The Virgin and the Vengeful Groom

by Dixie Browning

  At least she’d managed to hang on to one of the two.

  Curt took one last look at the neatly cut padlock. “No point in hoping for fingerprints,” he said. “Anyone who came armed with bolt cutters would know enough to wear gloves.”

  Lily nodded knowingly. Most of the street punks she’d spent her early life avoiding were too dumb to wear gloves. Shoot, snatch and run was their modus operandi.

  Suddenly he turned and strode back through the house, not waiting for her to follow. She scrambled after him, yelling, “What is it? Curt! What’s wrong now?”

  Back in his bedroom, he was standing before the open closet when she caught up with him. “Tell me! What’s wrong? Damn your macho, tough-guy pride, tell me!”

  “My boots.”

  “Your boots,” she repeated. She waited, trying to picture him wearing a pair of heavy waders. Moving closer, she stared at the clutter of shoes, metal tanks, tubes and various unidentifiable black neoprene shapes. By contrast, her own apartment was neat as a pin. “Are you sure they’re not there?”

  He sighed. And then he hunkered down in a way that had to be ruinous on legs that had been shot at and sliced open and Lord knows what else. She touched his shoulder to regain his attention. “Were they special boots? Um—diving boots?”

  “Yeah, they were special. Custom-made, with eel-skin panels and a starfish and trident design. Not another pair like ’em in the world. Damn things cost me a month’s pay, and I never even got to wear ’em.”

  He sounded so—so plaintive, Lily didn’t know whether to laugh or commiserate. Eel-skin boots with starfish and tridents?

  The mind boggled.

  “Go ahead and laugh. I don’t blame you. Obviously, you never lost something important.”

  Only my childhood, she was tempted to say, but didn’t because she had already said more than she’d ever intended to say. More than he wanted to hear.

  “I lost a…a pair of shoes once. I guess that’s sort of the same thing. Relatively speaking, that is. I bought ’em with my first paycheck from the cleaning service I worked for.”

  He tried to stand, settled back, but made it on the second try. “They were probably pretty miserable, anyway. I don’t have Western-styled feet.”

  “One good thing—it shouldn’t be too hard to spot someone who’s hobbling around in eel-skin boots decorated with starfish and whatchamacallits, right?”

  That got another of his rare grins, and Lily tried to think of something else cheerful, or at least hopeful, to say. “Why don’t I make sandwiches while you call the cops?”

  What she’d much rather do—not that she would—was to wrap him in her arms and hold on to him for the foreseeable future. Lust was bad enough. She could deal with lust because she knew where it led, which was precisely nowhere. But lust mixed with tenderness?

  No way.

  He followed her out into the hall. Paused, as if there was something he wanted to say, then shook his head and turned toward the phone. Lily waited until he punched in the number, wondering if it wouldn’t be best if she left first thing tomorrow. Or even tonight. It was getting out of hand, this feeling of wanting to say something, do something—anything—to get him to react.

  Which didn’t even make sense, she told herself as she headed for the kitchen to construct the kind of sandwich a man would need to keep up his strength. Her kitchen skills were about on a par with his, but between them they managed to satisfy their appetites.

  At least, their appetite for food…

  He joined her just as she was pouring drinks. “Is anyone coming out?”

  “Deputy sheriff’s on the way, but there was a big pileup just north of Buxton. It’s probably going to be a couple of hours before he can get up here.”

  “Then we might as well go ahead and eat.”

  By mutual consent they headed for the front porch. Across the highway, across the tops of the dunes, Curt could see the ocean. The distant horizon. It had a calming effect, and right now he could do with a dose of tranquility. It wasn’t the break-in. As a crime, that was little more than a minor irritation, relatively speaking. Even with the loss of his boots. He was used to dealing with crime on a far larger scale.

  It was Lily. What she had said about being a crack baby. All the term implied.

  But it was far more than that, it was the woman herself.

