The Virgin and the Vengeful Groom (15 page)

She was primed and ready. He was long past ready. And so he thrust into her.

She bucked wildly. He thought she might have cried out, but he couldn't be sure, he was too busy swearing. He couldn't stop thrusting, even when he knew—he
knew!

Too late. He was drowning, and there wasn't one damned thing he could do about it but ride it out.

Moments later, utterly spent, he collapsed on her, sweating like a horse, feeling lower than dirt—feeling that indescribable sensation that came from mind-altering sex. The trouble was, this time it was mixed up with guilt and anger and confusion.

Anger won out. “So what was I, honey—a guinea pig?”

When time passed and she didn't speak, he rolled off, grimacing as spasms of another kind began in earnest. “You want to tell me what this was all about, Lily? You were a virgin. A damned virgin!”

“Well, it's hardly against the law.” There was a red area on her neck where his beard had chafed her skin. God knows what other damage he'd managed to inflict. Aside from the obvious. He didn't even want to think about the fact that he'd just had unprotected sex with a stranger.

“Where the hell were your brains? If you're going to proposition a strange man, at least be sure you're carrying protection!” He waited. No response. He could hear her breathing, which was the only indication that he hadn't killed her. He knew he'd hurt her, but he refused to accept the entire blame for that.

“I don't have anything, um—communicable. I've been tested.”

She'd been tested. Which meant that regardless of what she'd led him to believe, she'd obviously engaged in some type of risky behavior at some point in her life.

“Drugs?” he ventured, but he knew better. Not with her history. She wouldn't even touch a beer.

His back wasn't going to let up anytime soon, not without help. The deputy would be pulling up any minute now. There was no time to go into it, so he said, “We're going
to have to talk, Lily. Only, right now, we'd better get dressed before we have company.”

She started to speak, broke off, then tried again. “All right, if it'll make you feel any better…” It wouldn't, but he let that pass. “I'm sorry. And yes, I deliberately used you because—well, because it was time, and I wanted it to be my choice. Me in charge, you know?”

He gave it all the consideration he thought it warranted. “Okay, so you were in charge. Did I perform to suit you? Any complaints? You want to critique my technique? You want to show me what I did wrong so next time I can get it right?” He was seething with anger, and at this point, he didn't care who knew it.

“I…well, I don't know. I mean, it's supposed to be pretty great, isn't it? The books say that even the first time, it might hurt, but the hurt goes away and then there's this terrific, earth-shattering explosion of pleasure—pulsating rainbows and all that.” She broke off, sounding confused, sounding embarrassed, making him feel guilty in spite of the fact that he was mad as hell.

“Yeah, I guess that about sums it up. I wouldn't use those words, exactly, but…close enough, I guess. Didn't happen, huh? Not for you?”

“Maybe if we tried again? It's not supposed to hurt after the first time, so maybe if we try it again, I'll get the full effect.”

He had to laugh. It nearly killed him, lying stiff as an oak six-by-six, afraid to do any more damage to his back than he'd already accomplished. “I think what's called for is a hot bath. Maybe with some salt thrown in. You—that is, you're bound to be sore, so maybe it would be best if we postponed the second act.”

“Oh. I guess I shouldn't have asked.”

Curt closed his eyes and prayed for delivery. From what,
he couldn't have said. From the naked woman in his bed who was all but begging for round two? Or the back that was killing him with each breath he took? “Look, I'm just thinking of you—of how sore you're going to be if you don't take precautions. I can deal with the sheriff.”

Precautions. Oh, man, that was another problem. He set it aside to handle when he had more time. At the moment he needed to get rid of her so that he could roll off the bed and crawl as far as the footlocker where he kept the high-powered stuff he'd quit taking nearly a month ago.

Watching her try to cover her bare backside with a shirt—his, not hers—he thought about how he'd come down here to finish recovering, to simplify his life in order to figure out what he wanted to do with the rest of it.

Oh, yeah, he'd simplified, all right. “Way to go, Powers.”

