He was halfway up the stairs of his porch when he noticed a well-toned set of legs, naked from mid-thigh down and crossed in that supremely feminine knee-over-knee way. The legs were visible, but just barely, in the dim post-sunset twilight. Ordinarily Cooper would not have taken issue with a woman seated on his deck chair, awaiting his arrival while showing some of the best legs he’d ever seen. Today, though, he knew there to be the high probability the owner of the legs was playing a role in Ronnie’s, and hell, probably also Woolsey’s latest idea of practical joke.

“Don’t get your hopes up,” he said. “Whatever it is they convinced you is going to happen, it’s been a long day. Too long. So it’s not going to happen.”

“Your hands are bleeding.”

Cooper recognized the voice but wasn’t immediately sure where he’d heard it; since he couldn’t yet see the woman’s face in the shadows of his porch, he looked down at his bandaged hands while he tried to figure it out.

“They’ll do that for a while,” he said. “Maybe a day or two.”

“You always sail nude?”

Her voice kind of drifted out to him. The feeling it gave him was somewhat disturbing-warmth, familiarity, imbalance. It felt good, but he felt immediately off guard. There’d only been one woman, a long time ago-

Wait a minute.

He tried to take back the thought he’d been in the midst of having, his mind’s hand reaching out, clutching, grasping for it in his attempt to reel it back in. He’d just realized who it was seated there on his porch, and he wasn’t about to acknowledge that kind of effect from her. Try as he did, he couldn’t grasp the thought-it hung there in his mind, evading him, the impression caused by her voice lingering.

He moved to the top stair, and through the inky shadows caught a flash of white from her eyes. He saw that her skin was nearly as bright as her eyes-woman needs a tan, he thought, like nobody’s business.

“Yes, I do,” he said, answering her question, “but that isn’t a sailboat, Laramie.”

He saw more white-a flash of teeth. Laramie was smiling.

Realizing she’d seen him pissing off the edge of the boat, Cooper felt suddenly childish. Everybody at the club, of course, was forced to regard that particular spectacle on a frequent basis, but having Laramie there to witness the nude blow-dry-and-piss session actually gave him the feeling he’d made a fool of himself.

“When you say your hands will do that for a while,” she said, “how do you know?”

“I did it while deep-sea angling.” Cooper wasn’t sure why he used the term angling, since he couldn’t remember ever having called it that. “Bring in a game fish the size we got today will usually take you six or seven hours. You’re out of practice, you’ll blister up in the first hour. Start bleeding before you’ve got the fish halfway home. I’m out of practice.”

“What did you catch?”

“What exactly are you doing here? Unless you’d prefer to beat around the bush for another hour or two.”

“Come on, what did you catch?”

“A marlin.”

“How big?”

“Hard to tell. Four-fifty, five hundred pounds.”

“Five hundred? Where is it?”

Cooper looked at her. The lie detector.

“I let her go.”

“Her?”

“Why are you here, Laramie,” he said.

Laramie stood. She brushed her shorts flat, and he saw she was wearing a pair of Conch Bay-issue knee-length khakis, part of the merchandising line Woolsey had launched the year before. Meaning maybe she’d come down in a hurry-packed light. Cooper thought of how she’d been difficult to get a hold of.

He could see her in full now, the recently set sun casting her in a glow he placed somewhere between crimson and sepia: buttery skin, pink from a couple hours of sun, compact features with little to nothing amiss, longish hair he’d call something like brownish blonde pulled back in a ponytail. She had the trim frame of a runner-fit and lean, but not about to go out and win any Puerto Rico bikini contests.

“Tell you what, W. Cooper,” she said. “Why don’t you bop into your room and shower off those little waves of salt.”

She pointed to his chest, where there were, indeed, crusted white wavelets of salt, distributed in the approximate pattern of sand on a beach. Cooper knew the salt water to dry that way when he started wet and rode home in the breeze.

“After that,” she said, “maybe we can have something to eat. I’ll buy you a dinner at the restaurant down there and answer your question of why I’m here. In fact, I’ll do you one better: I’ll make you a proposition.”

When it became apparent she wasn’t going to tell him the nature of the proposition, Cooper said, “If I were to hazard a guess, I’d say you’re down here on the sly. Maybe you even had your cute little rear end handed to you by some of those supremely wise bosses of yours. Meaning that the thing you’re probably interested in, I’m not necessarily capable-”

“Thanks for the ‘cute little rear end’ thing, just then,” Laramie said.

Cooper found he’d run out of fuel for whatever thought he’d been in the midst of conveying. He stood there at the top of the stairs, looking at Laramie’s particularly bright eyes with what he figured to be as blank an expression as he’d seen in the marlin’s half-dead stare.

“Just take that shower, mister,” she said, then sat down and recrossed her legs.

Cooper figured out what Ronnie’s smart-ass look was all about. The errand boy pulled a bottle of Chardonnay from a nest of ice beside their table, poured Laramie a glass, and replaced Cooper’s melting tumbler of tinted ice with a fresh pour of Maker’s Mark. Then Ronnie stood tall, hands clasped behind his back, and announced he was ready to take their orders, flaunting his smug gleam of pleasurable contempt in a way that made Cooper want to kick him in the shin.

Cooper knew that Ronnie was thinking there had never been a legitimate dinner date hosted by the occupant of bungalow nine, not that he’d seen in his tenure anyway. Ronnie was well aware that Cooper spent plenty of time helping women get drunk and enticing them to sneak up to his bungalow-leave your husband and his Izod shirt at the bar-but now, in the presence of Laramie, Cooper knew Ronnie could smell his vulnerability like a shark on the scent of blood. And the kid thought he was succeeding in delivering his implicit threat: Give me a few minutes with the lass and I’ll have her high-tailing it for the States in no time, mate. Tell her a story or two about her knight in shining armor, few of the things been said to have gone down over the years in good old bungalow number nine. Cooper resisted the tangible urge to grab Ronnie by his ponytail and inform the putz he didn’t give a shit about either Ronnie’s implicit threat, or the woman Ronnie was evidently so impressed with.

Laramie ordered a seafood Caesar salad and asked for the dressing on the side. Cooper told her nobody eats a Caesar salad with the dressing on the side, since that would keep it from being a Caesar salad. Then he ordered a Cabernet to accompany the Maker’s Mark, conch fritters, and the house burger with cheddar.

Once Ronnie had tenderfooted his way back to the kitchen, Cooper looked at Laramie, whose face was growing pinker by the minute from whatever sun she’d got while waiting for him to return. She was staring back at him with a look he couldn’t interpret, something between skepticism, fascination, and determination.

“Shoot,” Cooper said.

“Hm?”

“What’s the favor?”

“Proposition,” she said, and smiled, and Cooper felt a funny twitch in his stomach. Laramie grabbed her glass of Chardonnay and peered around the place-beach, lagoon, stars, garden, bungalows, torches. The warm orange glow of the fire-lit restaurant.

“Your home,” she said.

Ronnie came with Cooper’s glass of Cab. “Everything all right here?”