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      MILLS & BOON

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      Many thanks to Liz Jennings, Jean Fanelli Grundy, Salva, Sara, Mom, Kato, Yule Heibel, Margaret O’Neill Marbury and Kathryn Lye.

      For David Burke

      Contents

      Chapter 1

      Chapter 2

      Chapter 3

      Chapter 4

      Chapter 5

      Chapter 6

      Chapter 7

      Chapter 8

      Chapter 9

      Chapter 10

      Chapter 11

      Chapter 12

      Chapter 13

      Chapter 14

      Chapter 15

      Chapter 16

      Chapter 17

      Chapter 18

      Chapter 19

      Chapter 20

      Chapter 21

      Chapter 22

      Chapter 23

      Chapter 24

      Chapter 25

      1

      “Your prince could show up anytime, anywhere.” My mother’s words. Words not to be discounted, I’d decided. It hadn’t exactly been a bumper year in the man department. Winter had come with a vengeance and I spent a lot of time shivering under my duvet, finding true love and sensual thrills in hot paperbacks and the occasional Belgian chocolate hedgehog, emphasis on hog.

      To make things worse, Anna the Viking, legs that never quit, mind that never started, had moved in the month before. Ours was one of those West End Vancouver apartments just off Davie Street, post-war Bauhaus sterile, nice hardwood floors, but with walls made of meringue. It became pretty clear after a couple of weeks that Anna was going to be the star of an ongoing Bonkfest that I would have to endure through the connecting wall of our bedrooms.

      Anna was from Sweden and had men…and more men, and I don’t think conversation ever blighted her relationships. But none of them were THE ONE, because she would have stuck with him for more than a night. Let’s face it; it takes energy to find THE ONE, and I mean the kind of man who can walk, talk, dress himself and doesn’t have his finger up his nose while sitting alone in his car waiting for the light to change.

      I was running on empty that winter. Too long out of university to consider myself a student, I was determined not to run with my tail between my legs to my parents’ mind-numbingly tranquil suburb of Cedar Narrows. What would I do in Cedar Narrows anyway? It had all the vestiges of a self-sufficient town: shopping malls, cinemas, brand-new homes for families of ten, churches, schools, more shopping malls; it had everything but a soul of its own. For me it had always been like one huge waiting room in a train station. The last stop before the real city.

      So I’d given in to financial pressure and let Anna move in. With her ThighMaster, her mini-trampoline and her G-string. I tried turning the heat right down but she still paraded mostly naked around the living room.

      For the Viking’s share of the rent, I’d packed up what had been my studio into cardboard boxes and toted it all downstairs to the storage rooms. It was like locking my children away. Okay, ugly and deformed children, but my children nonetheless. Besides, how could I call myself an artist when I wasn’t even making art?

      Not only was I a non-artist, but it had been so long since I’d had a decent relationship that I was considering the possibilities of romance on distant shores. I was still worth a couple of camels, at least.

      There had been Frank, the “writer,” the year before, but he didn’t qualify as a decent boyfriend. He hadn’t even been a diamond in the rough. He was a zircon, emphasis on con, and it was because of him that I was forced to rent the spare room to Anna.

      Frank had all the requirements of a writer, the B.A. in English, the promising first half of a first novel rewritten a hundred times then abandoned for the first half of another promising first novel. He had the permanent three-day growth of beard, the scruffy corduroy jacket, the scotch and Gauloise halitosis, not to mention the scumbag buddies who always seemed to be flopping on my couch for the night. And could he talk! But lately, he confided in me, he was suffering from some kind of burnout or writer’s block. He just couldn’t seem to commit all those fine words to paper, just couldn’t push past it. That would have required hard work and hard work, as I found out too late, wasn’t really Frank’s line. My bank account and I were relieved to be rid of him.

      My only source of income was my job at Rogues’ Gallery in Gastown. Over the four years I’d worked there, it had lost its glamorous sheen. I was still getting minimum wage and still being called the assistant manager, a term that meant glorified gopher. Being a gopher for my boss, the oh-so-miraculously thin Nadine Thorpe, meant an exaggerated number of trips to all the delicatessens and pastry shops in the neighborhood. But more about that later.

      My situation was so tragic that winter that I even flirted with the idea of exploiting what little suppleness remained in my bod, a plumpish but pleasant twenty-nine-year-old bod, to find some rich old codger who would set me up as his bit of naughty. At least then I’d have a studio. But I just didn’t have it in me. My parents, in spite of all the odds against it, had brought me up with moral fiber, as well as plenty of the other kind.

      And it snowed a lot that year, something that doesn’t happen often on the West Coast. The sky loomed steely gray then dumped far more than was needed to make the scene quaint. Heavy snowfalls would have been okay if it had been my dream life, the one where me and some gorgeous heterosexual man are walking through the white wonderland discussing post-post-modernism, then returning home to drink brandy in front of the fireplace that my apartment didn’t have. Instead, it went on and on. The dark days of work at Rogues’ Gallery, mounting dreary exhibits by gay friends of Nadine’s, the works all heavily