With a groan he couldn't quite suppress, he closed his eyes, clenched his jaw and rolled off the bed onto his knees. One problem at a time was about all he could handle.

Problem number one was Lily.

L
ily heard him in the kitchen. He was making no effort to be quiet, slamming cabinet doors, scraping chairs. She knew when he ran water, because the water she was running in the stained, claw-footed tub slowed to a trickle.

She had heard the lid of his footlocker slam down, and because she knew that was where he kept his medicines, she allowed guilt to flow over her, along with the hot, weak-tea-colored water.

She'd forgotten to add salt. Just as well. While salt might help heal her more-obvious injury, the deepest hurt was hidden away inside her heart. That, she would have to deal with later—or live with for the rest of her life.

As for the other—sex, even with the right man, had been one big, flaming disappointment. All promise, but a little short on delivery. A lot short on delivery. Oh, the promise had been glorious beyond belief, but she'd desperately needed more. The ending had been all wrong.

Sighing, she slapped the wet washcloth over her breast and told herself to grow up and stop thinking like a romance writer. She'd had a few bells and whistles. If she'd expected the full marching band—expected him to suddenly realize he loved her—then she might as well start breathing again. It wasn't going to happen. She had done her very best not to put pressure on him—emotional pressure, that was. Because whatever love was, she was pretty sure it couldn't be coerced.

She knew for a fact that it couldn't be bartered, because her mother had gone that route. It was a dead end. Literally.

As near as Lily could figure out—and she was supposed to be something of an expert on the subject—love was something that happened spontaneously. Like snow. Like rainbows. Like, you open your eyes one day and whammo! There it is.

“Correct me if I'm wrong, Bess, but can love give you a sick feeling sometimes? Like running until your tongue's hanging out to catch the bus for the most important appointment of your life and watching it drive off without you?”

She should've settled for friendship. They'd been getting along so well—he'd even told her about his family, the ones that had come after Bess and old Matthew. Not much, because he didn't know much more about his family than she did about hers, but at least he knew who his were. He'd never been close to his mother, at least not since she had taken him away from his father and then lied and told him his father was dead. Lily had never been close to her own mother, because her mother had been lost long before Lily ever came on the scene.

“Something else we have in common,” she murmured, pulling the plug at the foot of the tub.

But Curt at least could remember his father. Remember the stories he'd told, anyway. Lily didn't even know her father's name. Worse, she was pretty sure her mother hadn't known. She remembered asking once, after she'd learned that some kids had one father who lived with them all the time and hardly ever even hit them.

Her mother had looked at her and started crying, and then whatsisface had come in and started yelling at her, and Lily had crept away to hide in her favorite hiding place with the sticky all-day sucker and a book she'd stolen from the library.

“Lily! Wake up in there, we've got company.”

Company. Oh, Lord, the sheriff. Curt's cowboy boots.

“Coming!” He probably needed to get in here, she thought, feeling guilty for trying to soak away this mess she'd got herself in. It was almost as if Bess had been egging her on, whispering “Go for it, girl!” Or the nineteenth-century equivalent.

Lily was coming to know the woman almost too well. She knew, for instance, that after remaining a spinster for most of her life, Bess had married herself a husband. One Horace Bagby, Esquire. That last she intended to look up as soon as she got back to Norfolk, but she thought it meant he was a lawyer.

“Lily?”

“I said I'm coming!”

Draped in a bath towel for lack of anything better, she hurried to her room and scrambled into the first thing she could lay hands on. Her hair was a tangled mess, and there were red patches on the side of her neck and one cheek, not to mention her breasts.

When she emerged from the house, the three men were standing out beside Curt's truck, the two uniformed deputies looking barely old enough to shave. Curt was wearing
the khakis he'd been wearing before she'd practically torn them off his body, along with a faded denim shirt. All three men stood as if they were saluting the flag. Stiff, solemn.

