The Accidental Princess Page 6

  As a declaration of womanhood, it wasn’t much but C.J. felt a stirring inside herself. If it wasn’t liberation, it was close enough.

  She stripped down and then tossed her cotton undergarments into the garbage can. The next time she got a paycheck she was going to spend every bit of it on sexy underwear. Lacy thongs and bras, hose with seams up the back and garter belts made of satin and lace. Black. Everything black.

  For now plain pink silk would have to do. Feeling reckless, she ditched the bra altogether. She wasn’t Audrey Hepburn in the yellow sundress, but she wasn’t dog meat either. She painted her lips, not bright red but just a touch of color, fluffed up her hair, then wrote a note to Sam.

  Dear Dad,

  I’ve gone to Shady Grove to catch up with Sandi. I’ll probably spend the night with her. See you in the morning.

  Crystal Jean.

  She didn’t know why she signed the note that way except that her mother always said Crystal Jean was an important name that made people sit up and take notice.

  C.J. doubted he would notice she was gone in the morning. And even if he did, he’d probably think she’d just gone to visit Ellie or Sandi.

  Predictable and boring, that’s what she was. Tonight she was going to change that. If Sandi could go man-fishing in Shady Grove, so could she.

  But not for Clint Garrett. Most certainly not for Clint. She wouldn’t touch him with a twenty-nine-and-a-half foot pole.

  She was looking for somebody nice. Somebody wearing a white shirt and tie and a smile that said I’m friendly but not too dangerous. Well, okay, it wouldn’t hurt if this friendly stranger turned out to be a little bit on the wild side. Wearing cowboy boots, say. Or a touch of leather.

  By the time C.J. got to Shady Grove she was sweating. When she pulled into the parking lot at Snookie’s Den and saw Clint’s big Harley and Sandi’s little car she nearly turned around and went home. They’d think she was spying, which she absolutely, positively was not.

  Maybe she was curious a little, but that was all. Besides, didn’t she have a right to go juking wherever she pleased?

  C.J. got bravely out of her car and went inside.

  Thank God they didn’t see her. C.J. spotted a booth hidden in a dark corner.

  “Take your order, hon?”

  C.J. blindly viewed the list of exotic drinks. Beer she couldn’t abide. Tasted like something that ought to be in a cup in the clinic’s lab. Bourbon sounded too brave and strong.

  “What’s good?” she asked.

  “How about something a little exotic?”

  “Okay.” If she leaned forward just a little bit she could see around the pole: she could watch Sandi and Clint without ever being spotted. Not that she was spying. Not by a long shot. She did notice, though, that they had their faces so close they could steal kisses if they wanted to. She watched to see if they would, but they just kept talking and talking.

  “Hon?”

  C.J. stabbed randomly at the drink menu. “I’ll take this one.”

  “Be right back.”

  It wasn’t until the waitress had gone that C.J. saw what she’d selected—a green monkey. Nature’s color. Cute little animal. It sounded harmless enough.

  Clint was enjoying Sandi’s latest C.J. tale, the one where they’d climbed a fig tree in order to escape the deadly pig trotting toward them in the pigsty.

  “I don’t know how we ended up in the pigsty in the first place, except that C.J. was always challenging me to do something Phoebe had forbidden, usually something that involved getting dirty and getting into trouble.”

  Her mother, the beauty queen. Clint could picture it, a defiant little girl who would think herself homely no matter how she looked, and all because her mother was renowned for her looks and charm.

  “I think she was trying hard to be just like her father,” Sandi added.

  Clint didn’t challenge her, but he had an entirely different picture of C.J. as a child. She’d been a little girl who desperately wanted to be like her mother, but because she thought she never could she did everything in her power to prove herself unworthy.

  “Anyhow,” Sandi continued, “as we clambered to safety the limb broke and we both ended up in the mud with the pig breathing down our necks. I screamed, but do you know what C.J. did?”

