All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law.
Linda Barlow Books
www.lindabarlow.com
ISBN: 978-1-941982-51-8
Publisher’s Note:
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are a product of the author’s imagination. Locales and public names are sometimes used for atmospheric purposes. Any resemblance to actual people, living or dead, or to businesses, companies, events, institutions, or locales is completely coincidental.
She recognized him instantly. It had been nine years since she had last seen the tall man with curly dark hair who was striding toward the table where she was seated. He was Stephen Silkwood, the mystery writer, and he was famous, at least among detective fiction buffs. But as he moved to the empty chair beside her, looking too damn hot for words, Viola forgot about his novels, which she loathed. Stephen had been the first man she had ever loved.
He was also the first to break her heart. The pain of that experience rushed back with surprising intensity. Shit. She thought she’d recovered from that melodrama years ago.
She wanted to jump up and flee the small Massachusetts college where she and her old flame were about to meet. But she couldn't do that.
Calm down, heart. Stop thumping. It happened eons ago.
She shot a pained glance at Jeff Slayton, a professor in the Whittacre College history department, who had told her that Silkwood had declined the invitation to participate in tonight’s panel discussion. She'd mentioned to Jeff that she didn't want to be grouped with this author.
Slayton had grinned at her and said, "Are you afraid he’ll reproach you for that scathing review you wrote when his latest book came out?"
The review
had
been scathing. Viola had argued that Silkwood’s popular historical mysteries pandered to the public’s lowest taste for brutality and violence. She objected to Silkwood’s hero Bartholomew Giles, intelligence agent for Queen Elizabeth’s spymaster Walsingham. Giles had a nasty predilection for torture, and he seemed particularly fond of torturing women. Viola's review had suggested that Silkwood should depend less on blood and guts and more on realistic character development and plot.
She knew that Silkwood had seen her review—which had appeared in both print and digital forms—because she had heard him interviewed on a popular podcast. "V. J. Bennett, whoever he—or more likely
she
—is, sounds like a malicious idiot," he'd said. "Maybe she should stick to reading cozy mysteries and romances."
He didn't know, apparently, that V. J. Bennett was Viola Quentin, his brief summer love of nine years ago, whom he had lied to and abandoned.
Viola pretended to be clicking through the notes on her tablet as Stephen coiled his long-limbed body into the chair beside her, accidentally bumping against one of her legs. The brief contact electrified her, transmitting a jolt that sizzled all the way down to her toes. Jeez! Didn't sexual chemistry have an expiration date?
Any hope that, up close, his once-gorgeous features would have aged into something ordinary vanished. The years barely seemed to have touched him. He'd been a sex god nine years ago, and he still was. It wasn't classical beauty that he possessed—his features were a bit too honed and edgy for that—rather it was that smoky impression of something dark and dangerous lurking beneath the surface. He'd always had that bad boy thing going for him.
His green eyes met and held hers. Hot, shared connection. She saw curiosity in those eyes, and a trace of amusement, but no hint of recognition.
"Am I late?" he asked, glancing around at the other seated participants. "I had a bit of car trouble."
He spoke with the impersonality of a stranger. The years that had passed since their final encounter must have erased her image from his mind.
"You're fine. We haven't started yet."
So. He didn't know who she was. Good. Much easier that way. There wouldn't be any awkwardness. She could pretend not to remember him, either.
As he surveyed the audience and the other panelists, she gave in to the temptation to check him out a bit more. His wavy dark hair was longer than was fashionable, its silky ends brushing the back of collar. Those expressive green eyes were distanced by a pair of dark-rimmed glasses, the angular cheekbones and sensuous mouth were just as she remembered them. A tingle went through her as she recalled some the wicked things he could do with that mouth.
Stop that, hormones! Behave yourselves.
His gaze shifted, and he caught her staring. He smiled as she hurriedly glanced away. It was a friendly smile, and it reminded her that he used to smile a lot. He had been an outgoing, genial sort of guy. "I’m Stephen. Who are you?"
