little twerp.
She must have somehow sensed his presence, because she glanced idly over at the kitchen doorway, then back at the coffeemaker again. A quick double take brought her attention back to him, and only then did Willis fully appreciate their situation.
He hadn’t anticipated that their first reunion since high school graduation would play out quite like this. She was in her underwear, after all, and he was fully dressed in khaki shorts, a navy blue polo and heavy hiking boots. And although his experience with women wasn’t extensive, Willis felt it was probably pretty safe to assume that most women didn’t take kindly to being caught by surprise in their underthings. Particularly when the catcher wasn’t reduced to his own Skivvies, and especially when the catcher was someone the woman had despised for more than a decade.
His suspicions were fairly well reinforced when Rosemary straightened and opened her mouth wide to emit a bloodchilling scream at the top of her lungs. He waited until she was finished, until she was staring at him silently with wide, terrified eyes, then he cleared his throat indelicately.
“Hi,” he said, pretending he noticed neither her state of dishabille nor her state of distress. “I don’t know if you remember me.” He stuck out his hand in as matter-of-fact a gesture as he could manage and added, “I’m Willis Random. We used to go to school together.”
In response to his reintroduction, Rosemary opened her mouth wide again and let out another, even more piercing, screech of horror.
Willis forced a nervous smile and dropped his hand back to his side. “Ah. I see you do remember me. And I’m flattered, Rosemary. Truly... flattered.”
The second scream brought around Willis’s companion—the mayor of Endicott, Indiana, who also happened to be Rosemary’s mother—and Mrs. March joined him at the kitchen doorway.
“Rosemary, for God’s sake,” her mother said. “Try to be a bit more polite. I know you and Willis never got along in high school, but the least you could do is try to start off on the right foot.” Mrs. March noted her daughter’s attire then and made a soft tsking noise. “And do put some clothes on, darling. You have a guest in your house.”
Then Mrs. March spun around with a quick “This way, Willis—I’ll show you your room,” and Willis and Rosemary were left alone again.
He scrunched up his shoulders awkwardly, then let them fall. “Good to see you again, Rosemary.” As he spun around, he couldn’t resist throwing over his shoulder, “All of you.”
He hurried to catch up with Mrs. March before Rosemary had a chance to respond with a hastily hurled pot of coffee. A wild rush of heat that he hadn’t felt in thirteen years sped through his body, but he recognized all too well. It was the feeling that had always assaulted him whenever he’d had to go toe-to-toe with Rosemary. And that had happened nearly every day when he was in the tenth grade.
The two of them had been lab partners in chemistry for an entire school year. Nine months of hell, Willis recalled now. And, he had to concede, stifling a wistful sigh that threatened, nine months of heaven, too.
He’d been the brainy geek who was skipped a couple of grades, two years younger and six inches shorter than every other guy in his class. Come to think of it, he’d also been shorter than Rosemary, and she’d doubtless outweighed him then. He’d been the proverbial ninety-seven-pound weakling until he’d taken up weight lifting in college. Of course, that second puberty he’d gone through toward the end of his sixteenth year had probably helped a lot, too.
And now he was back in Endicott, armed with five degrees—two of them doctorates—an assignment from MIT, where he currently taught astrophysics, and a high-powered telescope of his own design. He’d come back for the Comet Festival for which his hometown was famous, back for the answers that Bobrzynyckolonycki had refused to give him fifteen years before.
This time, when Willis studied the comet, he would do so with far greater knowledge and insight than he’d had when he was thirteen, the last time Bobrzynyckolonycki had come around. This time, when he collected and analyzed all of his data, it would be with infinitely more patience and attention than a teenage boy had been able to manage. This time, Willis promised himself, he was going to get the truth out of that damned comet, or he was going to die trying.
Thinking back on the vision of Rosemary and her scantily covered flesh, he bit back a groan. He’d always figured she would be the death of him someday. But he’d always assumed it would be her scathing words and utter contempt for him that finally did him in, and not his undying carnal desire for her. All of a sudden, he felt as if he was thirteen years old again.
And that was the last thing Willis needed. Rosemary March had made his life miserable when he was in high school. Alternately he’d hated and adored her, one minute wanting to cut her to the quick, the next minute wanting to cop a feel. She’d tied his pubescent libido in knots, something he’d never been able to understand.
Simply put, Rosemary had been an idiot, completely incapable of understanding even the most elementary scientific equation. How on earth he could have lusted after a girl who knew nothing about science, Willis had never been able to figure out. Oh, sure, she’d had a pretty face and a great body and all that, but she’d had no brain at all. How could he ever have been attracted to her? Even at thirteen, he should have been above that.
The sight of her standing half-undressed with her socks falling down around her ankles erupted in his brain again, and Willis felt himself jumping to life with a lack of control reminiscent of a thirteen-year-old boy. He clamped his teeth together tight and willed his body and libido to behave themselves. Evidently, he was still susceptible to pretty faces and great bodies, regardless of the brains that topped them.
Dammit.
Bobrzynyckolonycki, he reminded himself. The only heavenly body you’re here to study is the comet. Don’t forget that.
“Willis?” he heard Mrs. March call out some ways ahead of him. “Are you there?”
“I’m here, Mrs. March,” he called back, hurrying his step to catch up with her.
And Rosemary or no Rosemary, I’m not going home until I have the answers I demand.
Rosemary March stood open-mouthed and dumbfounded in her kitchen and tried to tell herself that what she had just seen was not Willis Random, but an hallucination brought on by yet another late night in front of the TV, with no other companion than The Zombies of Mora Tau and a pint of double-chocolate-chunk fudge ice cream.
There was no way she’d believe that the big hunk of manhood lounging in her kitchen doorway moments ago—however startling his appearance had been—could have begun his life as that pizza-faced little twerp who had made Rosemary’s life miserable when she was a teenager. Uh-uh. No way. No how.
The last time she’d seen Willis, he’d been giving his valedictorian speech at graduation. The class had congregated on the football field on an especially moody spring day, and Willis had literally been blown over by a good, stiff wind. Right off the podium, in front of the entire class of ’85, most of whom had hooted with laughter as a result.
The man who had just left her kitchen, on the other hand...
Rosemary shook her head hard in an effort to clear it. Okay, the guy’s glasses coincided with Willis’s myopia, but instead of the Scotch-taped earpiece that had marked the spectacles Willis wore, this guy’s were Ralph
