Читать книгу The Virgin And The Vagabond - Elizabeth Bevarly - Страница 9

One

Ah, September.

The blue skies and languid days. The stretches of sunny summer weather that made a person feel as if he were cheating the universe somehow by enjoying them. The subtle fusing of one season to another, as days shortened and nights grew longer almost seamlessly. The soft splashes of early-autumn color dashing the leaves of green. The quiet shift of the wind from warm to cool and back again as it whispered over one’s face.

The golden, burnished glow on the skin of naked sunbathers.

James Nash trained lus telescope not on a heavenly body up in the sky, but on one that was nestled on a chaise longue. A chaise longue in a backyard he estimated was a bttle over a mile away from the twelfth-story hotel suite where he’d set up his makeshift observatory. Providence had surprised him with the magnificent view as he’d been surveying his temporary surroundings, and now he was making the best of it.

He’d been scoping out the area, so to speak, trying to get a feel—from a safe distance, naturally—for Endicott, Indiana, the small town that would be his home for the next few weeks. But now he found himself wanting to get a feel of something else entirely. And from considerably more close up.

Originally, the only reason he had come to this dinky little backwater town was to observe a comet, an opportunity he’d been awaiting since he was a little boy. Simply put, James loved comets. He was fascinated by their travels, by their legends, by their mystique. Comets never stopped moving. Never slowed down. Vagabonds, that’s what they were. And he could really relate to that.

In fact, there was only one thing that James loved more than comets, and that was the feminine form. So he smiled as he shamelessly studied the naked woman who was enjoying the sunny afternoon the way God had intended. And he thanked his lucky stars that he had come by his massive fortune the old-fashioned way—by inheriting it—and not because he had a lot of money invested in useless things like privacy fences such as the one surrounding this particular feminine form’s backyard.

She was a sight beyond celestial beauty, with a body whose perfection made James want to lift his voice in song. Lying on her belly with her face turned away, her hair caught atop her head in a spray of silver-white, she boasted a golden back and bottom, unspoiled by the telltale white of bikini interruption. And her legs... Aye, caramba. Her legs were long and lean and bronzed, quite possibly the most perfect legs he had ever seen in his life.

And James Conover Nash IV had seen a lot of female legs in his time, of virtually every nationality. Since skipping out ten years ago on a Harvard education he hadn’t wanted in the first place, he’d trotted around the globe at least two dozen times.

And since his father’s death six years ago, he’d had little reason to curb his activities. James III hadn’t exactly been a monk by any stretch of the imagination. But even he, old hedonist that he had been, had tried while he was alive to put a leash on his son’s ceaseless partying from continent to continent.

Out of respect for the old man, James IV had tried to be discreet in his debauchery. But since his father wasn’t around to be embarrassed by his son any longer, James didn’t bother to hide his many and sundry appetites. Instead, he fed them without inhibition, unconcerned that they regularly grew more voracious.

However, he wasn’t thinking about all that right now. Right now, what he was thinking was that he’d really like to get to know those legs in that chaise longue better. And that bottom attached to them, too. And the back. The hair. Oh, what the hell. He wouldn’t mind making the acquaintance of the entire woman.

“Begley!” he called out as he reluctantly pulled back from the telescope.

Before he’d even completed the summons, the valet he had also inherited from his father stood stiff and waiting beside him. “Yes, Master Nash?”

James squeezed his eyes shut and drove a restive hand through his shoulder-length black hair. “Would you please call me James?” he asked the ancient-looking man, as he did on a daily basis. “I’m thirty years old, for God’s sake.”

Instead of commenting, Begley sidestepped the request—as he always did—and asked, “What was it you required?”

“I’m going out”

The announcement was more monumental than it sounded, because James never went out in public. Not voluntarily, at any rate. And certainly not without a disguise. A man of his world-renowned celebrity couldn’t afford to be seen among the masses, because those masses would good-naturedly rip him to shreds in search of a souvenir to recall the moment.

“And what shall you be wearing?” Begley asked.

At the moment, James wore nothing but a pair of pewter-color silk boxer shorts, accessorized with a cut-crystal tumbler of Scotch. So he thought for a moment, sipped his drink, then thought some more.