Pinned to her jacket was a tag that identified her simply as Prof. Bennett. He stared at it for such a long moment that she thought he'd identified her as the hostile book reviewer. But then she realized he was focusing on the open neckline of her blouse. That wretched tingle ran through her again, moving lower this time. Grrr! Surely that was nothing more than old memories churning. He was hot, yes, but so what?
"So, Professor," said Silkwood. "What do you profess?"
Something about the way he pronounced the word made it sound as though he regarded teaching as an activity that got you all slick and sweaty. "English lit." She nodded at Slayton, who had risen to make the introductions. "I think we're about to begin."
Silkwood politely turned his attention to Slayton, who got the panel rolling.
He didn't remember her. She could hardly believe it. His face and form were branded on her memory, but he had obviously forgotten the many hours they'd spent together back when he'd been a student of her father, Percy Quentin, also a novelist. Viola had been a teenager, just graduating from high school. Stephen had been a charming and talented writer who had not yet published his first book.
In those days, her father and Stephen had been close. Because her parents were divorced and Viola spent most of her time with her mother in San Francisco, she didn't meet Stephen until she spent that lazy summer before college on Cape Cod.
Stephen came down several times to visit her dad and talk about writing. He'd made friends with the cheerful teenager who was his mentor's only daughter. When he wasn’t busy workshopping the latest chapters of his novel with her father, they’d hung out. One balmy weekend in August, she tried to teach him how to windsurf. Although Stephen was fit and athletic—he had been a track star in college—he couldn't quite get the hang of windsurfing.
Her lesson had caused them both to collapse with laughter as he kept toppling over into the waves. They'd spent several hours in close physical contact, hauling each other up onto the board while she demonstrated the positioning and tried to help him stand and remain upright. He was determined to learn, and took his setbacks with good grace. She'd liked that about him. He had a calm, lighthearted attitude, and he didn't seem to mind that she, a teenager, was far more adept at the sport than he was.
Although she'd thought of Stephen as her father's friend, and much too old for her, on this afternoon the knowledge penetrated her brain that he wasn't
that
old. He had a beautiful body, long and lean, subtly muscled, with an ass to die for. At some point, as they bumped up against one another in the water, a spark caught. Stephen shoved the windsurf rig toward the shore, swam up against her slick body, fondled her long hair, and kissed her salt-sprayed lips.
She had fallen for him on the spot. She hadn't found out until later that he was engaged to be married.
Her father had broken the news to her at the end of that weekend, not long after Stephen had left. Percy Quentin must have noticed the change that had come over both of them after the windsurfing lesson. "He's got a girlfriend," he'd told her gently. "They're getting married. He's an unprincipled rascal. Forget him, child."
Forget him? She had tried. But she'd fallen hard. Even though he never wrote her any of the emails he promised, never texted, never called, it had taken a long time for the magic of that weekend to recede from her mind. Now here he was again, unearthing all those painful memories.
"What are we supposed to be discussing, anyway?" he asked under his breath. "Tell me, Professor, so I don't make an ass of myself."
"I think you'll mostly be taking questions from the audience." Mischievously she added, "I see several other members of the English department present, so you'd better be prepared to discuss stuff like post-colonial metaphor and allusion."
"Ouch. Wake me up when we get to the symbolism of murder or something equally literary."
"If you don't care for academic discussions, why are you here?"
"Jeff's an old friend. He talked me into it. Besides, my publisher likes it when I do these things." He grinned at her. "Gotta try to sell a few books." There was a cheerful note of self-mockery in his tone.
Once again, his deep green gaze flickered over her without a trace of recognition. His eyes were the same shade as the sea. The damn water where he had first kissed her...touched her...given her pleasure.
But he didn't remember. Well, shit. She didn't want to remember either.
