REUNION

By

Kimberly Zant

© copyright January 2006, Kimberly Zant

Cover art by Kat Richards, © copyright January 2006

ISBN 1-58608-815-7

New Concepts Publishing

Lake Park, GA 31636

www.newconceptspublishing.com

This is a work of fiction. All characters, events, and places are of the author’s imagination and not to be confused with fact. Any resemblance to living persons or events is merely coincidence.

Chapter One

I’d been torturing myself with the letter lying like a live coal on my hall table for almost a week. I tried to convince myself I’d forgotten all about it, but every time I passed that table coming or going, my gaze lit on that letter again.

My fifteenth year class reunion was coming up. I hadn’t been back to that awful little town since I’d graduated because I’d really grown to hate pretty much everything about it in the five years I’d spent there.

The town had one redeeming quality, though. His name was Heath.

I grew warm and tingly in all my special places even thinking the name.

How could one male have all that much animal attraction, I wondered irritably, especially all these many years later?

He was probably fat, bald, and divorced with three children.

Even though I knew that, statistically speaking, I was probably right, telling myself that made no difference at all. I continued to picture him in my mind as I’d last seen him--looking like some dark, dangerous hero that had just stepped out of the pages of Wuthering Heights.

I’d always imagined him as Heathcliff even though, aside from having that tall, dark and dangerous look going on for him, there wasn’t exactly a lot of similarity otherwise. My Heath was an only son and from a very well-to-do family, captain of the football team, honor student, voted most likely to succeed, most popular, etc., etc., ad nauseam.

The trouble was I couldn’t even hate him for being Mr. Perfect. He’d always worked on presenting the world with a macho, cocky attitude, but I could see right through that. He wasn’t nearly as cocky as he had every right to be considering his looks, his intelligence, and his pedigree.

I supposed that was because his mother had died when he was barely twelve.

He’d never been quite the same after that and I had burned to nurture and comfort him even before I’d gotten to the stage of burning to jump his bones.

I was actually surprised that they’d bothered to send me an invitation to the reunion. As far as I could tell I’d been the invisible girl throughout high school--which beat the hell out of being the butt of every joker and bully--but that hadn’t done a thing for an ego already suffering from the red hair and freckles some really sick deity had deigned to bestow upon me.

Ok, so they had called me stick, because I was skinny, but they’d discovered very quickly that I had the cliché temper to go with the red hair and although they’d called me berserker after I beat the shit out the boy that was tormenting me and got expelled for a month, they only whispered it behind my back and everyone seemed to prefer to just ignore me.

I preferred that, too, for the most part.

So, they’d either sent me the invite because they’d forgotten who I was and I was on the list, or because they were dying to see if I still looked like shit, or because they figured I wouldn’t go anyway.

I didn’t have any intention of going.

It had nothing to do with any anxiety about not stacking up. I was inclined to think I looked pretty damned good. I had to work like hell at it, but I wasn’t an eye sore. I was fairly successful--I wasn’t on welfare anyway. And I had actually been married. I wasn’t anymore and hadn’t taken his name, but I could still officially declare myself marriageable. It had lasted almost ten years, too.

OK six, but that was on the backside of five so I figured I could round it up. It sounded better. Of course we’d only actually lived together for three of those six years, but, officially, it was six.

So I could talk about my ex if I went and anybody actually spoke to me. And I was a business woman. Nobody would know that it was just a one woman operation that took up the front parlor of the tiny Victorian house I’d bullied my ex-husband into buying with me and restoring.

It was actually the house that was our downfall.

We hadn’t grown together while we were restoring it. We’d begun to fight like cats and dogs and continued to do so until he’d dumped my dream home into my lap and moved on to a cookie cutter apartment that had running water on command and a mealy mouthed female barely out of kindergarten who was afraid to move without his permission and, I suspected, got his consent before she even took a dump.

Spineless women made me ill. I didn’t know which was worse, the ones that truly were total cowards, or the ones who smiled complacently and called themselves ‘old fashioned,’ meaning they never took responsibility for anything but actually ruled the roost through torture by whining, begging, and weeping whenever they didn’t get their way.

In spite of all the time I spent trying to reason with myself, and all the time I spent trying to convince myself I wasn’t even interested enough to remember, I found myself making travel arrangements a full week before the damned reunion.

It was Heath.

I hadn’t thought about him, much, over the intervening years, but he’d gotten under my skin and stayed there. An exorcism had to be performed to rid myself of the demons.

I was going. If he had a wife and kids in tow, I’d call it a day.

If he was single, I was going to nail him--whatever he looked like now. The worse, the better, as far as I was concerned. A three day weekend was planned. With any luck, I’d have him by the second day and could be home the following day in time to rest up and get ready for another work week.

I would have to be a femme fatale--bold, reckless, and irresistible.

I could handle the bold and reckless part with no problem, and my ex could testify to fact that I was fatal in large doses. As for irresistible--I knew men. Free pussy was always irresistible and I was in luck, I had one.