“The eggplant Hugo Boss, I think,” he finally decided. “No, wait,” he interjected as Begley turned toward the closet on the other side of the room. “This occasion calls for something more casual.” He wiggled his dark brows playfully at the valet. “After all,” he added, “the woman I’m going to see isn’t wearing anything at all.”

Begley’s expression didn’t waver. “May I suggest the Armani, then. The gray trousers and white...what I believe you Americans call a ‘T’.” He gritted his teeth as he concluded speaking, though James was too much of a gentleman to call him on it.

“Perfect,” he replied with a smile. “The gray will match my eyes.”

Begley arched a single snowy eyebrow. “Quite.”

As the elderly valet went to collect James’s wardrobe, James himself turned back to the telescope that remained trained on the naked blonde. Her face was still turned away from him, but she had arced an arm above her head and stretched her toes to pointe, as if she were a prima ballerina executing a pirouette. Something inside James tightened fiercely, and he felt himself stirring to life.

“Down, boy,” he instructed a particular part of his anatomy that suddenly seemed to defy his control. “There will be time enough for that later. Lots and lots of time, if I have anything to say about it.”

And of course, he was certain that he would. It was easy for James to make assumptions about women, because all women invariably reacted to him exactly the same way. They fell recklessly and utterly in love with him, often for weeks at a time. There was absolutely no reason for him to think that the woman at the other end of his telescope would behave any differently.

“Shall I have Omar bring the car around?” Begley asked from the other side of the room.

James nodded, a smile curling his lips. “Most definitely,” he told his valet.

“And what shall I tell him is your destination?”

Reluctantly James shifted the telescope until he located a street sign two houses down from the one where the woman lay sunbathing. “Tell him we’ll be visiting a pink stucco house near the corner of...Oak Street and...Maple Street.” He turned to Begley with another smile, then downed the rest of his Scotch. “Isn’t that great? Oak and Maple streets. Is this midwestem stuff quaint, or what?”

Begley arched that single white brow once again. “Quaint. Quite. I shall telephone Omar immediately.”

“Yeah, do that. Tell him I’ll be down in fifteen minutes.” With one final glimpse through the lens at the sunbathing beauty, James turned toward the clothes Begley had laid out on the king-size bed. “And tell him to bring a book with him. War and Peace, maybe. Because I’m planning on being a while.”

Kirby Connaught was teetering on the precipice of unconsciousness, enjoying the sensation of the warm sunlight soaking into her bare skin, when the hair on the back of her neck leapt to attention. She snapped her eyes open wide. How odd. She’d had the strangest sensation that someone was watching her. But that was impossible. The eight-foot, privacy fence surrounding her backyard was impenetrable. And besides, her neighbors on all sides were at work.

She would have been at work herself, if she’d had any work to do. Unfortunately, she was quickly discovering that trying to get a business off the ground in a small town was next to impossible. Especially when that business involved something like interior decorating.

Simply put, no one in Endicott, Indiana, wanted change. Ever. Not to their small-town culture, not to their small-town values, not to their small-town economy. And not to their small-town homes, either, evidently. Nothing ever happened in the tiny community, anyway, so why should anyone be amenable to change? Kirby would probably be more successful trying to launch a career as a voodoo queen.

There had been a time in her life when Kirby had loved her hometown for the very reason that it did resist change and development. She’d liked the quiet pace, the simple pleasures. She’d wanted nothing more than to marry a local boy, settle down and start a family here. In fact, she still wanted those things. Which was probably why Endicott was starting to annoy her so much lately. There were reminders everywhere of all the things she had wanted and hadn’t been able to find.

She closed her eyes again, but couldn’t quite shake the sensation of being watched—and very intently, at that. Nonsense, she tried to tell herself. The only way anyone could be watching her would be if they were on the roof of the Admiralty Inn, the tallest building in town, a good mile away. And even if someone were watching her from that lofty standpoint, she’d just be a smudge of chaise longue amid a sea of grass. No one would be able to tell that she was naked. No one in Endicott had ever seen her naked.

Not that she hadn’t tried.