  Out of a clear, blue sky, as if she’d tuned in to his thoughts, she said, “You know something? I’ve been mugged. Twice I was nearly raped. I used to get beaten up before I got smart enough to disappear at the first sign of trouble. I’ve been robbed more times than I can remember—not that I had much to steal. I think the worst was when I was thirteen and someone stole a whole box of Krispy Kreme doughnuts I’d bought for my birthday.”

  Curt couldn’t have spoken if his life depended on it. Carefully, he sat his beer on the railing, his sandwich on the fish box. He waited for what came next, a feeling of cold dread in the pit of his belly.

  She took a big bite of her sandwich, a thoughtful look on her face as she chewed and swallowed. Then she reached for her tea, and he wanted to shake her, to grab her, to yell at her.

  “What I mean is that you don’t have to worry about me falling apart on you. I’m cool under pressure. Way cool. You might have gotten the impression—back in Norfolk, I mean—that I was freaked out, and I have to admit that a few years of soft living didn’t do my reflexes any good. You probably thought I was scared, but actually what I was, was mad as the devil. But I get over mad real quick, and even if I’d stayed there, I could’ve handled it just fine. So this—” she waved her sandwich expressively “—this is no big deal. We report it, replace the padlocks, maybe get a dog or something—I always wanted a dog, but my apartment has this rule.”

  “Lily, listen to me—”

  But she was on a roll. “I’m sorry about your boots, but the last thing you need is something that hurts your feet. I mean, you have enough troubles as it is.”

  “Lily, dammit!”

  “Well, anyway, about a dog? In one of my books this woman got herself a rottweiler, and the villain fed him a poisoned pork chop, but the dog had been trained not to take food from strangers, and then in Blood Relations, I had this old woman with a houseful of yappy little mongrels, and nobody could even step inside the front gate without setting them off. So if I were you, I’d think about—”

  Curt stood, reached down and removed the glass from her hand. He placed her half-eaten sandwich beside his own. And then he hauled her up into his arms and shut her up, using an unorthodox, if highly effective method. Efficiency, after all, was second nature to a man with his years of training.

  He kissed her. Told himself all that talking had to be the leading edge of hysteria—told himself she needed calming, reassuring—told himself everything but the truth, and the truth was that even watching her eat turned him on like a battery of klieg lights.

  His timing couldn’t have been worse, but this thing had been building for days. Now, with the heightened tension—with the revelations about her past, about who she was and just how far she had come—the situation had reached critical mass.

  And she felt it, too. She clung to him like moss to an oak tree. As if she’d been born to cling to him, her hands touching every part of him within reach. She clutched at his shoulders, raking her nails down his back, sending the kind of signals to his engorged groin that were the last thing he needed at this point.

  Drawing back to catch her breath, she gasped, “Curt, please—could we—”

  “Not a good idea, Lily.” Giving lie to the words, his hands went right on stroking her breasts through her bra, under her loose shirt, even as the feel of her nipples, hard against his palms drove him ever closer to the edge.

  “But couldn’t we just—”

  “Let’s not complicate things,” he made himself say. Famous last words of the seasoned warrior, the officer and gentleman.

  “I won’t complicate anything, I promise.” Her
hands flattened against his chest, slid down his rib cage to his belt, and he sucked in his breath. If she touched him there, he wouldn’t be responsible for his actions. Gentleman or not, he might take her right here on the front porch, in front of a steady stream of post-Labor-Day traffic.

  His brain continued to issue orders that his body continued to ignore. Capturing her hand, he pressed it against his diaphragm—then moved it lower. Way to go, man. Why not just fall on your sword and be done with it? Her fingers closed around him and he groaned.

  Lily gasped. She was shivering like a halyard in a gale-force wind. Her breathing was harsh and irregular, but then, his own was no better. “Lily, Lily—honey, you’re upset. Let’s think this thing through first.”

  “Let’s not. I don’t feel like thinking anymore.”

  “Then I’ll think for both of us. It’s a tough job, but somebody has to do it.”

