The Virgin And The Vagabond

The Virgin And The Vagabond
Elizabeth Bevarly

BLAME IT ON BOB AFTER YEARS OF WAITING FOR MR. RIGHT…Hometown girl Kirby Connaught was saving herself - if not for marriage, then at least for the perfect man. Someone who was husband and father material. Someone who was clearly… not the arrogant and sexy, no-strings-attached playboy at her door. So why was she having such a hard time resisting him?WAS IT OKAY TO SAMPLE A LITTLE OF MR. WRONG? Globe-trotting bachelor James Nash was the "most desirable man in America," yet suddenly a small corner of it was looking mighty appealing to him. He knew that Kirby really wanted happily-ever-after with a local boy - but what was the harm in getting her to expand her territory a little?BLAME IT ON BOB: The comet passes through only once every fifteen years… but it leaves behind a lifetime of love!

“Why Have You Been Keeping Every Man Who Shows An Interest In Me At Arm’s Length?” (#u4e7273f7-c4f1-53ae-97b6-f81fa8d0fefa)Letter to Reader (#ua3fca777-eb6f-5dfe-96af-83b024df3acf)Title Page (#u497125d2-13ad-56d8-835c-c91637d6c28b)About the Author (#u104b955c-f846-5ec7-b770-80b92c565e33)Dedication (#u9d6a26b9-a109-5bfe-81be-8812a3f04695)Prologue (#ude502509-0cd2-5ab4-b197-91ed55e5e58c)Chapter One (#ub520b504-88e9-53d1-805b-901a89f9d144)Chapter Two (#uf297eeb9-eb68-57d9-824c-1fd6a94c14ab)Chapter Three (#u8dcd1c87-7134-568e-911f-6a00d25658eb)Chapter Four (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Five (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Six (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Seven (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Eight (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Nine (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Ten (#litres_trial_promo)Epilogue (#litres_trial_promo)Copyright (#litres_trial_promo)

“Why Have You Been Keeping Every Man Who Shows An Interest In Me At Arm’s Length?”

Kirby asked James again.

Oh, yeah. That. “Um...” he began eloquently. “It’s because, ah ... Well, you see...”

But try as he might to answer the question, James realized he simply could not. So what did Kirby do? She asked him another one.

“Because wasn’t the whole point to find a man who would fall in love with me forever-after?” she began again, evidently unwilling to let it go until he gave her an explanation for his behavior.

He really wished he had one to offer her. Or to himself, for that matter....

Dear Reader,

This month Silhouette Desire brings you six brand-new, emotional and sensual novels by some of the bestselling—and most behaved—authors in the romance genre. Cait London continues her hugely popular miniseries THE TALLCHEEFS with The Seduction of Fiona Tallchief, April’s MAN OF THE MONTH. Next, Elizabeth Bevarly concludes her BLAME IT ON BOB series with The Virgin and the Vagabond. And when a socialite confesses her virginity to a cowboy, she just might be Taken by a Texan, in Lass Small’s THE KEEPERS OF TEXAS miniseries.

Plus, we have Maureen Child’s Maternity Bride, The Cowboy and the Calendar Girl, the last in the OPPOSITES ATTRACT series by Nancy Martin, and Kathryn Taylor’s tale of domesticating an office-bound hunk in Taming the Tycoon.

I hope you enjoy all six of Silhouette Desire’s selections this month—and every month!

Regards,

Senior Editor

Silhouette Books

Please address questions and book requests to:

Silhouette Reader Service requests to:

U.S.: 3010 Walden Ave., P.O. Box 1325, Buffalo, NY 14269

Canadian: P.O. Box 609. Fort Erie. Ont. L2A 5X3

Elizabeth Bevarly

The Virgin And The Vagabond

www.millsandboon.co.uk (http://www.millsandboon.co.uk)

ELIZABETH BEVARLY

is an honors graduate of the University of Louisville and achieved her dream of writing full-time before she even turned thirty! At heart, she is also an avid voyager who once helped navigate a friend’s thirty-five-foot sailboat across the Bermuda Triangle. “I really love to travel,” says this self-avowed beach burn. “To me, it’s the best education a person can give to herself.” Her dream is to one day have her own sailboat, a beautifully renovated older model forty-two footer, and to enjoy the freedom and tranquillity seafaring can bring. Elizabeth likes to think she has a lot in common with the characters she creates, people who know love and life go hand in hand. And she’s getting some firsthand experience with motherhood, as well—she and her husband welcomed their firstborn, a son, three years ago.

For Aunt Sissy,

who thinks my books are way too racy.

I hope you like this one, too.

Prologue

“I’m saving myself for marriage.”

Fifteen-year-old Kirby Connaught uttered the words without even thinking about them, such a staple of her vocabulary had they become. Then, with an angelic, self-satisfied smile, she forked a huge bite of potato salad into her mouth and chewed with much gusto.

Her fnend Angie Ellison, who sat across from her at the picnic table in Goldenrod Park, rolled her eyes heavenward. “Well, duh,” she replied eloquently. She fished a pickle spear from the Tupperware container near her hand and crunched it loudly. “Tell us something we don’t already know, Kirb.”

