"Because it's May in London?" he asked, grinning. "Or because the patron saint of dinner parties has it in for you?"

She swatted at him with the damp towel, but smiled in spite of herself. "Okay, point taken. But seriously, I meant to do the flowers from our garden, and now that's out. Not to mention that between boys and dogs, the house will be a sea of mud."

"The boys are with Wesley, probably making themselves sick on Wesley's mother's sweets and watching God knows what on the telly. As for the dogs, I will personally wipe every trace of muck from errant paws, and I can run down and get flowers from one of the stalls on Portobello." He slipped his arm round her shoulders. "Don't worry, love. You'll be brilliant."

For a moment, she allowed herself to rest her head against his shoulder. His shirt was damp from the rain, and through the fabric she could feel the comforting warmth of his skin. She leaned a little closer, then forced herself to quash the thought that there were better ways to spend a rainy Saturday afternoon with the children out of the house.

They had begun as partners at Scotland Yard, then against her better judgment they had become clandestine lovers until her promotion to inspector and transfer to Notting Hill Police Station had separated them professionally. With no barrier to their relationship, they had moved in together, each bringing a son from a previous marriage and complications that at times had seemed insurmountable. But they had got through these challenges, including the midterm loss of the child they had conceived together, and since their visit to Duncan's family in Cheshire this last Christmas, the dynamics of their cobbled-together family seemed to have meshed more smoothly.

It was a stroke of luck that had landed them in a house in an upmarket area of Notting Hill they would not normally have been able to afford, even with Kincaid's higher superintendent's salary. The house belonged to Duncan 's chief superintendent's sister, whose family had gone abroad on a five-year contract, and Duncan and Gemma had been recommended to her as the ideal tenants.

Gemma had never thought she would adjust to life in Notting Hill, so different was it from the working-class area of London where she had grown up, but now she found that she loved the house and neighborhood so passionately that she couldn't imagine leaving, and the end of their lease hovered in her mind like a distant specter.

What she hadn't learned to love was the art of formal entertaining, and tonight she'd agreed to host a dinner party, the anticipation of which had sent her into a paroxysm of nerves. The guest list included Chief Superintendent Denis Childs-Duncan's guv'nor and their landlady's brother-along with his wife, whom Gemma had never met; Superintendent Mark Lamb, Gemma's boss, and his wife; Doug Cullen, who was now Kincaid's sergeant; and PC Melody Talbot, who worked with Gemma at Notting Hill.

Doug Cullen and Melody Talbot didn't know each other well, and Gemma was indulging an impulse to play at matchmaker, although Kincaid had teasingly warned her that she'd better be prepared to deal with the consequences of meddling.

She sighed and straightened up, gazing at the abundance spilling from the carrier bags onto the kitchen table. There were fillets of fresh salmon, lemons, frilly bunches of fennel, and tiny jewel-like grape tomatoes, as well as bread from her favorite bakery on Portobello Road, several bottles of crisp white wine, and the makings for enough salad to feed an army. The dessert she had bought ready-made-to her shame, baker's daughter that she was-a beautiful fruit tart from Mr. Christian's Deli on Elgin Crescent. Attempting to bake would definitely have sent her over the edge into blithering idiocy.

"It all looked so easy in the cookery book," she said. "What if the chief super doesn't like it? Or what if he tells his sister we've made a wreck of her house?"

"You can't call him guv'nor at dinner, you know. You'll have to practice saying Denis." Kincaid gave her shoulder a squeeze and began pulling groceries from the bags. "And as for the house, it looks better than it did when we moved in. The food will be fabulous, the table stunning, and if all else fails," he added, grinning, "you can play the piano. What could possibly go wrong?"

Gemma stuck out her tongue. "Something," she said darkly, "always does."

The rain fell in relentless torrents, streaming down the garden window in a solid sheet of silver gilt, drumming against the glass roof of the conservatory like machine-gun fire.

Erika Rosenthal had always liked rain, liked the secretive sense it engendered, the opportunity it offered to shut out the world, but today, as the deluge darkened the May afternoon to evening, she was finding it uncomfortably oppressive.

She sat in her favorite chair in her sitting room, book open on her lap, cooling cup of coffee-decaffeinated, by her doctor's orders-on the side table, feeling as if the ceaseless pounding of the rain might penetrate roof and walls until it pierced the frail barrier of her skin.

She, who had never been able to find enough hours in the day to read, to write, to listen to music, to arrange her beloved flowers, had lately found herself unable to settle to anything. Her concentration had scattered like thrown pennies, and her mind seemed to wander of its own accord, in and out of recollections as vivid as waking dreams.

That morning, as she had been dressing, she'd suddenly found herself thinking that she must hurry or she'd be late for work at Whiteleys. Then with a start she'd realized that those days were long gone, and David with them, and the stab of grief she'd felt for the past had been as fresh as if it were yesterday.

She'd sat back on the edge of the bed, her breath rasping painfully in her throat, and forced herself to think of the discipline she had so carefully practiced over the years, the balancing of each day's small, luminous joys against the ever-threatening beast of despair.

Had she lost that struggle? Could it be that life coalesced, at the end, and that one had no choice but to shuttle back and forth in time, repeating the traumas one had thought long put to bed?

No, she thought now, chiding herself for allowing such self-pity to take hold. She stood up from her chair with a grimace. When one was her age, one was allowed an occasional bad day, and that was all this was. Tomorrow the sun would be shining, she would sit outside with the Sunday papers, watching children playing in the communal garden and discussing compost and birds' nests with her neighbor, and the world would right itself. Until then, she would pour herself a well-deserved sherry and abandon the meandering literary novel on her table for something pleasurably familiar-Jane Austen, perhaps.

She had reached her kitchen and was pouring the sludge that passed itself for coffee down the sink when the door buzzer sounded. Startled, she glanced out the garden window at the still-pouring rain, wondering who could be calling in such ungodly weather. A neighbor, perhaps, taken ill?

But when she pressed the intercom, a familiar voice said, "Erika? It's Henri. Henri Durrell. Can I come in?" He sounded agitated.

She hurried to unlock the door, shaking her head and tut-tutting when she saw the state of his coat and hat. "Henri! What on earth are you doing out in this?" she asked as she ushered him in. "It's wet enough to drown an otter."

He kissed her on the cheek as she took his things and hung them, dripping, on the pegs by the door.

"Lovely as ever, I see," he said in lieu of a reply, smoothing his damp but abundant white hair. He was still a good-looking man, with a fine chin and direct blue eyes, and he carried himself with a military erectness in spite of the problems she knew he had with his hips.