Table of Contents
Legal Page
Title Page
Book Description
Dedication
Trademarks Acknowledgement
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
New Excerpt
About the Author
Publisher Page
A Totally Bound Publication
The Wrath of Dimple
ISBN # 978-1-78430-104-0
©Copyright Lucy Woodhull 2014
Cover Art by Posh Gosh ©Copyright July 2014
Edited by Sarah Smeaton
Totally Bound Publishing
This is a work of fiction. All characters, places and events are from the author’s imagination and should not be confused with fact. Any resemblance to persons, living or dead, events or places is purely coincidental.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced in any material form, whether by printing, photocopying, scanning or otherwise without the written permission of the publisher, Totally Bound Publishing.
Applications should be addressed in the first instance, in writing, to Totally Bound Publishing. Unauthorised or restricted acts in relation to this publication may result in civil proceedings and/or criminal prosecution.
The author and illustrator have asserted their respective rights under the Copyright Designs and Patents Acts 1988 (as amended) to be identified as the author of this book and illustrator of the artwork.
Published in 2014 by Totally Bound Publishing, Newland House, The Point, Weaver Road, Lincoln, LN6 3QN
Warning:
This book contains sexually explicit content which is only suitable for mature readers. This story has a heat rating of Totally Burning and a Sexometer of 3.
Samantha Lytton
THE WRATH OF DIMPLE
Lucy Woodhull
Book three in the Samantha Lytton series.
Unforgettable. That’s what she’s not.
Life is perfect for Samantha Lytton, big-screen superheroine. Her acting career flourishes, the bad guys from her past are in prison, and she’s married her true love, be-dimpled ex-thief Sam. Everything is so rosy and idyllic, it’s like a freaking princess movie. Well, an R-rated one. Nothing could mar Sam and Samantha’s fairy-tale romance!
Except the moment in the emergency room when Sam, his head cracked open, turns to his beloved wife and asks, “Who the hell are you?”
He’s suffering from…Samnesia! (At least he still laughs at Samantha’s stupid puns.) How on earth did that happen? If Samantha is going to live her very own soap opera, she’d choose an evil twin over amnesia any day.
Samantha needs every ounce of her courage to win her husband back before their enemies catch up to finish them both off. She thought their love was written in the stars, but it might just be scribbled on an Etch-A-Sketch.
Dedication
To my father, who taught me to “walk this way,” just like Igor.
But no, Dad, we don’t want to watch Top Gun again!
Trademarks Acknowledgement
The author acknowledges the trademarked status and trademark owners of the following wordmarks mentioned in this work of fiction:
Etch-A-Sketch: The Ohio Art Company
Ghostbusters: Columbia Pictures Industries, Inc.
Xanadu: Jeffrey ‘Jeff’ Lynne
Jessica Rabbit: Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures
Xanax: Pfizer, Inc.
Star Wars: George Lucas
Variety: PMC
Starbucks: Starbucks Corporation
Google: Google, Inc.
iPad: Apple, Inc.
YouTube: Google, Inc.
Hobbit: J. R. R. Tolkien
Lord of the Rings: J. R. R. Tolkien
Jacuzzi: Jacuzzi Hot Tubs, Inc.
Rocky Balboa: United Artists
Mulder and Scully (X-files): Ten Thirteen Productions; 20th Century Fox Television, Inc.
Queequeg (X-Files): Ten Thirteen Productions; 20th Century Fox Television, Inc.
People’s Choice Awards: CBS
Scooby Snack (Scooby Doo): Hanna-Barbera Productions, Inc.
Austin Healey 3000 Mark II Roadster: Austin Healey
Hummer: General Motors Company
New York Post: News Corporation
Cleopatra: Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation
KFC: Yum! Brands, Inc.
