The Virgin And The Vagabond

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.

Two

A few hours later, she was feeling fresh and clean, dressed in a loose, white cotton sheath with three-quarter sleeves, a wide, scooped neck and sailor-type collar. But better than that, she thought as she strode into the Endicott Free Public Library to meet with the other festival committee members, she had gone a whole half hour without a single vision of James Nash erupting in her brain.

Upon entering the cavernous marble structure, however, her gaze was drawn to the periodicals section to the left of the check-out desk, and her thirty-minute record was broken. Darn. All she could think about then was that with a brief, effortless investigation, she could easily verify James’s claim to worldwide notoriety and nationwide desirability.

Glancing down at her watch, Kirby found, not much to her surprise, that she was fifteen minutes early for the meeting. She was always early for functions. Simply because, by virtue of her less-than-thriving business and completely inactive social life, she was pretty much overcome by leisure time.

Without thinking about her motives, she strode casually toward the periodicals, her white flats scuffing softly along the marble floor. She scanned the shelves until she located the one where Tattle Tales magazine just so happened to be housed, then thumbed nonchalantly through the last few months’ worth of issues, until she located one whose cover carried a very familiar face.