Cover

It would be amusing to teach this man a lesson

Letter to Reader

Title Page

PROLOGUE

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

EPILOGUE

Teaser chapter

Copyright

It would be amusing to teach this man a lesson

“Perhaps I will have that drink after all,” Star said.

As she took the brimming glass from him, a few drops fell onto her skin. Laughing provocatively, she made to lick them off, and then, looking straight into his eyes, offered him her wrist instead and whispered suggestively, “You do it....”

To her chagrin, instead of taking up her sensual invitation, he produced a large white handkerchief and carefully dried her skin, telling her quietly, “I’m afraid it’s going to stay slightly sticky. Did any spill on your dress?”

“No, my dress is fine,” Star told him angrily, snatching her wrist away from him, her skin burning slightly with an emotion that she realized with shock was humiliation.

No man...no man had ever reacted to her like that...rejected her like that, and this one was certainly not going to be allowed to be the first.

Dear Reader,

What is more natural than a bride wanting her closest friends also to find happiness in love? For Sally, this means tricking three of her wedding guests into catching her bouquet! Three women, each very different, but each with their own reasons for never wanting to marry. That is why they agree to a pact to stay single, but just how long will it take for the bouquet to begin its magic?

Penny Jordan has worked her magic on these three linked stories. One of Harlequin’s most successful and popular authors, she has written three compelling romances—all complete stories in themselves—which follow the lives and loves of Claire, Poppy and Star. Too Wise to Wed? is Star’s story. She’s too cynical about marriage to want to marry, but a little bit of seduction would not go amiss!

THE BRIDE’S BOUQUET—three women make a

pact to stay single, but one by one they fall, seduced

by the power of love

Too Wise to Wed?

Penny Jordan

www.millsandboon.co.uk

PROLOGUE

ANOTHER wedding celebration. Star scowled as she studied the elegant invitation before throwing it onto her desk.

She was very tempted to make some excuse not to go—but if she did her friend Sally was bound to pounce on her absence as a sure indication that she, Star, was afraid that the old-fashioned superstition that Sally had practised on the occasion of her own wedding might have some potency to it after all.

Which was all nonsense of course. Just because the other two women who had caught Sally’s bridal bouquet along with her had within six months of Sally’s own wedding become brides themselves, it did not mean that she, Star, was going to fall into the same trap. No way. Not ever.

She scowled again, even more horribly this time. The fact that Poppy, the other bridesmaid at Sally’s wedding, had got married had not come as all that much of a surprise to Star, but the announcement that Sally’s stepmother had also married—just a small, private wedding—and was now holding a celebration party with her new husband for all his friends and relations in America... Uneasily, Star stared out of her study window. It so happened that business was taking her across to the States so she could, in fact, make it to the party, and if she didn’t go...

If she didn’t go Sally would tease her unmercifully about being afraid that there was something in that stupid, old-fashioned tradition that whoever caught the bride’s bouquet would be the next to marry.

But weddings were not her thing at all—she had only gone to Sally’s because Sally was her oldest and closest friend. After all, she had attended far too many of her father’s to have any faith any longer in the durability of the supposedly lifelong vows that people exchanged in the heat of their emotional and physical desire for one another, their compelling need to believe that those feelings would last for ever.

No, weddings, or parties to celebrate them, were quite definitely not her scene, and marriage even less so.

But, that being the case, what had she to fear in going to Claire’s party? Wasn’t she, her will, her determination, stronger than any foolish superstition? Of course she was, and, just to prove it, throwing open her window, Star took a deep breath and said firmly and loudly, ‘I am not going to fall in love. I am not going to get married. Not now. Not ever. So there.

‘Now,’ she muttered as she closed the window, ignoring the startled and slightly nervous glance of the elderly lady walking across the lawn in front of the apartment block, ‘do your worst, because, I promise you, it won’t make any difference to me and it certainly won’t change my mind. Nothing could. Nothing and no one.’

CHAPTER ONE

STAR surveyed the crowd of happy well-wishers surrounding the recently married couple with cynical contempt.