In fact, Kirby had spent the last two years of her life trying to get naked with men, but no man in Endicott had ever been even remotely interested in getting to know her that intimately. She was the town good girl—too nice, too sweet, too innocent, too virginal for anyone of the male persuasion to even attempt to try that with her.

But then, she had no one but herself to blame. She’d always chosen the path of goodness—had been the most highly decorated Girl Scout, the most conscientious candy-striper, the perlaest cheerleader, the most dependable baby-sitter. And after her father’s death when she was twelve, she had become the sole caretaker for her mother, who had been weakened by heart disease shortly after Kirby was born.

Everyone had considered her a saint after that, even though Kirby had just thought herself a daughter who loved her mother. And when her mother passed away shortly after Kirby’s eighteenth birthday, the entire town had turned out in sympathy. After that, Endicott had, in effect, become Kirby’s caretakers. Older folks became surrogate parents. Younger folks became surrogate siblings. And no man in town wanted to get intimate with his sister.

Too, when Kirby had become old enough to understand what sex was all about, she’d insisted on saving herself for marriage. Of course, now that she was thirty years old and a potential life mate was nowhere to be found, she had altered her philosophy on that in a number of respects. Two years ago, as a matter of fact, shortly after her twenty-eighth birthday, when she’d realized that thirty—and Bob’s next visit—were so near on the horizon.

It had occurred to her then that if she was going to find that forever-after kind of love she’d wished for when she was fifteen, by the time the comet made its next visit, then she was going to have to give Bob a little help.

Unfortunately, by the time she began to rethink her virginal status, most of the eligible men in Endicott had been chaimed—a good many of them by women who hadn’t shared Kirby’s opinions where their own maidenhead had been concerned. What few available men were left simply didn’t view Kirby in a particularly sexual light. Not that any of the others had felt any differently.

She sighed heavily, thought about moving someplace where no one knew her, then, as always, dismissed the idea completely. Endicott was her home, the only place she’d ever known. Although she had no family left to speak of, her friends were here. She’d never traveled as a child, and simply had no desire to move. The thought of starting up all alone somewhere just held no appeal.

So she lived in the house where she had grown up, existed on a small income from investments, struggled to make her decorating business a viable source of income and spent most of her time alone.

She opened one eye and gazed up at the cloudless, pale blue sky. “Thanks for nothing, Bob,” she muttered.

Darned comet. So much for the myth of the wishes. So far, Bob was zero for three. Angie’s excitement had yet to materialize, Rosemary’s lab partner had yet to get what was coming to him and Kirby was nowhere near finding a forever-after kind of love. Endicott was still boring, Willis Random—if you could believe the gossip—was thriving as a brilliant astrophysicist teaching at MIT and not one single example of husband-and-father material had come close to entering Kirby’s orbit.

“Some wish-granting comet you turned out to be,” she added morosely, closing her eye again.

But when she heard what sounded like the faint ding-dong of her front doorbell singing through the soft silence of the backyard, she jumped up from the chaise longue and thrust her arms through the sleeves of a short peach-colored kimono, then dashed into the house.

“I’m coming!” she shouted as the doorbell sounded impatiently several more times. “Will you please lighten up on that thing? I’m not deaf,” she concluded as she jerked the door open.

“No, what you are is incredible.”

The rich, masculine voice poured over her like something hot, liquid and sticky. For a moment, Kirby could say nothing in response to the man’s observation, so surprised was she by his appearance on her doorstep. So she only gazed at him in silence, mouth slightly agape, wondering if she hadn’t simply fallen asleep on the chaise longue and been plunged into one of those erotic dreams that plagued her from time to time.

Her guest was, in a word, gorgeous. His jet-black hair, sleek and straight, was bound at his nape in a ponytail by some currently invisible means of support. A white short-sleeved T-shirt, deceptive in its simplicity and clearly not Fruit of the Loom, loosely covered—but not quite loosely enough—a torso corded with muscles. The baggy, pale gray trousers were also obviously of expensive cut, cinched around a slim waist, trim hips and legs she would have killed to know more about.

