The Dangerous Hero (6 page)

When he met her at the entrance to the restaurant, sauntering up with that slow, unconsciously erotic sway of his narrow hips, her own lust-weakened knees just about gave way. He was casually clad in jeans, a tweedy jacket that had seen better days, a blue T-shirt, and sock-less running shoes. The jeans were more snug than the previous day’s pants had been, hinting at the toned muscles underneath. Despite the lazy masculinity of his body, there was something endearingly rumpled about him. His hair was thick and curly, shining with damp ends, as if he'd just stepped out of the shower.

His smile had enough wattage to knock out a city block. "Hullo, Professor," he drawled, subjecting her to the same hot-eyed scrutiny that she'd probably just used on him. "I like your shirt."

She'd changed her clothes about a dozen times before settling on the green silk top with the pearl buttons down the front. With its high neckline and long sleeves, it looked almost prim, except for the way it clung to her slender curves. She had also donned nice jeans and a killer pair of sling-back shoes that upped her height to only a couple of inches shorter than his. She had let her hair hang in gentle waves on her shoulders instead of restraining it. Long. Red. Natural.

"Thanks. It's busy here, but I was able to make a reservation," she said, leading the way inside. She could sense him following close behind. One of his long arms reached over her shoulder to make sure the heavy doors didn't close too quickly, and by the time they had reached the hostess’s platform that hand was lightly resting on the small of her back. It was a subtle touch, but it electrified her.

Despite the crowd, they were lucky enough to get one of the more private booths toward the back. As they settled in across from each other, Viola realized that she was acutely nervous. Her heart was thundering, her palms felt damp, and she had no clue what to say to him. It was like being tongue-tied back in high school when the cute boy you were desperate to impress unexpectedly sat down at your lunch table.

"I hope you didn't catch a cold, huddling in your car in wet clothes last night," she ventured.

"Nope. Not so far, anyway." He appeared to be calm and confident, smiling and meeting her eyes with his usual direct gaze. "Thank you for agreeing to meet me. Are you still pissed? I must have been brain-dead not to know at once who you were."

"It's not as though we knew each other all that well, anyway."

His eyebrows quirked and his eyes glowed with a heat that seemed to burn her clothes to cinders. "Well enough," he said, grinning, and making her remember all those things that were probably illegal in Massachusetts.

The waiter intruded at that moment with menus and the wine list. Stephen ordered iced tea, and she followed suit. Good plan. Alcohol would just lower inhibitions that were already way below sea level.

He inquired whether she recommended any of the dishes on the menu, and they discussed the food for a few minutes before making their choices, which seemed to go right out of her head as soon as the waiter stepped away. She had no interest in the food.

"Did my father really frighten you off that summer?"

"He did. Scared me shitless, if you want to know the truth. I swallowed the whole under-eighteen thing. He threatened to have me arrested if I ever contacted you again. You know how he is. I thought he could do it."

She nodded. Her father had always been a huge, powerful, dominating figure in her life. Her mother used to say he should have been born in an earlier century. He would have made a good king.

"But why would he do that? He must have known how much I liked you. Why would he deliberately scuttle the connection that was growing between us?"

"Maybe he just couldn’t deal with the idea of me a prospective lover for his little girl. When things took that twist, he freaked."

"So he really spied on us that day? That totally creeps me out."

"It creeped me out too. In retrospect, though, maybe it's not so surprising. He had that telescope mounted on the porch overlooking the beach, remember? The one he used to watch the stars and the ships on the horizon? And possibly the neighbors?"

"Oh my god. You mean he's like, a voyeur?"

He shrugged. "I'm just saying. He was into that stuff, spy-cams and electronic surveillance. It's in all his books."

He was right. Unlike Stephen's books, her father's mystery novels were contemporary stories that relied on high tech police procedure to uncover the murderer. It boggled her mind to think that her father had intruded into something so intimate and personal.

"I never gave him any reason to use his surveillance gear on me. I didn't even go out on dates when I was staying with him."