How many of those exclaiming enthusiastically about the happiness that lay ahead of Claire and Brad now that they were married could truthfully put their hands on their hearts and swear that their marriages, their permanent relationships, had truly enriched their lives, had truly made them happy?

If they’d known what she was thinking they would no doubt have questioned the ability of someone who had never been married and who was so vehemently and vocally opposed to any kind of emotional commitment to pronounce on the state of marriage at all, much less to criticise it, but Star believed that she had access to far more experience of what marriage actually was than most of them would be able to boast.

‘Star. Claire said you were going to be here.’ Silently Star suffered the enthusiastic hug of her oldest friend.

Sally’s voice voice muffled slightly by the thick, smooth, shiny sweep of Star’s dark red hair as she continued to hug her whilst telling her, ‘I’m so pleased about Ma and Brad, I just wish she wasn’t going to be living so far away. It was a wonderful idea of Brad’s family, wasn’t it, to organise this post-wedding gettogether and to invite us all over to share it?

‘Has Brad confirmed officially yet that you’re getting the PR contract for the British distribution side of things?’ Sally asked as she released her.

‘Not yet,’ Star told her calmly.

‘But you are going to get the contract,’ Sally insisted.

‘It looks likely,’ Star agreed sedately.

‘There’s only you left now,’ Sally teased her friend, changing tack. ‘Out of the three of you who caught my bouquet, two are now married, despite the vow that all of you made to stay single.’

Star gave a small, dismissive shrug.

‘It was inevitable that Poppy would marry James once she had got over her adolescent crush on Chris, and as for your stepmother...’ Star looked thoughtfully towards Claire, who was standing arm in arm with her new husband, her head inclined towards him as they exchanged a small, intimate smile.

‘You can stop looking at me like that,’ she warned Sally firmly. ‘I’m afraid I fully intend to be the exception to the rule, Sally. I intend to stay very firmly single and free of any kind of long-term emotional commitment.’

‘What if you fall in love?’ Sally probed spiritedly.

Star gave her a contemptuously bitter look.

‘Fall in love? You mean like my mother, who has fallen in love so many times that even she must have lost count, and who uses that state as an excuse for submerging herself and everyone close to her in a swamp of emotional chaos? Or were you meaning that I should, perhaps, follow my father’s example and show my “love” by begetting children whose existence becomes virtually forgotten when he moves on to a new love and a new commitment?’

‘Oh, Star,’ Sally protested remorsefully, reaching out to touch her friend’s slim, tanned wrist in a gesture of female sympathy. ‘I’m sorry. I—’

‘Don’t be,’ Star interrupted her crisply. ‘I’m not. In fact I’m grateful to both my parents for showing me reality rather than allowing me to believe in a false ideology. All right, so my parents might have taken to unconventional lengths the modern view that we each have a right to pursue our emotional happiness, no matter what the cost, but tell me honestly, Sally, how many couples you can name who remain genuinely happy in their relationships once the initial gloss has worn off.’

‘You’re such a cynic,’ Sally complained on a sigh.

‘No,’ Star punched back. ‘I’m a realist. I accept what, at heart, most women know but cannot allow themselves to accept—that the male human being is genetically programmed to spread his seed, his genes, just as far as he physically can, to impregnate as many women as he possibly can, and that is why he finds it biologically impossible to remain faithful to one woman.

‘And that is also why, in my opinion, if a woman wants to be happy she has to adopt his way of life, to enjoy herself sexually when it suits her and not him, to choose her sexual partners because they please her and to refrain from becoming emotionally involved with them, and to remember, if and when she chooses to have a child, that the chances are that she will be the sole emotional support to that child—!’

‘Oh, Star, that’s not fair,’ Sally interrupted her sadly, wincing when she saw the sardonic eyebrow that Star raised in silent mockery to her protest. ‘All right, I know that there are men like your... Men who do... Men who can’t be faithful to one woman,’ Sally agreed. ‘But not all men are like that.’

