Ebony set the last of Mike’s bags on the floor of his new sleeping quarters. "As you can see, you should be quite comfortable here."

Half an hour had passed since the incident in Ebony’s bedroom. In that time frame, Mike had dressed himself, and Ebony had done the same. After accomplishing this, she proceeded to direct him to a new room which was right across the hall from her own room. She normally saved that room for special guests, but Mike didn’t need to know that. Mike's move was so that she would not to have to worry about a repeat performance of what had happened a short time ago; she wasn't sure how she would react any more. The fact that she felt anything at all was reason for her to fear the outcome. "Feel free to go anywhere in my house and explore. All of the facilities are at your disposal if you wish to use them. Towels and other linens are already in your bathroom. If you need anything else, I should be aroused..." She could feel the tell-tale blush creeping up to her ears and surrounding her dark skin in a cocoon of embarrassment. She then cleared her throat and continued: "…around here somewhere." Ebony bit her tongue hard on the Freudian slip before she turned around to leave, but then a thought occurred to her. She turned around and faced him again, her index finger pointing at him accusingly as if he'd already done the deed. "Oh, and one other important detail that you must pay strict adherence to: don’t mess with my dogs … or with Fate."

Trying not to smile at the slip that Ebony had made a short time ago, he asked, "Why can't I?" Figuring that he was already on pretty shaky ground with her, he didn’t want to alienate her any more than he had already.

"Because they don’t take kindly to strangers, that’s why; especially Fate and Destiny. Fate doesn’t take kindly to any type of stranger, and Destiny doesn’t seem to like males... of any species. But she dislikes human males most of all." There was a good reason behind that. Ebony looked closely at Mike to see if he could detect that she was holding that information back from him, but he didn't seem to hear the slight catch in her throat. The memory tried to resurface, but she immediately squelched it. Destiny, aside from Fate, was her favorite, for many reasons, one being that she'd saved her life once.

She was then interrupted from her trip down memory lane by Mike's next question: "Destiny?"

Clearing her throat a bit to dislodge the tiny lump that had formed there, she replied, "Yeah, she’s my lead dog."

"Fate and Destiny, eh?" Mike arched an eyebrow at her. "Intriguing names. So I’m not to mess with either of them?" Ebony nodded. "Very well. I’ll leave them alone. As you know, no one can control either one... unless they wish to be controlled."

A slight inflection in the tone of his voice made her look up at him with a surprised expression on her face. "How’d you know?"

Lifting both eyebrows, Mike questioned, "How’d I know what?"

"That neither Fate nor Destiny can be controlled unless they want to be?" She leaned casually against the doorjamb.

At her question, he only smirked at her in response. It only took her a few seconds to pick up on Mike’s thought pattern. Repeating the words to herself, she broke into a smile. "Ah! I see..." Equivocal son-of-a-bitch! This thought was not an insult. She grinned at him.

Mike smiled in return. He had always loved Ebony’s smile, the way the dimples in her cheeks would sink deeply into her ebony flesh, seeming to cause her deep eyes to sparkle with humor and youth. Her smile always seemed to light up a room. Clearing her throat once again, she skillfully avoided looking into his eyes. Rocking a bit on her heals for a moment, she then waved and left him alone. Mike looked around the room before whispering, "Damn!"

There were only three days left until Christmas, and he needed to figure out why Ebony no longer celebrated it. Considering that she didn't want to get any where near him, that was going to be a problem. He sat down on the bed. Who knew how long he would be trapped in this wilderness before the road was cleared. One thing was certain, however: he needed to find some things to do to occupy his mind so that he didn’t end up ravaging the woman that he still loved against her will. Chewing on his bottom lip, Mike tried to think of a way to really break the ice so that Ebony would open up to him. He knew that their breakup had something to do with the whole situation, but he had this sneaking suspicion, this sixth sense, that there had to be more... a lot more. He needed to find her weak point, her Achilles’ heal. Of course, assuming that he found out what had happened in her life in all the years they'd been estranged, would it bring them closer together or tear them even further apart?

"Hmm ..." Judging from the situation thus far, Ebony didn’t want to get very close to him, physically or emotionally, and maybe that was her weak point. Maybe what he needed to do was press the advantage; he was, after all, bigger and stronger than she, and a hell of a lot better at the game of seduction. He wouldn’t force her to do anything, but he’d certainly give her a few things to think about. Maybe the right thing to do was to make Ebony face what was bothering her, to face whatever seemed to be hidden behind her eyes, masking them with glimmers of pain and betrayal ... whatever that was. He tapped his index finger against his jaw. As an idea began to hatch inside of his mind, he knew that he would have to get started as soon as possible if he wanted his plan to work.

