It was while she was slathering her rather nice twenty-eight-year-old body with a bar of very soapy soap that Cindy thought she heard some kind of bump or thump in the cabin outside of Kevin Anderson's bathroom.
She stood very still, aware suddenly of just how naked naked really was, and held her breath the way she had when she'd been a little girl and played boogeyman with her brother and her brother was three steps away from finding her hiding under the bed-held her breath and strained her hearing so hard she got a slight headache.
But there was just the warm water beating on her body, beading on her body, and the pleasant exhaustion that came at the end of a long day.
Then she decided she was being paranoid. Maybe Kevin had just opened and shut a drawer with undue power. He liked doing stuff like that-flinging back doors and jerking up chairs from the floor and twisting them around to sit on. It was because he did things like that, or so she supposed, that she'd finally accepted his apologies for last night ("I've just been sort of uptight, babe," was the way he'd said it, not ever using the exact word sorry exactly but she knew that for a guy like him-he had, after all, had his own network series and there was the promise of another-that for a guy like him even those words had been difficult to say) and so, at the last, Tobin gone, she'd said, yes, all right, she'd go back to his cabin with him, both of them knowing of course what that meant.
Kevin had wanted to take her two steps inside the cabin door. The nun's outfit had really fired up most of the men. But inside its heavy black folds she'd run with sweat and insisted on taking a quick shower, during which time she'd started composing a letter to Aberdeen about how weird this trip was becoming, with a TV star practically begging her for her company.
A door slammed.
She couldn't be sure of it.
It might have been any number of other things- somebody drunk falling against the wall in the corridor, Kevin sliding back the closet door with his usual enthusiasm-but somehow she thought not.
Somehow she thought a door had slammed.
Tired of all her apprehension, she turned off the shower, slid back the door, and grabbed a big white fluffy towel.
She dried off quickly, took a smaller towel to use as a turban for her hair, and then left the slippery tiles and steamy air of the bathroom.
She found Kevin immediately and began screaming almost as immediately.