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but you’re a sexy woman.” With one flick of his hand, he untied her robe. He slipped his arms around her naked body, running his palms up and down her back.
    “And you’re my guy. I gotta protect you.”
    “I’ll handle the cop.”
    Chris had dated only casually before meeting Phil, and she’d never been in love before. Phil told her right off that he was used goods. He’d been divorced twice, and freely admitted that the problems in his marriages had been mostly his fault. That admission only made Chris love him all the more. Honesty was important to her, and Phil might not be perfect, but he was an honest man. He was her silver fox, a superconfident older guy who would never let her down. None of the younger men she’d dated could hold a candle to him. The difference in their ages didn’t matter a bit to her. He was in better shape than most twenty-year-olds.
    Chris was the second child of a hardworking mom and a father who’d dumped her before she was even born. Her first memories were of an apartment over a dentist’s office. Tiny rooms. A TV set that didn’t work. Lots of canned spaghetti for dinner. When she was nine, she and her mom and her older brother had moved to another apartment, this one above the Lakeside Pavilion in South Minneapolis. It was a cheap dollar theater that, in the ’80s, before VCRs were in every home, had made money showing old movies. Chris had grown up watching Montgomery Clift and Elizabeth Taylor, Bette Davis and Jimmy Stewart. Her favorite was Errol Flynn. When she was twelve, she got a job helping the manager at the theater clean up between showings. By the time she was fifteen, she was working the concessions. At sixteen, she manned the ticket booth. One of the perks of her job was a free pass to any movie she wanted to see—and she wanted to see them all. It was a glamorous world totally unlike her everyday life. She always suspected that when she met “the” man, it would be incredibly romantic, just like what she saw in the movies. It turned out that she was right.
    Two summers ago, she’d been jogging around Lake Harriet early one morning when she’d turned into Super Klutz, tripped over a rock, and landed in a bush. A man who’d been sitting on one of the benches came over and helped her up. Branches had scraped her legs, but other than that, she was fine.
    “If you hadn’t been checking me out so carefully, you would have seen the rock,” he said. When he grinned at her, she saw that he had a beautiful smile. He looked just like Errol Flynn.
    She smiled back at him. And that was how it started. She sat down on the bench and they began talking. He told her he owned a construction company. She said she worked for Cafe Aldo as a line chef. He laughed, said it was a small world. As it turned out, he was part owner of that restaurant. And that’s when they realized they’d met before. He’d walked through the kitchen one day a few months before and asked her to grill him a steak. She remembered thinking he was handsome, but that was as far as it went.
    They couldn’t seem to stop talking that first morning. He invited her to have breakfast with him. She had the day off, so she took him up on his offer. Later, they ended up in Hudson at another restaurant for lunch—one more cafe in which he had a part interest. They spent the afternoon antiquing along the St. Croix, the evening sitting on Phil’s deck, and then she stayed the night.
    The next morning, Phil asked her to move in with him. He told her he’d never been so powerfully attracted to anybody before in his life, both physically and intellectually. He couldn’t let her get away now that he’d found her. He said he felt he’d finally found his soul mate, and even though she wasn’t an impulsive person, Chris felt the exact same way.
    And still, she hesitated. The apartment she lived in wasn’t fabulous—nothing like his home in Woodbury—but it was hers. She’d worked hard to get where she was.