  “Something bold.”

  “Exactly. When that old sow started rooting around in the mud, C.J. jumped on her back and yelled, ‘Ride ’em, cowboy.’”

  They lapsed into a friendly and comfortable silence while the band played an old Hank Williams song that made Clint think about dancing close with a woman’s head on his shoulder and the smell of her perfume filling him up with sweet sadness.

  Sandi glanced at her watch. “It’s getting late.”

  “We never did dance,” he said.

  “That’s okay.” He took the slender hand she held out. “Thank you for not letting me make a fool of myself.”

  “Thank you.” He leaned over and kissed her cheek. “Are you sure you won’t let me see you home?”

  “Positive. I’ve been taking care of myself for a very long time.”

  There was no self-pity in her tone, but underneath that smile was a bone-deep sadness he knew and understood, one that wouldn’t go away. He might as well go home.

  “I’ll walk you to your car.”

  The green monkey was neither cute nor benign, but it was too late to do anything about that now because Clint and Sandi were coming her way. C.J. ducked behind her pole, but not before she’d seen how they kissed. Actually he’d done the kissing and only on her cheek that C.J. knew of. She’d probably missed the best ones, the one with lips locked and tongues entangled.

  Look at the bright side, though, they’d probably name their first child after her. Girl or boy, it wouldn’t matter.

  “C.J.?” C.J. jumped a mile, and when she landed back in her seat she saw that Sandi and Clint had launched a sneak attack.

  “What are you doing here?” Sandi’s smile looked the same, but C.J. wasn’t fooled. She’d been misplaced by Clint Garrett. Or was that displaced?

  Oh, she couldn’t think. Green monkeys were stomping around her head and making all sorts of diversionary noises.

  “I’m uh…drinking mean gunkeys.” A big hiccup exploded, and from the way they were looking at C.J. you’d think she was the one who had done it. Well, she knew good and well she hadn’t because that wasn’t nice manners, and if there was one thing she had it was nice manners.

  “She never has had a head for alcohol,” Sandi told Clint, and C.J. stood up to defend herself.

  But the floor was warped and it tossed her back onto her seat in an undignified heap.

  When Sandi said, “I’d better take her home,” C.J. noticed that at a certain angle her neck looked long and not at all graceful but more like something you’d want to hide under turtleneck sweaters. She was on the verge of pointing that out when she remembered the red sequined dress, and so she forgave Sandi’s fatal flaw because of her past generosity.

  “I’m not going,” she said.

  Sandi leaned close, and of course C.J. saw that she was mistaken. Her friend had a graceful neck and furthermore there was not a single flaw in her face or her figure, which made C.J. wish for another of those monkey drinks. Purple this time, because obviously green was the color of envy and that’s why her brain felt warped and she felt surly.

  “But, C.J…..”

  “You go on with Mishter Gilded.”

  Clint took Sandi’s arm. “Come on, I’ll see you to your car then…” His words got lost as he hightailed it out of there, which just proved how eager he was to help out a woman with an exploding biological clock.

  C.J. tortured herself thinking about the two of them in a tangle of love, then she braved the undulating sea of pea-green carpet in order to find the bathroom.

  Her caged monkeys were looking for escape.

  Chapter Six

  When he discovered C.J. missing from her booth Clin
t mentally kicked himself for going off and leaving her in that condition in the first place. He felt a tightening in his chest like a man about to have a heart attack.

  He hadn’t felt this anxious since he’d played hooky from eighth grade then had to face the disappointment of his mother.

  It served him right. He knew better than to embrace chivalry and honor.

  If he weren’t careful he’d discover he had a heart. Even worse, others would discover it. Sandi probably already had. All that big talk about getting information on C.J. for his articles… He’d be willing to bet his Harley that she’d seen right through him.

  Tomorrow he’d do some damage control. He’d find a party girl and flaunt her all around town.

