The Virgin and the Vengeful Groom

by Dixie Browning

  “The boxes don’t take up all that much room, they’re not in the way.”

  They were dancing around, each one trying to gain the high ground. “Oh, and don’t forget to include that book over there on the chair. Looks like one of dear old Aunt Bessie’s diaries.”

  She closed her eyes, looking as if she were praying…or trying to figure out where to kick him to do the most damage. Strong, fragile, gutsy and vulnerable. Hell of a combination. He’d been trained to come in hard, fast, and silent—to get the job done and get out. He hadn’t been trained to offer comfort and protection—at least, not the kind he wanted to offer this woman.

  “Give it up, O’Malley, you know you’re outmatched,” he said softly.

  For a long time she didn’t speak. Didn’t look at him, but stared at the musty old book on the seat of the upholstered rocking chair. If she was deliberately trying to throw him off the scent, she’d find out that he was an old hand at creating a feint as a diversion while the real action was taking place somewhere else.

  Turns out, she was even better at it than he was. “We could compromise.”

  “Compromise? Now, look—”

  “Just hear me out. I’m willing to do this only because I’m under a certain amount of pressure. I’ve got a contract in the works, which means I’ll have to be here to—”

  “What compromise?”

  “I’ll share. You can come here for, say, two hours every morning and we’ll sort through everything, and then you can take what I don’t need and—”

  “Need? What the devil is this garbage about need?”

  She looked ready to take a swing at him. Instead, she said patiently, “I’m really into Bess’s story. It’s…it’s sort of like we’re bonded. I mean, think of it this way—she was a writer, I’m a writer. She was an independent woman, I’m an independent woman. I think she needs her story told, and I’m the logical one to tell it, only I need all those papers until I can decide which ones are about Bess and which aren’t. Technically, they’re all mine, but you can have those that aren’t directly related to Bess.”

  Curt raked both hands through his hair. He’d been standing ever since she’d let him inside. Another five minutes and he’d be ready for traction. “All right, let’s talk about both our problems. You say you’re willing to share—I can live with that. You say we can spend a couple of hours every day here in your apartment, where there’s not enough room to swing a rat by the tail—where some cretin keeps bugging you on the phone. Great working atmosphere, huh?”

  “Well, what do you suggest? That we haul all six boxes to a neutral place and camp out there until we sort everything out?”

  “Bess ever mention a place called Powers Point?”

  “So what if she did? What does it have to do with anything?”

  “I’ll tell you what it has to do, lady—as much as I hate to say this, it’s probably the best answer to both our problems.”

  Three

  Closing the door a few minutes later, Lily leaned against the cool white surface and wondered if she had completely lost her mind. What happened to the survival instinct that had kept her relatively safe growing up in the worst neighborhoods of Boston, Baltimore and Detroit? Too many years of soft living? With everything else that was going on in her life, he had to happen to her.

  The man was an enigma. Another of her new words. And that was only for starters. Not only did he affect her mind, he affected her body, and she could have sworn she was immune to that sort of thing. Actually, immunization hadn’t been all that hard to maintain, since she hardly ever encountered a man capable of overcoming years of conditioning. Not that she didn’t look. And think. And wonder.

  But that was as far as it ever went. As far as she allowed it to go. For years she had managed to keep herself safe. No big deal. Early exposure to the seamiest side of life had built up so many layers of defense it was a wonder she could function, much less write about the kind of romance that existed only between the covers of a book.

  Thanks to her own stubborn refusal to give up, plus a few years of counseling, she’d been functioning just fine until recently. She still went out of her way to avoid men she found too attractive, which wasn’t all that difficult. According to her few close women friends, her standards were unrealistically high. They blamed it on her profession.

  “Hey, no man can live up to Lily’s standards, right, girlfriend?”

  So far, no man had. If she’d needed a test, it was just possible she’d found one. Curt Powers was not only attractive, he was intriguing, mysterious and sexy enough to arouse instincts she could have sworn were stone-cold dead.

  But he had something she wanted, and she had something he wanted, and until they could settle on who got what, they were going to have to deal. “Bess, I’m not going to let you down, I promise.” Just because she would rather avoid trouble whenever possible, that didn’t mean she was a coward. If something was worth fighting for, she could more than hold her own.

  It had to be fate that had led her to that particular place at that particular time. Fate that had prompted her to bid on half a dozen cartons that could have been filled with useless junk from someone’s attic. Instead of useless junk, she had found a kindred spirit, a woman who had something to say and needed a spokesman. Spokeswoman.

  “I’m here for you, Bess. One way or another, we’ll get your story told,” she said aloud, feeling not at all self-conscious, because she often talked to herself. Tried out dialogue. Argued. And if occasionally her characters argued back, it was nobody’s business but her own.

  One thing, though—if she was going to hang on to Bess’s material long enough to get her story told, that meant she was going to have to do business with Bess’s great-great-whatever. Business business, not monkey business. No more letting herself be distracted by the shape of his mouth when he shaped his words. No more letting her imagination off the leash, which she was inclined to do, usually at the worst possible times.

