The Damsel in This Dress (30 page)

Six months later

Hold on while I get out my thesaurus; this review is going to require more words than my paltry vocabulary contains. Ah, here we go: marvelous, extraordinary, splendid, meritorious (oh, that’s a good one), bravo, spectacular, superlative . . .

To continue would require more space than this column allows, so let me simply conclude by saying that
Four Men and a Corpse,
J. Soldier McKennitt’s latest crime drama, is well worth your time and money.

Not!

The plot is silly, the characters dumb, the writing so-so. What less could you ask for? This is the fourth installment in the Crimes of the Northwest series, and while each entry has defied common sense and literary style,
Four Men and a Corpse
is the worst to date . . .

“There’s more. Wanna hear it?”

“Betsy, darling,” Soldier said as he pulled his wife into his arms. “Do you think you can wait to castrate me until we’ve conceived at least one child?”

She giggled and tossed the newspaper aside. Slipping her arms around his waist, she said, “Not a problem. At least, not as of a few minutes ago when I tinkled on the stick.
And
the stick turned blue.”

He raised his brows. “Really? A baby? You and me? All right! When?”

“The end of September.” She gazed up into his eyes. “I love you.”

He bent his head and whispered wonderful things in her ear while she ran her fingers through his soft hair and smiled. Then he kissed her. Then he kissed her again. And again. Soon, his light kisses turned urgent and hot.

Guiding her to the bed, he murmured against her mouth, “Take off your nightgown. I want to look at your tummy.”

“It’s too early to see any difference.”

“That’s not why I want to see your tummy,” he growled.

“Wait,” she said, touching her fingertips to his lips. “I have more good news. Daddy got a job!”

Soldier peered down at her. “Well, that’s great, honey. He must be really thrilled. But, well, given his, uh, condition and everything . . . I mean, he’s brilliant, but he doesn’t seem to have any fashion sense, his social skills are pretty bad, he has trouble getting projects done on time, and when he does, sometimes they don’t work.” He shrugged. “What kind of job could he do where he would fit in? Who hired him?”

“Microsoft. He starts tomorrow.”

She grinned up at him, and he got lost in her all over again. He just had to be the luckiest man alive.

As he held her close, he remembered for the thousandth time watching that car sail off the end of the dock and disappear under the surface of the water. The impact had killed Carla, and might have killed Betsy, too, if she hadn’t made sure to strap herself in.

He’d been out of the car, running like hell toward the water, and was in mid-dive before the car even broke the surface. Kicking off his shoes and thrashing out of his jacket, he’d fought the waves to reach her door with a single-minded strength he didn’t know he possessed. When the car’s rooftop disappeared beneath the water, he was nearly certain she was lost.

That first breath of air she’d taken on the dock as he’d hovered over her was like his own first breath, and his life had begun all over again.

He loved her so damn much that sometimes, when she looked up at him with a gleam in her eye or a sexy little smirk on her lips, he just wanted to bust out laughing. He was a lucky son of a bitch to have found a woman like her.

And now she was pregnant with their first child. A baby, their baby. It was almost too wonderful to grasp.

As she slipped out of her nightgown and snuggled back down into their warm bed, she said, “We don’t have a lot of time. Claire will be here at ten with my mother and Piddle the Valiant.”

Soldier grunted. “Piddle, the Dog Who Lived.”

“Oh, stop it!” she giggled. “I’m just glad he was only knocked unconscious and not killed.” She snuggled closer. “And Taylor’s coming by later, too, so we can all have dinner and celebrate!”

Betsy nudged her leg over Soldier’s thigh and inched her body closer to his. “Mmm,” she hummed. “You want to take that T-shirt off, get naked, and have our own little celebration?”

Reaching for the hem, he pulled the shirt up and off and tossed it in a corner of their bedroom, which had been just her room before they’d begun remodeling the Victorian.

“Does that answer your question?” he said as he pulled her on top of him and raised his head to kiss her.

“Well,” she purred as she slid her hand down his belly, and down and down and, oh, baby. “Let me put this in terms you’ll understand . . .”

Long ago and far away in a fairytale land called California,
MARIANNE STILLINGS
’s mother read her the Little Golden Book of The Ugly Duckling. She cried so hard at how badly the duckling was treated her mother frantically skipped ahead to calm her and prove all would end well. The book has been lost over the years, but Marianne’s love of reading and happy endings has remained. Now a resident of Washington State, when not writing happy endings of her own, she works as a tech writer for The Boeing Company, and spends time with her husband Mike, daughters Rebecca and Katie, and Dorothy the Wonder Dog. Please visit Marianne at www.mariannestillings.com.

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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

Copyright © 2004 by Marianne Stillings

ISBN: 0-06-057533-6

EPub Edition © June 2011 ISBN: 9780062105813

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