The Virgin And The Vengeful Groom. Dixie Browning

okay,” Lily had laughed. “Bring on your whereases and heretofores.”

      Davonda had made a growling noise, but she’d laughed, too. She knew better than anyone about the great gaping holes in Lily’s education. Schooling had not been a priority in Lily’s youth. Thank God reading had.

      She wished now she’d put it off until tomorrow. Even without the stress of the past week, with that nutcase ruining her life, playing lady for any length of time was exhausting. Here in the home she had made for herself, she could relax, think about her work in progress—or think about nothing at all. If she wanted to sleep all day and write all night, it was nobody’s business but her own. She did the tours and signings because her publisher had more or less mandated it—another new word—and because she knew for a fact that it had a direct bearing on her sales. The one today, for instance, would probably gain her a few new readers, and that would multiply exponentially, in the words of her publicist. Lily had come home and looked up exponentially to see if it was going to be good or bad. Given a choice, she’d much prefer to put on her oldest sweats, stock up on junk food and get on with the task of disappearing into the nice, safe world of fiction. She could write her way into all sorts of trouble, knowing that she could write her way out again. It was…exponential.

      But even without the overeager fans and the few cranks, there’d been changes in her nice, comfortable lifestyle once she started showing up regularly near the top of the bestseller lists. Not all of them were to her advantage. Like luck, success was extremely fragile. One flop—one disappointing sellthrough, and it could all go up in smoke. So she juggled her career, dealt with her fans, most of whom were wonderfully supportive, and tried to ignore the few who weren’t. She listened with half an ear to the experts, afraid to trust in today or to look too far into tomorrow because she couldn’t quite forget yesterday.

      The doorbell caught her halfway to her room to change into something presentable. Other than the police, the locksmith and the pizza delivery man, the only people who knew where she lived were her agent and her housekeeper.

      “You’re—” Early, she’d been going to say, already reaching for the chain. Her first impulse was to slam the door. Her second was to scream bloody murder. She was still debating when the phone rang.

      “The cops are already on the way,” she lied, shoving hard at the door that was blocked open by a big, water-stained deck shoe.

      Behind her, the machine picked up, and she heard the familiar whispery voice. “Lily…guess what I’m doing right now. I’m in bed, and I’m not wearing nothing, and I’ve got your picture right—”

      “Oh—damn!”

      Confusion, impotent anger, frustration—embarrassment—it was too much. She closed her eyes and leaned against the door, never mind that his foot was still in the crack.

      “You want to tell me what’s going on?” Curt pushed against the security chain, half-tempted to extricate his foot, walk away and forget he’d ever heard of Lily O’Malley. He didn’t need any more complications at this point in his life.

      Trouble was, the officer-and-gentleman stuff had been drilled into him at an impressionable age. Regardless of the fact that she was either an outright thief or a conscienceless opportunist, she obviously needed help. “Open the door, O’Malley.” He made an attempt to sound reassuring.

      She was not reassured. Glared at him, in fact. “Look, I don’t have time to play games,” he growled. His back was acting up again, thanks to yesterday’s long drive and a night of trying to sleep on a bed that was too short, too hard, in a room where the window was sealed shut. His left leg still hadn’t forgiven him for those three flights of stairs.

      “Or maybe you enjoy dirty phone calls? Some people even pay for the privilege of crawling through that particular gutter.”

      She closed her eyes. Her face, already pale without the war paint, grew a shade whiter.

      “Okay, if that’s the way you want to play it, I’ll just state my business, you can hand over my property, and I’ll get out of your hair.”

      “Property?”

      He did a quick countdown, trying to hang onto his temper. “I believe I mentioned before that you’ve got something that belongs to me?” He wouldn’t have been surprised to find the lady in the process of sneaking out with all six boxes, after the way she had tried to elude him at the mall. He had let her get away, just to see what she was up to, but the game was over.

      “Look, just hand over the boxes and we’ll call it even. I won’t prosecute and you can get back to your—”

      “You won’t what?”

      “Uh…prosecute?” Indignation wasn’t precisely the reaction he’d expected.

      “Look, for your information, I don’t have one damned thing that belongs to you, and what’s more, I’m tired of jerks like you who won’t give up!”

      “You’re tired? Well, that’s just tough, lady!”

      Jerks like him? By the time he had tailed her here, nearly losing her twice in rush hour traffic, found a parking space a block and a half away, jogged the distance on concrete sidewalks and then climbed three flights of stairs, what little patience he might have been able to scrape up had eroded down to bedrock.

      “If you want your friend to quit calling, sic the cops on him. The advice is free. Now you can hand over my personal property. I won’t even press charges.”

      “Charges! What charges? You’re crazy, you know that? I’m going to call 911 right now and report—”

      “Fine. Then you can explain how you came to be in possession of six boxes of my personal, private property!”

      Gray eyes. Clear as rainwater. You’d think a woman with eyes like that couldn’t hide a damned thing, but she was hiding something, all right. Guilt, obviously, because if she’d been innocent, she wouldn’t have run away. “I’m waiting. Want to make the call or shall I make it for you? I’ve got a cell phone in my truck.”

      She was leaning against the door now, one hand gripping the edge so hard the tips of her fingers were white. She wasn’t anywhere near as cool as she would like him to believe, not by a long shot.

      He shoved his foot another inch through the crack and hoped to hell she didn’t throw her weight against the door. His metatarsals were about the only bones that hadn’t been busted at one time or another in his colorful career. He would kind of like to keep it that way. “You going to call the cops?”

      “The cops,” she repeated numbly.

      “Right, O’Malley. The men in blue. So I can reclaim my boxes and you can get your boyfriend off your back. That is, if you want him off your back?”

      Heavy sigh. Her fingers slid down the edge of the door. They both knew she was fighting a losing battle—evidently fighting it on two fronts. Hell, even the U.S. armed forces had trouble doing that in these days of military cutbacks. “Miss O’Malley? You want to talk about this?”

      Somewhat to his surprise, a few protective instincts kicked in. It was part of the code every SEAL team operated under, only this was no team operation. If there were rules to cover a situation like this, he’d never heard of them. With his back on the verge of spasms, his left leg giving him fits and his gut complaining about the pastrami and horseradish he’d had earlier, he had to reach deep for patience. “Look, there’s obviously something going on here. You need to call 911. I can wait out here, or I can wait inside. Either way, I’m not leaving.”

      Small gasp. Could’ve been a sob, but he didn’t think so. And then the chain fell and she opened the door. Roughly 110 pounds, swathed in a shapeless velvet tent, hair spilling over her shoulders like a dark waterfall, not a speck of color in her face except for those wide gray eyes…and she was mad as hell. Ready to knock his head off.

      Ignoring an inappropriate and totally unexpected sexual response,