Cheez-Its: Kellogg's
Good Housekeeping: Hearst Corporation
Ab Fab: French and Saunders Production; British Broadcasting Corporation
Indiana Jones: Paramount Pictures Corporation
My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic: Hasbro Studios
Wile E. Coyote (Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies): Warner Bros. Entertainment Inc.Warner Bros. Pictures
Ovaltine: Associated British Foods plc
The Outlaw: Howard Hughes Production
Scandal: ABC Studios; ShondaLand; Disney–ABC Domestic Television
‘What Doesn’t Kill You Makes You Stronger’ (Stronger): Jörgen Elofsson, David Gamson, Greg Kurstin, Ali Tamposi
iTunes: Apple, Inc.
Apple: Apple, Inc.
Glamour: Condé Nast
Bugs Bunny (Looney Tunes): Warner Bros. Entertainment Inc.Warner Bros. Pictures
Benny Hill Show: Associated-Rediffusion Rediffusion, London; Thames Television; FremantleMedia Ltd.
Scooby Doo: Hanna-Barbera Productions, Inc.
Hulk: Marvel Comics
The Bodyguard: Warner Bros. Entertainment Inc. Warner Bros. Pictures
Amex: American Express Company
X-Men: Marvel Comics
Duane Reade: Duane Reade Inc.
The Simpsons: Gracie Films; 20th Century Fox Television, Inc.
Homer, Marge (The Simpsons): Gracie Films; 20th Century Fox Television, Inc.
Photoshop: Adobe Systems Incorporated
Sailor Moon: VIZ Media, LLC; The Incredible World of DiC; Cloverway Inc.
HBO: Time Warner Inc.
True Blood: HBO; Your Face Goes Here Entertainment
Twitter: Twitter, Inc.
Macy’s: Macy’s Inc.
The Princess and the Frog: Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures
Grease: Paramount Pictures Corporation
Harry Potter: J. K. Rowling
MTV Movie Awards: Viacom Media Networks
Kleenex: Kimberly-Clark Corporation
Jell-O: Kraft Foods Group, Inc.
Raiders of the Lost Ark: Paramount Pictures Corporation
Roger Rabbit: Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures
Hannibal: Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studios Inc.; Universal Pictures
Gumby: Clokey Productions; DreamWorks Classics
Pulitzer Prize: Columbia University in the City of New York
Chapel of Love: Jeff Barry, Ellie Greenwich and Phil Spector
Run the World:
Terius ‘The-Dream’ Nash and C. ‘Tricky’ Stewart
Earth Angel: Curtis Williams (credited); Jesse Belvin, Gaynel Hodge (uncredited)
Back to the Future: Universal Pictures
Eeyore: A. A. Milne
Love of a Lifetime: C.J. Snare and guitarist Bill Leverty
Don’t Trust the B---- in Apartment 23: Twentieth Television, Inc.
The Cosby Show: Viacom Inc.; Paramount Domestic Television
Rupaul’s Drag Race: World of Wonder Production Company; Passion Distribution
Barbie: Mattel
Botox: Allergan, Inc.
Kryptonite: DC Comics
Friends: Warner Bros. Television; National Broadcasting Company
Oscar: Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences
Tiffany: Tiffany & Company
Magic: John Farrar
Pottery Barn: Williams-Sonoma, Inc.
Lifetime: A&E Television Networks, LLC
MTA: Metropolitan Transportation Authority
Percocet: Actavis
Captain Kirk (Star Trek): CBS; Paramount Pictures Corporation
Miss Piggy (The Muppets): The Walt Disney Company
Delorean: DeLorean Motor Company
Dolce & Gabbana: Dolce & Gabbana S.r.l.
Barney (Barney & Friends): WNET
‘I carried a watermelon’ (Dirty Dancing): Vestron Picture
‘We Have Top Men Working On It Now’ (Raiders of the Lost Ark): Paramount Pictures Corporation
Chapter One
Wedded Blitz
You know those moments that are so surreal, so nightmarish, that it seems you’re trapped in a Lady GaGa video being forced to communicate with a spider wearing a dress made of bees, except you don’t speak spider or bee? Or GaGa for that matter. That’s what it felt like the day soon after New Year’s when I arrived at the hospital, my best friend Ellen clutching my cold, stiff fingers, to hear the terrifying news.
