Laurie Sawyer was a handful, and she knew it. Many of her friends and potential lovers had told her so. She didn't suffer fools--especially male fools--gladly, and she was quick to perceive slights to her dignity and self-esteem. Smart, quick-witted, and also very attractive (some of her admirers had even said she was beautiful), she felt no reason to settle for second-best. As she looked at herself in the mirror (something she did a bit too often), she noticed her clean, sharp features (deep green eyes, slender nose, full lips, gently curving jawline) encased by jet-black hair--not to mention the obvious things that men are so inclined to salivate over (firm, ample breasts, flat stomach, shapely bottom). At twenty-eight, she felt in the prime of life. She thought to herself:
If there's such a thing as an alpha female--and there ought to be--I'm it!
Right now she was pondering whether to go through with the date--really just an initial meeting over coffee at Starbucks (where else?), not terribly far from her house in a suburb of Boston--with a guy named Patrick Williamson. He'd requested the meeting on the online dating website she had joined, but she wasn't sure he was really her type. His age was okay--thirty-one--and he was a freelance writer, which argued a certain degree of independence and initiative. But there was something just a bit too cocky about the guy. She didn't like feeling overmatched by a man.
But she went ahead and met him. It was a lazy Sunday in April, and she didn't have much else to do.
Patrick proved to be surprising in a number of ways. Sure, he was an intellectual, but at least he wasn't a stuffy old professor: he'd had enough of those in her years at Tufts. He wrote detective stories--had published a number of novels. Laurie hadn't read any of them, but she was a fan of the genre. And, defying the stereotype of the bespectacled, hollow-chested author holed up in his attic scribbling the hours away, Patrick turned out to be more than physically fit. Much as she liked guys who worked with their brains more than with their muscles, she couldn't help admiring the rugged expression of his face, his broad shoulders, and his generally imposing physique.
The meeting went well, and they exchanged some basic information about themselves. Laurie worked as a mid-level executive in a nonprofit in downtown Boston, and Patrick said he'd gone freelance--after working in a publishing company for some years following his graduation from Brown University--about six years ago. A couple of his detective novels had been optioned for films, but no movies had actually been made, and Patrick humbly declared that he never expected that to happen.
The one thing that made Laurie pause was when the subject of Patrick's marriage and divorce came up.
He was pretty evasive on what had happened. At twenty-four he'd married a woman he'd met at the publishing company, but they'd split up four years later. Laurie was struck by that.
"That's not a long time to be married," she said, looking keenly at her companion over the small table where they'd sat down. "It seems to me you should still be in the honeymoon stage."
"I wouldn't say that," Patrick said, with a rather bitter curl of his lips. "Those years seemed like decades."
"That bad, huh?"
"It started out fine, but went downhill pretty quickly."
"Why?"
Patrick seemed startled at Laurie's blunt query. "Um, well, it's hard to explain. I--"
"Try," she persisted.
He gave her a sharp look that said,
I will, if you give me a chance.
"Maybe I was working too much. But I was trying to establish myself, and Dorothy didn't seem to understand that. She thought I was ignoring her. So things went from bad to worse, and she just left."
"Just like that?"
"Yes. Just like that."
Laurie felt there was a lot more to the story than what Patrick was telling her--but she couldn't expect him to spill the beans on such an intimate matter to a person he hardly knew. But she filed it away in the back of her mind, to bring up later--if that is, she actually saw Patrick again.
She wasn't even sure she wanted to do that. She liked the guy, but there was something about him that didn't quite sit well with her.
And that's why she could have kicked herself when she invited him back to her apartment to look over her collection of old-time detective novels.
Patrick smirked out of the side of his mouth. "Is this the female equivalent of 'Come over and see my etchings'?"
"Something like that," Laurie said acidly, getting up abruptly.
The fact is that she was proud of her book collection--and who better to appreciate it than a guy who wrote books for a living?
It was actually a short walk over to her apartment, so she urged Patrick to leave his car in the parking lot and accompany her on foot.
When they got into her place, Patrick noted with admiration the austere but tasteful furnishings. Laurie hated clutter, and her living quarters had an open, airy look that suited her perfectly. The book collection was situated in a second bedroom that was reserved only for that purpose. The moment Patrick walked in there, he seemed in heaven. With mouth slightly open, he took in shelf after shelf of books by Agatha Christie, John Dickson Carr, Margery Allingham, Ellery Queen, and many others--including a whole bookcase devoted to classic and contemporary hard-boiled writers, from Hammett and Chandler to Ross Macdonald and Elmore Leonard.
She didn't exactly know how the horseplay started.
Feeling entirely comfortable in her own space, and basking in the praise that Patrick had showered upon her for her good taste in books, she found herself thinking of him as an old friend. And he seemed to feel the same way.
That's probably why, when she made some witticism, he took it upon himself to throw one of the pillows on her living-room sofa right at her face.
