Dixie Browning – The Virgin And The Vengeful Groom (страница 4)

“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 store manager—

“Miss O’Malley? I believe you have something that belongs to me,” he said in a voice that could best be described as chocolate-covered gravel.

It didn’t sound like the voice she’d heard on the phone, but voices could be disguised.

Her mouth was so dry she couldn’t have spit if her pants were on fire, but she forced herself to look him in the eye. Coolly, graciously she said, “I beg your pardon?”

Two

I beg your pardon?

Lily was tough. She had grown up tough. In the neighborhoods where she’d spent her formative years, toughness was a prerequisite to survival. Over the intervening years she had moved countless times, to different cities, different states. She had learned how to dress, how to speak, which fork to use for oysters, which to save for cake. The one thing she had never quite managed to do was lose the urge to slip away rather than confront trouble head-on.

And this man, whether or not he was actually her crank caller, was trouble.

“I said, you have something that belongs to me,” he repeated, never breaking eye contact. Her fingers tightened on her Montblanc pen, the one she had treated herself to after her first book went to number two on the bestseller list and stayed there for three weeks. As a weapon it was slightly better than car keys. As a reminder of who she was and how much she’d accomplished, how far she had come from the skinny kid who had scrounged for food from restaurant garbage, worn clothes snagged from backyard clotheslines because she didn’t dare risk getting caught shoplifting, it served well enough.

She opened her mouth to beg his pardon again, snapped it shut and looked around for mall security—for anyone bigger and tougher than the man towering over her.

“If you’d like to buy a book, I’ll be—”

“I’ll pay you whatever you laid out for them.” Unblinking. She’d heard of unblinking eyes—probably used the phrase herself a time or two. This was the first time she had actually been confronted by a pair of deep-set, intensely blue, unblinking eyes.

How the dickens could a man make her feel threatened and dithery at the same time? She’d been threatened by experts. The crank caller who insisted on telling her in detail what he’d like to do to her made her want to kick him where it would do the most damage. The creep who had actually invaded her home, leaving disgusting things in her underwear drawer!

But dithery? The last time she could remember feeling dithery was when she’d been offered her first three-book contract after her first book had gone back to press five times. Getting a grip on herself, she said in her best Masterpiece Theater voice, “I’m sorry, but you’ve obviously mistaken me for someone else.”

He glanced at the nameplate: Lily O’Malley, Bestselling Author. His unblinking eyes shifted to the newspaper clipping mounted on a poster along with one of her publicity stills. He said, “I don’t think so. Look, you’ll be finished here at two? Why don’t I come back later, and we can settle things then?”

Totally confused, Lily watched him turn and walk away in that odd, gliding way he had of moving. In a woman it would have been called graceful. He could have balanced a book on his head. In a man it was something else altogether. Subtle? Scary? How would she describe it as a writer?

She knew very well how she would describe it as a woman. In a word, sexy. He might not be the weirdo she had first taken him for, but any dealings with a man like that could definitely be classified as a walk on the wild side, and what woman hadn’t been tempted at some time in her life to walk on the wild side?

Not Lily, though. Thank you very much. She’d been there, done that.

Turning her attention to the woman who was examining one of her books, she eased into her famous-author mode. “What do you think of the cover?”

“Well, it’s real pretty, but I’d rather see who the story’s about,” the woman replied with a faint frown.

They discussed covers. They discussed her last two novels. By that time a line was forming, and Lily tucked the dangerous-looking man into a compartment of her mind and shut the door. It was another of her talents—compartmentalizing—that had stood her in good stead over the years. Some doors had not been unlocked in years.

A few never would be.

So that was Lily O’Malley, Curt mused as he sought out the food court and ordered a pastrami on rye with horseradish. She didn’t add up. Classy didn’t quite say it all. Neither did sexy. Yet she was both of those and more. Intriguing was a word that came to mind. He reminded himself that he wasn’t here to be intrigued, he was here to get back what she had stolen from him, legally or not, and get the hell back to the island, where he could take his own sweet time going through it.