But what caught her attention most was the single, exquisite, apricot-colored rose the man held in one hand, and the dewy magnum of champagne he held in the other. Quickly she forced her focus back to his face, where her surprise at his appearance had prevented her gaze from lingering. Now she took in his features, one by beautiful one, and felt the world drop away from beneath her.

His eyes were as pale as his hair was dark, an almost mystical gray framed by long, sooty lashes and straight, elegant black brows. His nose was narrow, his lips full and his cheekbones had evidently been carved from Italian marble. As she watched, his magnificent mouth curled into a smile, and he tipped his head forward in greeting.

“Hello,” he said simply.

When Kirby realized her mouth was still hanging open, she quickly snapped it shut. “Uh, hi,” she began eloquently.

He smiled a mischievous little smile. “My name’s James. What’s yours?”

“Kirby,” she replied without thinking.

“Wanna come out to play?”

She blinked at him three times quickly, as if a too-bright flash had gone off right in front of her eyes. “Wh-what?” she stammered.

He shrugged. “Okay. We can stay in and play. I’d like that better anyway.”

She shook her head hard in an effort to clear it of the muzziness that had overtaken it, and wondered if maybe she had spent too much time in the sun. Behind the beautiful man who stood on her front porch, everything appeared to be the same. The yellow chrysanthemums she’d planted along the walkway were starting to bloom, a few early fallen leaves were scattered about her impeccably groomed yard, and there was still a pothole at the foot of her driveway that she was going to have to call the city about seeing to again. Nothing at all out of the ordinary.

Except, of course, for the silvery Rolls-Royce, complete with livened driver behind the wheel, that was parked at the curb in front of her house. That was certainly something she didn’t see everyday.

She turned her attention back to her unexpected visitor. “Who are you?” she managed to ask.

His smile fell some, as if he couldn’t quite believe she had just posed the question she had uttered. “Who am I?” he repeated. He expelled a single, incredulous sound. “I’m James Nash.”

Kirby said nothing, waiting for him to elaborate. But when he only stood there gazing at her, she added, “What are you selling?”

His beautiful eyes nearly bugged out of his head at her question. “Selling? What am I selling?”

She nodded, gripping the front door more tightly, ready to close it tight. It didn’t matter how good-looking this guy was or that he had been ferried by Rolls to her front door. She was tired, she had a headache and she was in no mood for fun and games.

She remembered then that she was also naked under her robe, and the thought of fun and games suddenly took on a more sinister connotation. Certainly Endicott was one of the safest places on the planet by national standards, the kind of town people normally only chose to visit by sticking a pin in a map. Then again, there were a lot of weirdos out there who could stick a mean pin.

“Whatever you’re selling,” Kirby said as she began to push the front door closed, “I don’t want any.”

Before door met jamb, however, her visitor stuck the toe of his obviously expensive, clearly Italian, loafer in the opening, effectively interrupting the brush-off. A thrill of something slightly scary shivered up her spine, and Kirby tried to push harder.

“You don’t understand—I’m James Nash,” the man repeated slowly and clearly, as if he were speaking to a two-year-old child. “Nash,” he said again. He paused a moment before adding, “You might have seen my face on the cover of Tattle Tales magazine a few months ago. They’ve designated me the Most Desirable Man in America this year.”

Although Kirby could certainly believe a man who looked like he did was capable of winning such a distinction, she didn’t for a moment put credence in his claim. “Um, congratulations,” she said as smoothly as she could. “But you evidently have me mistaken for the Most Gullible Woman in America.” Without missing a beat, she added, “That would be my friend, Angie. She lives on the other side of town. Now if you’ll excuse me... Goodbye.”

She tried again to close the door, but the man who called himself James Nash, Most Desirable Man in America, kept his foot firmly planted between it and the latch. And he smiled again, looking devastating and yes, darn it, desirable. She frowned as a spark of heat sputtered to life in her midsection. Boy, she really was desperate for a man if a total stranger was flicking her Bic.

“You really don’t know who I am?” he asked. “You honestly don’t recognize my name?”

Kirby sighed impatiently, chanced opening the door wider and said, “No. Sorry. Should I?”

He chuckled with genuine delight. “You’ve really never seen me before?”

She shook her head.

