Authors: Elizabeth Bevarly
You've Got Male
Andrew—the smart, witty, creative, articulate man with whom Avery had fallen passionately in love—was cheating on her.
A month ago she’d known their first encounter must have been destiny. Fate. Kismet. It was simply Meant To Be. What difference did it make if they’d never actually met in person? Who cared if they’d never actually spoken to each other? Their cyber relationship was a meeting of minds, a melding of souls, a blending of hearts.
Until now.
Now he was typing nauseating pop-culture-infested lines to some cheap bit of cyberfluff with the screen name Tinky Bell. A brainless ninny who said things like “ur 2 kewl.”
The hideous massacre of the English language aside, Avery couldn’t believer
her
Andrew was talking about TV shows! He didn’t even watch TV!
But the clincher was Andrew using with Tinky Bell the same words that won Avery’s heart.
Well, she’d fix Andrew. Not only would she dump him, but she’d give him something to remember her by. Oh, yes. She’d create just the right farewell gift…one he and his precious computer system would never forget.
ELIZABETH BEVARLY
Express Male
(May 2008)
Overnight Male
(June 2008)
Married to His Business
*
The Debutante
†
The Newlyweds
Taming the Beastly M.D.
Taming the Prince
The Secret Life of Connor Monahan
you’ve got male
For Mom, with love.
Because it’s been too long since I dedicated a book to you.
Thanks for so many things. You’re the best.
I have many people to thank for this one.
First, thanks to Liz Bemis of Bemis Web Design for helping me get all the technical jargon and equipment right, thereby enabling me to make Avery the computer whiz and Webhead that she is. Some of the technology and equipment that both OPUS and Avery use I made up myself, but it’s okay, because making up stuff is my job. If I did get anything wrong with the real stuff, it’s my fault, not Liz’s.
Thanks to Wanda Ottewell, my fabulous editor, for helping me buff the rough spots and see the gaps, and make everything in the story nice and neat. Thanks to Tracy Farrell and HQN Books for giving this book such a wonderful home. Thanks to Steve Axelrod for helping me find that home.
I’d also like to thank the incredibly nice, patient, generous David Dafoe, of Pro-Liquitech, whose lovely donation to Turning Point for Autism won him a brief appearance in the book. For more information about all the great things Turning Point does, visit their Web site at turningpoint1.com (don’t forget the 1!). It was great fun being able to invite a real person to the party at the Nesbitt estate.
Thanks, too, to good friends (you know who you are) for daily support and camaraderie and laughter that goes above and beyond the call of friendship. Without you guys, I’d be like Avery at the opening of chapter four.
And finally, as always, thanks to David and Eli, my lifelines. My life. Without you guys, I’d be lost.
I love you both bunches. Hug. Kiss. Pat.
A
VERY
N
ESBITT WAS IN LOVE
. Madly, passionately, wildly in love. She was besotted. She was bedazzled. She was befuddled. She was in love as she’d never been in love before.
And it was with a man who went beyond dreamy. He was smart and witty. He was creative and articulate. He was handsome and sexy. He always said what she needed to hear, right when she needed to hear it. He knew her backward and forward, just as she knew him inside and out. And he loved her exactly the way she was. That, more than anything else, had sealed her fate and ensured that her love would last forever. Andrew Paddington made Avery feel as if nothing in her life would ever go wrong again. He was just perfect in every way.
The bastard.
Theirs had been a whirlwind courtship, had come at Avery out of nowhere and swept her into a fantasy worthy of an epic romance. Andrew was in her thoughts and her dreams, in her plans and her performance, in her ego and her id. He filled her days with delight and her nights with pleasure, imbued her with joy that made her downright giddy. And that was no small accomplishment for a woman who was normally pragmatic, cynical and down-to-earth. Although Avery had only met him a month ago, she’d known after that first encounter that their meeting must have been destiny. Fate. Kismet. It was simply Meant To Be.
Bastard.
What difference did it make if they’d never actually met in person? Physical trappings weren’t what love was about. Love was a meeting of minds, a melding of souls, a blending of hearts. Besides, they’d exchanged photos, and the ones he’d sent to her depicted him as a sandy-haired twentysomething with the eyes of a poet, the mouth of a troubadour, the hands of an artist and phenomenal pecs. He was an utter, unmitigated masterpiece.
Bastard, bastard, bastard.
Who cared if they’d never actually spoken to each other? Vocal avowals of devotion were as nebulous and inconstant as the wind. Avery had Andrew’s love for her in
writing.
In the loveliest prose she’d ever read, words—
feelings—
wrought so tenderly, they would move a despot to tears. After only four weeks, she had a file filled with his e-mails to her and she’d logged every chat-room exchange they’d shared in a special folder titled Snookypie. On those nights when she was alone and feeling dreamy and lovey-dovey, she lit candles and opened a bottle of wine, then read over his words again and again, pretending he was right there in her Central Park West condo, murmuring them into her ear.
