The Perfect Man SS Read online

  It was a picture of her and Josiah at dinner the night before, looking, from the outside, like a very happy couple.

  Obviously he had hired someone to take the picture. Someone who had watched them the entire evening, and waited for the right moment to snap the shot. That was unsettling. And so was the fact that Josiah had found her house. She was unlisted in the phonebook, and on public records, she used her first name—Giacinta—with no middle initial. And although her last name was unusual, there were at least five other Racettes listed. Had Josiah sent a basket to every one of them, hoping that he’d find the right one and she’d call him?

  Or had he had her followed?

  The thought made her look over her shoulder. Maybe there was someone on the street now, watching her, wondering how she would react to this gift.

  She didn’t want to bring it inside, but she felt like she had no choice. She suddenly felt quite exposed on the porch.

  She picked up the basket by its beribboned handle and unlocked her door. Then she stepped inside, closed the door as her security firm had instructed her, and punched in her code. Her hands were shaking.

  On impulse, she reset the perimeter alarm. She hadn’t done that since she moved in, had thought it a silly precaution.

  It didn’t seem that silly any more.

  She set the basket on the deacons bench she had near the front door. Then she fumbled through the ribbon to find the card which she knew had to be there.

  Her name was on the envelope in calligraphed script, but the message inside was typed on the delivery service’s card.

  Two hearts, perfectly meshed.

  Two lives, perfectly twined.

  Is it luck that we have found each other?

  Or does Fate divine a way for perfect matches to meet?

  Those were her words. The stilted words of Quinn Ralston, the hero of her sixth novel, a man who finally learned to free the poetry locked in his soul.

  “God,” she whispered, so creeped out that her hands felt dirty just from touching the card. She picked up the basket and carried it to the back of the house, setting it in the entry way where she kept her bundled newspapers.

  She supposed most women would keep the chocolates, flowers, and wine even if they didn’t like the man who sent them. But she wasn’t most women. And the photograph bothered her more than she could say.

  She locked the interior door, then went to the kitchen and scrubbed her hands until they were raw.

  ***

  Somehow she managed to escape to the Juneau of her imagination, working furiously in her upstairs office, getting nearly fifteen pages done before dinner. Uncharacteristically, she closed the drapes, hiding the city view she had paid so much for. She didn’t want anyone looking in.

  She was cooking herself a taco salad out of Bite-sized Tostitos and bagged shredded lettuce when the phone rang, startling her. She went to answer it, and then some instinct convinced her not to. Instead, she went to her answering machine and turned up the sound.

  “Paige? If you’re there, please pick up. It’s Josiah.” He paused and she held her breath. She hadn’t given him this number. And Sally had said that morning that she hadn’t given Paige’s unlisted number to anyone. “Well, um, you’re probably working and can’t hear this.”

  A shiver ran through her. He knew she was home, then? Or was he guessing.

  “I just wanted to find out of you got my present. I have tickets to tomorrow night’s presentation of La Boheme. I know how much you love opera and this one in particular. They’re box seats. Hard to get. And perfect, just like you. Call me back.” He rattled off his phone number and then hung up.

  She stared at the machine, with its blinking red light. She hadn’t discussed the opera with him. She hadn’t discussed the opera with Sally either, after she found out that Sally hated “all that screeching.” Sally wouldn’t know La Boheme from Don Giovanni, and she certainly wouldn’t remember either well enough to mention to someone else.

  Well, maybe Paige’s problem was that she had been polite to him the night before. Maybe she should have left. She’d had this problem in the past—mostly in college. She’d always tried to be polite to men who were interested in her, even if she wasn’t interested in return. But sometimes, politeness merely encouraged them. Sometimes she had to be harsh just to send them away.

  Harsh or polite, she really didn’t want to talk to Josiah ever again. She would ignore the call, and hope that he would forget her. Most men understood a lack of response. They knew it for the brush-off it was.

  If he managed to run into her, she would just apologize and give him the You’re Very Nice I’m Sure You’ll Meet Someone Special Someday speech. That one worked every time.

  Somehow, having a plan calmed her. She finished cooking the beef for her taco salad and took it to the butcher block table in the center of her kitchen. There she opened the latest copy of Publisher’s Weekly and read it while she ate.

  ***

  During the next week, she got fifteen bouquets of flowers, each one an arrangement described in her books. Her plan wasn’t working. She hadn’t run into Josiah, but she didn’t answer his phone calls. He didn’t seem to understand the brush off. He would call two or three times a day to leave messages on her machine, and once an hour, he would call and hang up. Sometimes she found herself standing over the Caller ID box, fists clenched.

  All of this made work impossible. When the phone rang, she listened for his voice. When it wasn’t him, she scrambled to pick up, her concentration broken.

  In addition to the bouquets, he had taken to sending her cards and writing her long e-mails, sometimes mimicking the language of the men in her novels.

  Finally, she called Sally and explained what was going on.

  “I’m sorry,” Sally said. “I had no idea he was like this.”

  Paige sighed heavily. She was beginning to feel trapped in the house. “You started this. What do you recommend?”