‘Aren’t they? But then you would say that, wouldn’t you?’ Star asked her grimly. ‘After all, you’ve got a vested interest in believing it, haven’t you?’ she added. ‘Speaking of which, how are things between you and Chris at the moment?’

‘They’re fine,’ Sally told her quickly.

Star knew her so well. Too well at times. Star knew how to get under her skin and pinpoint those small, tell-tale areas of vulnerability. She always had done and it didn’t even help Sally to remind herself that Star’s mode of defending herself and her own vulnerability was to go on the attack. Sally knew how much Star hated any reminders, any discussions about her emotional history, and how prone she was to fending them off by targeting her ‘attackers’ own weak points.

Not that her relationship with Chris was weak or under threat in any way, Sally hastily assured herself. It was true that just lately Chris had been working longer hours and away from home rather a lot, but...

Sally, suddenly realising that Star had switched her attention to someone else, turned round to see what had distracted her and was rather puzzled when she could see nothing out of the ordinary.

‘I must go,’ she told Star. ‘Chris will be wondering where I am.’

‘Mmm...’ Star agreed, steadily returning the appreciative interest of a man standing several yards away.

He had been watching her virtually all afternoon, despite his outward absorption in the woman clinging determinedly to his side.

She had two children with her, both of them petite and fair-haired like her. She was quite obviously their mother. Was he their father? Star gave a small shrug. What concern was that of hers?

She was not the kind of woman who deliberately made a play for another woman’s man, enjoying the challenge of taking from and competing with her own sex, but neither did she necessarily believe that it was up to her to be the guardian of someone else’s relationship.

As a young adult in her late teens and early twenties, she had gone through a phase of sexual experimentation with a variety of short-lived partners. But these days she was extremely choosy—too picky, in fact, or so she had been told—and she was very strict about adhering to a certain set of rules and standards that she had evolved for herself—not, perhaps, the same rules that society hypocritically pretended to live by, but she stuck to hers and they were important to her.

For a start, her partner had to have a clean bill of health and a willingness to prove it. And he certainly had to understand that all she intended to share with him was her sexual self.

She had no inhibitions or hang-ups about the physical side of her nature. Why should she have? If nature hadn’t intended a woman to enjoy sexual pleasure then she wouldn’t have equipped her with the means to do so, and, that being the case, it was more of a sin, in Star’s book, to deny herself that sexual pleasure than to enforce on herself a set of antiquated rules which had been imposed on women by men to preserve their own self-bestowed right to enjoy their sexuality whilst denying women the right to enjoy theirs.

Last but not least, her partner had to accept with good grace the fact that once the sexual excitement of their relationship had faded it was time for them both to move on, although not necessarily, in her case, to another lover.

These days she spent more time in bed alone than with someone else, and, if she was honest with herself, she had grown to prefer it that way.

When her father had walked out on her mother and she had witnessed the financial and emotional devastation that his absence had caused, despite her youth, she had made herself a vow that the same thing would never happen to her, that she would never allow herself to depend financially, or indeed in any way, on anyone other than herself, and that, unlike her mother, she would not keep on falling in love and remarrying in the forlorn hope of finding someone to fill the empty space in her life...in herself...

There were no empty spaces in her life or in her, Star had decided triumphantly three months ago when the arrival of her twenty-fifth birthday had prompted a mental stocktaking of her life.

‘Mom, I need the bathroom...’

Star frowned as her attention was abruptly refocused on the small family group that she had noticed earlier by the shrill, insistent voice of one of the children.

The man with them—their father, she assumed—was, she observed, more interested in catching her eye than acknowledging his wife’s attempt to capture his attention.

‘Clay, Ginny wants the bathroom,’ Star heard her telling him.

‘Then take her,’ he responded impatiently, shaking his head when the woman tried to insist that he went with them.

The look he gave Star as his wife gave in and walked away from him with their children across the lawn of Brad’s large family home—built on the shores of the lake around which lay the small American town where he and his family lived and to which he had brought his bride, Sally’s stepmother—was one she had seen in very many pairs of male eyes before his.

