CHAPTER TWO

      THE room seemed to whirl around Dana.

      It wasn’t possible, she thought. It was six years since they’d called it quits, and the proof was buried at the back of the fire-safe box in her closet where she kept her most important papers.

      Or…was it?

      Suddenly—illogically—doubt swept over her. She had certainly received documents. But when that long brown envelope had finally arrived, months after they’d actually split, she’d simply glanced at the papers inside before she’d put the package away. Half of her had been relieved that the whole mess was over, but the other half was still stinging with misery and injured pride. The last thing she’d wanted to do was read every last detail, set down in harsh black and white in a chilly legal document, concerning the most painful mistake of her life.

      But she’d looked at it closely enough to know what it was—a final dissolution of her brief marriage. Zeke was wrong, that was all there was to it. Where he’d gotten the idea that the divorce hadn’t gone through was beyond her, but he had to be wrong.

      Or else he was flat-out lying.

      She found herself looking uncertainly at him. The one thing he had never done, in their months together, was to lie to her.

      People change, she thought. But did they change in such essential ways as that?

      Of course, the fact that he’d never lied to her wasn’t exactly an accolade, Dana told herself. There had been times during their brief marriage when Zeke’s bluntness had not helped the situation at all. For instance, during that last argument when he’d made it clear that he was anxious not only to get away from the campus but from her…

      This is no time to be reliving the past, she reminded herself. You’ve got enough to deal with right now. Like the fact that Barclay’s face had turned purple and he looked as if he couldn’t breathe.

      She hit him a sharp blow between the shoulder blades, just in case he’d inhaled an olive, and he gasped, choked, and started to laugh. “For a minute there, I thought you were serious,” he said. “What a joker—I’d heard you have quite a sense of humor, Zeke, but I had no idea it was quite so…unusual.”

      Zeke looked down at him, eyes half-hooded. Though he was only a couple of inches taller than Barclay, somehow he managed to make it look like much more, as though he towered over the other man.

      It was a good trick, Dana thought. Under other circumstances, she might have been amused at his lord-of-the-manor pose.

      “Oh, it’s a side-splitter of a story, all right,” Zeke said agreeably. “I’m glad you enjoyed my efforts to entertain you, Bark.”

      If he hadn’t already had a shock, Dana suspected Barclay wouldn’t even have winced at the mangling of his name. But obviously he wasn’t fully recovered yet, for distaste flickered across his face. “Uh…yeah,” he said. “Let me get you that drink Dana promised you.”

      He strode off toward the bar. The buzz of conversation picked up again, and for a moment Zeke and Dana were almost alone in the center of the room.

      “I don’t know what game you’re playing,” Dana said, “but I don’t appreciate it.”

      “Sorry to interrupt your life, honey, but it isn’t a game.” Zeke’s gaze shifted to a point over her shoulder.

      Dana was furious. “You can’t just come in here and make an announcement like that and then ignore me when I ask for an explanation!”

      “Oh, you want an explanation,” he said with a bright-eyed air of discovery. “And here I thought you’d already decided I’d made it up just to interfere in your new romance.”

      “As if you’d want to,” Dana snapped.

      He looked appraisingly at her. “Don’t you mean, ‘As if you could’? Come between you and the new boyfriend, I mean.”

      “That, too.” It came out sounding a little lame, Dana thought, but her feelings—or lack of them—for Barclay were certainly none of Zeke’s business.

      “Though I’d be doing you a favor if I did break it up. Honestly, Dana, can’t you do any better than Barclay Howell?”

      “Coming from you, Zeke, that’s the funniest joke of the year.”

      “Everybody thinks I’m so humorous, maybe I should take up comedy.”

      “You’d fit right into the profession,” Dana said coolly.

      Zeke reached past her to take the glass Barclay was holding. “Thanks, Bark.”

      Dana bit her tongue. The night was young, and sooner or later she’d have a chance to get Zeke off in a corner and shake an explanation out of him. Whether he could adequately justify what he’d done was probably another question altogether, but at least she could find out what he’d been thinking when he made that bizarre announcement.

      In the meantime, she decided, the best way to head off more questions was to pretend nothing important had happened. She smiled at Barclay. “You must ask Zeke to tell you about his first couple of years here. The university had quite a reputation as a party school back then, and he helped add a chapter to the story. If you’ll excuse me, gentlemen, I see that Professor Wells has just arrived. I’m helping her to organize an event that’s coming up later this week, and I must ask her about a few details.” She tried not to give a sigh of relief as she made her escape.

      Professor Wells was at the bar, taking a tentative sip of her Scotch and water. “I hate these parties,” she grumbled to Dana. “But at least I’ll say for Barclay Howell that he insists on good Scotch. I think the stuff the last president served was really antifreeze. How are the arrangements for the trivia tournament shaping up?”

      Dana bit back a smile. “I’m sure the sponsors of the Academic Honors Bowl wouldn’t