Bad As She Wants to Be - Softcover

Bar Harbor, Maine

Summer 2003

The day Frannie Luttrell saved Marianne from drowning, she also fell in love with Dax Cordrey.

The whole thing played out in slow motion. A splash, a bloodcurdling scream, and everything stopped. No one moved. On the deck of the yacht anchored closest to the pier, people stood frozen.

Frannie stripped off her shorts and tee and dove off the pier. She didn't know that behind her, Dax had leapt into his speedboat to follow her; she was only aware of people pointing to where the girl had disappeared.

She didn't think -- she grabbed a deep breath and went down, immediately seeing the slack body of a slender girl descending toward bottom. Grasping the girl's arm, she pulled her hard and explosively up to the surface. As she broke, she heard a commanding voice -- "Here!" -- and a strong hand reached out to her and hauled the victim up into the motorboat.

She nearly fell on board next to the girl's limp body and felt for signs of life. There was no breath, no pulse, and she immediately began mouth-to-mouth resuscitation as if she were on auto-pilot.

The commanding voice was speaking into his cell phone. "Almost there," she heard him say through her panic. "They're on their way."

No breath, no breath -- but just as the boat veered toward the dock, the girl suddenly choked and spewed seawater. Frannie thought her heart would stop.

Only then did she look up at her savior, her hair bedraggled, her eyes tearing up, her mouth vulnerable. She wore no makeup, her face was burned and freckled, her bikini plastered to her slender, boyish body, and she looked right into his intense blue gaze -- and her heart stopped.

The rest was like snapshots in her memory: the EMTs carefully lifting the girl into the ambulance, the applause from onlookers, the heat of the sun on her wet skin, the fact she was barely dressed, him standing so close to her.

But most of all she remembered that he scared the hell out of her. She wasn't supposed to meet someone like him when she was seventeen and looked like hell. And he surely wasn't supposed to look like him either: tall, angular, elegant, not remotely handsome. Not anything she wanted or expected or needed now. Just him, strong and long and elusively magnetic, with a perfect mouth and that cool, assessing blue gaze that made her heart stop.

And then she became aware people were watching them. She remembered slanting an uncertain look at him. "I have to go."

His gaze flickered slightly. "Her name is Marianne Nyland." His voice was deep, rich, faintly accented. "She'll want to meet you."

"I'll -- meet you there then," she said, trying to sound nonchalant.

He vaulted onto the dock and held out his hand. She had to take it, though she didn't want to touch him. His grip was enfolding and warm; she felt as if she were melting into it, and that she never wanted to let go.

She stepped up and quickly relinquished his hand. Someone handed her a shirt and she bundled up, feeling suddenly exposed.

"What's your name?"

She froze. She just couldn't give him her plain-Jane name, she just couldn't. She needed a pseudonym fast -- something exotic, sexy, memorable, romantic -- everything she wasn't.

"F-Frankie," she stammered after a moment.

He absorbed that, sweeping her with another one of those looks. "I'm Dax. I'll drive you."

"I don't know you."

"You know the important things," he said cryptically. "Come on."

She did. She thought she did. But she didn't know that he drove a new $45,000 Mercedes, that he was the son of one of the elusive, exclusive summer scions, that he would kiss her and she wouldn't deny him, and that everything was going to change.

A girl's life was defined by lines: fine lines, hairlines, bikini lines, class lines, the tightrope line between being a good girl and a slut. But there was always a moment when the lines blurred and a good girl had to decide whether to toe the line, cross the line, or stay safe behind the line that guarded her virtue.

Frannie knew she'd pole vaulted over that line the moment she'd agreed to let Dax drive her to the hospital, and she didn't care.

When he stopped the car in the parking lot, and just sat looking at her as if he were wrestling with his better instincts...her bones melted.

"How old are you anyway?"

Shit. The chasm. "Eighteen," she lied.

He made a sound. "I think I need to kiss you."

The lines dissolved. Need was grown-up stuff.

If he had any reservations, they didn't matter. The tension had already escalated to the screaming point, and every cell in her body wanted him to touch her. Taste her. Want her.

She wasn't conscious of leaning toward him, but she felt him cup her cheek; she closed her eyes as his mouth touched hers gently at first, and then he became a marauding pirate; he probed her mouth deeply and her whole body turned to tallow: thick, rich, hot, moist, malleable, ready to mold him to her burgeoning desire.