Barely waiting until his wife and children were out of sight, he started to make his way towards Star.

Star did nothing. She simply stood still, watching and waiting.

He was quite attractive, she decided judiciously, though not so attractive as he obviously believed, but then she quite enjoyed a certain amount of confidence in a man, as well as that very obvious streak of selfishness, provided he did not bring it to bed with him.

A selfish lover was not to her taste at all.

As he came towards her she did not, as another woman might have done, exhibit any self-consciousness. There was no need for her to raise flirtatious fingers to the silky dark red satin of her hair which today she was wearing loose over her shoulders in a smooth, polished, immaculate fall. Nor did she need to check any other details of her appearance or draw attention to her sensuality.

The simple silk and linen dress that she was wearing had been bought in Milan and it showed. It fitted the slender, elegant line of her body perfectly. That was to say, it merely hinted at the feminine curves that lay beneath it rather than hugging or emphasising them in the way that the dress worn by the woman who had been clinging so desperately and so unsuccessfully to the man’s side had done.

Star never wore clothes which drew attention to her sexuality—there had never been any need for her to do so—not even in bed, where the only thing she wanted next to her own skin was that of her lover.

Behind her she could still hear the querulous voice of the child and the equally irritated response of her mother.

Star’s make-up, like her hair and her perfume, was understated. Her father might not have given her his physical support or indeed his financial support during her childhood, but he had given her his excellent bone structure, and by his absence he had also given her the opportunity to witness, at first hand, the folly of trying too hard to please his sex.

Not that she would ever have been tempted to try to appeal to this particular specimen of it, she decided, abruptly changing her mind about her admirer’s potential as she observed the smug satisfaction in his eyes—and the lack of humour or intelligence. She might not want to form any kind of permanent or emotional bond with a lover but she enjoyed the spine-tingling ritual of foreplay as much as any other woman, especially when it was spiced with intelligent conversation and laughter.

As she broke eye contact with him with a coolly dismissive look that told him he was wasting his time, she realised that she could still hear the whiny voice of the child behind her and her mother’s reproach as she demanded, ‘Oh, Ginny, why did you say you wanted the. bathroom if you don’t? Your father... Oh...’

Star frowned as the woman’s tone of voice changed, all its former irritation and lethargy replaced by an almost breathless note of sexual excitement and warmth as she exclaimed, ‘Oh, Kyle! Where did you come from? I didn’t see you. Clay is—’

‘I know where Clay is. I’ve seen him,’ Star heard a coolly incisive male voice interrupting, and she could tell from the way he drawled the words that he knew exactly what Clay had been doing and, moreover, did not approve.

The voice sounded interesting but the man, Star suspected, who not really her type. He sounded far too disapproving and moralistic.

She was just about to walk away and refill her glass with the rather good champagne cocktail that she had been enjoying when a purposeful quartet comprising the two adults she had just heard talking plus the two children—or, rather, a slightly uncertain trio shepherded by an extremely large and very determined sheepdog in the form of a man who would normally have caused her more than a single heartbeat’s recognition of his masculine appeal—crossed her line of vision heading towards the man who had just been trying to attract her attention.

There was really no comparison between the two men, Star decided. Clay now looked sulkily, almost seedily unappealing as he ignored his wife’s outstretched hand and frowned impatiently down at his two children, whilst the man who had sounded so determined to remind him of his marital and parental status looked...

He looked like the very best kind of sexy American male, Star admitted to herself.

Tall, lithe in the way he moved, he had a sheen of good health on his thick, well-cut dark brown hair and on his forearms where his flesh was exposed by the short sleeves of his snowy-white T-shirt.

She didn’t miss, either, the brief glance he gave her as he restored and reunited the small family group—a look which told her how thoroughly he disapproved of what had been going on.

In a flash, the automatic flare of sexual awareness she had felt was submerged by a much stronger flare of resentful anger as she recognised what he was doing. The fact that she herself had already decided that she wasn’t remotely interested in the sexual invitation being handed out to her was forgotten as she rose to the challenge of his interference.