  He thought she chuckled, but he couldn’t be sure. Think? It was all he could do to remain vertical. Obeying an instinct older than man, he widened his stance and lifted her so that his bulge nudged her cleft. Resting his chin on her hair—on the place where those unexpected cowlicks never failed to slip under his guard—he breathed in the clean, wildflower scent of her hair, her skin. Desire escalated into compulsion, compulsion to obsession. He wanted closer, wanted inside her, even as the last whisper of sanity whispered that sex might no longer be enough.

  Ah, Lily, Lily, don’t do this to me.

  But she was doing it, all right, and he was letting her. Enabling, it was called. What was it about this particular woman? He’d known prettier women. Smarter women. The only trouble was, they weren’t Lily.

  “What’s wrong?” Her lips moved against the sensitized skin on his neck. “Are you still mad at me for buying your family papers at the auction?”

  “Am I what?” Clear symptom of oxygen-starvation. All the blood was pooled below his belt.

  “Curt, if I hadn’t bought the lot, somebody else would’ve, or else they’d have ended up in the city landfill.”

  “It’s not—Lily, we need to—” He couldn’t even manage to piece together a coherent sentence.

  “I know I’m not the most beautiful woman in the world, but I’m no Halloween spook, either. So why don’t you kiss me again and take me to bed, and then we can deal with the deputy without all this—this sexual tension messing things up.”

  He couldn’t believe he was hearing what he was hearing. “Lily, listen—”

  “No, you listen to me, Curt Powers, you’ve been parading around in front of me all week in those skintight trunks, and leaving your razor right next to my toothbrush, and—and—well, I’m only human, you know.”

  If she’d leveled a twelve-gauge shotgun at him, he couldn’t have been any more stunned. He dropped his arms and backed away. “Is that what you want? Sex? Because that’s all it would be, Lily. No strings, no demands, no regrets.”

  He could see her throat move as she swallowed, but she nodded gamely. “Well, I know that, for heaven’s sake. You don’t think I want to spend the rest of my life with a sorehead like you, in a place like this, do you? I just thought as long as we’re here—consenting adults, and all that, I mean—and well, why not? It’s not as if we’re indifferent to each other. That is, I’m not.”

  Lily waited for God to strike her dead. It wasn’t the first time she’d done something foolish. She had never claimed to be the brightest woman in the world. It was, however, the first time she’d done something irreversibly stupid. And this was. If she went through with it—if he did it, that is, if they did it together—then she would never again be the same woman.

  But then, that was the point, wasn’t it? No more wondering what all the whoop-de-do was all about? All the stuff she wrote in her books, that she’d never even come close to experiencing? Faking it was all very well, but if sex truly was the most earth-shattering, mind-bending thing that could happen to a woman—with the right man—then why deprive herself of a beautiful experience? She wasn’t getting any younger.

  It was unfortunate that Curt Powers turned out to be the right man, but there you were—these things just happened sometimes. She wasn’t like her mother. She wasn’t doing it for money or drugs or anything ugly. Not that she was going to pin any romantic tags on it, because no matter what she might feel…for him it was only chemistry. That stuff bugs exuded. Phero-something-or-other.

  And once she did it, she could tuck the experience away in her bag of tricks and write about it again and again, and maybe bring out the memory now and then to comfort her in what was probably going to be a solitary old age. Because she had definitely met the right man, only he wasn’t available. Not long-term, and certainly not to her.

  “So…will you?” If it sounded as if she was talking through clenched teeth, it was because she was. Her jaw was practically locked with embarrassment and because she was afraid that either he was going to refuse or she was going to pull her usual stunt and run away.

  Curt studied her long and hard, taking in the stubborn set of her jaw, the uncertain, almost pleading look in her eyes. Oh, yeah, his brain was definitely starved of oxygen, the reasons embarrassingly obvious. There was no way in hell he could hide the condition he was in when she was practically begging for what he’d been wanting almost from the first time he’d laid eyes on her. Certainly the second.