Curt waved her over, and she forced a smile, then thought better of it. They'd been robbed, after all. This was serious business. Only trouble was, she couldn't seem to keep her mind on his lost cowboy boots when she had her own losses to deal with.
Deep breath. Think of it as research. Weird things a writer might someday need to know.

Such as the fact that deputy sheriffs didn't sweat. Even with the sun down, the temperature was still in the high eighties. Not a bead of sweat in sight. Creases down the backs of their shirts and the front of their pants so sharp they had to have been preordained.

Curt made the introductions. One of the men murmured acknowledgment, and the other one nodded solemnly.

“Anything you want to add?” Curt asked her. He'd obviously taken a pain pill. She could usually tell, because the twin creases between his eyebrows weren't quite as pronounced.

“You told them about the boots? And the first time? The other night?”

He nodded. She tried to ignore the speculation in the eyes of the two young men, but it was clear what they were thinking. Does she or doesn't she? Has she or hasn't she?

She had. Although judging from Curt's expressionless face, he'd already forgotten about it. Maybe the whole episode had been only one of her wilder flights of fancy. Except there was the soreness between her legs and a growing misery that felt sort of like the flu, only worse.

One of the lawmen slapped a mosquito. The other one jotted down something on a small pad, then tore off the
page and handed it to Curt. Seeing that they were about to leave, Lily turned away, resisting the urge to invite them in for a sandwich and a glass of iced tea. Anything to postpone the inevitable confrontation.

The old house looked more desolate than ever in her present frame of mind. The least he could do was to plant a damned flower or something! “It's not that he doesn't care, Bess, he simply doesn't know any better. His mama never taught him to appreciate the finer things of life.”

She waited on the front porch, swatting mosquitoes, waving them out of her face, watching the man standing in the driveway. She'd never seen any man who looked so alone. She felt like crying, but instead she lifted her eyes and stared at the sky. Jupiter was rising, followed by tiny, distant Saturn. She knew because she had looked it up in a book on planets and constellations in an effort to learn how the wishing star myth had started. That had been for her second book, the one where she'd killed off nearly half a village and then made the chief of police fall in love with the prime suspect.

She knew better now than to wish. Once upon a time she'd had a silver-plated spoon with the silver mostly worn off. She remembered sleeping with it, feeling safe as long as she could rub her thumb in the smooth bowl.
Make a wish, Lily. Make a wish on the spoon, and it'll come true.

It never had, of course. She'd known better, even then, but she'd desperately needed something to cling to, and a magic spoon had seemed better than nothing.

“You okay?” Curt had waited until the two men had driven off before heading back to the house.

“Sure,” she replied, shrugging as if to prove it. Then she spoiled the effect by shivering.

“Ah, honey, don't do that.”

“I'm not doing anything,” she snapped.

He opened his arms, and she was tempted. More tempted than he would ever know. Fortunately, she had better sense. “I'm just hungry,” she snarled, ready to pick a fight. Anything was better than throwing herself at him and howling her heart out.

His skeptical look said he wasn't buying it, but he let her get away with it, all the same. “I guess we never got around to finishing supper, did we?”

“No, I don't believe we ever did,” she replied with saccharine sweetness. She could toss everything in her car and leave, or wait until tomorrow so that she could spend a little more time wallowing in humiliation, rejection and all those other rotten, nonproductive emotions.

It was a no-brainer. She would do what she had always done, which was to stand tall, pretend like crazy and then go home and rewrite the script, giving herself a better part. Maybe she should've been an actress instead of a writer.

“I'll make more sandwiches.” Lily, in the role of gracious hostess.

“Fine. I'll pry loose enough ice cubes for your tea.”

“By the way, I'm thinking of leaving tomorrow,” she said airily a few minutes later. After working side by side in silence, tossing together a makeshift meal, they had adjourned to the living room.

Curt nodded and sipped his beer. He'd had three today. Two past his limit, especially when he was back on pain pills.

She was leaving. It wasn't as if he hadn't known it. Hell, he'd counted on it—it was the only reason he'd let her come here. He'd told himself he could handle anything for a limited time. He'd proved it too often for there to be any doubt in his mind.