“Not on TV? In magazines? On the Internet?” He leaned forward and lowered his voice conspiratorially as he added, “I’m a regular weekly feature on the show, ‘Undercover Camera’—it’s syndicated, so you’ll have to check your local listings—and there’s an entire web site dedicated to sightings of me. If you’d like, I can write down the URL for you.”

Kirby paused, utterly bewildered by what the man was telling her, but reluctantly entranced by his deep, resonant voice. When she finally regained her senses—what few of them she could collect—she shook her head again. “Sorry.” she repeated. “But I have no idea who you are.”

He gazed at her in silence, as if he weren’t quite sure of her species origin. Then a shimmer of amusement lit his eyes. “How utterly delightful,” he murmured. His smile turned dazzling as he ran a hand modestly over his hair. “Think a minute. Surely you’ve heard my name somewhere. James Nash. I’m an icon of popular American culture.”

Kirby smiled back—indulgently, she hoped, because one could never be too careful when one was confronted by mental instability. “Well, gee, I guess that would explain it,” she said carefully. “I’m not much of a fan of popular American culture. I don’t own a television or have access to the Internet, and the only magazines I read are related to the decorating industry.”

“There you go,” he said with a nod. “Two of my houses were featured in Architectural Digest last year. And Metropolitan Home‘s latest holiday issue was practically devoted to my Central Park condo.”

Kirby nibbled her lip thoughtfully for a moment as she searched through the files in her brain. She eyed the man more carefully. “Don’t tell me that leopard-print sofa and zebra-striped club chair were yours.”

He beamed. “You remember!”

“And you need a new decorator,” she said, making a face. “I hated that spread.”

His smile fell. “But I love that sofa.”

This time when she shook her head, it was with a cluck of disapproval. “Look, that whole African explorer thing went out a long time ago. Today’s decorators are getting back to the basics. Doing more with less. Simple lines, clean colors. Lots of light and space. Not dead animals.”

His expression was crestfallen. “But I like dead animals.”

“Hey, guy, so did Ernest Hemingway, but that didn’t make him an expert in interior design.”

She suddenly remembered that she was standing at her front door wearing little more than a suntan, jawing with a man of indeterminate psychological status about home furnishings. With the hand she didn’t have wrapped around the doorknob in a whiteknuckled grip, she clutched more tightly the top of her robe.

“Um, look,” she tried again, “it was, uh, nice, um, meeting you, Mr., ah...Nash, was it?”

He nodded, his dashing smile returning full-blown. “Please...call me James.”

“Okay. Goodbye, James. I really have to go.” And she tried, again without success, to push the front door closed.

He gazed at her through the Italian-loafer-wide opening in the door, as if he couldn’t believe what she’d just told him. “Go?” he echoed. “But I just got here.”

She arched her eyebrows silently at his announcement.

“I brought champagne,” he added, holding up the bottle of what even she, with her very limited knowledge of such things, could see was extremely expensive wine.

Still not quite certain that she wasn’t dreaming the entire episode, Kirby said softly, “I don’t understand what that has to do with anything.”

“I brought champagne,” he repeated in that voice of put-upon patience, as if she should know exactly what he intended by the statement.

“And that would mean...what?”

His lips curled once more into that devastating smile that kindled a quick fire in her belly. “It means that by the time we finish dinner this evening, we’ll both be feeling pretty frisky.”

The fire in her belly exploded at that, sending flaming debris all through her system. She told herself he couldn’t possibly be intimating what he seemed to be intimating. He couldn’t possibly be intimating that they should get drunk and get...well, intimate. Was he?

“Um,” she began. But she couldn’t make herself say more than that.

James evidently interpreted her lack of response as the positive reply he seemed to be expecting, because that twinkle of something scandalous came back into his eyes. “You don’t even have to change your clothes,” he said softly. “It just so happens that my favorite outfit for a woman is nudity. Especially when there’s no tan line to act as an unnecessary accessory.”

Kirby gaped at that, because she suddenly realized that her earlier sensation of being watched while sunbathing had been founded after all. She didn’t know how “Mr. Desirable” Nash had managed it, but now some man in Endicott had finally seen her naked. And she hadn’t even had to try.