"All the more reason, I guess, for him to think you were too young. I should have called his bluff, but I was intimidated. He had been my teacher and I had a lot of respect for him. I was also writing my first novel at the time, and I guess I thought that if I defied him, he would trash my work and maybe put up hurdles that would make it hard for me to get published."

"You didn't fight for me," she said quietly.

He shook his head, looking somber. "No, I didn't. I would have, I think, if it hadn't all seemed like such a dream. Until that afternoon, we hadn't…I’d never thought of you that way. You were just this teenage girl, Percy's daughter, cute and friendly, with a huge, mischievous grin, and fun to chat with when I wasn't taking shop with your dad. I'm still not sure how you transformed into the breathtakingly sexy young woman who made my head spin."

The compliment made her flush again, but the emotion inspiring it was much nicer. "My father never even told me that he had confronted you. He said I should forget about you because you were getting married. I believed it. I felt betrayed."

"I’m sorry."

"I guess it’s him I should blame, not you."

"In fairness, I don’t know whether Percy knew my marriage plans had been called off. It wasn't the sort of thing I ever discussed with him." He paused. "I guess I can’t rule out the possibility that he thought I was still engaged. He was probably just trying to protect you."

It was something, she thought. She would have hated to believe that her father had lied to her about that. "He was always over-protective. I suppose, in a way, he was right. I still had college ahead of me. You
were
too old for me."

"Then." Leaning forward a bit, he pinned her with his vivid green gaze. "The same objection can't be made now."

There was something about his low, husky voice that just screamed sex, sex, and more sex. She felt herself swaying toward him just as she had in the elevator, wanted to get closer, and cursing the table for being in the way. There must be other objections that could be made now, she thought, scrambling to think of one.

"But now," she said, "we have a different problem."

His brows arched in that sardonic gesture that he did so well. "And what might that be?"

"I don't like your books," she said, smiling.

"Ah. Now that is unfortunate. I don't see it as a problem, though. My books don't come to bed with me. In fact, I have a library in my home where my books can be all snugly locked away, out of your sight, lest they offend your feminist sensibilities."

Viola wished her heart would not persist in beating so frantically. Had he just invited her to his home? Sounded like it. And to his bed. Where did he live? How long would it take to get there?

Her heart might be fluttering for him, but her brain was operating on its own wavelength. Without any conscious forethought she said, "But what if your books do come to bed with you? Aren't your stories part of you? Isn't Bartholomew Giles part of you?"

He tiled his head to one side, considering. "I admit that it's an intriguing question. Where do our stories come from? When I sit down at the computer to write, I have no idea what's going to pour out of me over the course of the next few hours. Why do I write about certain subjects? I don't know. I'm not sure any author knows."

"It must have been a conscious choice, though, to create a hero who behaves like a villain. Usually it's the bad guys who rape, torture, and kill."

"It's a narrative risk. That's part of what makes it fun. I have to find some way to keep my readers interested in Bart, even if he horrifies them. If there isn’t some tiny way in which they can sympathize with him, they'll probably throw the book at the wall."

"My sympathies are always for the unfortunate women he abuses, no matter how much treason they've committed against the crown."

"It's not always a woman."

Their food arrived, interrupting the conversation briefly. When the dishes were all placed on the table and the waiter moved away, Stephen said, "Bart has a rigid sense of justice. There are rules he follows to the letter. The rules are there to protect the Queen and ensure the stability of her government. People who break the rules are punished."

"So there's no place for mercy in his worldview?"

"None. To show mercy because the prisoner is a woman would not make any sense to him. She has reason, just the same as any man. She chose to violate the rules, so she should suffer just the same as any man. It's pretty egalitarian."

She hadn't looked at it from that perspective. She wasn't sure she bought the argument, but it did provide some insight into Bartholomew Giles's character. "With each book I keep wondering if maybe you're going to redeem Bart somehow."