  So she’d noticed him. What woman didn’t watch men? That’s what sunglasses had been invented for. Of course, in her case it was purely research, nothing personal. He might look like a storybook hero—he might even smell like one, all sun-washed male, with a hint of some citrusy aftershave. But he was even more persistent than she was, and that she didn’t need at the moment. For all she knew, he might even be married, with a wife and a houseful of children.

  Lily had come a long way, but she’d never claimed to be perfect. When it came to weaknesses, she could list her own right down the line. She was still a tad too defensive. She was inclined to be a pack rat. She wasn’t neat, but then, that was why she had Doris. She couldn’t cook, although she was a whiz at sandwiches. She couldn’t spell, but her computer could. Her grasp of grammar, let alone all the other little refinements in a writer’s bag of tricks—well, she was still working on all that. So far she’d been able to fake it.

  Her editor said she had “voice,” which meant she didn’t have to speak perfect English. Colloquial was just fine. She even knew how to spell colloquial, because she’d come home and looked up the word. Actually, she was inclined to soak up the voice of whatever writer she was currently reading, and right now she found herself thinking in Bess Powers’s voice.

  Or at least the way she imagined nineteenth-century English would be spoken by a woman who’d been raised with a bunch of rough sailors.

  The phone rang. She tensed, then sighed when Davonda’s rich contralto flowed into the room. “Sorry I got held up, I’ll be by in about ten minutes with the contract. Can’t stay, though. Got a date with one prime hunk. Dinner and who knows.”

  That was Davonda. Twice married, twice divorced, ever hopeful.

  Lily pulled her hair back and tied it with a scarf, splashed cold water on her cheeks and picked up three days’ worth of newspapers she’d never got around to reading. To avoid thinking about the wretched mess her life had become, she focused on the man she had fought to a draw over six boxes of old pa
pers.

  Why did he limp? He’d covered it earlier today with that sexy glide, but tonight he hadn’t bothered. How had he been burned? Not from any careless household accident, she was willing to bet. Once when she was about ten, her mother, stoned, as usual, had shoved her against an oil heater. The whole place could’ve gone up in flames, but Lily had grabbed the heater before any oil spilled and set it upright. In the process she’d burned big blisters on both hands and one wrist. She could still remember the incredible pain. She’d tended the blisters herself, using soap and water and cooking oil, and wrapping them with a Grateful Dead T-shirt. Amazingly, they had healed without infections. Even the scars had finally disappeared, although she was still a little light in the fingerprint department.

  She was willing to bet Curt’s burns hadn’t come from any oil heater. A few years ago she might have asked. She had better manners now, having worked at it for years by reading every book on etiquette she could find and watching the way other women behaved under different circumstances. Not that she didn’t slip up occasionally, but she was good at covering any gaffes. One interviewer had even called her charmingly unselfconscious.

  If he only knew. She had practically wet her pants when he’d used a word she didn’t know in a question she didn’t know the answer to, and so she’d done what any well-bred lady would do. She had sneezed delicately into her lace-edged handkerchief, accepted his automatic blessing, and changed the subject.

  So, Lily, she asked herself now—how would a well-bred woman behave toward a man who pushed every button she had, plus a few she’d never known she possessed?

  “If she had half a brain in her skull, she would run like hell,” she muttered, and gathered up two days’ worth of clothing to toss into the hamper.

  There was packing to do, and then she’d better let Doris know she would be out of town a few days and ask her to water the plants. Lily had a brown thumb, but she had hopes that pretty soon her flowering whatchamacallits and her hanging thingamabobs would sprout new leaves or buds or whatever. She had always wanted houseplants. All the pictures in the house magazines she used to pore over in the library were full of plants. Big muscular things with shiny leaves the size of hubcaps. She’d made up her mind before she was twelve that if she ever had a home of her own, she would have herself a jungleful of lush growing things, even if she had to postpone buying furniture.

  So far her apartment didn’t look much like the pictures in the magazines, but then, she’d only been at it for little more than a year. Plants took time, even with Doris to keep her from drowning or starving them.

  Glaring at the phone, she dared it to ring while she dragged the boxes from her office into the living room, unearthed a roll of duct tape to seal them up, and then headed for the bedroom again to start packing her suitcase. Nothing like having an organized mind. With five things to do she could usually manage to get through two before she started skipping, wandering all over the map. It was something else she was working on. Efficiency.

  “Oops—call Doris,” she reminded herself.

  Davonda came by just as she finished packing. “Going somewhere?” she inquired, eyeing the suitcase beside the front door.

  “Just for a day or so. Research.”

  “Research, hmm? Then why’re you blushing?”

  “Oh, for heaven’s sake, if my face is red it’s from exertion. I’ve been handling those boxes of…of research material.”

  “Umm-hmm. If you say so, girl. Just watch it, y’hear? You’re nowhere near as smart as you think you are.”

  “Just because you went to Yale and I didn’t.” It was a standing joke between them, Davonda’s degrees and Lily’s lack of even a GED, and their relative income levels.

  “Okay, I’ve made a few changes. Look ’em over, call if you’ve got any questions, otherwise initial where I did, sign ’em and I’ll pick it up…when?”

  “When what? Oh. The contract.”

