The Worst Romance Novel Ever Written by H. M. Mann Page B

plucked or trimmed those scraggly, dark strings hanging down from his nostrils to his upper lip, but not this scum-sucking, manly, mannish pig. Thais knew at that moment that Gunn was the most manly, mannish man ever created since the beginning of time. She knew that her destiny was to bear him a child whom she would nickname Sparky in thirty-four months.
    “ Oh, you poor, poor, poor, poor, dear,” Thais said, her words dripping carelessly with careful amounts of caring care. “Are you okay?”
    “ No,” Gunn said while licking alcohol-thinned blood and Cuban cigar debris from his lips. He, too, decided that Thais was his real soul mate based on the size of her gun, the ruggedness of her police-issue trousers bulging with ammunition, and her silly little laugh. “Can you, can you heal me, oh fair one with the large gun, rugged pants, and silly little laugh? Will you, will you heal me, you who should be Miss America provided you say politically correct things in all your answers to the judges even if your answers are against everything you believe in?”
    Thais’s face melted into that soft and caring face women use whenever they hold a newborn baby, kitten, puppy, or new pair of shoes to add to the thousand and five pairs overflowing their closets, most of these shoes worn once with an outfit that has since gone out of style everywhere but The View.
    “ I can sure try,” Thais said with care dripping from her silly little voice onto his lap and forming a puddle of caring goo. “But you want me to heal you? How can you know that I’m the one? I never went to medical school, though I wanted to. I faint at the sight of blood anyway. I’ve always been that way. I’d skin my knee, see the blood, and pow! Right over onto my noggin and bleeding worse than before. Scraped off many an eyebrow in my day, I have. And don’t even get me started about scabs, especially the oozing ones that look like dried up frogs. But … how do you know that I’m your one and only?”
    Gunn chewed on his cigar, reduced after twelve hours and a major collision to a saliva-filled thumb of Cuban tobacco. “You had me at scum-sucking pig.”
    Thais’s eyes misted up, and she said so sweetly, “That is so sweet.”
    “ I know it is,” Gunn said with a knowing air. “It’s why I said it. I say sweet things so you don’t think I’m completely an incorrigible rogue. I say sweet things because I do have a soft side and a rare tea cozy collection. I say sweet things to get you romantically interested in me because otherwise you would arrest me and throw away the key. Look, I have to pee because of the thirteen Tom Collins I just drank before washing them down with a bottle of Johnny Walker Red, so if you don’t mind …”
    Thais marveled at Gunn’s ability to drink and to be able to converse after he should have been brain dead hours ago.
    “ Oh,” Gunn added brokenly, “and I think my leg’s broken.”
    “ You have another one,” Thais said with a silly little womanly giggle.
    So wise, this woman, Gunn thought. She is a femme fatale, a beautiful, siren-like woman capable of destroying a man’s soul and life by making him feel bad, confused, and infatuated all at the same time. She’s like a dame in a Bogart movie, but not the one with that decrepit boat and all those Germans. You know, a Bogart movie with the dame who shows up at the detective’s office flashing her gams wrapped in black market nylons, and she turns out to be really, really evil and really, really beautiful at the same time, kind of like Queen Elizabeth I, who wasn’t actually that pretty, but if you wanted to keep your royal artist’s gig, you had to paint her beautifully or she’d chop your fool head off in front of a cheering crowd of English soccer fans and other theologians.
    Thais was like that, the yin to his yang, the dark to his light, the snap, crackle, and pop to his Rice Krispies, a real woman who put on her police-issue trousers one leg at a