The Virgin And The Vagabond

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?