“So…if you're sure you don't want Bess's novels, I
might as well take them off your hands,” she said with a careless air that wasn't at all convincing.

“Sure. What about the diaries. You want those, too?”

“I'll take whatever you don't want.” She took one bite of her sandwich and laid it aside.

The trouble was he no longer knew what he wanted. He'd come to the island because he'd needed a place to hole up, recuperate and make up his mind whether to get out of the Navy and look for another line of work, or stay in and hold down a desk. He was in line for a promotion. His diving days might be over, but he still had a lot to offer.

But somewhere along the line, things had changed. The parameters had shifted. Lily had happened. At this point he could lay it all on the table, the good and bad, including what had happened the last time he'd asked a woman to marry him—and try to make sense of what was happening now.

Not that there was any comparison. He hadn't even gotten that far with Lily. As for Alicia, he could no longer remember what the big attraction had been. He only knew that when he'd found out she was keeping score—that he was the fifth SEAL scalp she'd nailed to her bedpost—he'd walked out. Dropped the diamond he'd been about to give her in the kitchen sink and switched on the disposal. A real class act all around.

He cleared his throat. “Lily, listen, we need to—”

When the phone rang at his side, he thought,
Saved by the bell.
A moment later he handed it to her. “It's for you.”

Lily hesitated. He could see the fear in her eyes. “No one knows where I am but Davonda and Doris—my agent and my housekeeper.”

“It was a woman,” he said, and watched the relief come flooding back to her eyes.

“Hello? Doris? What's wrong, has something happened?”

Curt listened unabashedly to the one-sided conversation, watching her expressive face. How could eyes so clear hide so many secrets? He could have sworn she was on the level, but then, he'd believed Alicia, too. From the first time he'd laid eyes on Lily, all dolled up like an admiral's wife, she'd been pitching him curves. She used words he'd never even heard, and then tripped over terms that were common coinage. She wore pearls and sneakers with holes in the toes. She seemed perfectly content in an unpainted ruin in the middle of nowhere, with a refrigerator that held only two ice trays, yet according to the biography in the back of her books she lived in seclusion in a swank area in Virginia and traveled frequently abroad.

The apartment he'd seen was adequate—even pleasant. Swank, it was not.

What if everything she had told him about herself was a lie? The crack-baby story—all of it?

He heard her say, “I'm so sorry—yes, I know, but—well, yes, of course. These things happen. Doris, are you sure you're all right? Because you sound like something's worrying you. Is it your feet? My plants?”

Light from the overhead fixture shone down on her hair, giving it a look of polished mahogany. He could see his marks on her skin, and wished he'd taken the time to shave first. Next time he would.

Next time, hell, there wouldn't be a next time.

“Problems?” he inquired when she handed him the phone. She was frowning.

“I'm not sure,” she said thoughtfully. “I've lost my housekeeper.”

“Hire another one.”

“Doris and I were—that is, I thought we were friends.”

“Even friends can retire.”

“I never thought of her as old enough to retire. She has a son who lives at home—from a few things she's said, I think he's probably old enough to get a job and move out, but he won't, so she really needs to work.”

“Maybe she just doesn't like working for a celebrity.”

She gave him a look that was pure Lily. He'd come to expect them—even to provoke them. “You think I'm some kind of prima donna? Ha! Doris has never even read one of my books. I've given her autographed copies of every one I've ever written, even the paperbacks. She says she doesn't have time to read, but I happen to know she reads every word of the
Star
and the
Enquirer.
”

Their eyes met in shared amusement—one of those odd moments of intimacy that had nothing to do with sex. Curt heard himself saying, “I'm going to miss you.”

She studied the frayed toe of one sneaker, seemingly unaffected, but he was on to her now. So he pushed his luck. “Why not hang around a few more days? I've got a guy coming next week to fence in the cemetery and straighten the tombstones. If that's really Bess out there, I'm pretty sure she'd appreciate your, um…”