Bastard squared.
But now the unthinkable was happening. Andrew was cheating on her with another woman. And Avery was finding out about it just as women did on those bad made-for-cable movies. She’d walked in on him and found him in bed with another woman.
Well, okay, figuratively speaking. What had actually happened was that she’d stumbled upon him online, blabbing away with some cheap bit of cyberfluff in, of all places, a
Survivor: Mall of America
chat room. This after Andrew had assured Avery that he loathed popular culture as much as she did. But what really toasted her melbas was that the cyberfluff he was chatting with, who went by the screen name of—Avery had to bite back her nausea when she saw it—Tinky Belle, was clearly an idiot. But Andrew was
agreeing
with her that the music of Clay Aiken could, if people would just open their eyes and ears and hearts to it, bring peace and harmony to the entire planet.
Bastard cubed.
Unable to believe her eyes, Avery felt around until she located the chair in front of her desk and clumsily pulled it out. Then she nearly missed the surface of her desk when she set her bowl of Cajun popcorn and the bottle of Wild Cherry Pepsi on top of it. She tugged at her electric-blue pajama pants spattered with images of French landmarks and numbly sat down, adjusting the oversize purple sweatshirt boasting Wellesley College as she did. Then she wiggled her toes in her fuzzy pink slippers to warm them, adjusted her little black-framed glasses on the bridge of her nose, pushed one of two long, thick black braids over her shoulder and studied the screen more closely.
Maybe she was wrong, she thought as she watched the rapid-fire exchange scroll by. She shouldn’t jump to conclusions. Surely Andrew wasn’t the only guy out there in cyberspace who used the handle Mad2Live. It was a phrase from
On the Road,
after all. And there were probably lots of Kerouac fans online. Andrew loved Avery. He’d told her so. He wouldn’t cheat on her like this. Especially not with some brainless ninny who said things like, “ur 2 kewl mad.”
Please, people!
she wanted to shout at the screen whenever she saw message-board shorthand.
Speak English! Or Spanish! Or French! Or German! Or some legitimate language that indicates you’re at least halfway literate! And capitalize where necessary! And for God’s sake, punctuate!
Even though she was a computer geek in the most extreme sense of the word, Avery couldn’t bring herself to type in anything other than the language she’d learned growing up in the Hamptons. Tony private schools could mess with you in a lot of ways, she knew, but at least they taught you to be well-spoken. That shouldn’t change just because your language of choice was cyber-speak.
She watched Mad2Live and Tinky Belle—gag—swap warm fuzzies for as long as she could stomach it and ultimately decided there was no way that this Mad2Live could be Andrew. Andrew would never, ever concede that the
Survivor
series was, as Tinky Belle claimed, “qualty educatnl programing u cn wach w/ the hole famly.”
Oh, yes,
Avery thought.
It’s definitely mus c tv.
She was about to leave the chat room to visit another—she was, after all, supposed to be working—when Mad2Live posted something that made her fingers convulse on the mouse:
You, Tinky Belle, are a dazzling blossom of hope burgeoning at the center of an unforgiving cultural wasteland.
Acid heat splashed through Avery’s belly when she read that. Because those were the exact words Andrew had used to describe her that first night they met in a Henry James chat room. Except for the Tinky Belle part, since Avery’s screen name—at least that night—had been Daisy Miller. There was no way there could be two Mad2Lives on the Internet flirting with women by calling them dazzling blossoms of hope who burgeoned in cultural wastelands. That was Andrew—
her
Andrew—through and through.
After that it was impossible for Avery to ignore Tinky and Mad’s conversation. And as she watched the lines of dialogue on her screen roll past, she read more and more from Mad2Live that was pulled verbatim from some of the e-mails Andrew had sent to her. And she should know, since she’d practically memorized some of them.
Had she mentioned he was a complete bastard?
Eventually Tinky bade farewell to Mad and evaporated from the chat room, and Avery watched in astonishment as he immediately began to flirt with another occupant, this one calling herself Deb2000. But Deb wasn’t impressed by any of Mad’s cajoling, so, obviously disgruntled, Mad signed out of the chat room.
And Avery followed him.
Luckily she had dozens of screen names she used for her work and she could log in to rooms under several that Andrew would never recognize. And luckily, too, she knew the online community better than she knew even her own Manhattan neighborhood. Because the Internet was where Avery worked every single night. And it was where she played after she knocked off work. It was also where she shopped, where she learned and where she socialized. It was where she found her music, her books, her entertainment and her dinner selections. Hell, she pretty much lived on the Net. And she knew Andrew almost as well as she knew the online community.
