The Virgin And The Vengeful Groom. Dixie Browning
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up in a place like Powers Point. He was into solitude. Solitude, singlehood and simplified living.
But dammit, what was his was his! Just because he happened to miss a couple of rent payments on a dinky little storage locker, that didn’t give those jerks the right to auction his stuff off to the highest bidder. It wasn’t as if he’d had nothing better to do than keep up with such trivial details. He’d gone all the way to hell and back serving the interests of his country. Fighting terrorists, arms dealers and drug dealers, who were more and more often turning out to be one and the same, hardly fell into the category of a nine-to-five job.
He didn’t care what was in those boxes, his father had wanted him to have them, and he was damned well going to have them, and Miss Lily O’Malley could get her ideas from the city landfill as far as he was concerned.
It took three days to locate the woman. The drive to Norfolk took longer than it should because he’d had to get out every fifty miles or so to work the kinks out of his carcass. First thing he did was find a motel, check in and stand under a hot shower until his eyelids began to droop. After that he dried off and ordered in a pizza. He fell asleep with a half-eaten pizza before him and an open phone book, roused just enough to fall into bed and slept for ten hours.
Most of the next day was spent in tracking down a woman who obviously didn’t want to be found. The phone company was no help at all. Gave him a hard time, in fact. When he’d pressed he’d been told that the woman had been having trouble with crank calls and that he could talk to the police if he insisted. He’d declined the offer.
Next he tried the storage company, but the birdbrain in the office spouted the company line. Skip three months and you’re dead meat. Company policy.
He refrained from telling her what she could do with her company policy and tackled the newspaper office, with no better luck. City directory? Sorry. He was an officer in the United States Navy? Big deal. They had naval officers running out their ears here in the Norfolk area.
Curt still had a few sources of information not available to the general public, but as national security was not at issue, he wasn’t about to pull rank over a bunch of old papers and the works of some nineteenth-century hack writer.
It was at a public library that he finally got his first lead. Lily O’Malley would be appearing at a local bookstore to sign copies of her newest book between the hours of twelve and two the next afternoon.
Bingo.
Thanks to a friendly, informative librarian, he also learned that the lady had earned herself a nice collection of awards and was on the way to building a reputation writing something called romantic suspense. What he couldn’t figure out was why a successful contemporary writer would fork over even a few bucks for the scribblings of an obscure nineteenth-century spinster who, according to what little family legend he could recall, had made a career of distorting the truth.
At the bookstore he spent ten minutes checking out the site, pretending an interest in astrology while he watched a table being set up, complete with lace cover, flowers, posters and a stack of books a foot high and five feet long. If they were expecting to sell that many copies, he’d better move the hell out of the way or get crushed in the stampede.
Nobody stared at the shiny new skin on the side of his neck, or if they did, they were discreet about it. He’d worn khakis and a black T-shirt, something to blend in with the Saturday-afternoon crowd. His hair had grown shaggy since he’d left the hospital. The gray seemed more pronounced, but all in all, there was nothing about him that should spook a lady writer.
After rethinking his initial plan to confront and demand, he opted for diplomacy. A brief, polite explanation, followed by an offer to repay whatever she’d laid out, after which he would collect his property and leave.
“I hate this, I really do,” Lily told herself as she shoved her lucky roller ball pen in her purse, dropped her purse in her tote and let herself out the door. No matter how many signings she did, she always got butterflies. What if nobody came? What if she had to sit there for two hours, trying to appear friendly and approachable when she felt like hiding in the rest room? What if no one showed up? What if they did, but not one single book sold?
It could happen. Once, in the early days of her career, before all the mergers had done away with the small distributors, she had spent two hellish hours in a huge discount store at 6:00 p.m. on a Friday, before towering stacks of her third paperback novel. Four sales reps, all young, all built like football players, had lined up behind her, arms crossed over their chests. Not a single person approached her table. When she’d taken a rest room break halfway through the ordeal, she’d overheard one woman wondering who she was and another one saying, “I don’t know, but she must be important, she’s got all those bodyguards with her.”
After all the those slimy phone calls she’d been getting from some creep who got his jollies by talking dirty to women, not to mention the fact that someone—the same creep, she was sure of it—had actually been inside her apartment, she almost wished she did have a few bodyguards. Not that she couldn’t handle herself in a pinch, but all the same… Deep breath, Lily. You can do this. You’ve done it a dozen times before. This is only one teeny little bookstore, not a five-city tour.
It was still hard to believe—sometimes, even now, she had to pinch herself—but people took her at face value. The bookstore manager had baked cookies and brought a lace tablecloth from her own home. Lily was so touched she felt like weeping. Nerves did that to her, and her own had been stretched to the breaking point. Her best friend, who was also her agent, had urged her to get out of town until the police could do their job. Instead, she had done as they suggested and changed her unlisted number, changed the lock on her door and had a chain installed.
That had hurt. One of the things she loved most about her apartment was that it was in such a safe neighborhood, half the time when residents visited someone else in the building, they left their doors unlocked. And while she had never quite gone that far, she’d never felt threatened. Until now.
At least here in broad daylight, in a busy mall bookstore, she should be safe.
There were already several people glancing this way, looking as if they might be coming over. The woman with two children—the teenage girls with the pierced eyebrows. The man in the black T-shirt…
Mercy. She would willingly go back to “clinch covers” if he would agree to pose. What was there about dangerous-looking men? she wondered. Men with dark, slashing eyebrows, shaggy, sun-streaked hair, unsmiling mouths and lean, hawkish features?
Hawkish features? Lily, my girl, you sound like a writer.
Then there was the way he moved, as if he had ball bearing joints. She could imagine a dancer moving that way, or a hunter silently gliding through the forest. Odds were this man was no dancer. There was no shotgun in evidence, which meant he probably wasn’t on safari, either. He could be one of those foreign correspondents who put on a battle jacket to stand before a camera and read a script, or he could be—
Oh, God, he was—he was coming over here.
What if he was the one?
Ohmigod, ohmigod, ohmigod.
He’s not going to hurt you here, not out in public!
Where was the security guard? Every mall had security guards, because stuff happened. There were creeps everywhere.
Uncapping her pen, she gripped it in her right fist and lowered her hand to her lap. Smile, Lily, smile! Don’t let him know you’re afraid, bluff! You can do it, you’re an old hand at bluff and run. Besides, even if he turned out to be her crank caller, the policewoman had told her that nine times out of ten, crank callers were harmless. Pathetic losers who couldn’t interact with women except anonymously.
The last thing this man looked was harmless.
He was staring at her. Now he was moving in her direction. Years of soft living had taken its toll, because she was suddenly having trouble breathing. Surely someone was looking this way—someone would notice if he started anything? The