  “I don’t know,” Sally said. “I’d offer to call him, but I don’t think he’ll listen to me. This sounds sick.”

  “Yeah,” Paige said. “That’s what I’m thinking.”

  “Maybe you should go to the police.”

  Paige felt cold. The police. If she went to them, it would be an acknowledgement that this had become serious.

  “Maybe,” she said, but she hoped she wouldn’t have to.

  ***

  Looking back on it, she realized she might have continued enduring if it weren’t for the incident at the grocery store. She had been leaving the house, always wondering if someone was watching her, and then deciding that she was being just a bit too paranoid. But the fact that Josiah showed up in the grocery store a few moments after she arrived, pushing no grocery cart and dressed exactly like Maximilian D. Lake from Love at 37,000 Feet was no coincidence.

  He wore a new brown leather bomber jacket, aviation sunglasses, khakis and a white scarf. When he saw her in the produce aisle, he whipped the sunglasses off with an affected air.

  “Paige, darling! I’ve been worried about you.” His eyes were even more intense that she remembered, and this time they were green, just like Maximilian Lake’s.

  “Josiah,” she said, amazed at how calm she sounded. Her heart was pounding and her stomach was churning. He had her trapped – her cart was between the tomato and asparagus aisles. Behind her, the water jets, set to mist the produce every five minutes, kicked on.

  “You have no idea how concerned I’ve been,” he said, taking a step closer. She backed toward the onions. “When a person lives alone, works alone, and doesn’t answer her phone, well, anything could be wrong.”

  Was that a threat? She couldn’t tell. She made herself smile at him. “There’s no need to worry about me. There are people checking on me all the time.”

  “Really?” He raised a single eyebrow, something she’d often described in her novels, but never actually seen in person. He probably knew that no one came to her house without an inv
itation. He seemed to know everything else.

  She gripped the handle on her shopping cart firmly. “I’m glad I ran into you. I’ve been wanting to tell you something.”

  His face lit up, a look that would have been attractive if it weren’t so needy. “You have?”

  She nodded. Now was the time, her best and only chance. She pushed the cart forward just a little, so that he had to move aside. He seemed to think she was doing it to get closer to him. She was doing it so that she’d be able to get away.

  “I really appreciate all the trouble you went to for dinner,” she said. “It was one of the most memorable—”

  “Our entire life could be like that,” he said quickly. “An adventure every day, just like your books.”

  She had to concentrate to keep that smile on her face. “Writers write about adventure, Josiah, because we really don’t want to go out and experience it ourselves.”

  He laughed. It sounded forced. “I’m sure Papa Hemingway is spinning in his grave. You are such a kidder, Paige.”

  “I’m not kidding,” she said. “You’re a very nice man, Josiah, but—”

  “A nice man?” He took a step toward her, his face suddenly red. “A nice man? The only men who get described that way in your books are the losers, the ones the heroine wants to let down easy.”

  She let the words hang between them for a moment. And then she said, “I’m sorry.”

  He stared at her as if she had hit him. She pushed the cart passed him, resisting the impulse to run. She was rounding the corner into the meat aisle when she heard him say, “You bitch!”

  Her hands started trembling then, and she couldn’t read her list. But she had to. He wouldn’t run her out of here. Then he’d realize just how scared she was.

  He was coming up behind her. “You can’t do this, Paige. You know how good we are together. You know.”

  She turned around, leaned against her cart and prayed silently for strength. “Josiah, we had one date, and it wasn’t very good. Now please, leave me alone.”

  A store employee was watching from the corner of the aisle. The butcher had looked up through the window in the back.

  Josiah grabbed her wrist so hard that she could feel his fingers digging into her skin. “I’ll make you remember. I’ll make you—”

  “Are you all right, miss?” The store employee had stepped to her side.

  “No,” she said. “He’s hurting me.”

  “This is none of your business,” Josiah said. “She’s my girlfriend.”

  “I don’t know him,” Paige said.

  The employee had taken Josiah’s arm. Other employees were coming from various parts of the store. He must have given them a signal. Some of the customers were gathering too.

  “Sir, we’re going to have to ask you to leave,” the employee said.

  “You have no right.”

  “We have every right, sir,” the employee said. “Now let the lady go.”

  Josiah stared at him for a moment, then at the other customers. Store security had joined them.

  “Paige,” Josiah said, “tell them how much you love me. Tell them that we were meant to be together.”

  “I don’t know you,” she said, and this time her words seemed to get through. He let go of her arm and allowed the employee to pull him away.

  She collapsed against her cart in relief, and the store manager, a middle-aged man with a nice face, asked her if she needed to sit down. She nodded. He led her to the back of the store, past the cans that were being recycled and the gray refrigeration units to a tiny office filled with red signs about customer service.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m so sorry.”

  “Why?” The manager pulled over a metal folding chair and helped her into it. Then he sat behind the desk. “It seemed like he was harassing you. Who is he?”

  “I don’t really know.” She was still shaking. “A friend set us up on a blind date, and he hasn’t left me alone since.”

