The Virgin and the Vengeful Groom (2 page)

For reasons that hadn't made sense at the time, and hardly did even now, Lily had felt defensive on behalf of the papers. Poor things, no one had wanted them. Lily knew what it was like to be shunned. Sensible or not, she'd gone all defensive and put in a bid on the lot. At least she could give the things a decent burial. Burn them or something. Maybe even try to locate the owner.

Feeling self-righteous, she had taken a second look and discovered among the ancient newspapers what appeared to be travel journals or logbooks, a few old novels, the covers all mildewed, and several diaries, the locks no longer effective as the leather straps had more or less disintegrated. That was when she'd first felt it—that all-but-imperceptible quiver of excitement that always came when she hit on the seed of a solid plot. Sometimes it was the people, sometimes the conflict—this time it was a woman named Bess, who had written diaries.

Diaries that Lily was increasingly certain she'd been meant to find all these years later, because she and Bess
were kindred spirits. Oh, yes they were, and if that sounded spooky, so be it. She didn't have to admit to anything, all she'd had to do was pay for the stuff, drag it to her car, squeeze it in and get it home and up to her third-floor apartment.

Which she had ultimately done, her appetite whetted by the promise of mystery, tragedy, possibly even romance….

The boxes had been heavy, her car was small. Enter the second coincidence, or as Lily preferred to think of it, the second omen. She was of two minds when it came to publicity. Personally, she hated it. As Lily O'Malley, bestselling novelist, she had learned to tolerate it, although even the best publicity was not without dangers. Occasionally a fan grew somewhat…obsessive.

She'd been struggling to load the boxes on a dolly to get them to her car when she'd sensed someone behind her. Braced instinctively for trouble, she heard the man say, “Hey, aren't you Lily O'Malley? My wife reads everything you write. I thought I recognized you from your picture inside the back cover.”

She eyed him warily. He was wearing an Atlanta Braves cap. The press pass clipped to his pocket looked legitimate, but with what had been happening to her this past week—the phone calls and the awful things she'd found in her underwear drawer—she didn't dare take chances. If this guy turned out to be her stalker, she would just as soon confront him here in a public place, where one loud scream would bring help.

On the other hand, if he really was a reporter, she would rather not be discovered wearing her oldest grungies. Hardly the image her publisher liked her to present.

Never show fear, she reminded herself. Cardinal rule. “And you are?” she demanded in her most imperious tone.

“Bill DeSalvo,
Virginian Pilot.
Whatcha got here, books?”

He looked harmless, but then, so had Ted Bundy. “Nothing at all valuable—mostly old papers. Actually, I'm really not sure yet.”

“Bought yourself a pig in a poke, huh?”

“You have a way with words,” she said dryly. After hearing his voice, she was pretty sure he was not the one. In fact, he was a fellow writer. So she ventured a smile, but a quick one. Not a particularly warm one.

“Let me give you a hand with that stuff.” By the time he'd helped her lift the last box and squeeze it into her open sports car, she had gleaned quite a bit of information. She knew, for instance, that his wife read a chapter over her breakfast every morning and three chapters before she fell asleep each night, which didn't say a whole lot for their marriage.

DeSalvo learned that the boxes contained old logbooks, a few moldy novels and the journals of a woman who seemed to have spent some time at sea. He also learned that Lily's latest title,
Blood Will Tell,
was due to hit the stands within days and that she would be appearing at a local bookstore. And yes, of course she'd be delighted to sign a book for his wife.

Asked where she got her ideas, she nodded to the boxes. “Who knows? I might have just bought six boxes of ideas.”

The young man jotted down a few notes. “You mean you do this kind of thing all the time, looking for inspiration?”

By then Lily had learned that DeSalvo was brand-new at his job, and that running into a celebrity was a big break. Flattered in spite of herself, she told him about the time she'd paid eighty-five dollars for the diary of a nineteenth-
century prostitute only to find that it was a combination account book and recipe book. “All I learned was that bay leaves keep weevils out of cornmeal and that the diarist earned a grand total of two dollars a night, six nights a week and paid someone named Leandra ten dollars a month.”

“For what, bed, board and clean sheets?”

“Probably.”

It was then that she'd noticed the photographer he'd waved over. “D'you mind?” the young journalist asked, and she brushed back her hair and tried to look as glamorous as possible, wearing the ancient white shirt and baggy slacks she'd put on to deal with the accumulation of books Doris kept threatening to burn.

And now here she was, piling up still more stuff to trip over. Pack rats didn't need housekeepers, they needed warehouses and bulldozers.

“Hope you find something in there worth all the trouble,” the young reporter had said when she'd climbed behind the wheel.

“Or at any rate something more intriguing than budgets and household hints,” she returned, laughing. This time the flash caught her with her mouth open and her hair blowing across her face. Oh, well. Any publicity was supposed to be better than none at all. “There's bound to be something here. A bit of mystery, a bit of romance—who knows what I'll find?”

She waved and backed out of the parking slot, muttering under her breath, “Just don't you dare refer to my books as bodice rippers.”

 

“The hell you say!” Curt's feet hit the deck with a jarring force that caused him to wince, swear and catch his breath. He had read and reread the piece in the
Pilot.
It
was the picture of a laughing woman that had first caught his attention. Something about the way her windblown hair swirled around a face that was more intriguing than pretty—the way her shirt was lovingly plastered over small, high breasts. It was only when he'd read through the two short columns the second time that something struck a nerve. Storage unit? Six boxes? Papers, ledgers, journals and a few musty old novels?

“When asked where she got her ideas, the novelist replied that ideas were everywhere. ‘Glimpses of strangers. Snatches of overheard conversation. A few lines in a newspaper. Ideas are never the problem, what's hard to find is the time to do them all justice.”'

Ideas, hell, the woman was a common thief! Unless he was very much mistaken, those boxes piled in the back seat of her toy car were his own personal property!

Not that he was into material possessions, other than his dive gear and his wheels. Naturally, those were top of the line. If creature comforts had been a priority, he would never have holed 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—