  Clint sighed. He wasn’t going to do that. He was going to find C.J. and rescue her, and for no other reason than the insistent demands of his newly awakened conscience.

  The woman who had waited his table was Gloria. “Have you seen the woman in yellow who was sitting in that corner booth?”

  “Yes. She went into the ladies’ room about ten minutes ago.”

  A lot of things could happen in ten minutes, every one of them bad. Clint imagined each one in vivid detail… C.J. passed out on a stone-cold floor, her head gashed open from her fall. C.J. too sick to stand, clinging to the edge of the toilet and moaning his name. C.J. abducted. The most sensational crime Hot Coffee had ever seen.

  “Would you mind going in there and seeing about her? She’s not in very good condition.”

  “Sure. Be right back.”

  “And, Gloria, don’t mention that I sent you.”

  It couldn’t have been more than three minutes until Gloria emerged from the ladies’ room with C.J. in tow, but in that time Clint aged ten years.

  “You scared me to death.” He scooped up C.J. and held her close, and darned if he didn’t feel like some kind of hero in a Greek myth.

  “Wha’?”

  “I’m taking you home.”

  It was only after he got to the parking lot that he realized his dilemma. Obviously he couldn’t haul her off on the back of his bike because she was in no condition to hang on.

  He propped C.J. against the wall and rummaged through her purse looking for car keys. He’d never seen as much stuff in his life—six-months-old receipts, scraps of paper with snippets written down in some undecipherable code, a thousand tubes of lip balm, fourteen pens, earrings without their backings. What did women do? Keep their filing and bookkeeping in their purses? Use them as garbage cans?

  Why couldn’t women be more like men? That’s what he wanted to know.

  Thankfully C.J. was quiet during his long quest for keys. When he found them he hauled her over his shoulder and folded her into the front seat of her car. Her eyes looked so glazed he checked her pulse. Still beating.

  Though he was not responsible for her condition, there was no way he could take her back to Sam, though God knows what he was going to do with her when he got her home. She roused briefly when he turned into his apartment complex.

  “This is not my housh.”

  “I know.”

  “Where Shandi?”

  “She left before we did.”

  He parked in the garage where he usually kept his Harley, and when he lifted her out of the car she lolled in his arms and gave him a stern look.

  “Unhand me, shir.”

  “No way. Think of this as a pajama party, just the two of us.”

  “Don’t like pajamas.”

  “That’s okay. You can sleep in the nude.”

  “With you?”

  The sheer artlessness of the question caught him off guard. Lord, how was he ever going to get through the night without losing his sanity and his honor?

  The first battle hadn’t even started, but with her sweet weight in his arms he was already losing the war. Best thing he could do was get off the battleground.

  He tossed her over his shoulder so he could fit the key into the lock. His bedroom lay straight ahead. All he had to do was deposit her on the bed and shut the door, then he’d be home free. But first he had to make it to the door. First he had to traverse a huge expanse of living room that looked as hot and endless as the Mojave.

  “Here goes,” he said, and C.J. giggled.

  Suddenly the green monkeys made it all so clear to her: she was desirable, she was invincible and she was getting a second chance to have a taste of excess. No, not just a taste. A huge dose.

  “Here goesh wha’?”

  “Torture.”

  She’d had something else in mind, but if he was into kinky stuff she’d try to play that game provided it could be done upside down. Dangling over his shoulder she latched on to the first delicious-looking target she saw. His jeans were tight, his back pocket was handy and his backside was sooo enticing. She slid her hand inside and began to massage.

  “What are you doing?” He pulled back so hard she lost her breath.

  “Foreplay.”

  “What?”

  “I said FOREPLAY. Have you lost your min’?”

  “No. Only my sanity.”

  That struck her as funny, and she had to recover from another fit of giggles before she could continue her erotic games. She hiccupped once which put her face in the vicinity of his neck, his thick, muscular, manly smelling neck that was too good to resist. She took a little nip, and when he yelped she licked it to make it all better.