  “Some friend,” the manager said. His phone beeped, and he answered it. He spoke for a moment, his words soft. She didn’t listen. She was staring at her wrist. Josiah’s fingers had left marks.

  Then the manager hung up. “He’s gone. Our man took his license number and he’s been forbidden to come into the store again. That’s all we can do.”

  “Thank you,” she said.

  The manager frowned. He was looking at her bruised wrist as well. “You know guys like him don’t back down.”

  “I’m beginning to realize that,” she said.

  ***

  And that was how she found herself parking her grocery-stuffed car in front of the local precinct. It was a gray cinderblock building built in the late 1960s with reinforced windows and a steel door. Somehow it did not inspire confidence.

  She went inside anyway. The front hallway was narrow, and obviously redesigned. A steel door stood to her right and to her left was a window made of bullet-proof glass. Behind it sat a man in a police uniform.

  She stepped up to the window. He finished typing something into a computer before speaking to her. “What?”

  “I’d like to file a complaint.”

  “I’ll buzz you in. Take the second door to your right. Someone there’ll help you.”

  “Thanks,” she said, but her voice was lost in the electronic buzz that filled the narrow hallway. She opened the door and found herself in the original corridor, filled with blond wood and doors with windows. Very sixties, very unsafe. She shook her head slightly, opened the second door, and stepped inside.

  She entered a large room filled with desks. It smelled of burned coffee and mold. Most of the desks were empty, although on most of them, the desk lamps were on, revealing piles of papers and files. Black phones as old as the building sat on each desk, and she was startled to see that typewriters outnumbered computers.

  There were only a handful of people in the room, most of them bent over their files, looking frustrated. A man with salt and pepper hair was carrying a cup of coffee back to his desk. He didn’t look like any sort of police detective she’d imagined. He was squarely built and seemed rather ordinary.

  When he saw her, he said, “Help you?”

  “I want to file a complaint.”

  “Come with me.” His deep voice was cracked and hoarse, as if he had been shouting all day.

  He led her to a small desk in the center of the room. Most of the desks were pushed together facing each other, but this one stood alone. And it had a computer, screen showing the SFPD logo.

  “I’m Detective Conover. How can I help you, Miss…?”

  “Paige Racette.” Her voice sounded small in the large room.

  He kicked a scarred wooden chair toward her. “What’s your complaint?”

  She sat down slowly, her heart pounding. “I’m being harassed.”

  “Harassed?”

  “Stalked.”

  He looked at her straight on, then, and she thought she saw a world-weariness in his brown eyes. His entire face was rumpled, like a coat that had been balled up and left in the bottom of a closet. It wasn’t a handsome face by any definition, but it had a comfortable quality, a trustworthy quality, that was built into the lines.

  “Tell me about it,” he said.

  So she did. She started with the blind date, talked about how strange Josiah was, and how he wouldn’t leave her alone.

  “And he was taking things out of my novels like I would appreciate it. It really upset me.”

  “Novels?” It was the first time Conover had interrupted her.

  She nodded. “I write romances.”

  “And are you published?”

  The question startled her. Usually when she mentioned her name people recognized it. They always recognized it after she said she wrote romances.

  “Yes,” she said.

  “So you were hoisted on your own petard, aren’t you?”

  “Excuse me?”

  “You write about your sexual fantasie
s for a living, and then complain when someone is trying to take you up on it.” He said that so deadpan, so seriously, that for a moment, she couldn’t breathe.

  “It’s not like that,” she said.

  “Oh? It’s advertising, lady.”

  She was shaking again. She had known this was a bad idea. Why would she expect sympathy from the police? “So since Donald Westlake writes about thieves, he shouldn’t complain if he gets robbed? Or Stephen King shouldn’t be upset if someone break his ankle with a sledgehammer?”

  “Touchy,” the detective said, but she noticed a twinkle in his eye that hadn’t been there before.

  She actually counted to ten, silently, before responding. She hadn’t done that since she was a little girl. Then she said, as calmly as she could, “You baited me on purpose.”

  He grinned—and it smoothed out the care lines in his face, enhancing the twinkle in his eye and, for a moment, making him breathlessly attractive.

  “There are a lot of celebrities in this town, Ms. Racette. It’s hard for the lesser ones to get noticed. Sometimes they’ll stage some sort of crime for publicity’s sake. And really, what would be better than a romance writer being romanced by a fan who was using the structure of her books to do it?”

  She wasn’t sure what she objected to the most, being called a minor celebrity, being branded as a publicity hound, or finding this outrageous man attractive, even for a moment.

  “I don’t like attention,” she said slowly. “If I liked attention, I would have chosen a different career. I hate book signings and television interviews, and I certainly don’t want a word of this mess breathed to the press.”

  “So far so good,” he said. She couldn’t tell if he believed her, still. But she was amusing him. And that really pissed her off.

  She held up her wrist. “He did this.”

  The smile left Conover’s face. He took her hand gently in his own and extended it, examining the bruises as if they were clues. “When?”

  “About an hour ago. At San Francisco Produce.” She flushed saying the name of the grocery store. It was upscale and trendy, precisely the place a “celebrity” would shop.