  Even so, he felt compelled to remind her that the deputy sheriff was on his way. To give her—to give them both—one last chance to come to their senses.

  “But not right away. There was that accident, remember?”

  What he remembered was all the reasons why he should just toss her baggage in her car, slap her on the rear bumper and send her off with whatever papers she wanted. Hell, she could have the lot. He would like to believe he still had enough integrity not to take advantage of a woman who was a little off in the head. A woman who thought she’d been sent here on some kind of mission to immortalize his batty great-great-aunt.

  But she was making it damned hard.

  Lily stepped closer. Tensing, Curt stood his ground. She reached up and brushed her lips against his. Her hands slid inside his shirt and found his nipples. Nail hard, they telegraphed a message where no message was needed. It was called sensory overload.

  “Lily, think about it—I don’t want to—”

  “I do. Please, Curt? I’ve never felt like this before.”

  If she’d been some by-the-hour bimbo, he wouldn’t have wasted time talking, but this was Lily.

  Lilith. Female demon rumored to hang out in desolate places.

  Oh, yeah, he’d heard all about Lilith. If this was her twenty-first-century incarnation, then he was in way over his head.

  Nine

  Halfway to the bedroom, Curt swept her up in his arms. “Last chance,” he warned, wondering what he’d do if she took him up on the escape clause.

  Instead, she tugged his face down to hers and rubbed her parted lips against his mouth. “You’re supposed to kiss me back,” she murmured.

  It was all he could do to carry her. If he had to kiss her, too, they’d both end up sprawled on the floor. He told himself there were ninety-nine reasons to walk away and not one damned reason to follow through. Somebody’s bluff had just been called, and for the life of him, he wasn’t sure which one of them was the caller and which the callee.

  His lower back protested with a warning twinge. Valiantly he ignored it. He made it as far as the bed, dropped the woman on top of the heap of line-dried laundry she had dumped there. Just as he collapsed beside her, she rolled her onto her back and lifted her arms in a sweet gesture of welcome.

  There were winners and losers in any game, and this was the oldest game in the world. Curt told himself that he didn’t want Lily to end up on the losing side, but at this point the alternative wasn’t too appealing, either.

  “You’re thinking,” she whispered, searching his face for…something she wasn’t going to find there. “You think too much.”<
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  So he quit thinking and covered her mouth with a hungry kiss.

  His subconscious mind took over as his conscious mind shut down. It was called situation awareness. Skin like richest cream. Just beneath the silken surface, a strength, a resilience he was only now coming to appreciate. The heady scent of arousal, mixed with what he’d come to think of as Essence of Lily. “Lily—are you sure?”

  His advance warning systems—the clanging bells, the prickly awareness—were out of commission. There was only the muffled roar of surf and the more intimate sound of quick, harsh breathing. Curt told himself that if he had to stop now, he could do it, but it might be days before he could walk in an upright position.

  “Too many clothes,” she complained. “I want to see you.”

  If it weren’t for the flimsy barrier of clothing between them, he thought with desperate amusement, he would be rearing over her like a maddened stallion. He reached for the buttons of her shirt. Fingers that could disarm a bomb so sensitive that a harsh word would set it off were defeated by a simple buttonhole. He gave up and ripped. Buttons flew, striking the floor like a handful of rice thrown at a wedding.

  Bad analogy.

  Encouraged by his frustration, which she obviously took for eagerness, Lily attacked his belt buckle. “Careful, there,” he whispered hoarsely.

  They managed between them to shed enough clothes so the rest didn’t matter. Her bra was around her waist. It could wait. The world could wait.

  Lily couldn’t. “Don’t be so blasted gentle,” she growled. “Don’t treat me like a lady, treat me like a woman!” Impatient, desperately afraid even now that he wasn’t going to take what she offered—equally afraid he would—she tugged at his shirt, managed to pull it over his head and fling it across the room.