  “Would you stop that?”

  “You don’ like it?”

  “That’s not the problem.”

  “Problem?”

  “I like it too much.”

  That sounded good to C.J. Better than good. It sounded like encouragement, so she looked around for another place to lick. His ear was right there, pinkish and curved just right for her tongue. She plunged right in and he made groaning sounds which could have been good or bad. Being new at all this, she couldn’t tell.

  “Like it?” she whispered, and when he didn’t answer she took his silence for consent and did it all over again.

  She was turning out to be a natural. Why hadn’t anybody told her? Why had she waited till she was practically over the hill before she’d found her true self?

  Wouldn’t her ex-friend Sandi turn green with envy?

  With a sound like an aroused bull elephant, Clint charged toward the bedroom, kicked open the door and dumped her onto the bed. There was only so much torture a man could endure.

  “You want to play games, do you?”

  “What kind?”

  “Don’t widen those blue eyes at me, princess. You know exactly what kind.”

  Silencing the voice of his newfound conscience, Clint jerked off his shirt. Buttons flew every which way, and damned if the little minx in his bed didn’t grab a handful of bedcovers and pretend to cower in terror.

  “Your little act won’t wash with me. You’ve been asking for this ever since I brought you home.”

  She hiccupped once, then covered her mouth with her hand. “S’cuse me.”

  “If you think you can change things with a latent attack of manners, you’re wrong.”

  He flung his constricting jeans to the floor and stalked toward the bed. The mattress sank under the weight of his knee, and she scuttled to the far side of the bed. He grabbed her foot and hauled her toward him.

  “Bravo, C.J. You could go onstage with that modest act.”

  “It’s not an act.”

  “Are you telling me the woman who licked my neck like an expert courtesan is scared?”

  Her eyes shot daggers as she jerked out of his reach. “There’s nothing I enjoy more than a fiery woman.” He snaked out one arm and dragged her back. She went as stiff and scratchy as an over-starched shirt. “Make no mistake about it, princess. I plan to enjoy you to the hilt.”

  “With that golden sword of yoursh?”

  “You do have a way with words.” He tightened his hold and discovered she wasn’t wearing a bra. The thin fabric of her summer sundress only heightened
his excitement. “Let’s see how you are with actions.”

  He claimed her sweet open mouth then lingered there for such a long time he remembered such things as innocence and tenderness.

  C.J. made a little moaning sound, and he tore himself away from her intoxicating lips.

  “Hmm,” she murmured. “I like that.”

  Amazing, her ability to keep throwing him curves. “You do?”

  “Yes. I’ve never been kissed like that.”

  His wicked intentions fled like a flock of naughty children.

  “You are the damnedest woman I’ve ever met.”

  “And you are the dam’dish man.”

  “You’re also very drunk.”

  “Am not.”

  “Are, too.” He had to laugh. Just look at him, sitting on his own bed with a ready woman in his arms, and all he could think about was how he was going to get her out of her dress and into a pair of his pajamas without shocking her modesty.

  She tilted her head back and looked at him with pouty lips. “Kiss me again.”

  “Not tonight, princess.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because I make it a habit never to take advantage of an inebriated woman. The problem with you is, I keep forgetting.”

  “Caush o’ me?”

  “Yes, because of you.”

  She gave him an arch smile. “Am I shexy?”

  “You are very shexy.”

  She giggled and that started a gale of hiccups. He pounded her on the back, and when that didn’t work he kissed her again. It was the only thing to do.

  She melted against him, making little moaning sounds of pleasure, and what could he do but lower her to the mattress and mold her against his near-naked body? After all, he was only human.

  And she was only a natural. Her hands knew exactly what to do, exactly which spots to touch. His arousal was immediate and insistent.

  The devil in him said, Go on, do it. She wants it. All you have to do is lift her skirt and slide down her panties. But the aggravating angel over his shoulder said, Even you draw the line at this.