The Virgin And The Vagabond. Elizabeth Bevarly

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