Or at least she’d thought she knew him that well. But now she was beginning to think him a complete stranger. Because he flitted from one chat room to another, all of them themed around shallow pop-culture subject matter—everything from Pilates to low-carb cuisine—and in every one of them he waited long enough to identify which of the room’s inhabitants were female and which seemed to be the least, uh, bright. And then he chose one and began to work on her in exactly the way he had worked on Avery that first night he’d encountered her. And shame boiled within her when she realized that she had capitulated to his pretty words as easily as had women who thought deep-fried pork flesh was an essential part of good nutrition.
How could he do this to her? How could he think she was stupid?
She?
Avery Nesbitt? She wasn’t stupid. She was a criminal genius! Even
Time
magazine had said so! And even if the criminal part was debatable, once a genius, always a genius. How could he cheat on her this way? And be so obvious about it? He
knew
how good she was. He knew what she did for a living and how much time she spent online. He knew everything about her. She’d even told him about her past transgressions, and he hadn’t flinched. He’d told her her past didn’t matter, that anything that had happened before the day he met her wasn’t important because he didn’t start living until the day he met her.
Oh, he was
such
a bastard.
Well, she’d fix Andrew. Not only would she dump him faster than you could say, “
Survivor:
Up Yours,” but she’d give him something to remember her by, too. She’d blow off work and stay up all night if she had to to concoct just the right farewell gift.
Of course, being up all night wasn’t exactly a sacrifice to Avery, since she pretty much lived her life at night anyway. Nighttime didn’t have rules or expectations the way daytime hours did. So when most people were coming home from their jobs and starting to wind down, Avery was rising and revving to go. And when most people’s alarm clocks were going off and signaling the beginning of their workday, Avery was pouring herself a scotch and popping a DVD of a
Cracker
mystery into the player and trying to wind down. Unfortunately, she’d never been as good at winding down as she was at revving up.
Because Avery Nesbitt was what some people—those who claimed an ounce or two of compassion—called “a bit neurotic.” She was what other people—those who didn’t give a damn about compassion—called “totally whack.” Hey, what else could you call a woman who lived in her pajamas on the Internet and never left her apartment unless it was to take her cat to the vet, and even then had to load up on half a bottle of scotch just to get herself over the threshold? What else did you call a woman who bought into the tripe men like Andrew Paddington fed to unsuspecting morons?
But Avery didn’t care what anyone thought about her these days, any more than she’d cared when she was a kid. She especially didn’t care tonight. Tonight and tomorrow night—and all the hours in between—she had other things on her mind. Her gift for Andrew would take the better part of the next forty-eight hours to create.
Fortunately for Avery, she was totally whack and had nowhere else to go.
“H
EY, HOW’S IT FEELING OUT
there, Dixon?”
“Like Antarctica. Only without all the warm toastiness.”
“Well, we’ll see if we can’t get you something closer to Greenland next time you’re in the field.”
“How many times do I have to remind you people—I’m not supposed to be in the field!”
Because the field was cold and harsh and unforgiving. Even with a laptop and a decent cup of coffee.
Dixon tugged the zipper of his leather jacket higher, curled his hands around a quickly cooling cup of espresso and pulled his backward-facing driver’s cap farther down over inky black hair that was badly in need of a trim. But that did little to warm him below the waist, and faded blue jeans, though normally his favorite garment, weren’t all that effective in warding off the cold.
Even the cold found in the back of a van that was insulated with high-tech surveillance equipment.
He was infinitely more suited to the great indoors, he thought as he switched his attention from the laptop monitor to a television screen that offered a three-hundred-and-sixty-degree view of the area outside the van. Yeah, indoors he could get a hot shower and a hot sandwich and some hot coffee. Life didn’t get much better than that. Unless maybe you substituted warmed brandy for the hot coffee and added a hot woman with hot hands to the hot shower. Preferably one with a hot name like Lola or Mimi or Fritzi or—
“Dixon?”
No, that wouldn’t work. That was the name he was going by himself these days. It would get way too confusing. So maybe he could just call her—
“Dixon?”
“What?” he said, grinding the words out irritably as his hot shower/hot woman fantasy receded to the back of his brain, leaving him even colder than before.
“You need anything?”
He bit back a grumble at the question that came through the earpiece of his headset. Hadn’t he just been thinking about that when the other agent rudely interrupted him?
“No, Gillespie,” he muttered into the microphone below his chin to the newly minted OPUS agent who’d been assigned to shadow him—more to keep Gillespie out of trouble than anything else, Dixon knew. “I don’t need anything.” Except for his usual partner to get back from her leave of absence so
she
could go into the field instead of him, the way she was supposed to. That way Dixon could go back to collecting the information she sent him and find the missing pieces. Indoors. Where he normally worked. Where it was warm.
