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sympathetically. He was familiar with the problem of McCallister. Ann smiled at the car and took a healthy bite of her sandwich. Oscar was a great audience. He always agreed with her.
    She chewed slowly, her eyes focused on nothing in particular. What was it about Flynn McCallister that never failed to irritate her? When she'd first moved in, she'd been prepared to be a cordial neighbor. Her father had pointed out that the McCallister family was wealthy and old power. Ann wasn't terribly interested in her neighbor's antecedents as long as he was quiet and didn't expect to borrow a cup of sugar at two-thirty in the morning.
    At least that's what she thought before she'd met Flynn McCallister. He seemed to fit her simple criteria for neighborly behavior. He didn't throw wild parties. He was always polite. He'd never asked to borrow a cup of sugar at any time of day or night. In fact, they didn't run into each other very often. Sometimes it was a week or more between sightings.
    Considering how little she saw of him, he took up an inordinate amount of room in her thoughts. Most of it hostile. It was the way he looked at her. Every time they met, those electric blue eyes seemed to strip her naked. And it wasn't just her clothes he was seeing through. It was as if he could see right through to her soul. Not that she had anything to hide, Ann told herself. It was just that she didn't like feeling naked in front of a total stranger.
    And it didn't help at all to know that it was deliberate. He knew exactly what he was doing. He enjoyed flustering her. It annoyed Ann that he could read her so easily, and it annoyed her even more that she couldn't control her reaction to him. She was a doctor. People's lives rested in her hands every day. Control was essential in her work, and it carried over into her private life. With nothing but a look and a quirk of an eyebrow, Flynn McCallister managed to weaken that control, and she resented it.
    It was resentment that made her feel so flushed and breathless when he looked at her. It was simple curiosity that made her wonder what it would feel like when he kissed someone. Not her, of course. She had no desire to kiss a man who couldn't even hold a job. It was just that he'd probably kissed a lot of women and she'd never been kissed by an expert. It was natural that she was curious.
    "But we know where curiosity gets you, don't we, Oscar? Look what happened to the cat." Oscar blinked at her and then hopped down off the stool and trotted into the living room. "Oh dear. Maybe I shouldn't have mentioned it."
    His tail disappeared around the corner with an indignant flip and Ann giggled. It was a girlish sound that would have surprised a lot of people who thought they knew her. Her colleagues at work had never heard Dr. Perry giggle. It was rare for her to bestow so much as a smile on anyone but a patient.
    Despite the fiery warmth of her hair, she had a reputation for being icy cold. She did her work with a slightly feverish dedication that earned her respect, but she kept too much distance between herself and her colleagues to earn anything more than respect.
    When Ann took time to think about it, she told herself she preferred it that way. She didn't really have time for all the foolish machinations that seemed to go along with friendships. Her work was too important to her. It filled her life quite nicely. If there were times when she saw two nurses laughing together and felt a little wistful, it was only when she was tired.
    The phone rang, startling her out of her thoughts, and she jumped. It rang again, but she didn't move immediately. It would be her father. He would want a progress report. How did she tell him that a medical career wasn't like being a corporate executive where every day she could report some deal closed, some new advance toward a vice presidency? The triumphs of helping a patient didn't interest him in the least. He wanted to know where her career was going. He thought she