Carnal Innocence

“Your mother used to take care of all that stuff when she was alive.”

“That was when I was a little girl. I’m twenty-seven years old now, Dad. I can take care of myself.”

Though straight talk and some TLC usually brought her father around to her point of view, some days—like this one—he made her feel as if she was stuck in a time warp. As if she was still that toddler who’d run out across the tarmac to welcome her daddy home from overseas, instead of an adult who still loved her daddy but who wanted the chance to make her own mistakes and earn her own triumphs without her omnipresent family waiting to oversee every choice she made.

After several more reassurances that her Memorial Day asthma attack had not been life threatening, Caitlin gave her father her love and promised to call again over the weekend.

“Unless you have a hot date…”

Caitlin laughed. She hadn’t realized hot date was in her father’s vocabulary. Without a division of troops to worry about any longer, the general focused all of his concerns on his three children. “Don’t worry, Dad. When I get serious about a guy, I’ll be sure you get to meet him.”

“Damn straight. I don’t want some sweet-talker like your brother Travis turning your head and gettin’ you into trouble.”

“Me? Trouble?” She wished. “I’m the most down-to-earth of all your children.” Not counting her rich fantasy life—that would remain her own little secret. “Don’t you trust me?”

“Of course I do. But you’re my youngest.” It was a needless reminder of how well her two older brothers and her father overprotected her. “You’re also the one I rushed to the hospital when Travis brought home that cat and you stopped breathing.”

He still thought she was that ten-year-old girl whose allergies and asthma hadn’t yet been diagnosed. Caitlin tried to remember this was love, not control, talking. “Don’t worry, Dad. I won’t let any man tell me what to do. I won’t let any man give me a cat, either.”

Her father laughed as she’d intended. “Good girl.”

Good girl. Responsible. Levelheaded. In other words…? Boring.

She needed to get a life. Maybe she just needed to live the one she had. She knew the one she wanted—one filled with adventure. One in which her father didn’t worry about her health. One in which her brothers didn’t request personal leave so they could check out her latest boyfriend to make sure he passed muster and minded his manners.

She wanted a life with the heady adrenaline rush of having her mind engaged in a creative challenge. A life filled with fascinating people. A life filled with great sex—okay, any sex—with a real, live, breathing man instead of one of her bad-boy fantasies. A life in which her body cooperated with her goals—where she’d push herself to her limits and then soar far beyond them.

An Olympic athlete.

A movie star.

An astronaut.

A spy.

“Yeah, right.”

She didn’t realize she’d muttered her frustration out loud until her father spoke. “What’s that, sweetie?”

Caitlin pulled herself to attention and covered her slip. “Nothing, Dad. I’d better go. I have some things to take care of here.”

“All right. Call if you need anything.”

They said their goodbyes and hung up. Caitlin pushed aside her gloomy spiraling thoughts. So she wanted independence and adventure, huh? Without alarming her father or putting half the Marine Corps on her tail?

Fat chance.

Maybe she’d best stick to her books.

Sure, she was doing her part to keep the public schools of Alexandria, Virginia, running smoothly. And her eighth-grade students could reconnoiter a sentence with the best in the country, uncovering subordinate clauses and adverbs long before they infiltrated high school. But what was she doing for fun and excitement in her life?

Caitlin picked up her roommate’s discarded sweater from the floor of the closet and sighed with fatigue. Today, it seemed, she was destined for nothing more laudable or exciting than cleaning up after Cassie.

She spotted the sticky residue of fast food on the plate beside the telephone on the entryway table and cringed. The leather-bound book that her roommate had used for a coaster caught her eye next. “Cassie!”

Caitlin picked up the paper cup and muttered an unladylike oath. The cup had been sitting there long enough to soften up and spring a leak. The book was now marked with a permanent circular tattoo. After trashing the cup, Caitlin thumbed through the pages, bemoaning the damage to one of her favorite stories.

“Sydney Carton, my hero.” She opened A Tale of Two Cities to the last page and read the final line. “‘It is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done…”’ Caitlin closed the book and hugged it to her chest. “You got a bum deal, Syd.”

How many times had she rewritten the ending in her imagination? In her version, Dickens’s scoundrel of the French Revolution was rescued at the guillotine by a resourceful American woman. Let Charles Darnay have his sweet, good-girl heroine. Caitlin and Sydney always ended up in a little grass hut on the beach in Tahiti in her happy ending. Sometimes they ended up naked on the beach itself.

Caitlin returned the book to the hanging shelf above the telephone table. Being an English teacher as she was, the symbolism of closing the book on her fantasy life wasn’t lost on her. Was it really asking too much for fate to break her out of her rut?

Her gaze traveled down to the table, beyond the trash and burrito remains, beyond the telephone, and lighted on the folded sheaf of flowery notepaper propped up next to a stamped business envelope that contained their rent check. Unmailed. Caitlin jabbed her fingers into the blond hair at her temples and lifted the chin-length tendrils into fluffy disarray. Typical.

A muscle-tensing sense of impending crisis zipped from the roots of Caitlin’s kinky hair all the way down to her size-nine feet. “Definitely the worst of times.”

Cassie Kramer had the truest heart in the world, but her impulsive approach to life had left Caitlin in the mop-up and rescue position more than once during the course of their friendship. It looked as if today would be no different. She picked up Cassie’s note.

Her roommate’s handwriting was as flowery as the colorful daisies on the paper, and had been punctuated by a series of smiley faces. “Sorry about the rent check.” A frowny face added its own apology. Caitlin picked up the envelope she’d addressed before going to her father’s. Dropping their rent into the mailbox had been a simple enough request—one her scatterbrained roommate had somehow overlooked. But Caitlin would take care of it. With the leeway granted by their landlord, she could still get it to him by the fifth of the month.

Caitlin read on.

“I know the place is a mess, too. But I got tied up, so to speak.” Smiley face. “Tim and I discovered that panty hose will do the trick.” Another smiley face and two exclamation points.

Caitlin looked up and frowned. “Who’s Tim?” Despite her roomie’s diminutive height, she was generously proportioned and had a flirty, outgoing personality that men found irresistible. She was small and feminine and spontaneous, and men with sex and fun and adventure on their minds flocked to her.

Caitlin attracted a different sort. Standing nearly six feet tall in her bare feet, she found that a decent pair of heels left her towering over most men. Adding in the three bad-ass marines she called family, who loved her a little too well, didn’t help set the mood for potential lovers.

And then there was the problem of being boring to contend with.

Virginia Is for Lovers.

Her home state’s old tourism slogan mocked her. Maybe if she was Cassie Kramer…

Cassie could hang out until closing time at smoky bars on dance night and have her pick of the litter of available men. Caitlin could last an hour, maybe two, before her eyes stung and her lungs congested. There was nothing quite like hacking up phlegm to keep a man from asking her to dance.

Or to do anything else.

She was doomed to late nights at the library, with its purified air and rarefied patrons. While she loved her books, the fiction stacks just didn’t draw the kind of men Caitlin wanted to meet. There’d been a few nice ones there—graduate students, retirees, Jimmy the bachelor librarian.

But not one of them looked the part of the disreputable beast from her favorite fairy tale. Not one bore an air that even hinted at danger. They were all charming and sweet and courteous—and stuck in the same drudgery-filled life that Caitlin was.

Lucky Cassie. Damn lucky.

Caitlin read on. Cassie’s note might well be the most interesting part of her evening.

“Will you be a dear and give my note to Sean?”