"Redemption? Screw that. He's a sadistic, unrepentant bastard who has dedicated his life to keeping Elizabeth Tudor safe on her throne. He'll kill for her, but he'll also die for her because she's the only thing that gives his life meaning."

"Are you saying he loves the Queen?"

He paused, considering. After a few moments, he shook his head. "I don't think he’s capable of love."

For no reason that she could explain, Viola began to feel uneasy. It was probably not a great idea to spend one's first date with the man she was crushing on criticizing the books he had written and the character he had created. What author wanted to hear that?

So she smiled and changed the subject, asking, "Did you ever manage to learn to windsurf? Your first lesson didn't go too well, if I remember correctly. I was probably a lousy teacher."

The faint line that had formed in the middle of his forehead during the Bart discussion smoothed out instantly. "I'll have you know that I now have mad windsurfing skills. Come down to the Cape with me, and I'll show you."

"Is that where you live? On the Cape?"

"Yup. I have a house on the beach."

"I’d love to see it someday," she heard herself say.

Stephen returned her smile with about a year’s worth of compound interest. "Then see it someday you shall, Viola."

* * *

The rest of the meal passed in a pleasant haze. Viola was never sure afterwards what she had eaten, or how it had tasted. The conversation never lagged; one subject flowed easily into the next. They discovered that they shared a lot of interests. When she gingerly sounded him out on his political views, she was relieved to find that they had no major disagreements, even though he continued to tease her about her supposedly radical feminism. "I'm not radical," she protested. "You're just being a guy."

"Guilty as charged."

They ordered dessert and coffee not because either of them cared what they were eating but because it was a way to prolong the meal. Viola was now regretting that she had insisted on meeting him at the restaurant since it meant that they had two separate cars. She didn't want this meeting to end. Should she invite him back to her place? If he was staying at Jeff Slayton's, he couldn't very well invite her back there. Anyway, he and Jeff presumably had plans.

Almost as if he were reading her mind, he said, "So, there’s this thing at Jeff’s this evening. It’s why I stayed in town after that panel discussion at the college yesterday."

"What thing is that?"

"A party. Or, a sort of gaming reunion."

"A gaming reunion?"

"It's one of those geek things," he said with a chuckle. "Internet gaming, MMOs and such. You know what those are?"

"Um, yeah. Have you forgotten how I could kick your ass at computer games a decade ago?"

"Some humiliations a man never forgets! Have you ever played Warcraft, Lord of the Rings Online, Hunt The Night City?"

"Sure. I even raid, occasionally."

"Okay, that's it, you can book the church and order the flowers. We're getting married."

She giggled. "I might have known. You writers sit alone in front of your computers all day to work, and you keep right on sitting there when you need entertainment. Am I right?"

"Pretty much."

"So you and Jeff used to game together in college?"

"Yup, but the reason we really got into it was that another of our friends, Max, is a game designer. Among other things. He worked on a couple of games so famous that even non gamers have heard of them, and later he built an empire doing software design."

"Is Max one of the guys who's going to be at this party?'

"Supposedly, but who knows, with Max. He’s kind of a phantom. Another old friend, Nick, might be there, if he's back in the country. Nick's an archaeologist who's usually out on dig somewhere. "

"So it's you, Jeff, Max, and Nick?"

"And Kate, if she can make it. She’s a theater actress in Boston, and she may be doing a play, I’m not sure. I hope she can come, since she's our main healer."

"That figures! You only let the girl gamer play if she heals?"

"I suppose
you
refuse to heal?"

"I like doing damage. DPS for the win!"

"Why am I not surprised?" he said, grinning. "So, do you want to come with me tonight and maybe do some damage?"

Was he inviting her to his reunion? "Sure, but, would that be appropriate? Sounds like you’re going to be partying with your old friends. I wouldn’t want to intrude on that."

"Nah, it’s fine. We're all friendly. Kate has a new guy, so you won’t be the only addition to our merry little gang. Anyway, you already know Jeff."