What he needed to do was do something that he had never done in his entire life: be sickeningly romantic while at the same time be seductive with the purpose in mind to fill her nights with a passion she had yet to witness. He had to touch the soft spot in Ebony’s heart while at the same time trigger her primal side, the side that she seemed most afraid of. She was definitely stubborn though. He might have his work cut out for him.

Later, when Mike found Ebony, he found her sitting behind a mahogany desk in her study, writing something in a little, black book. Apparently, she hadn’t heard him enter the room, so he really wasn’t surprised when she nearly fell out of her chair when he said a bright and cheerful, "Hello!"

"Geezum crow, Mike! Don’t you know how to knock?" That's when he noticed the discreet movements of her hands as she tried to conceal the little book she had been writing in. She tried to distract him from watching her movements by giving him a look of mock anger.

"Sorry about that." He grinned at her boyishly. "I just wanted to come down to see what you were up to."

She made a play to show that she was busy by straightening some of the papers strewn helter-skelter across the surface of the desk. "Nothing much. Just catching up on some paperwork. What are you up to?" She covered the little book with a stack of papers as inconspicuously as possible.

"Oh, about six-foot-two." He grinned.

"Funny."

"Thank you!" Mike chuckled as he came around the side of the desk and tried to peer at what Ebony had been working on. "Anything I can help you with?"

"Umm... not really." She started nibbling on her lower lip which was a sign to him that she was uneasy about something. "I just have some personal matters that I need to take care of."

He took one last peek at the stack of papers covering the little black book before he shrugged nonchalantly and walked over to the other side of the room to take a look at some of the books she had on her shelves. Some were classics, and others were children's stories. He took a peek at her over his shoulder with one brow arched. He didn't know that she liked to read children's stories. He'd have to ask her more about that later on. As he continued to scan her library, he stated, "That’s all well and good, but I’m bored. I came down here to ask you if you would give me a tour of this wonderful establishment of yours."

"Uh... sure! Just give me a moment to clean up here. I’ll meet you in the living room in a few minutes, okay?" She began rifling through her papers again.

"You bet!" Before Mike left, he walked back over to her, leaned down and gave her a kiss on her cheek. He smiled, unnoticed, at the look on her face after that tiny kiss. He also noted out of the corner of his eye, before he left her study, that she had taken out a key to unlock a drawer in her desk before she quickly stuffed the little book inside.

A short time later, when Ebony entered the living room, she found Mike studying the picture above her couch. "You know something, Eb? This painting looks a lot like Fate," he commented without turning around.

It amazed Ebony sometimes how he knew that she was standing in the room when she'd made no noise to announce her presence. Maybe he had a sixth sense or something freaky like that. "Actually," she began, "it is a painting of Fate."

"Wow, that’s great! Who’d you hire to do it, and how much did it cost you?" He lifted a finger to touch the painting, but then he thought better of it. The oils on his fingers might mar it's beauty, and it's value. It really must have cost her a bundle to get it done!

With a smirk plastered on her face, one that he couldn’t see because he still had his eyes glued to the painting, she announced, "Actually, it didn’t cost me a damn thing!" She chuckled a little bit.

He glanced at her. She seemed really amused about something all of a sudden. Then he turned back towards the painting. "Oh, really? How come? The work on it is so very skillful. The artist certainly has a flare for the imaginative and has a great eye for detail." He turned his head and arched one eyebrow at her. "What? Did he owe you a favor perhaps?" He grinned before turning back to the painting to get a better look.

"No, I wasn’t owed any favors." Ebony grinned to herself as she watched Mike admire the painting. "And thanks for the compliments." This was stated softly.

Mike’s head spun around and his eyes grew very round in surprise. "You painted it?!"

"Surprised?"

"Damn straight!"

She chuckled softly. Then she shrugged modestly. "It was a hobby that I picked up in graduate school. Having no social life certainly leaves one with a lot of time on one’s hands. I thought that I would work on my aesthetic abilities to pass the lonely time away," she explained as she stared at the painting. "I must have painted this about a year or so ago." She looked down at the tiny signature and at the date in the lower, right-hand corner. "Yup. About a year ago."

Mike straightened himself and looked at her steadily for a moment. "What do you mean you had no social life? I thought you had promised me that you would make the time to make friends!"

