Miracle by Deborah Smith

right. “Then I suppose you’re a gangster’s moll … temporarily.”
    “Nah. You be Fred, and I’ll be Ginger. Got your dancin’ shoes?”
    Sebastien realized he was smiling at her. No one had ever looked beneath the facade of his home. “Come along, Ginger. I’ll show you the kitchen.”
    Once there Amy silently examined modular white cabinets and white countertops that swooped around the room. She ran her fingertips along the white Venetian blinds above a kidney-shaped metal sink. “No dust. I knew it.”
    “I have a rather compulsive maid.”
    She sniffed delicately at the herbs growing in ceramic pots along the windowsill, then studied the gleaming copper pans hanging over an elaborate gas range and grill. “You probably cook something besides hamburgers in this place.”
    “Yes. I’m a very good cook. What Frenchman isn’t? Are you hungry?”
    She shook her head. In the bright overhead light he saw all the exhaustion in her body and in her pale, bruised face. “I think I’ll just go to bed.”
    When she swayed a little he took her elbow and guided her down a hallway where the unadorned cream-colored walls raised spareness to new heights. She stopped to gaze at metal-framed photographs of old cars and whimsical inventions. “Most people put up pictures of their families. You put up pictures of
things
. Me, I put up pictures of movie and TV stars. Strangers. I guess that’s as bad.”
    He didn’t quite know what to say to that, since she hadn’t sounded sarcastic or insulting. Did she think that he was lonely? unloved? unlovable? Before he could answer such disturbing insight his eyes caught an edge of blue under the face of the plain little wristwatch she wore. “What is that on your skin?”
    “What? Nothing. Just a birthmark.” She backed toward the door to the guest room, a coolly elegant place of white lacquered furniture and white satin bed coverings.
    “My payment, mademoiselle, for stitching that stubborn chin of yours, is to see what is tattooed on your wrist.”
    She halted, frowning, then jerked her wristwatch up an inch and stuck her arm out. “It’s a heart with the letters of my last name around it in a circle. A friend of my dad’s put it there when I was about five years old. She said it was a charm against evil. She was a fortune teller in a carnival. I didn’t ask for it, okay? I’m not a biker or anything. It’s the only tattoo I’ve got, okay? I try to keep it hidden.”
    “No need to be so defensive.” He grasped her hand and studied the crudely etched heart, which looked deflated. It bothered him to think of a child being permanently marked by superstition; then he considered the fact that his mother’s prayers to the saints and her astrology had marked him in a less visible but equally potent way. “You need a transplant.”
    She shivered under his touch but didn’t pull away. Her fingertips pressed into his palm with disarming warmth. “I’ll trade you,” she said softly. “Heart for heart. Scar for scar.”
    Shaken by such unexpected power, he watched her silently as she withdrew into the plush confines of his guest room.

    He was seated at the island in the center of his kitchen at five the next morning, groggily drinking a cup of thick black coffee, when Amy tiptoed in. She was dressed in denim shorts, a T-shirt, and sneakers. She carried her straw hat and sunglasses. He was dressed in a short robe of blue silk. She halted abruptly at the sight of him lounging on a tall black bar stool with his long, naked legs idly crossed and the robe gaping open to reveal most of his chest.
    “I’m sorry—I mean, excuse me,” she managed to say, blushing.
    “Come in. I thought you’d sleep late.”
    Sebastien rearranged himself into a more formal posture and pulled the robe closed. Underneath the cool silk he grew so hard that he ached, not an unusual condition for him in the presence of a desirable female, but dangerous in combination with his emotions for this