“What?” she said, the odd encounter becoming more and more surreal with every passing moment.

He nodded, smiling, obviously not noticing her growing fury. “Don’t worry,” he said softly. “I won’t tell your neighbors what a hedonist you are. And I don’t know if you realize it or not, but sunbathing nude is rivaled only by one thing in pleasure.” He winked lasciviously. “Sunbathing nude with a friend.”

He held up the bottle, now sweaty with condensation, and the sight of the moisture streaking down its sides wreaked havoc with something dark and dangerous inside her that she immediately tried to tamp down. But still, Kirby was unable to utter a sound.

So James continued blithely. “Well, sunbathing nude with a friend and a big bottle of champagne. You just never know where the combination of the two might lead you.” He dipped his head forward and wiggled his eyebrows suggestively. “But wouldn’t it be fun to find out?”

Instinct told her to slam the door as hard as she could and hopefully break at least one of his toes. Reason told her to scream at the top of her lungs and hope that one of her neighbors dialed 911. But ultimately Kirby did neither of those things.

Instead, with one swift move, she snaked a hand out the door, grabbed the bottle of champagne, and then pushed James Nash as hard as she could. It wasn’t hard enough to send him sprawling onto his fanny, as she had hoped, but she surprised him enough to knock him off balance, forcing him to remove his foot from the door. When he did, she slammed the door tight, bolted it and slid the chain into place.

Then she opened the six-inch-by-four-inch door-in-a-door that served as her peephole and told him, “Thanks, Mr. Nash, but I think the champagne will suffice very nicely on its own.”

And with that, she slammed the little door on him, too, and left him standing there bemused, and gorgeous—not to mention all alone—on her front porch.

James could only gape in disbelief at the sight of the big wooden door so close to his nose. A woman had actually slammed the door in his face. Two doors, if he counted the little one, too. And she’d stolen his champagne. An entire magnum. Of Perrier-Jouët.

That meant war.

Outraged, he lifted his fist to knock again, then hesitated when a startling realization smacked him right upside his head.

This was a new experience.

After all his years of globe-trottng and debauchery, he had begun to think there were no new experiences left for him to enjoy. He had embraced Been There, Done That as his motto long before it had been silk-screened onto T-shirts for mass consumption. He had indeed been virtually everywhere in the world, and he had done virtually everything there was to do.

African safari? Circumnavigating the globe? Done that. A visit with the Dalai Lama? Tea with the Queen of England? Done that. Slept in the Blue Room at the White House? Yawn. Done that, too. Seen Siegfried and Roy perform? Done that twice. It was all a big crashing bore by now. For years he’d been convinced that there simply was, for him, no such thing as a new experience.

Yet this Kirby person was presenting him with exactly that. Not only was she absolutely clueless as to his identity and notonety—something with which James had never been confronted—but she seemed in no way interested to learn more about him. Women always knew who he was. And they always wanted to get to know him better.

There were women out there who had actually formed a club, the members of which made it their sole purpose in life to sleep with him. They even had special little badges available to award to those who succeeded in their quest—if they succeeded.

Not that James approved of such a single-minded goal. People should have some hobbies, after all. And in spite of all the sordid stories printed and broadcast about him, he was nowhere near as promiscuous as the tabloids and trash TV made him out to be. Oh, sure, he loved women to distraction, but he wasn’t totally without standards. He never involved himself with women who were on the rebound. He avoided women under the age of twenty-one. And he certainly steered clear of married women.

Still, he did like women. Very much.

His gaze skittered to the mailbox, a tidy little brass rectangle, embossed with a tidy little frog on a tidy little lily pad, and tidy little letters proclaiming the property as 231 Oak Street. And just below that, more tidy little letters spelling out the name Connaught. Kirby Connaught, he mused further. It shouldn’t be too difficult to uncover the secrets of her life. This was small-town America, after all, right?

Clearly he had a full afternoon ahead of him. Or, at least, Begley did. There was no way James could go out on a fishing expedition himself—he’d be netted and scaled in no time flat.

When he realized he still held the perfect, apricot-colored rose in his hand, he lifted it to his nose for an idle sniff, its tangy, sweet aroma filling his senses. He tucked it into Kirby’s tidy little mailbox and spun on his heel to leave, awed by the episode that had just transpired.