Rosemary March, who completed the trio of tenth-grade friends enjoying the sunny September afternoon, had perched herself atop the table with her sandal-clad feet flat on the bench beside Angie. “Yeah, Kirby,” she said over her shoulder. “It’s not like this is news to anyone.”

“It is to Stewart Hogan,” Kirby muttered, gazing suspiciously at the blond-haired, blue-eyed senior a few picnic tables down. “When we went out the other night, you wouldn’t believe what he wanted to do.”

Angie and Rosemary exchanged knowing, wistful httle smiles that made Kirby’s face flush with heat. Her two friends had been dating since they were thirteen, and both had steady boyfriends now. And Kirby was vicariously familiar with all the things that went on with teenage courtship—the arms around each other, the hands in each other’s back pockets, the hugging, the kissing, the necking.

She was sure her friends thought she was the biggest prude in the world because she never dated at all—the only reason Stewart had asked her out was because he’d just moved to town a few weeks earlier and didn’t know about her spotless reputation that kept most of the boys at bay.

But Kirby’s lack of experience with the opposite sex had nothing to do with a code of morality or a cold disposition. On the contrary, she often lay awake at night wondering what it would be like to do the things she longed to do with a boy, tried to imagine the feel of a boy’s mouth and hands on her body, fantasized about experiencing for real all the scandalous things she’d read about in her favorite books by Anya Seton and Kathleen Woodiwiss and Erica Jong.

And when she finally did fall asleep, Kirby was often plagued by the most feverish dreams, dreams that left her feeling empty and achy upon waking. Despite what her friends—and everyone else in Endicott, Indiana—thought about her, she had a perfectly healthy adolescent libido and an equally healthy adolescent sexual curiosity. But she wanted to make sure it was the real thing with a guy before she went too far. Or anywhere at all, for that matter. Simply put, she wanted to be in love. Maybe that made her old-fashioned, but it certainly didn’t make her a prude.

“Yeah, but Stewart Hogan just moved here,” Angie said with a shrug, bringing Kirby’s attention back to the conversation at hand. “He doesn’t realize what a nice girl you are. Give him a few weeks of seeing you in action. Then he’ll leave you alone. Just like all the other guys in Endicott do.”

Rosemary chuckled. “Yeah, one look at you in your Cadet Scout uniform or your candy-striper outfit ought to cool any ideas he might have about taking liberties with you. And when he finds out you’re president of Future Homemakers of America, he’ll run screaming in the other direction.”

“There’s nothing wrong with wanting to be a homemaker,” Kirby stated crisply.

“I never said there was,” Rosemary pointed out. “But what guy wants to think about starting a family when he’s only seventeen years old?”

“Don’t worry, Kirby,” Angie interjected. “You’ll find the right guy for husband and father someday. I think it’s great that you’re planning to wait for him.”

“Yeah, you’re a braver man than me,” Rosemary agreed.

Kirby smiled, but something deep inside her felt shut up tight. She was confident that the man of her dreams was out there in the world somewhere. She just wondered what it was going to take to bring him to a little nothing-ever-happens-here town like Endicott, Indiana.

The three girls, like everyone else who called the small town home, had turned out for the traditional Parsec Picnic in the Park, an official event that was part of the Welcome Back, Bob Comet Festival. Comet Bob actually had a much more formal, much more comet-appropriate name, but because everyone outside the scientific community was pretty much incapable of pronouncing the word Bobrzynyckolonycki unless they were three sheets to the wind, the name had been shortened some time ago to simply Bob.

And because Bob was such a habitual visitor to the skies directly above Endicott, the small southern Indiana town had come to claim him as their own. Despite the fact that it was unheard of for a comet to be so down-to-the-minute regular—speaking both in terms of time and of longitude and latitude—Comet Bob was exactly and unscientifically that. Every fifteen years, like clockwork, the comet returned to the earth during the month of September. And when it did, it always made its closest pass to the planet right above Endicott.

Hence the Comet Festival, which had been occurring in town every fifteenth September since the end of the nineteenth century. For whatever reason, Bob behaved with a regularity and predictability that had puzzled the scientific community since the comet’s discovery nearly two hundred years ago. Furthermore, because of Bob’s mysterious behavior, the comet had become something of a mythical being, in and of itself.

And as was the case with mythical beings, much folklore had grown up around Bob as a result. A lot of people in town said the comet’s return to the planet made for a host of strange behaviors in Endicott. Put simply, people acted funny whenever Bob came around. Otherwise normal, functional folks would suddenly become...well, abnormal and dysfunctional. Elderly matrons donned leather miniskirts. Grunge teenagers became big fans of Wayne Newton. Husbands offered to do the cooking. Very odd behavior all around. And, too often for it to be ignored, people who would normally dismiss each other without a glance, fell utterly and irrevocably in love.

And then, of course, for those who liked their folklore to be magical, there was the myth of the wishes.