The tall doctor whipped off her no-nonsense glasses with one hand and held a chart with the other. “Ms Lytton, I’m Doctor Mehta,” she began in the grave voice one delivers spider-strewn news with, “I’m afraid your husband—Mr Ballitch?—is—”
“Dead!” yelled Ellen.
“Oh my God!” My knees buckled, and I collapsed into the chasm of horror that had suddenly replaced the floor.
“What? No!” The doc knelt down to my pathetic level.
I whipped my head up, hope flaring in my fluttering heart.
“Don’t worry—he’s just in a coma!” she finished with a smile.
They helped me into a plastic waiting room chair, and the doctor said more words to me about Sam. My brand new husband. We were supposed to leave for a honeymoon tomorrow, but now he’d experienced a ‘blow to the head’, had been ‘found in the street’, and lay in a coma—just a coma! No big whoop!—induced by the doctors to reduce swelling in his brain.
Damn it, I loved his brain. It was one of my favorite parts of him.
“His name is pronounced ‘Ball-itch’,” lied Ellen. The witness protection people had a wonderful sense of humor.
“So, it’s not a natural coma,” Ellen said to me in the faux-happy tone one might use with a deranged cat. She petted my hair. “It’s better, because the professionals are controlling it. Right, Doc?”
Dr Mehta made noncommittal utterings designed to not get herself sued when things took a catastrophic turn for the worse. I’m pretty sure that doctors nowadays refuse to verify anything whatsoever, including their own existence on this plane.
What she’d said finally began to seep into my synapses. No. No, no, no. Sam and I had a good life together now. No more criminals chasing. No more doubts nagging. And we had a cat. A beautiful black cat named Captain Taco. “I don’t want my Taco to be raised in a single-parent household.” The sobs came now like a tsunami.
Dr Mehta pursed her lips and stepped away from me and my wailing. “Do you need a sedative, Ms Lytton?” Her voice became softer, simpler. “Are you confused?”
My bestie waved her away and held me in her arms while I cried. The world had become a black hole, and its vast emptiness loomed on every side. I clung to Ellen, and she let me get mascara all over her cashmere sweater—that’s love. She cuddled me close for what seemed like hours, until my body was an empty, aching husk. It was like Jesus had punched me in the soul with a fist made of tanker trucks. I told Ellen that, and she said it sounded like a country song.
After the crying had trickled, and the dry heaves had stopped, Ellen rubbed my back. “The doc says you can see him in a little while. The neurologist is with him now.”
I pushed against Ellen’s shoulder and swiped at some of the snot on my face. “Why did you say it that way? ‘Dead!’ Like you just won the Sam-hating sweepstakes?”
Ellen had always disliked my ex-art thief, and not just because she didn’t enjoy penises in general.
“I mean, sure, I dreamed of this day,” Ellen began with a swish of her long, brown hair.
I fell over onto the bank of waiting room chairs.
“Don’t put your face on those! Or your hands. Ugh, Lytton, come here.”
She held me again and said, “I’m kidding, of course. I don’t want Sam to—”
I stiffened, and she didn’t repeat the horrible ‘d’ word.
“—be in a coma or anything else. I want him to continue screwing up your otherwise ideal life for decades to come.”
My life had been ideal for the last two years. My film career was amazeballs. I’d become a superhero with my own spoofy franchise—The Ovarian Hellion: The Sword of Cockmore. It had debuted this past summer with record-setting box office and fabulous reviews. Sam—now on the straight and narrow—and I had lived a blissful life free of criminals, men with guns and stolen art. I brought home the bacon, and he’d rediscovered the painting he’d given up long ago. And he was good. Damn good! Kind of in the Kandinsky or Pollack school—all strong lines, splatters, wild colors and passion. He would come to me from an afternoon of painting, covered in smudged rainbows and sauntering all sexy, frustrated artist-like…
Fresh tears sprang to my burning eye sockets. “He was trying to get a gallery show for the spring.” I slid back down, my muscles physically incapable of doing anything but twitch and regret.