She knew she must look different now. In those days, she still had the short, spiky black hair she’d adopted for her senior year of high school. It had been summer vacation, so she’d run around with no make-up, dressed casually in shorts and bikini tops, spending so many hours in the sun that her fair skin must have been dotted with freckles. Today she was clad in a well-tailored suit. Her hair, long restored to its natural auburn, was loose on her shoulders. Her freckles, mercifully, had faded. She was more mature than she'd been that summer, more self-assured, and, she hoped, more resistant to the man's deadly charm.
"Relax," she said, tossing him a grin. "Think of the royalties."
He smiled back, sipped water from the bottle someone had left for him, and fielded a question from the audience. He answered with wit and self-deprecation, and after a couple of brief exchanges, he said, "I think you ought to ask this lovely lady beside me a question or two." He glanced once again at Viola's nametag. "Professor, uh, Bennett is undoubtedly an expert on Umberto Eco or Ellis Peters or—"
"Or you," David Newstead interrupted. David, another member of the English department, was seated on the other side of Viola, and he leaned eagerly across her as he spoke. "She's quite an expert on you, Mr. Silkwood, even if she's not one of your most ardent admirers."
Viola shot her colleague a quelling look, but it was too late. Behind his wire-rimmed glasses, Stephen's eyes narrowed as he stared harder at Viola's uninformative nametag. He raised his glance and looked at her as if they were alone in the room. "Not the immortal V. J. Bennett?"
"I'm afraid so."
A broad smile transformed his features, but the glint that flashed in his eyes was both a challenge and a goad. "My interest in this discussion has suddenly increased," he said.
Someone from the audience asked why the professor was not one of Silkwood's admirers. Since she hadn't expected him to show up, Viola hadn't come prepared to discuss his novels. Besides, although she disliked his work, she felt a bit guilty about writing such a negative review.
Oh well. She couldn’t back down now. "Your sadistic hero, Bartholomew Giles, has either raped, tortured, or brutally killed a woman in each of his last three adventures. Don't you think it's time he got over his blatant misogyny?"
Since the audience was packed with female students, several shouts of approval greeted her comment. Heartened, she went on, "After all, books like yours have a certain influence on the people who read them. It seems ethically questionable to me to suggest it's okay for a man to treat women the way Giles does."
"Bart Giles is the product of my imagination. I try to make him behave in a manner consistent with the times. Misogyny was not something folks gave much thought to in the 16th century."
"I don't find woman-haters appealing, no matter what century they appear in."
"Fair enough," said Stephen. "Neither do I, in the real world. But this is fiction. I'm not suggesting people go out and imitate my protagonist's actions." He grinned at the audience. "Not that it would be too easy to do. I don't think most people have a rack in their basement. Or thumbscrews."
This got a laugh, and Viola smiled, too. It wasn’t easy to resist his charm.
Focus
.
"Besides," he added, still flirting with the audience, "I get fan mail from a lot of women who like Bart. The dangerous hero has always had a certain appeal."
Some members of the audience nodded, laughed and clapped. It wasn't easy to debate a dude who knew all there was to know about getting females to pant over him.
"Suppose somebody was inspired to attack a woman after reading one of your torture scenes?" she tried. "Would you feel morally responsible?"
"If a man murders his brother and marries his sister-in-law after a performance of Hamlet, does that make Shakespeare morally responsible?"
"Are you comparing yourself to Shakespeare, Mr. Silkwood?"
He grinned. "I hope I’m not that arrogant." He paused, taking off his glasses and cleaning them off with a handkerchief he pulled from his pants' pocket. "Tell me, Ms. Bennett, why do academics criticize living writers so harshly? You wait until we're dead before giving us any credit for artistry. Yet without us, where would literature professors be? You need me, Professor Bennett. You really ought to support my work."
He got another round of applause for this, but something about the way he said, "You need me," and the mischievous gleam in his eyes as he said it, sent another flash of awareness through her. Jeez, not again!