Nobody's Princess

The meandering, winding campus roads were familiar, but like a surprise, Regan’s street led to a section of older homes, tall Victorian types all scrunched together. When Alex parked in front of her mailbox, he climbed out and shook his head.

Hers was a Victorian structure, too, but where her neighbors had gone for standard house colors—whites, reds, grays—Regan had gone for a freshly painted teal with a mustardy-hued trim. The roof sagged in one spot. The miniature front lawn was mowed, but a wild tangle of overgrown honeysuckle and myrtle clustered around the porch. A little red Mazda, old, with a battered fender, was parked cockeyed in the drive.

The neighborhood looked like start-out houses for young couples—kids screaming as they raced through sprinklers, roller skates racketing down the sidewalks, stereos blaring from open windows. It was like another world from the shadowy, formal rooms haunted with antiques and objets d’art that Alex called home. He could feel a grin kicking up the corners of his mouth. He loved his place. But for damn sure, this was a shock of something different, an alien universe away from the heartache of Gwen and his whole normal life.

Her screen door clapped open before he’d bounded up the first step. “So you made it! I was afraid you might have trouble finding the address—”

“No problem.”

She glanced past his shoulder. “That’s quite a jalopy you’ve got parked there. Now why am I not surprised you suckered into a car with a big history? But I’ll bet the upkeep costs you the sun and the moon.”

“Yeah, it does.” Somehow he could have guessed Regan wouldn’t be impressed by a car—or much of anything materially. His poor Jag was probably smarting at that “jalopy” crack, but she’d already moved on.

“Well, come in, come in...although I have to say, if you forgot your appetite, you need to go home and get it. These steaks turned out bigger than I first thought. And I hate to put you to work the instant you get here, but I’m having a heck of a time with my grill—”

“I’ll be damned. Don’t tell me you need a hero?”

He’d almost forgotten that whiskey-wicked chuckle. “Don’t you start with me, buster. Come on in, and let me at least get you a glass of iced tea before we start fighting about heroes and sexist nonsense...”

Coming in was easier said than done. Kittens attacked him the instant he walked in the door. There seemed to be a dozen—she claimed there were only four—but all of them were uglier than sin and old enough for trouble. Colors splashed at him. The kitchen was a reasonably subdued teal and cream, but then Regan hadn’t likely put in the counters and floor. Her personal stamp was everywhere else, the living room done in reds and clutter—red couch, red chairs, books stacked and heaped everywhere, light and heat streaming through the undraped windows.

She started talking and didn’t stop. She didn’t even try to save him from the cats. “I had a roommate until a month ago. Julie had the appalling bad judgment to fall in love and get married, and when she and Jim moved into another Victorian place, they took the curtains from this one. I’m looking for another roommate right now. And I keep meaning to put up some more drapes, but somehow I don’t seem to be getting it done. I don’t seem to be getting the air conditioner fixed too fast, either, but it’s cool enough on the back porch. You like your iced tea with lemon or mint?”

“Mint, if you’ve got it.” Right now he needed the ice more than the tea. Never mind the house, never mind the cats. He was around academic people all the time, but absolutely no one like Regan.

She looked him over as if she was mentally stripping the clothes right off him...and liked what she saw. Ladies didn’t look at men that way. Not in his world. And no woman, positively, had ever sent him charged messages that she found him sexually attractive and didn’t mind him knowing it.

All these years, he’d empathized with women who complained about being treated like sex objects. To hell with that. This was fun. Gwen’s abandoning him for a young stud scissored strips in his masculine confidence like nothing else ever had. Regan’s sloe eyes checking him over boosted his ego like nothing else possibly could.

And her. Her version of casual attire was criminally short cutoffs and a flapping-loose bright print shirt. The shirt covered everything. She just wore no bra, and the silky fabric swished and cupped her full breasts every time she moved. She was always moving. Her hair had been chestnut brown the other day. Today it had a streak of blond, the style worn swept up, off her long white neck, and clipped in a pell-mell cascade. Maybe she’d brushed it. Or maybe it just always looked as if she’d just climbed out of a man’s bed—after a long, sultry, acrobatic night.

There actually seemed no vanity to her. Regan just seemed totally comfortable with her body, how she looked, who she was. And that was good, Alex thought. Only his first thought—that the shock of something different was good for him—was superceded by another. His blood pressure was never going to be able to handle a whole evening. Every look at her mainlined a charge direct to his hormones. His nerves just wouldn’t survive it.

She handed him a dripping glass of iced tea, and led him out to work on her misbehaving barbeque. The coven of cats followed him. She kept talking—not incessantly—but enough so he was busy answering her.

He never meant to relax. He meant to come up with a tactfully polite escape line and take a powder, but he had to fix her grill. By that time she’d absconded with his iced tea and returned with a tall pitcher of mint juleps. Then the steaks had to be cooked, and since he’d stayed that long...well, hell.

The neighborhood had quieted down and the sky faded to a jeweled palette by the time she served dinner on a card table on the back porch. The steaks were ogre-sized, and the baked potatoes were buried under lushly dripping butter and sour cream. The key lime pie, she claimed, was her only culinary skill, so he was ordered to save room.

