His Girl Friday. Diana Palmer

Karol home with me after dinner and there he stood, sharpening his knife on a whetstone. He took one hard look at her and invited himself for coffee and a drink. He didn’t go home until after midnight. Meanwhile he treated Karol to a monologue on the fine art of castrating calves, mucking out stables and assorted other disgusting subjects that made her sick. She went home.”

      “Oh, I can understand that,” she agreed, trying to convince herself that it didn’t matter about Karol going home with him. It did irritate her, though, that she minded his careless attitude toward his conquests, when she should have been grateful that she wasn’t among them. “I once heard him tell one of your women friends about the treatments you were taking for some contagious condition.”

      His eyes widened. “It was Vera, wasn’t it? Wasn’t it? My God—” he banged his fist on the desk “—that’s why she left in such a hurry and without saying goodbye! The venomous old snake!” Vera, Danetta recalled, had been his steady date before Karol.

      “Is that any way to talk about your father, Mr. Ritter?” she asked gently.

      He gave her a tolerant stare. “Dan,” he began, using the appalling nickname that he and he alone had stuck her with, “when he was in here last week, one of the kinder things he said about you was that you dressed as if you had pull at the Salvation Army surplus store.”

      She was so insulted that she forgot to protest the destruction of her name. “The venomous old snake!” she exclaimed.

      He raised an eyebrow. “That’s what I thought you said. Any ideas?”

      “None that won’t get you arrested,” she replied. “Why is he interfering so much lately?”

      He sighed, brushing a huge hand through his thick, wavy hair. “He thinks I need a wife. So he’s going to find me one.”

      “Maybe he’s just bored,” she murmured thoughtfully. “You could ask your stepmother to take him on a world cruise.”

      His eyes hardened. “I have as little contact with my stepmother as possible,” he said curtly.

      “Sorry.” She knew that was a sore spot with him, but she didn’t know why. He was a very private man in some ways.

      He shrugged. “I guess your parents are still married?”

      She smiled. “Yes, sir, for thirty years last November.”

      “Don’t call me sir,” he said harshly. He broke a pencil and got to his feet, moving toward the window like a human steamroller while Danetta caught her breath at the bite in his voice. He pulled open the blinds and looked over the flat landscape of the city. “I don’t want to get married. I don’t want to love anyone.”

      She stared at his broad back incomprehensibly.

      He fingered the blinds thoughtfully. “You haven’t volunteered any information about Karol to my father, have you?” he asked suddenly, turning toward her.

      His height was intimidating when he loomed over her that way. She shifted gracefully in the chair. “No, si—” She cleared her throat. “No, Mr. Ritter. He did all the talking. As usual.”

      “What did he say?”

      She muffled a giggle. “That you were going to catch some god-awful disease if he didn’t save you from those women.” She leaned forward. “You don’t know where they’ve been, you see.”

      He burst out laughing. The sound was deep and rich and pleasant, because he wasn’t usually a laughing man. It took some of the age from his hard face, made his blue eyes sparkle. She smiled at him because he looked wickedly handsome when he was amused.

      “So that’s his angle. Maybe I can have a long talk with him about modern life.”

      “That will only work if you tie him up and gag him first.”

      “He’s confiding in you lately, is that it?” He pursed his lips and studied her with that quiet scrutiny that was becoming more and more frequent. “How old are you now, Dan?”

      “Twenty-three.” And if you don’t stop calling me Dan, I’m going to wrap you in cellophane tape and hang you out the window, she added silently.

      “You were barely twenty-one when you came here,” he recalled thoughtfully. “Gangly and nervous and painfully shy. In some ways, you’re still shy.”

      “How kind of you to notice,” she said, “now about the mail—”

      “You don’t date,” he said as if he knew.

      She crossed her long legs. “Well, no. Not a lot,” she said with obvious reluctance.

      His blue eyes searched hers. “Why?”

      She chose her words carefully. She’d never had this kind of personal discussion with him before, and she wondered why he’d brought up the subject. Surely his father hadn’t been trying to play Cupid for her? “I’m not modern enough to suit most men,” she replied finally.

      He perched himself on the corner of his desk and looked down at her quietly. “Modern as in sexually liberated?”

      She felt her cheeks grow warm. “My parents were middle-aged when I came along, and they were and are very conventional people. I was taught that love should mean something more than sex. But I discovered that to most men, love meant a nice dinner followed by a session in bed. Nobody was willing to spend the time it would take to build a relationship, especially when there were so many women who didn’t want one anyway. So I gave up evenings with unpleasant endings and brought Norman home to live with me.”

      He frowned. “Norman?”

      “Norman, my iguana,” she explained.

      He paled and gave her a frankly horrified look. “Your what?”

      “My iguana. He’s a nice pet,” she said defensively. “I got him when he was just a baby—”

      “An iguana!” He looked quickly around the office as if he thought she’d put Norman in her purse and brought him to work with her. He actually shuddered. “My God, nobody has an iguana for a pet! It’s a snake with legs, for heaven’s sake!”

      She glared at him. “He is not! In fact, he looks like a little Chinese dragon. He’s an iguanid; a descendant of dinosaurs, of ancient Iguanodon. He’s quiet and clean and you should see the effect he has on door-to-door salesmen! He’s three feet long, although he’s still just a baby,” she murmured with a smile. Incredible that she’d never told him about Norman, but then, they hardly ever discussed routine things about their private lives. He didn’t even know that she lived with Cousin Jenny, she supposed. She wondered if he even knew that Cousin Jenny worked for his father, or that two years ago, it was Jenny who had told her about this job so that she could apply for it.

      “Why do you keep a reptile for a pet? Are you trying to grow your own prince?”

      She sighed angrily. “That only works with frogs. Listen, I just keep Norman for a pet, I don’t kiss him.” She frowned. “Well, I used to when he was a baby—”

      “Oh, God!” he burst out, shuddering. He stared at her. “No wonder you can’t get dates! No sane man goes around kissing a woman who kisses iguanas!”

      “There’s no danger of that,” she sighed to herself, unperturbed on the surface as she fought down the picture in her mind of Mr. Ritter bending her back over an arm and kissing her senseless. That was what she’d thought he was going to do at that Christmas party for one long, ecstatic second, until he came to his senses.

      He got up and moved around his desk and sat down heavily. “I can see it now. One night there’ll be a man in your apartment, and you’ll call a press conference to explain how he got there. First you picked up your iguana and kissed it, and all of a sudden, poof! Prince Charming!” He frowned. “Or would you get a king with something as big as an iguana?”

      “You’ll