"Improper English" - читать интересную книгу автора (MacAlister Katie)

Chapter Two




“Oh, that my sainted Lord Raoul would find me here in this evil place!” The Lady Rowena’s creamy, bounteous bosom heaved as she wailed to the silent cell she had been imprisoned in, wringing her hands and rending her clothing without regard to modesty or economy. “Oh but that I could at this dark moment kiss his firmly chiseled lips! Oh that I could hold him in my arms, stroking the tousled curls back from his broad and manly brow! Oh that I could seat myself upon his manly pillar of alabaster and ride him as he’s never been ridden before! Oh! Oh!”





“Be honest now, is that something you’d like to read more of?”

“Well. . . it’s very explicit, isn’t it? I mean, what with his pillars and her bosom and all.”

I leaned forward onto my knees and wriggled my right ankle to bring feeling back into my foot. I’d been squatting next to the library cart so long my feet were going numb. “All romances have sex in them in the U.S. You did say you read romances, right?”

The librarian ducked her head in a shy gesture and pushed the cart down the stack. I followed on my knees.

“Other than his pillar and her boobs, what did you think? Is this a book you would buy?”

The woman looked around nervously, then leaned her head close to mine and whispered, “I think you should take the smut out of it. Romance isn’t about sex, you know. It’s about two people committing themselves to each other.”

She smiled a tense little smile and nodded as she wheeled the book cart away. I looked at the manuscript in my hand. No sex?

I considered the no-sex angle while I marched home to my lovely little flat, the same lovely little flat in which I had laughed long and hard the day before, chortling merrily over Isabella’s offer of her latest boy toy. Oh yes, I laughed when Isabella called down to me that this perfect man—the man she thought was meant for me—was her lover. I laughed and rolled my eyes as I wandered back into my tiny little flat to ask the room, “Yeah, right, like I just fell off the stupid wagon?” The sad reality is that after I got through laughing, I started seriously considering what Isabella had said.

I suppose a few words are needed to explain why an offer of Isabella’s homme de l’heure would strike a chord of interest in someone who’d spent the last ten years of her life bouncing from creep to creep, with a few intermittent losers tossed in just to break up the monotony.

My mother’s best friend from school married a rich Brit, and they had a daughter, Stephanie. Steph was off to Australia for the summer, leaving her flat in an old house on a relatively quiet square in need of a subletter. After six long weeks of negotiation, Mom and I made a deal, with her agreeing to pay for the flat while I tried my wings as a writer.

There was much more riding on the situation than just an arrangement between Mom and me, though; there was a little matter of my entire life, my future, my hopes and dreams and .. . well, I’ll be honest, I’ve never been much of a success at life, something my mother brings to my attention frequently. I’d been married once, to a workaholic Microsoft yuppie who divorced me after telling me I was bad luck. I’ve had eighteen jobs in the last ten years, doing everything from scraping up gum at a movie theater, to staring blindly at microfilmed checks at a bank, to walking dogs for people who were too busy to walk their own dogs. I’ve had a slightly fewer number of boyfriends in those same ten years, hooking up with some guys who could easily outcreep Charles Manson.

Although it may seem that my one and only goal is being successful at writing a book—and the motivation for success is strong, since failure means I’d have to give up my life to stay in a hick town in a desert in eastern Washington taking care of my paternal grandmother’s bodily needs—more important than that is my need to prove to my mother once and for all that I can succeed at something. Anything. Just once, I’d like to come out on top and have her witness my triumph.

The need for parental approval—it’s a massive, unwieldy weight to bear.

When I first arrived at the house in London, Isabella greeted me politely, gave me the keys to the doors, showed me my new home for the next two months, and briefly explained who the other tenants were.

“The ground floor has two families and their children,” she said in a plummy English accent that sent little goose bumps of delight up and down my spine. England! I was really in England!

She frowned for a moment at an oversized gold floor pillow and adjusted it infinitesimally to the left. ‘“The families are related—sisters—and both spend their summers in Provence. Their flats are let to visiting scholars. This should be fixed.”

I looked where she was pointing at one of the side windows which didn’t quite close all the way. “It’s not a problem, I doubt that anyone would scale three floors to crawl into the flat.”

“Mmm.” She moved on to straighten an ugly Van Gogh print. “The first floor is shared by Dr. Bollocks— he teaches at London University—and the Muttsnuts.” She pursed her lips and shook her head briefly at the mention of the last name. “They’re newlyweds. We hardly ever see them.”

Dr. Bollocks? Muttsnuts? Quaint English names—you gotta love ‘em!