Worst Fears Realized

going to reason with Dolce, too?”
    “I’m not sure she can be reasoned with.”
    “Now you’re beginning to get the picture.”
    “I’m too tired to think about it right now,” Stone said. “And the painkillers are starting to kick in. I hope I can get upstairs before I fall asleep.”
    “You want some help?”
    “No, I’ll make it.” Stone opened the car door and stepped out into the rain. “Good night, Dino.”
    “Good night, Stone. I’ll call you tomorrow and give you the latest on Mitteldorfer.”
    “You do that.” Stone closed the car door and walked slowly up the front steps of his house. He let himself in and took the elevator upstairs, because he didn’t feel like negotiating the stairs. He had a pretty good buzz from the painkillers.
    There was a light on in the bedroom, which gave him a little start. He crept into the room and found Dolce asleep in his bed, naked, only partly covered bya sheet. The expression on her face was one of a somnolent child, all innocence and sweetness.
    He slipped out of the sling that held his arm, got undressed as quietly as he could, switched off the light, and got into bed beside her. She stirred in her sleep and reached out for him, illuminated by the light of half a moon, coming through the clouds outside.
    “You okay?” she asked, without really waking up.
    “I’m okay. How’d you get in?”
    Her brow wrinkled. “Remote control for the garage door. I brought your car back. What happened?”
    She seemed to be waking up, now, and he didn’t want that. He stroked her face, and she slept again. “I’ll tell you tomorrow,” he whispered, letting sleep come to him.
    He had absolutely no idea what he would say to her tomorrow.

    Acknowledgments
    I am grateful to my editor, vice president and associate publisher Gladys Justin Carr, and her staff, associate editor Erin Cartwright and editorial associate Deirdre O’Brien, as well as all those at HarperCollins who have worked so hard for the success of my books.
    I also want to express my gratitude to my agent, Morton L. Janklow, and his principal associate, Anne Sibbald, as well as to the staff of Janklow & Nesbit for their continuing efforts in the management of my writing career and for their warm friendship.
    I am also very grateful to my wife, Chris, who is always the first subjected to my manuscripts, for plugging the holes therein and for the shoulder rubs that keep me working at the computer.

    “We Are Very Different People”:
    Stuart Woods on Stone Barrington
    An Interview by Claire E. White
    Stuart Woods was born in the small southern town of Manchester, Georgia on January 9, 1938. His mother was a church organist and his father an ex-convict who left when Stuart was two years old, when it was suggested to him that, because of his apparent participation in the burglary of a Royal Crown Cola bottling plant, he might be more comfortable in another state. He chose California, and Stuart only met him twice thereafter before his death in 1959, when Stuart was a senior in college.
    After college, Stuart spent a year in Atlanta, two months of which were spent in basic training for what he calls “the draft-dodger program” of the Air NationalGuard. He worked at a men’s’ clothing store and at Rich’s department store while he got his military obligation out of the way. Then, in the autumn of 1960, he moved to New York in search of a writing job. The magazines and newspapers weren’t hiring, so he got a job in a training program at an advertising agency, earning seventy dollars a week. “It is a measure of my value to the company,” he says, “that my secretary was earning eighty dollars a week.”
    At the end of the sixties, after spending several weeks in London, he moved to that city and worked there for three years in various advertising agencies. At the end of that time he decided that the time had come for him to write the novel he had been thinking about since the age of ten. But after getting about a hundred pages into the book, he discovered sailing, and “…everything went to hell. All I did was sail.”
    After a couple of years of this his grandfather died, leaving him, “…just enough money to get into debt for a boat,” and he decided to compete in the 1976 Observer Single-handed Transatlantic Race (OSTAR). Since his previous sailing experience consisted of, “…racing a ten-foot plywood dingy on Sunday afternoons against small children, losing regularly,” he spent