Or maybe it wasn't caution that held her back from bursts of ecstatic lunacy, but caution's evil twin: cowardice. That worry had haunted her since one of her professors, an architect whose skills and talent she deeply respected, had commented that her designs were "safe." Adequate and buildable, unlike some of her classmates' impractical designs, yet there was little about her work that would inspire anyone to build it. But there were small flashes of creative genius, he'd told her. Here and there, in the treatment of a staircase or a roofline, he saw a glimmer of what she was capable of.

He had given her a B minus and told her that she'd be stuck doing architectural grunt work her whole career unless she learned to open up to her creative side, to stop being afraid of her own ideas.

She supposed he'd intended the comment to wake her up and inspire her, but all it had done was undercut her confidence, not knowing how to make herself more courageously creative. She'd thought she was being creative, and didn't know where this hidden genius was supposed to be residing or how to force it out of its hidey-hole.

The phone rang, jolting her out of her dark thoughts. She lunged for it, then held it in her hand without answering, dreading the conversation to come.

She swallowed her cowardice and flipped open the phone. "Hello?"

"Emma?" a male voice asked, voice cracking in the middle of her name.

"Yes?"

Throat clearing." 'Scuse me. This is Kevin," he went on, voice warbling somewhere around normality. "We met today at Russ's house?"

"Yes, hello. He told me that you might be calling."

"And here I am!" He laughed and then coughed.

Her last bits of hope for a potential match were fading fast. A silence stretched between them, in which she could almost hear the nervous tension thrumming through his wiry body. "How's your car?" she asked, for lack of anything better to say. "Get any scratches or dings this afternoon?"

"A rock chip in my windshield as I was driving home. Can you believe it!"

"Ooh, bad luck, there. I hope it wont be too expensive to fix."

He took the topic and ran with it for the next five minutes, apparently taking Emma's mmms and ahs and polite questions as signs of interest. Her mind began to wander to one of her favorite mental escapes: designing her dream bathroom. What were the codes for placement of electrical outlets near water, again? She eyed the binder, her fingers itching to flip it open and check.

"So I was thinking," Kevin said, "maybe you'd like to go for a drive out to Snoqualmie Falls, and we can have dinner at the lodge there."

"Dinner?" she said, snapping back to the present, a wall of cobalt blue glass tiles fading from her vision.

"I thought it would be a pretty drive."

"I'm sure it would be-"

"Great! How about Friday?"

She hadn't meant to say yes; she hadn't meant to imply an answer one way or the other! "This week isn't good," she fibbed.

"The Friday after, then. Or the Saturday-we could make a day of it! Maybe drive all the way to Ellensburg-"

"No!" Emma interrupted in a panic. "No, no, dinner would be better."

"Okay," he said, sounding disappointed.

"Friday after next, dinner, Snoqualmie Falls," Emma repeated, trying to sound cheerful and wondering how she'd managed to get locked into a date she didn't want. Too late to back out now, though.

Kevin quickly wrapped up the call, seeming to sense his perilous hold on her, and Emma snapped her phone shut. "Well, that sucks," she said aloud, and went out to the kitchen to get a bowl of ice cream.

Daphne had left a newspaper on the table, and Emma sat down with her ice cream and unfolded the front section. She skimmed the headlines and her gaze caught on the one at the bottom of the page:

King Street Station on Track for Design Contest

She dropped her spoon back into her bowl, her eyes eagerly taking in the details of the article.

The City of Seattle, the Burlington Northern Santa Fe freight company that owned the tracks, the federal government, and private investors were coming together to fund a complete teardown and reconstruction of the King Street train station. The new design would be decided by a panel of judges, chosen from the pool of entries in a contest. The winning designer or design team would be offered a contract to work on the new station.

The King Street Station was the only train station in Seattle, there being no subway. Emma had been to it once or twice to pick up friends who had taken Amtrak, and the place was a dump. Not only was it in serious disrepair, with plywood nailed over crumbling walls and two-thirds of the building off limits to all but the rats, but the only access was from a dead-end street with nowhere to turn around, making for chaos between taxis, buses, and hapless passenger cars all trying to get in and out.

Emma abandoned her ice cream and dashed back to her room with newspaper in hand, her heart thumping with excitement. At her computer, she typed in the URL to the website with the contest details. Professors in grad school had frequently used design contests from all over the country as assignments, but none of her work had ever been judged good enough by a professor to be sent in.

But that didn't mean she couldn't succeed this time, in her own city. She understood Seattle and its Zeitgeist; she could create something that spoke to its people. She could do this!

The contest site said that preliminary judging would be of a two-dimensional poster board. Ten finalists would present their ideas in front of the judges, the press, the project backers, and any of the interested public.

If she could make it to the finals, it might be the break she'd been looking for. Big professional design teams would surely be entering. Being a finalist alongside them would be a fabulous opportunity to network and schmooze! And if nothing else, it would be a big fat star on her resume\

This could be it. If she really set herself free, if she really dug down and unearthed that inner creative genius, maybe things would finally take a turn for the better. Maya Lin, the woman who won the contest to design the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, had also been graded average by her professors, and now her name was one of the few that Joe Public recognized in contemporary architecture.

What worked for Maya Lin might work for Emma Mayson, too.

Russ turned on the shower and tilted the nozzle so it hit the tiles he'd just scrubbed, rinsing away the cleanser. He cursed as water dripped down his arm and into the sleeve of his shirt.

This was ridiculous. He'd spent the last two hours cleaning his house in preparation for Emma's arrival to dean his house. He'd only meant to clean up any embarrassing bits of personal dirt, but suddenly it had seemed that such bits were everywhere. He didn't want her finding a stray toenail clipping on the carpet or a body hair on a sheet; didn't want her finding gunk around his shower drain or a crusty dish on the counter, or coffee grounds under the sink where they'd missed the trash can. The thought of her cleaning up after him bothered him.

If she were older, or married, or unattractive either physically or emotionally, then he wouldn't care. But she was none of those things. She was hot.

A guy doesn't want a hot girl scrubbing his toilet and muttering to herself what a filthy pig he is. Even if the guy didn't have a chance in hell with her, even if one of his friends has managed to get a date with her-a friggin' date!-he still doesn't want that.

He shut off the shower and perked his ears at a distant sound. Did he hear something? She wasn't here already, was she? He cursed again and went to check on his laundry, anxious to get the next load into the wash and safely out of her reach. He could not have her touching his Jockeys; he just couldn't.