Just what the hell did he think he was doing? Star asked herself wrathfully. She had a deeply rooted resentment of other people trying to make her decisions for her, to control her life for her, especially her sex life, and if he thought for one moment that if she’d really been interested in Clay she would have allowed him or that theatrical piece of byplay of his to stop her...

Frowning, she started to turn away, shrugging aside her irritation.

It wasn’t like her to let anyone get under her skin so easily, especially a male anyone...and especially a male anyone whom she didn’t even know and with whom she had barely exchanged more than one assessing glance.

Her frown deepening at the realization that she’d let herself waste time thinking about a man whom she was hardly likely to see again, Star was startled when the subject of her thoughts suddenly appeared in front of her, blocking her path.

Star focused cool aquamarine eyes on him without smiling.

‘We haven’t been introduced yet,’ he began, smiling at her.

His teeth, Star was surprised to see, did not possess the uniform perfection that she had grown used to seeing in American adults. In fact, one of the front ones had a small but very definite chip in it. His smile was slightly lopsided as well, making him look vaguely boyish—something which might appeal to those members of her sex who enjoyed having someone to mother, Star decided scathingly, but she personally preferred her men to be totally and uncompromisingly adult, thank you very much.

‘No, we haven’t, have we?’ she agreed in answer to his comment, with a pointed and wholly unfriendly baring of her teeth, but as she made to sidestep him he stepped with her, still blocking her path.

Star stepped the other way and again he followed her.

‘You’re in my way,’ she told him sharply.

‘Your glass is empty,’ he commented, ignoring both her comment and her hauteur. ‘Let me get you another drink.’

‘Thank you, I can get my own drinks and anything else I feel I might need,’ Star told him evenly.

To her surprise, instead of being offended, he laughed.

‘Ah, you’re annoyed with me over Clay,’ he said, knowingly shaking his head as he added, ‘I’m sorry about that, but you would have been rather disappointed. He isn’t—’

‘Really? You certainly are a very perceptive man,’ Star marvelled sarcastically, ‘if one look is all it takes for you to know immediately exactly what another person wants.’

‘He’s a married man,’ he returned quietly, the good humour dying from his eyes. His eyes were a very deep, dense blue, shaded by thick dark blunt lashes which, for some odd reason, Star felt compulsively tempted to reach out and touch to see if they felt as soft as they looked.

‘Yes, I rather assumed he was,’ Star agreed. ‘Which was what attracted me to him in the first place,’ she added with blithe disregard for the truth. No one, but no one had the right to make her decisions for her and she was determined to make sure that this interfering would-be knight in shining armour was made aware of that fact.

‘Married men make by far the best lovers,’ she went on in deliberate provocation. ‘They’re normally so grateful to have a receptive, responsive woman in their bed after being frozen out sexually by their wives that they’ re only too willing to please, and, of course, once the fun is over you can send them home.’

‘Fun? You think of sex as fun—something recreational like baseball?’ he questioned sharply.

‘Yes,’ Star agreed, pleased to have pierced the armour of quiet self-assurance that he seemed to wear so easily and so irritatingly.

‘Don’t you?’ she challenged him mockingly.

‘No,’ he retorted immediately, ‘I don’t. So far as I am concerned, sex without emotion, without love, without all the things that bond two people together, is like a flower without perfume, initially appealing but on closer inspection a disappointment.’

‘That depends, surely, on your outlook?’ Star argued, adding when he looked questioningly at her, ‘On whether or not you want your flower to be perfumed. Some people don’t; some people are allergic to perfume.’

Trust her, she was thinking ruefully. Outwardly this man, whoever he was, had all the male attributes that most appealed to her. Pity that he’d had to go and spoil it all by opening his mouth and voicing his opinions. An amusing thought suddenly occurred to her, making her eyes sparkle warningly. He deserved to be punished a little for his interference and his high-handed, moralistic manner and she certainly deserved to have a little fun.