Two kittens climbed on her lap, two on his. Unidentified paws kept showing up on the table, prepared to swipe any scrap—or anything that moved—and the mama cat chaperoned from a windowsill. Regan seemed to consider the cat-dominated dinner status quo. She also slipped her shoes off, and insisted he slip off his.

“This is Scarlett O‘Haira’s second litter. I wanted to get her fixed after the last one, but she took off with another true-love Romeo before that litter was weaned. I didn’t know she could get pregs while she was still nursing, and then it was too late. I’ve lectured and lectured about those love ’em and leave ’em types, but when she’s in love, she just doesn’t listen. Have you ever seen uglier kittens?”

“Um...maybe they’ll grow into their looks,” Alex said tactfully.

“My God, you really are chivalrous...more key lime pie?”

“If you feed me any more, you’ll have to roll me home. How long have you lived here?”

“Almost two years now. My family’s from Michigan. I taught at the U of M before this. But when they started the women’s studies program at Whitaker...well, the job came up right at a time when I wanted a total break. I love the warmer climate. And I thought it’d be fun to be a rabble-rousing feminist from the North on a quiet, traditional campus like this.”

“And how’s the rabble-rousing part of that going?”

“Not too bad. I haven’t been threatened with suspension more than once a term so far.” She grinned. “The girls pack my classes. That whole part’s going great. But I’m allergic to those formal faculty teas. There isn’t a tweed or a little flowered dress in my whole closet. And I’ve been known to use ‘language’ on occasion.”

“Not that.”

“What can I tell you. I was raised with four brothers. All rascals. I had to find some way to hold my own or they’d have buried me.”

Maybe they were rascals, but her voice was wrapped with love when she mentioned her brothers. Alex wasn’t sure where her negative views about heroes came from, but it wasn’t because of them. When she lifted a plate, he automatically stood up. “I’ll help with the dishes.”

“Good. I hate ’em with a passion.”

She wasn’t kidding. She not only let him wash and dry, but she supervised him doing it. Alex teased her about laziness, although he had the sneaky feeling that she was deliberately giving him stuff to do to make him feel more like a friend than a guest. Probably surprising him far more than her, it was working.

In short order they’d finished the chores and aimed for the back porch again, this time settling in the rickety porch swing. All five cats climbed on laps. True darkness had fallen by then, bringing a cool breeze that sifted strands of her hair and ruffled her collar. Lights popped on in the neighborhood. Katydids called. She poured him another glass from the pitcher of mint juleps.

“Have you heard from your Gwen?”

“No.”

“Do you think you will?”

The first time he’d met Regan, he thought her outspoken prying damn near close to rude. Now, it just seemed part of her, not about rudeness at all but more a gutsy honesty that was intrinsically part of her nature. And he admired it—even if she had the slight, nasty tendency to put him on the spot. “Yeah. Eventually. Gwen always lived here, and so does her family. So sooner or later, regardless of what happens with the guy she took off with, she’s bound to show back up if only to see her family.”

Regan reached up to unclip the hairpin, and shook her hair loose to let the breeze play with it. “That’s one of the reasons I took the job here—to be able to escape having to see a guy. He taught in the same building.”

Hell. If she could put him on the spot with those dicey questions, so could he. “You were in love with him?”

“Oh, yeah. Head over heels.” Her eyes looked smoky by moonlight, her face soft-brushed in the silvery shadows. “His name was Ty. I could have sworn I was picking a prince. He was blond, blue-eyed, claimed to be madly in love with me right back. Until I was late one month. At which time he turned into a frog faster than a witch could wave a wand.”

Late. The last time a woman had mentioned her period around him was precisely never. But she was trying to find a way to tell him, he suspected, that she’d had a “male Gwen” in her life. “He left you in the lurch?”

“I wasn’t in the lurch. It turned out I wasn’t pregnant. And to be honest, I admit to being careless...it just didn’t seem that way at the time. We were so in love that I was positive we were headed for rings and orange blossoms and that whole shebang. I never meant to skip a pill, but when it happened I just wasn’t that worried about it. Our starting a family seemed in the cards.”

“It still hurts?” he asked quietly.

“Yes and no. It doesn’t hurt that he’s gone from my life. Once he picked up with a young female student, the handwriting on his character wall was damn obvious. But it hurts that I was so damned naive and stupid to be taken in. It’s not like I was seventeen. I was too damned old to still be believing in the ‘magic’ of love.”

He’d been keeping the swing swaying with a foot. Now he stopped. “You’re serious? You really don’t believe in love?”

“I believe that if two people work like dogs, they may—may—make a successful marriage. But I’m not sure that has anything to do with love. I think couples with stars in their eyes, looking for magic and romance, are selling themselves lies that can seriously hurt them.” She cocked her head. “You were just burned by someone yourself, Alex.”

“Yeah. But not because either of us lied. It just didn’t work out. I wasn’t the right man for her.”

She shook her head vehemently. “There is no right man. There are no heroes. Not for a man—or a woman.”

Alex didn’t shout at her. By the cut-and-dried code he lived by, a man never vented temper on a woman. His voice did sneak up another notch in volume, though, but that was necessary. Her whole cynical view...as if love weren’t the most powerful force in the universe, as if there were something inherently dishonest in the concept of romance...well, he simply had to tactfully address the errors in her thinking.