The Virgin And The Vagabond

It was widely believed by the Endicotians that people who were born in town during the year of the comet had a distinct advantage over those who were not. It was said that if a native Endicotian’s birth occurred in a year of Bob’s appearance, and if that person made a wish during Bob’s next visit, while the comet was passing directly overhead, then that person’s wish would come true when Bob came around again.

Kirby, Rosemary and Angie had all been born the year Bob had made his last visit. And two nights before, as the girls had lain in the soft, green grass of Angie’s backyard, each had sent a wish skyward while the comet was making its closest pass to the planet.

Angie, Kirby recalled with a smile, had wished for something exciting to happen in the small town. It was a fitting wish for someone who exaggerated everything and saw spectacles where there were none, simply to spice up an otherwise mundane, mediocre, midwestern life. Kirby, however, would be satisfied if Endicott never changed. She liked the slow pace and predictability. It was the perfect place to settle down and raise a family.

Rosemary, she recalled further, her smile broadening, had wished that, someday, her thirteen-year-old lab partner, a pizza-faced little twerp named Willis Random, would get what was coming to him. Another appropriate wish, Kirby thought, seeing as how Willis and Rosemary were generally at each other’s throats. But Kirby kind of liked Willis, even if he did have an IQ the size of the Milky Way and didn’t let anyone ever forget it. There was something decent and lovable about him, something that would make him a good husband and father someday.

Kirby had made a wish that night, too, she reminisced as her smile grew dreamy. A wish she had made often for years. She’d asked Bob for true love, the kind that outlasted eternity. She wanted someday to find a man who would love her forever, a man she would love in return with all her heart. A man who would build a home with her, start a family with her, share her dreams and desires for all time. A forever-after kind of love. That was what Kirby had wished for.

And because she knew Bob had granted wishes before, and because hers was so very noble, Kirby was certain the comet would see fit to answer her prayers. Bob was constant, after all. Predictable. Dependable. Just like the man she hoped to find for herself someday.

Bob would grant her wish by the time he made his next approach to the planet—she was sure of it. By her thirtieth birthday, Kirby would be settled down, married with children and happier than she had ever imagined she could be. Of that she was completely confident. Because Bob, she knew, had never proved himself wrong.

Bob always made wishes come true.

One

Ah, September.

The blue skies and languid days. The stretches of sunny summer weather that made a person feel as if he were cheating the universe somehow by enjoying them. The subtle fusing of one season to another, as days shortened and nights grew longer almost seamlessly. The soft splashes of early-autumn color dashing the leaves of green. The quiet shift of the wind from warm to cool and back again as it whispered over one’s face.

The golden, burnished glow on the skin of naked sunbathers.

James Nash trained lus telescope not on a heavenly body up in the sky, but on one that was nestled on a chaise longue. A chaise longue in a backyard he estimated was a bttle over a mile away from the twelfth-story hotel suite where he’d set up his makeshift observatory. Providence had surprised him with the magnificent view as he’d been surveying his temporary surroundings, and now he was making the best of it.

He’d been scoping out the area, so to speak, trying to get a feel—from a safe distance, naturally—for Endicott, Indiana, the small town that would be his home for the next few weeks. But now he found himself wanting to get a feel of something else entirely. And from considerably more close up.

Originally, the only reason he had come to this dinky little backwater town was to observe a comet, an opportunity he’d been awaiting since he was a little boy. Simply put, James loved comets. He was fascinated by their travels, by their legends, by their mystique. Comets never stopped moving. Never slowed down. Vagabonds, that’s what they were. And he could really relate to that.

In fact, there was only one thing that James loved more than comets, and that was the feminine form. So he smiled as he shamelessly studied the naked woman who was enjoying the sunny afternoon the way God had intended. And he thanked his lucky stars that he had come by his massive fortune the old-fashioned way—by inheriting it—and not because he had a lot of money invested in useless things like privacy fences such as the one surrounding this particular feminine form’s backyard.

She was a sight beyond celestial beauty, with a body whose perfection made James want to lift his voice in song. Lying on her belly with her face turned away, her hair caught atop her head in a spray of silver-white, she boasted a golden back and bottom, unspoiled by the telltale white of bikini interruption. And her legs... Aye, caramba. Her legs were long and lean and bronzed, quite possibly the most perfect legs he had ever seen in his life.

And James Conover Nash IV had seen a lot of female legs in his time, of virtually every nationality. Since skipping out ten years ago on a Harvard education he hadn’t wanted in the first place, he’d trotted around the globe at least two dozen times.

And since his father’s death six years ago, he’d had little reason to curb his activities. James III hadn’t exactly been a monk by any stretch of the imagination. But even he, old hedonist that he had been, had tried while he was alive to put a leash on his son’s ceaseless partying from continent to continent.

Out of respect for the old man, James IV had tried to be discreet in his debauchery. But since his father wasn’t around to be embarrassed by his son any longer, James didn’t bother to hide his many and sundry appetites. Instead, he fed them without inhibition, unconcerned that they regularly grew more voracious.

However, he wasn’t thinking about all that right now. Right now, what he was thinking was that he’d really like to get to know those legs in that chaise longue better. And that bottom attached to them, too. And the back. The hair. Oh, what the hell. He wouldn’t mind making the acquaintance of the entire woman.

“Begley!” he called out as he reluctantly pulled back from the telescope.

Before he’d even completed the summons, the valet he had also inherited from his father stood stiff and waiting beside him. “Yes, Master Nash?”