Ellen let me lie there this time—she patted my hip and wondered aloud where the bar was.
After a couple of hours, during which I stared into space, and Ellen tried not to act bored by cracking dumb jokes at me, they finally let me see him. Hope and dread combined in my gut to form a confusing new emotion that felt like kittens bathed in sewer sludge.
I entered the white room full of whirring machines and nearly buckled again. Sam’s head was bandaged like Boris Karloff, his eyes framed by purple circles. The neurologist said he’d taken a blow from a blunt object to the medial cranial area, then landed in the street on his face not ten blocks from our apartment on the Upper East Side. I asked Dr Brains what the prognosis was, and he danced a soft-shoe, complete with spins— “Well, it’s difficult to say—we hope that there may be some, perhaps, improvement of a sort—but, of course, dying and/or death might occur. We’ll try to bring him out of the coma tomorrow—the apocalypse could happen is all I’m saying—no guarantees!”
I leaned over Sam, his beautiful hazel gaze shut away, giant tube things snaking out of his arm, his hair—what they hadn’t shaved—as pointy as my insides.
“I’m the only one who’s supposed to hit you, baby,” I said. I had a long history of accidentally assaulting Sam. Most of the time, he deserved it.
Dr Brains did not find the humor in my joke. He shot me a stare of alarm and took that moment to tell me the cops wanted to talk to me.
Cops. Hospitals. How many times had I performed this scene? I needed to start burning sage to chase away evil spirits. Wait, I lived in New York now—I needed some damn Ghostbusters to get rid of whatever demonic wraith prevented us from being great. I thought I’d left my Lifetim
e movie days behind me. I opened blockbusters now! But being a movie star didn’t stop the bad shit, it just helped the bad shit occur in a cushy, private room.
An Italian-looking older man shuffled in wearing a brown suit that I’m pretty sure was prized off Lenny Briscoe.
Right behind him followed, “Nicolette!” I cried.
Ellen ran to the room’s doorway but stopped in her tracks at a pointed eye-flick from her fiancée.
“Ellen, Samantha,” Detective Nicolette Fitzgerald said smoothly. “I’m sorry this has happened,” she said directly to me.
This, naturally, caused my tears to bubble up. Her brown gaze shined with sympathy, and I couldn’t believe that I’d be receiving the help of my—practically once removed or something—sister-in-law, the cop. She said, “This is Detective Pirelli, my partner. Joe, this is Ellen, my fiancée, and her friend, Samantha Lytton.”
“That cock and swords movie was hilarious,” Joe told me. “Made me want to run around in pajamas all day.”
The Ovarian Hellion wears a sensible outfit of pajamas and sneakers to fight injustice in, because she was written by a woman. I wished I had that outfit right now—it’s the uniform of everyone in a depression medicine commercial. “Thanks,” I said. “What the hell happened to him, Nicolette?”
Nicolette sighed. “Well, a passer-by found him around midnight, just lying in the street, bleeding from the head. The assailant left Sam’s wallet in his pants and didn’t appear to take anything. I have a feeling—”
She laid on feeling because she knew that Sam used to be an art thief. However, she couldn’t tell her partner that because Sam was in witness protection.
“I mean, I think this was personal.” She paused, almost didn’t shake her head, and asked, “Does Sam have any enemies?”
I laughed. She raised her eyebrows. I raised mine higher. A recounting of Sam’s enemies would take all day and require a chart.
What was I allowed to tell her in front of old Joe here? Before she’d arrived, I’d called Sam’s handler with the US Feds, but nobody had responded to tell me what the hell to say. “None that I know of currently,” was what I told Nicolette now. That was as safe an answer as any. I told them he’d gone out to an art opening last night, alone, as I’d had a date with Ellen for her final wedding dress fitting. We’d had a private appointment with one of Manhattan’s more snooty dress shops. My ass still had lip prints on it. When I’d gotten home, Sam hadn’t been back from the event yet. I’d begun worrying around one a.m. when he wouldn’t respond to texts. The cops had called at two.