She couldn’t remember the last time she had devoted her energy to anything other than her work. Her last relationship had been over for—Oh... She was startled to realise that it was almost two years since she had told Jean Paul that their long distance affair was over.

She had been celibate for two years! Amazing... Oh, yes, it was high time she had some fun.

So he didn’t believe in sex without emotion, did he? Well, she didn’t believe him. No doubt he found it a good line with which to blind other women to the truth, but she was not like other women. No man really wanted commitment... No man really wanted a woman’s lifelong love. Oh, he might tell you he did at the start of a relationship, but sooner or later- he would revert to type—to want the challenge of someone fresh, someone new. Star had seen it happen so many, many times.

Yes, it would be amusing to teach this man a lesson, to let him believe that he had deceived her with his insincerity, and even more amusing to bring him to the point where he was forced to admit just how good sex could be—for its own sake—and she would make him admit it; Star was determined on that point.

‘It’s normally my sex who express those particular views,’ she told him, letting her voice soften and become slightly husky, her eyes sending deliberately sensual messages to his as she played with her empty glass. Then she breathed, ‘Perhaps I will have that drink after all.’

It never mattered how blatant you were or how insincere, Star reflected grimly as he fell into step beside her, guiding her through the crowd to a hovering waiter with a full tray of freshly poured cocktails. Men fell for it every time, greedily swallowing bait that surely in reality should have choked them.

There hadn’t been a man born yet whose sexual ego didn’t outweigh his brains, she decided as she accepted the full glass he was handing to her..

As she took the brimming glass from him a few drops fell onto her skin. Laughing provocatively, she made to lick them off, and then, looking straight into his eyes, offered him her wrist instead and whispered suggestively, ‘You do it...’

To her chagrin, instead of taking up her sensual invitation, he produced a large white handkerchief and carefully dried her skin, telling her quietly, ‘I’m afraid it’s going to stay slightly sticky. Did any spill on your dress? It might—’

‘No, my dress is fine,’ Star told him angrily, snatching her wrist away from him, her skin burning slightly with an emotion that she realised with shock was humiliation.

No man...no man had ever reacted to her like that...rejected her like that, and this one was certainly not going to be allowed to be the first.

Stifling her pride and staying where she was instead of turning on her heel and storming away from him proved harder than she had anticipated, but somehow she managed it.

‘Are you a member of Brad’s family?’ she asked him, subtly studying the contours of his body as she waited for him to reply.

Those muscles were certainly solid enough. What did he do? she wondered. Something that involved being outdoors a good deal of the time, perhaps.

‘No, I’m not. Are you related to Claire?’

He sounded more polite than genuinely interested but Star refused to be put off.

‘No. I’m actually a friend of Sally, Claire’s stepdaughter,’ she explained. ‘In fact we’ve been friends since our schooldays; but I’m not just here as a friend—I’m here on business as well. I’m a consultant and Brad’s been asking my advice on how to improve the image of their British distribution arm...’

A slight exaggeration of the truth but justified in the circumstances, Star excused herself. She was not normally given to exaggerating her own importance—in any area of her life. It was not normally necessary and she recognised that she was being far more forthcoming, supplying him with far more information about herself than she would normally have done.

But then this was not just about sex, just about meeting an attractive and very sexy man and wanting to go to bed with him, it was about proving a point, about confirming one of life’s realities, about making him back down and admit that he was lying when he pretended to be so emotionally correct and right on!

Engrossed in her own thoughts, Star missed the sudden, startled flare of recognition that darkened his eyes as he listened to what she was saying.

‘So...you won’t be attending the family dinner later this evening, then,’ Star commented, and offered temptingly, ‘Neither shall I.’

In point of fact she had been invited but she knew that Sally and Claire would understand if she didn’t go.

‘No... No, I shan’t,’ he was agreeing, his impossibly dark blue eyes—in a woman Star would have instantly suspected coloured contact lenses but something told her that this man would never fall victim to such vanity—meeting hers and causing her pulse to race a little faster. Oh, yes, he was quite definitely her type, physically at least.