A new experience. How very extraordinary.

A blond, blue-eyed beauty who’d had no idea who he was had slammed the door right in his face. A door on a neat little pink stucco house, sitting on nothing less than Oak Street, U.S A. A pink stucco house that had a frog on its mailbox and yellow flowers sprouting along the walk.

James shook his head in wonder. Kirby Connaught was about as small-town, middle-American a woman as he could conjure up in his wildest dreams, the epitome of all that baseball-and-Mom-and-apple-pie mentality.

Except for that naked sunbathing business, he thought further, something he really wanted to investigate more thoroughly. Her enjoyment of such an activity suggested that beneath the delectable exterior of this small-town girl there was a hedonist’s soul to rival his own just begging to break free. Now all James had to do was make her realize the true nature of her inner self.

But then, he was the Most Desirable Man in America, he reminded himself in matter-of-fact terms, without a trace of arrogance. And no woman could resist that for long. Not even a small-town, middle-American one who lived in a tidy little pink stucco house, right?

Smiling, James spun around toward his waiting car, feeling more purpose than he’d felt in a long, long time. A new experience, he marveled again. A true adventure. Kirby Connaught, he decided resolutely, was going to provide him with both.

Kirby peeked through the curtains of her living room window, and observed with what she assured herself was only idle interest the departure of James Nash, icon of popular American culture.

What a jerk, she thought. Acting as if he need only show up at her front door to have her fall to her knees and beg him to make love to her. Obviously he was unaware of her high standards where men were concerned. Clearly he had no idea that she was only interested in men who were decent and warm and conscientious, not to mention local. What would she possibly want with the likes of James Nash?

Other than hours of unbridled physical satisfaction, of course. She squeezed her eyes shut tight to banish the uncharacteristic idea that leapt to life in her brain. Unfortunately, closing her eyes only brought the graphic images into stark focus.

She really had gone far too long without experiencing the sexual satisfaction any normal human being required, she thought with a sigh that sounded disturbingly wistful. All her life she had saved herself for the perfect union, and now that perfect union seemed well beyond her reach. No man in Endicott was interested. The way things looked now, she was going to end her days as a dried-up old spinster, a local legend for every young girl to whisper about, and for every young boy to fall back on in efforts of seduction.

Better be careful they’d tell their would-be conquests. Or you might end up like Old Lady Connaught, who at ninety years of age has never even come close to enjoying the Big O.

Kirby sighed wistfully again, not even trying to deny the fact that she was just that—wistful. If she was so worried about winding up a shriveled old virgin, and if she knew she would never find the perfect match, then why couldn’t she be satisfied with an imperfect one? she asked herself, not for the first time. Why hadn’t she just jumped at James Nash’s more-than-obvious offer?

Immediately she knew the answer to that question. Because deep down, she still harbored some small hope that Bob would bring her a man who would love her forever after. And she wanted it to be special when that man appeared James Nash, she was certain, wasn’t that man.

Even if he’d been telling the truth about making the cover of Tattle Tales magazine—which, of course, she sincerely doubted—he was far too caught up in himself to ever give a woman any kind of attention. And if he was a celebrity—again, something Kirby suspected was a complete fabrication—then that was all the more reason for her to avoid him. Because there was no way any celebrities would ever settle down and start a family in Endicott.

The sound of his car rumbling to life outside brought her attention to the window again, and something inside her trembled in time with the purr of the Rolls’s engine. Through the sheer curtains, she watched as the silvery car pulled slowly away from the curb. And for some reason, the only thought that tumbled through her head was that her very last chance was slipping right out of her grasp.

She shoved the odd idea away and headed for her shower, determined not to give another thought to James Nash. It wasn’t like she didn’t have enough to keep her mind occupied for the next few weeks, anyway. She was, after all, serving on the committee of the Welcome Back, Bob Comet Festival, something that would keep her unusually busy for the month of September. She had a million things to organize, a million events to oversee, a million places to go, a million people to meet. She had a comet to welcome back. Whether Bob was bringing her a wish come true or not.