Ebony arched one eyebrow at him. "I did find the time. But there was no one there that I could talk to the way that..." She paused and looked quickly at him. Then she quieted down again as she looked back at her painting.

Feeling that, once again, he'd hit upon a nerve, another touchy subject, he stated softly, "You have a great talent, Eb."

"Thanks," she stated after a momentary pause. She blushed slightly, too. "Shall we begin the tour?"

"You bet!"

Ebony stood in an upright, very formal posture as she spread her hands wide. "Welcome to my living room. I take a lot of pride in the decorations."

"And what lovely decorations they are. You really do make a nice, little homemaker, Eb," Mike commented as he looked at the crystal figurines sitting on an oak end table on one side of the couch. "Any prospects for getting married?" He added this comment as a bit of an afterthought to see what her response would be like.

In a very unemotional tone of voice, she responded, "I told you a long time ago that I would never get married."

Changing tactics again to seemingly keep her off balance, he continued to comment on the decorations in the living room. "And these lamps, did you make them yourself?"

The lamps that he was referring to were made of red clay and painted in a Native American fashion. "No. Those I bought while I was in graduate school. I had to furnish my apartment somehow."

"Very nice."

"Shall we move to the next room?" She questioned when he had finished looking around in the living room.

"One question first," he began, making his way over to her mantle.

"What’s that?" She watched his graceful movements. Sometimes when he walked, she was reminded of a stalking predator. She could easily see his muscles flexing beneath the surface of his clothing.

"Why aren’t you in any of the pictures of your family?" He indicated the one in which ever person in her family was standing in the picture except for her.

"I was the one taking the pictures," she shrugged.

"Well, that’s obvious, but don’t you have one of those cameras that has a timer on it? That way you'd be able to be a part of the pictures." Mike continued.

"Yes, but I already know what I look like. I really didn’t need to be in any of those pictures," she explained.

"Plus you hate having your picture taken," Mike commented dryly. Ebony stuck her tongue out at him. "What happened to your sisters?"

"Oh, they’re around somewhere. I mean, they aren’t in Canada. They’re down in the States. I don’t write them much any more."

Because he finally had her traipsing down memory lane, Mike decided to put his plan into action. "Why don’t you communicate with them?"

"Well, you know that the relationship me and my younger sister had was never really a very stable one. And once my older sister got married, the friendship that she and I shared kinda went down the toilet. I don’t like her husband, and I never will. They finally got enough money together to move away from my parents."

"What happened to your parents? How are they doing?"

She didn't respond right away to his questioning as she took a look at one of the pictures sitting on her mantle. It was one of her mother and father sitting on a swing beneath a bower of trees. Her mother was sitting on her father's lap wit a huge grin plastered on her face. Her father, on the other hand was sticking his tongue out at Ebony who was taking the picture. Both of them looked very happy, and so much in love. That picture was taken of them on their thirtieth wedding anniversary. "They’re dead... shall we move along?" Ebony began moving in the direction of the kitchen.

Mikes' brain froze. "Wait, wait, wait! What do you mean they’re dead?!" Mike asked before she could escape.

"They died in the same accident that my aunt and uncle died in," she said softly.

Crossing his arms in front of his chest and refusing to budge, he announced, "You know that you’re going to have to tell me sometime, Eb, so you might as well tell me now and get it over with." He then sat down on the couch, refusing to budge until she told him.

"Why should I tell you?" she asked softly, her gaze not quite meeting his own.

"Because I’m your friend… your best friend, whether you want to admit it right now or not." He paused for emphasis before he dropped a tiny bomb on her head. "And I know that you are still in love with me so you might as well quit pretending that you aren’t." He gave her a pointed look that dared her to deny it.

Because she had been so hurt by what had happened all those years ago, piled on top of so many other things that had happened to her afterwards, Ebony did deny it.

At first, she didn’t say anything. She just stared at him as if he were omniscient, but then after the initial shock wore off, her eyes got this glazed expression before she said, "I don’t know what you mean. I stopped loving you a long time ago." Then she did walk out of the room.

Mike only stared at her retreating form, too amazed at Ebony’s persistence with lying to him and to herself to move. After the shock wore off, he found the energy to get up off of the couch. She wasn’t going to get away with lying to herself while he was still alive. What he needed to do was to force her to face things.

"Ebony Marie Montana!" Mike shouted as he entered the kitchen. He found Ebony leaning up against the counter when he walked in.

