Tall Tales and Wedding Veils by Jane Graves Page A

out to be everything she wasn’t: a hot single girl who’d had a whirlwind romance, lived it up, and was now moving on to her next adventure. For once in her life, that was who she wanted to be, not poor, plain, pitiful Heather who couldn’t get a man to save her life.
    Chapter 7

    A s they pulled into Tony’s apartment complex, Heather let out the breath she’d been holding. She’d felt uptight all the way there, wondering what she’d gotten herself into. What if he lived in a slum? What if criminals lived next door? What if she was going to be living someplace she wouldn’t even think of going after dark, or maybe even in the daytime?

    But this seemed okay. Red brick. Black shutters. Recent paint. Grounds well-kept. Late-model cars in the parking lot. It was nice. She could stay here. She could do this. Then she followed Tony into his apartment.

    How had a tornado trashed only his place without destroying the rest of the apartment complex?

    Newspapers were strewn on the sofa. A pair of tattered jeans and a shirt were thrown over the back of a dining room chair. Bills and ad circulars were scattered across the dining room table. A big plastic bowl sat on the coffee table, empty except for a few popcorn kernels in the bottom. An overflowing laundry basket sat on the floor beside the sofa, and she had no idea if its contents were clean or dirty. Possibly both.

    The fireplace was nice, with a raised hearth and a mantel inset with emerald green tile, but it looked as if it had never been used except as a place to stack old issues of
Hot Rod
and
Sports Illustrated.
The walls were empty. Nothing decorative. Nothing homey. No pictures, no photographs, no nothing.

    And the kitchen. She couldn’t see all of it from the living room, but she saw the trash can. The
overflowing
trash can. A little shiver of
ick
slithered down her spine.

    The only pristine thing she saw was a plasma TV the size of a Times Square billboard, which completed the picture to make Tony’s apartment every cliché of bachelorhood all rolled into one. Heather knew there had to be a decent apartment beneath all the mess, but it would take somebody with a hell of an imagination to see it, and she’d never been all that imaginative.

    “Nice place you’ve got here,” she told him.

    “Watch it. I know sarcasm when I hear it.” Tony wheeled his suitcase against a wall and smacked down the handle. “I like the ‘lived in’ look.”

    “Is that what this is?”

    “I should have known. You’re a neat freak, aren’t you?”

    “There’s nothing freaky about being neat.”

    “Other women who come here don’t seem to mind.”

    “Well, there’s a fetish I’ve never heard of. You sleep with blind women.”

    “They’re not looking at the décor,” he said with a smile. “They’re too busy looking at me.”

    Egomaniac.

    He grabbed her suitcase. “Come on. I’ll show you to the Presidential Suite.”

    He led her to his spare bedroom. Boxes were scattered everywhere. A beat-up dresser sat along one wall, and an orange plaid sofa the size of the
Titanic
sat along another. A neon Budweiser sign leaned against the sofa, its cord lying in a tangled heap. It looked as if a dorm room had exploded.

    “Well,” Heather said, “this is nice.”

    He shoved a few boxes aside. “I use this room for storage.”

    She looked into one of the boxes. It was full of
Sports Illustrated
annual swimsuit editions. “Yeah, you sure wouldn’t want to throw those away.”

    “I tried once,” Tony said with a sad shake of his head, “but then I pictured all those beautiful women facedown in a Dumpster, and I just couldn’t do it.”

    Heather started to suggest that maybe paper women wouldn’t care, only to realize there was a more pressing issue. “You didn’t tell me there was no bed.”

    “This is a sofa bed.”

    He nudged a few more boxes aside and opened it up to reveal a mattress that was a twisted-up orthopedic