James squeezed his eyes shut and drove a restive hand through his shoulder-length black hair. “Would you please call me James?” he asked the ancient-looking man, as he did on a daily basis. “I’m thirty years old, for God’s sake.”

Instead of commenting, Begley sidestepped the request—as he always did—and asked, “What was it you required?”

“I’m going out”

The announcement was more monumental than it sounded, because James never went out in public. Not voluntarily, at any rate. And certainly not without a disguise. A man of his world-renowned celebrity couldn’t afford to be seen among the masses, because those masses would good-naturedly rip him to shreds in search of a souvenir to recall the moment.

“And what shall you be wearing?” Begley asked.

At the moment, James wore nothing but a pair of pewter-color silk boxer shorts, accessorized with a cut-crystal tumbler of Scotch. So he thought for a moment, sipped his drink, then thought some more.

“The eggplant Hugo Boss, I think,” he finally decided. “No, wait,” he interjected as Begley turned toward the closet on the other side of the room. “This occasion calls for something more casual.” He wiggled his dark brows playfully at the valet. “After all,” he added, “the woman I’m going to see isn’t wearing anything at all.”

Begley’s expression didn’t waver. “May I suggest the Armani, then. The gray trousers and white...what I believe you Americans call a ‘T’.” He gritted his teeth as he concluded speaking, though James was too much of a gentleman to call him on it.

“Perfect,” he replied with a smile. “The gray will match my eyes.”

Begley arched a single snowy eyebrow. “Quite.”

As the elderly valet went to collect James’s wardrobe, James himself turned back to the telescope that remained trained on the naked blonde. Her face was still turned away from him, but she had arced an arm above her head and stretched her toes to pointe, as if she were a prima ballerina executing a pirouette. Something inside James tightened fiercely, and he felt himself stirring to life.

“Down, boy,” he instructed a particular part of his anatomy that suddenly seemed to defy his control. “There will be time enough for that later. Lots and lots of time, if I have anything to say about it.”

And of course, he was certain that he would. It was easy for James to make assumptions about women, because all women invariably reacted to him exactly the same way. They fell recklessly and utterly in love with him, often for weeks at a time. There was absolutely no reason for him to think that the woman at the other end of his telescope would behave any differently.

“Shall I have Omar bring the car around?” Begley asked from the other side of the room.

James nodded, a smile curling his lips. “Most definitely,” he told his valet.

“And what shall I tell him is your destination?”

Reluctantly James shifted the telescope until he located a street sign two houses down from the one where the woman lay sunbathing. “Tell him we’ll be visiting a pink stucco house near the corner of...Oak Street and...Maple Street.” He turned to Begley with another smile, then downed the rest of his Scotch. “Isn’t that great? Oak and Maple streets. Is this midwestem stuff quaint, or what?”

Begley arched that single white brow once again. “Quaint. Quite. I shall telephone Omar immediately.”

“Yeah, do that. Tell him I’ll be down in fifteen minutes.” With one final glimpse through the lens at the sunbathing beauty, James turned toward the clothes Begley had laid out on the king-size bed. “And tell him to bring a book with him. War and Peace, maybe. Because I’m planning on being a while.”

Kirby Connaught was teetering on the precipice of unconsciousness, enjoying the sensation of the warm sunlight soaking into her bare skin, when the hair on the back of her neck leapt to attention. She snapped her eyes open wide. How odd. She’d had the strangest sensation that someone was watching her. But that was impossible. The eight-foot, privacy fence surrounding her backyard was impenetrable. And besides, her neighbors on all sides were at work.

She would have been at work herself, if she’d had any work to do. Unfortunately, she was quickly discovering that trying to get a business off the ground in a small town was next to impossible. Especially when that business involved something like interior decorating.

Simply put, no one in Endicott, Indiana, wanted change. Ever. Not to their small-town culture, not to their small-town values, not to their small-town economy. And not to their small-town homes, either, evidently. Nothing ever happened in the tiny community, anyway, so why should anyone be amenable to change? Kirby would probably be more successful trying to launch a career as a voodoo queen.

There had been a time in her life when Kirby had loved her hometown for the very reason that it did resist change and development. She’d liked the quiet pace, the simple pleasures. She’d wanted nothing more than to marry a local boy, settle down and start a family here. In fact, she still wanted those things. Which was probably why Endicott was starting to annoy her so much lately. There were reminders everywhere of all the things she had wanted and hadn’t been able to find.

She closed her eyes again, but couldn’t quite shake the sensation of being watched—and very intently, at that. Nonsense, she tried to tell herself. The only way anyone could be watching her would be if they were on the roof of the Admiralty Inn, the tallest building in town, a good mile away. And even if someone were watching her from that lofty standpoint, she’d just be a smudge of chaise longue amid a sea of grass. No one would be able to tell that she was naked. No one in Endicott had ever seen her naked.

Not that she hadn’t tried.

In fact, Kirby had spent the last two years of her life trying to get naked with men, but no man in Endicott had ever been even remotely interested in getting to know her that intimately. She was the town good girl—too nice, too sweet, too innocent, too virginal for anyone of the male persuasion to even attempt to try that with her.

But then, she had no one but herself to blame. She’d always chosen the path of goodness—had been the most highly decorated Girl Scout, the most conscientious candy-striper, the perlaest cheerleader, the most dependable baby-sitter. And after her father’s death when she was twelve, she had become the sole caretaker for her mother, who had been weakened by heart disease shortly after Kirby was born.