And as long as you're correcting yourself, Emily thought as she leaned closer to the mirror to reapply her lipstick, this floating castle with sails can't really be called a boat.

Boats were unassuming, functional little things you sat in and used oars to row. Or they were things with sails attached that gave you calluses on your hands, sunburn on your face and a healthy lungful of fresh ocean air. Sometimes they took you from point A to point B, but mostly from point A to nowhere, and back again.

Despite the fact that there was, indeed, no destination for this evening's sail, there was nothing unassuming about the sailing vessel Emily was standing on. True, the Home Free wasn't large enough to be called a ship, but somehow the word boat didn't fit, either.

Yacht, thought Emily as she adjusted the straps of her new black party dress. Alexander Delmore's boat really had to be called a yacht.

She looked at herself critically in the mirror. She'd picked up this dress in a fancy department store's bargain basement. Even marked down the way it had been, it had put her out nearly half of one of her weekly paychecks.

Spending that much money was a big deal to her. It meant she'd have to watch her grocery money for the next few weeks, and really try to keep her expenses down. But to real estate tycoon Alexander Delmore, the amount she'd spent on the dress would have been laughably small. When Alex took her out to dinner, he spent that much on one bottle of wine.

Of course, he made significantly more money wheeling and dealing in real estate than she made as a high school English teacher. That was