d succeeded. But then there had been that easy friendliness when he’d told her about the photographs and, nearly as surprising, the moment she’d sensed another person half revealed in that flash of anger in her office.
    She snapped the light off in the living room with unnecessary force. It was probably all an effort to keep her at a