  A three-book contract with a seven-figure advance, that’s all. At any other time in her life she’d be dancing on the rooftops. At the moment she seemed to have blown all her emotional fuses. “Tell you what, I’ll take it with me and read it over word by word and drop it in the mail in case I’m gone more than a couple of days, okay?” She wouldn’t be, but just in case…

  “Who is he? No, don’t answer that, I don’t even want to know. But, girl, you know the score.” Davonda knew more about Lily’s past than anyone other than the counselor who had straightened her out and set her on a more constructive path.

  “Honestly, Davie, it’s just research. I came across some fascinating material, only it’s—well, it’s complicated.”

  “Complicated. Right.” Davonda rolled her expressive eyes. “At least the timing’s good. Best thing in the world—get out of town until things settle down around here. Then if you want to sue the phone company, I’ll represent you.”

  Not until she was standing under the shower did it occur to Lily that the fire she was leaping into might be more dangerous than the frying pan she was leaping out of. While hot water drilled down on the tense muscles at the back of her neck and sluiced down her body, she thought about that crazy prickle of awareness that had come over her the first time she’d seen Curt Powers at the bookstore.

  She let the water run cool and then cold. It didn’t help. Words and phrases popped into her mind as she visualized the way he walked. Snake-hipped. Tigerlike. Gliding, as though he had a case of dynamite balanced on his head.

  She shut off the water and shivered, not from the cold so much as from the awareness that always served as a warning. The awareness of her own femininity. Of what she had denied for so long, but hadn’t quite managed to kill. That she was a woman with a woman’s needs. A woman afraid to allow anyone to come too close, because closeness meant getting hurt, and she’d been hurt too often ever to risk it again.

  “Face it, girl, you’re a fraud. Clear case of early malnutrition. Your body grew up, but your brain barely made it past puberty.” Here she had her first three-book contract with a seven-figure advance, with a creep making her life a living hell, and all she could think about was what sex would be like with a man she didn’t know, didn’t trust and certainly didn’t like. A lion of a man into whose den she had just delivered herself.

  A lion of a man? Talk about your purple prose.

  But it was true. Whatever it was that men had that made women do incredibly stupid things, Curt Powers had cornered the market. Testosterone? Machismo?

  Whatever. Chemistry was another area where she was woefully ignorant.

  “And, Bess, he’s not even handsome, not by male-cover-model standards. Remind me to tell you about the covers we have these days.” She dusted down with lilac-scented talcum powder, sneezed twice and muttered, “Bless you.” She didn’t know if self-blessings counted, but she needed all the help she could get.

  “Did women have biological clocks in your day, Bess? I’ve been reading up on it, and you know what? I’m beginning to believe it’s more than just a medical myth.”

  What if he tried to seduce her, she wondered as she brushed her teeth. Would raging hormones overcome common sense? Where did temptation fit in? Because she was tempted. She didn’t have to like him—she didn’t even have to know him, to be tempted.

  What if she tried to seduce him? She knew how it was done on paper. On paper, she had done it plenty of times. Even though her books fell into the category of suspense, there was always an element of romance involved. And while personally she went out of her way to avoid temptation, she knew all about it. Even a hardheaded realist could dream. It was those very dreams that enabled her to do what she did, which was to create lovely, sexy, temporarily dangerous, but eventually happy-ever-after lives for other people to live.

  Curt Powers was the kind of man she wrote about in her books and avoided like the plague in real life. She would be safe, she reminded herself as she rinsed and spat, just as long as she remembered the rules. Rule number one, know the o
dds going in.

  Too late, she was already in. She grimaced at the face in the mirror and skipped to rule number two. Run like hell. That was still a possibility. And if worse came to worst, she would have to rely on thumbs, knees, teeth and five-alarm screams.

  At nine-thirty the next morning she took one look at the mess stacked in her living room and headed for the medicine cabinet. Somebody had evidently borrowed her head for basketball practice. Either that or she had a bad case of coffee jitters. She kept meaning to swear off caffeine. Kept forgetting to do it.

  After three aspirin, washed down with last night’s stale coffee, she stood in front of her closet and pondered what to wear. One of the skills she was working on was how to dress appropriately for the occasion. Things had been easier back when she’d worn whatever she could swipe from other people’s clotheslines. Now she fought a constant battle between her personal desire for anonymity and her publisher’s insistence on exposure. They’d even given her a Web page, for gosh sake, and she wasn’t even online. Lily the writer wore silks and strappy high heels. The real Lily dressed down. Way down.

  She opted for baggy slacks, a man’s shirts, and a pair of sneakers—the discount store variety, not the name brand. This was a working trip, not a publicity tour.

  “You trying to prove something, Lily?” she asked, all innocence.

  “Damn right I am!” she growled back at the mirror.

  And that was another thing—she’d have to try to remember not to talk to herself while she was at Powers Point. At least not out loud. And definitely not to talk to Bess.

  He was early. Her doorbell rang at one minute to ten. Armor firmly in place, Lily opened the door, silently daring him to comment on her baggy eyes, her baggy slacks or any other bags he happened to notice.

  “Rough night?” He noticed, all right.

  “Caffeine,” she snapped.