"Yes?" Her walls were back up again.

Damn! Mike thought. He couldn’t pry if she had walls up. "Never mind... shall we continue with the tour?" he asked after a long pause to assess the situation. What he had to do was catch her off guard again like he had the first time. "So where are we now, oh-illustrious-hostess?" he asked sarcastically.

"Welcome to the kitchen. Here we have most of the food and whatnot. There is a pantry through that door there." Ebony pointed to another door. "Through that other door over there we have the breezeway which leads to the garage. There’s a door in the breezeway that leads to the relaxation zone of the house."

"The relaxation zone?" Mike asked, puzzled.

"Yes. It houses a sauna, a Jacuzzi, and a heated, Olympic-sized swimming pool."

"Wow..."

"Yeah. My uncle thought of everything when he built this house," Ebony stated wistfully. Then she sighed.

"So how’d they die?"

Sighing, she decided to give in and tell him what had happened. "My parents and I had come up here to visit my aunt and uncle for a winter holiday. We’d all gone on a snow-mobile trek down some of the trails and the back roads that we have up here. Mom rode with dad and my aunt rode with my uncle. Then out of nowhere, this big-ass Mack truck, a tractor trailer, came tearing around this blind corner on one of the back roads. The sun had been setting for quite a while, and the bastard didn’t have his headlights on like he was supposed to. He also didn’t sound his horn. Well, around the corner he came..." She paused as her voice cracked with emotion. "He was as drunk as a skunk!"

"He hit them?!"

Ebony only nodded.

"Man... that must have been tough to take..." Mike said softly as he walked over to her and placed both his hands on her shoulders.

"That’s an understatement," she finally responded after she'd gained control of her emotions. Once she had, however, she stepped away from Mike to put some distance between them.

Boy... this is going to be harder than I thought! Mike mused.

"So show me the basement."

She led him through the breezeway and through a doorway that led down to the basement. Upon entering the room, his eyes nearly bugged out of his head.

"Wow!"

Ebony grinned at him. "Like I said: my uncle thought of everything. He didn’t want us kids to be bored if we ever came up to visit." She looked around the room a bit before she briefly showed him the laundry room with its two sets of washers and dryers. After that, she led him back up the stairs to the breezeway where they took a detour into the relaxation zone.

"Boy... if you wanted to have an orgy, this certainly would be the place to do it," Mike commented. He peaked at Ebony out of the corner of his eye to see if he could judge her mood now. Some walls seemed to have caved in, but she was still on alert. With his fingers crossed, he softly asked, "Have you ever made love in the water before?"

She looked up at him sharply. Her expression didn't change much however, but he could tell that the walls were slowly coming back up. "Only you would know that, Mike," she responded, not looking directly at him.

"You mean to tell me that you’ve never done that with any other partners before?" He said this softly as he walked over to stand beside her. He looked at her out of the corner of his eye as he tested the temperature of the water.

When the topic of making love had come up, so had an idea. He would try a little bit of a seduction technique that he read about once. It had told its readers that when a woman seemed lost in the past, move slowly towards her, slow enough not to startle her, but fast enough so that she couldn't make a move to escape right away. Then move in for the kill. Slowly, he slid his hand around Ebony’s waist as she stared off into the distance, seemingly, into outer space. Then he slowly turned her around and began to slowly walk her towards a wall. "Ebony," he called softly, his lips grazing the woman’s neck. "Did you hear what I said?"

"Hmm?" She replied, her focus on the softly-textured lips grazing her flesh.

"I asked if you’d ever made love with any other partners in water before... ever," he repeated, looking her directly in her suddenly mahogany brown eyes before rapidly bringing his lips roughly against hers. That was when he immediately felt the change come over Ebony. With a sound escaping from her throat that sounded like a cross between a roar and a human scream, she shoved him away from her with a force that nearly toppled him. It wasn’t the same force that she'd used when she'd shoved him earlier. It was much stronger, as if she was fighting for her life.

Mike had been expecting a reaction, but that hadn’t been it. From his position on one of the pool-side chairs, he looked at Ebony with confusion written all over his face as he studied her. Ebony seemed to be all right on the outside, but on the inside, he could sense the quivering, the fear, the darkness start to surround her. It was similar to the darkness inside of himself that expressed itself only in his nightmares. Something had happened to her... something awful. After a few moments with no sound or movement from her, he knew that he would have to break the trance that she seemed to be in.

"So have you?" he asked louder than was necessary. He stood up, but did not move any closer to her.