LITMIR.BIZ

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on?”

      “I really couldn’t say, sir,” the waiter said sternly. “I’ll get your check.”

      “He’s not very happy,” Hannah said, watching the waiter walk off, his spine rigid. “I guess that means you’ll have to leave him a big tip.”

      “Oh, yeah,” Alex said, nodding. “A really big tip. But it was worth it to see you smile, hear you laugh. You do both much too seldom, Hannah.”

      She dropped her gaze, then dared to look up at him again. “Don’t do that or I’ll get all nervous again, and I don’t think there’s a tip large enough to cover me knocking over the entire table when I stand up. And that’s possible, you know, knowing my history.”

      “Hannah Slip-on-a-banana,” Alex said, also sober once more. “I wonder—how much do you think that name had to do with your little mishaps? It’s got to be really difficult to be graceful when everyone’s waiting for your next misstep. After a while, you’d have to start believing everyone’s right, and just plain give up trying.”

      Hannah melted. Right there in the restaurant, with the waiter placing a burgundy leather folder in front of Alex and waiting until he’d produced a credit card to pay the check, Hannah Clark melted. He knew, Alex Coleman knew. For the first time in her life, she felt as if someone understood her, even cared about her, cared enough to consider how she got to be the local joke, the clumsy child, the awkward adolescent, the shy teenager. The oldest virgin in Texas, perhaps in all of the United States.

      “Do…did you really mean it earlier when you said you’d like to make it up to me—you know, for that stuff we talked about?”

      Alex pulled back her chair and helped her to her feet, then led her out of the restaurant. “Yes, Hannah, I did,” he said as he fished in his pocket for his keys, then opened the door into the night. “Why? Have you thought of a way I could begin repaying you? Tipping over my water glass seems somehow inadequate.”

      How would she say it? Could she say it? She couldn’t believe she was even thinking it.

      “Well,” she said at last, once they were in the car, “there is something…”

      Chapter Three

      The last time Alex had nearly run his own car off a road had been when he had just turned sixteen and decided that driving and smoking menthol cigarettes “went together.” He’d taken his first drag, choked, dropped the cigarette between his legs and nearly taken out Mrs. Rafferty’s hand-painted mailbox.

      This time it was a U.S. mailbox at the corner of Fifth and Main that nearly bit the dust. But then, he was older now, and the shock had been bigger. Therefore, the mailbox should be bigger, too.

      “You…you want me to what?” he said as he recovered, slowed the vehicle to look over at Hannah in the darkness.

      She had sunk down in the seat, sitting on her spine, her head on her chest. “You did ask,” she said in a small voice.

      “Well, hell, yeah—but what kind of answer was that? I mean, you could give a guy a little warning. You know, something like, ‘Hey, Alex, I’m going to drop a bomb now. Maybe you’ll want to duck and cover.”’

      “Never mind, okay?” Hannah said, pushing herself upright once more. “Forget it. Just—forget it.”

      “Forget it? How am I suppose to forget it? You just asked me to rid you of your…to…you want me to—oh, hell, Hannah. You can’t still be a virgin. You’re what—twenty-six, twenty-seven?”

      “Twenty-eight,” she told him, her high-buttoned blouse choking her, half from sliding down in the seat and partly because she may just have swallowed her tongue. She wasn’t quite sure. But if she choked to death in the next five seconds, she really didn’t think that would be a bad thing. “I’m twenty-eight and never been more than kissed. It’s embarrassing.”

      “How? Nobody knows but you. And now me,” Alex added, shaking his head. “And that’s another thing, Hannah. Why me?”

      “Good question,” Hannah mumbled, mortified. What had gotten into her? She hadn’t had any wine, so she couldn’t use drunken stupidity as an excuse. “It’s just that…well, you did ask what you could do for me. And you said I could ask anything, anything at all, and I…well, I really would like your help.”

      Alex pulled up in the small cement parking lot beside the veterinary office and cut the engine. “My help. Hannah, it isn’t as if you asked me to change a tire or help you move—which I think you ought to consider, not that it’s any of my business. But asking me to…to—”

      “Make me a woman is how I think I said it,” Hannah said, helping him and cringing at the same time. The only thing worse than saying the words again would be to hear him say them.

      “Yes, that,” Alex said, pushing his fingers through his hair. “Is it really so necessary to you?”

      Hannah nodded. “Maybe it’s stupid, but yes, I do think it’s necessary.” She turned toward him, trying to explain. “It’s time I grew up—all the way up. I thought I had, but then I came home, and I’m right back where I started. Unsure of myself, wondering who and what I am. Falling back into old patterns, probably unhealthy patterns. I still feel like a girl. A young, clumsy little girl. I’m twenty-eight, Alex. Twenty-eight! It’s time I grew up.”

      “Having sex doesn’t make you a grown-up, Hannah. Just ask all the teenage mothers, if you don’t believe me.”

      “You…you’d be careful,” she said, averting her gaze once more, grateful for the relative dark inside the vehicle, even with the streetlight shining at the corner. “You wouldn’t let that happen to me.”

      “No, of course I wouldn’t let anything like that happen to—what the hell am I saying? Hannah, no. It’s a crazy idea. I’m sorry, but it just is.”

      “Okay,” she said quietly. “Just forget I asked. And you’re right, it is a crazy idea.”

      “So you’re not going to go out hunting for someone else to…to make you a woman?”

      Hannah bowed her head, bit her lips. She’d been right. It was worse when he said it.

      “Hannah? Answer me. You are going to give up the idea, right?”

      She looked over at him in the darkness. He couldn’t know, must never know. She’d rather go to her grave a repressed virgin than give herself to anyone but this man she’d dreamed of all her life. All she’d wanted was this one time, this one memory, before she went back to her unfulfilled and unfulfilling life. Was that too much to ask? Apparently it was.

      “Hannah? Would you please answer me?”

      “Good night, Alex,” she said, opening the door and quickly hopping out of the vehicle. “I had a wonderful time.”

      “Hannah!” he called after her as she ran toward the door. Then he sat back in his seat and slammed his fists against the steering wheel. “Damn it! Now what do I do?”

      THE THRONE ROOM in the great palace of Sorajhee, located in the capital city of Jeved, had always been one of the most beautiful chambers, its simple Moorish architecture accented with golf leaf, its tall, ornamental windows looking out over the perfect blue of the Persian Gulf.

      From this room, from the jewel-encrusted throne set at the top of a pedestal surrounded by steps on which the guilty, the penitent and the hopeful petitioner had all prostrated themselves, the Jeved family had ruled for generations.

      Today the air in the throne room was tense, almost trembling, as Azzam, ruler of Sorajhee, looked down at his counterpart from Balahar, King Zakariyya Al Farid.

      “Will you speak, my friend, or only continue to pose, impressing me with your power, which is no less or greater than mine own?” King Zakariyya Al Farid turned away from Azzam and walked to the gilt chair that

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