Oh, and the back rubs lacked a certain heft. Still, Robert managed to make her feel amazingly wonderful for someone whose spirit was willing but the flesh nonexistent. Kelly Scranton could fix the martini herself. And unlike most of the men she’d dated, Robert was always willing to listen to her gripes, and he generally commiserated. In fact he seemed to crave her tales of woe from the trenches of the architectural world, or any other world. Being limited to the house made him hungry for any and all information from outside, which was why she generally left either the television or a radio going even when she wasn’t there. Her nineteenth-century mansion on the Virginia side of the Chesapeake Bay coast was almost two hours’ drive from D.C., so Kelly generally spent a couple of days in town at a time, meeting with clients and other business contacts before returning home where she could do much of the drawing in peace and conduct the rest of her business via phone. That particular Thursday she’d been gone for three days, working on a large collaborative project.