This was beyond...anything -- any other guy, any other make out; this wasn't casual, he wasn't even touching her and she was nearly naked. His tongue...oh God...she was going to die from the pleasure of tasting him and those tangy little orgasmic darts piercing her everywhere --

He pulled away slowly, leaving the taste of him still in her mouth, and she opened her eyes and stared into his for what seemed like forever.

"Marianne..." he murmured, easing her away.

Oh.... Damn. She'd almost forgotten about Marianne in her consuming need for his mouth. The hell with Marianne. She didn't care if she ever met Marianne, for God's sake. Who the hell was Marianne, anyway? She leaned toward him again hungrily.

But he was already out his door and coming around to the passenger side to open hers.

She never forgot her first sight of Marianne. Marianne was absolutely beautiful, with thick blonde hair and doll-like features -- those deep-set cornflower blue eyes, that perfect translucent skin, those perfectly arched eyebrows, her perfect pink mouth, and a wand-thin body any model would kill for.

She was sitting up in bed, primping in a handheld mirror, when Dax knocked.

"Dax!" she greeted him joyfully.

"This is Frankie," Dax said, diverting the joy. "She pulled you out of the water."

Marianne looked at Frankie, then at Dax, and then at Frankie again, hard. "Oh -- oh! You're..."

"Frankie," she jumped in.

"Omigod -- I owe you my life!"

Frankie held up her hand. "Anyone would have done what I did."

"Anyone didn't," Dax said pointedly.

"I have to do something to thank her. Don't I, Dax?"

"If you must," Dax said, with a shrug.

"I'll think of something wonderful," Marianne said, slanting a scathing glance at Dax and then turning to Frankie. "Saving a life is not something that should be rewarded lightly. I'm perfectly aware of that, Dax."

"I never thought you weren't," Dax murmured, and Frankie wondered how the touch of irony in his voice utterly escaped Marianne.

But Marianne was still staring at Frankie. "You're not one of the gang."

"Hell no," Dax said. "They didn't have the balls. They just stared at their Ballys."

Marianne shot him another look, and then stared long and consideringly at Frankie. "I know what we're going to do. I'm going to take you over altogether, Frankie. Introduce you to everyone. Take you everywhere. All you have to do is give me your life for the next month, in exchange for your saving mine. How does that sound? Don't think. Just say yes."

How could she say no? Another line crossed, the wide unbridgeable line between the townies and the wealthy summer residents who ruled the harbor for three months of the year.

This, secretly, was the life Frankie yearned for -- where you called a cleaning service to open the house and paraded your limousine up Main Street to the family's fifteen-room summer cottage overlooking the harbor. Who wouldn't want to be one of them? They had the most fun, the best times. They did everything and anything they wanted, with little supervision and no constraints.

They were all decadently rich, like Marianne, who was the only child of parents who were the sole surviving progeny of either family. Her father had retired, she told Frankie, and was now a consultant on the board of the investment company his great-grandfather had founded. Which meant his name was still on the letterhead to assure the investors that a Nyland was still in charge while he watched the money roll in.

Frankie couldn't conceive of that kind of life, that much money, that much excess, that much anything. Which amazed Marianne, all of whose friends were that rich. "Well, you're going to live how the other half lives for the rest of this summer. That's the least I can do, for what you did."

Frankie didn't protest. She'd grown up in a rural town, not far from the harbor; she'd worked every summer since she was twelve, whether blueberry picking up north, mucking stables, or the counseling gig she'd had for the past two summers.

She didn't have clothes or connections. She barely had conversation. She could do a few athletic things well: swim, ice skate, ski. She had a passable game of tennis and she could ride, skills she wasn't willing to test with Marianne's set. She played a mean game of Ping-Pong, chess, and checkers, and she'd learned rudimentary chording so she could accompany songs on a guitar around a campfire.

Not real useful things in Marianne's world.

The next evening as she walked up the steps to the country club where Marianne had invited her to the dance, she felt like she was Cinderella and Marianne her fairy godmother.

"There will be a ticket for you at the door," Marianne had told her.

"Me? I don't even have a dress for a dance at a country club."

"Sure you do. I have enough dresses to outfit the whole town. I'll send my driver with a couple, then he can bring you up to the club when you're ready."

This was so beyond Fr...