‘So both of us will be at a loose end,’ Star prompted. She was beginning to wonder if she had imagined the intelligence she had seen in his eyes earlier, he was so slow on the uptake.

‘Yeah, I guess it looks as though we will...’ he agreed in a slow drawl.

‘We could have dinner together,’ she persisted, ‘at my hotel; I’m staying at the Lakeside,’ she added, mentioning the town’s most luxurious hotel.

‘The Lakeside...’ He glanced at his watch—a plain, no-nonsense affair with a worn leather strap, Star noticed. ‘I could meet you in the foyer at eight?’

‘Eight will be fine.’ Star assured him, wondering what on earth she was letting herself in for.

She said as much to Sally a few minutes later when her dinner date had excused himself and she had bumped into her and Chris walking across the lawn.

‘I hope I don’t have to work as hard in bed as I had to do to get him to have dinner with me,’ she told her friend feelingly.

Sally laughed, although Star could see that Chris looked slightly uncomfortable. Men didn’t like it when a woman was sexually aggressive, it made them feel uneasy... threatened.

‘Where is he?’ Sally demanded. ‘Point him out to me...’

‘I can’t; he’s disappeared,’ Star told her as she searched the crowded lawn.

‘Perhaps he’s got cold feet and decided to make his escape,’ Chris suggested.

Star gave him a cool look.

‘If he has, there are plenty of others to take his place,’ she responded.

She could see Sally biting her lip and giving Chris a warning look as he opened his mouth to say something else, but she waited until Chris had excused himself and left them on their own before telling her friend gently, ‘It’s all right Sally, you don’t have to protect me from Chris. I know he doesn’t approve of me.’

‘It’s not that,’ Sally protested. ‘It’s just...’

‘It’s just that he doesn’t like it when a woman behaves like a man?’ Star suggested.

‘You deliberately try to give him the wrong impression,’ Sally defended her husband. ‘You make him think...’

‘Make him think what?’ Star taunted her. ‘I make him think that I like sex...that I like men.’

‘But you don’t, do you?’ Sally countered swiftly, shocking Star into silence. Then seizing the advantage she had gained, she continued, ‘You don’t really like men at all, Star; you despise them. You think that all men are like your father,’ she added sadly, ‘and they aren’t. They—’

‘No?’ Star fought back. ‘Tell me that again in ten years’ time, Sal!’

‘Oh, Star,’ Sally protested under her breath as she watched her friend stalk off.

‘Where’s Star gone?’ Chris asked his wife a few minutes later as he rejoined her. ‘Off on another manhunt?’

‘Oh, Chris, she isn’t like that. Not really,’ Sally protested. ‘She just...she’s just so vulnerable, really. She was hurt so badly when her father left her mother and rejected her, trying to claim that she wasn’t his child, and then there were so many bad relationships in her mother’s life, so many love affairs that went wrong, that it just reinforced her belief that men can’t be trusted. She tries to pretend she doesn’t care—she even jokes that she can’t remember any more how many step and half brothers and sisters she has got because there are so many of them—but deep down inside, I know that she does care, that she—’

‘You’re far too soft-hearted,’ Chris told her lovingly, curling his arm around her and swinging her round so that they were face to face. ‘I don’t know whether it’s all this fresh air or not, but suddenly I am very, very hungry.’

‘Hungry...?’ Sally gave him a startled look. ‘Chris, we’ve only just eaten that wonderful buffet; you can’t possibly—’

‘Who said anything about being hungry for food?’ Chris whispered in her ear. ‘It’s you I’m hungry for... Mmm...and you taste very, very good as well...’

‘Chris!’ Sally protested as he started to nibble her ear, but she was laughing as she tried to push him away.

On the other side of the lawn someone else observed them. He had been watching too when Star had been with them, had seen her stalk away from Sally in obvious high dudgeon.

It was funny, but although he had heard quite a lot about her both from Sally and from Claire he still hadn’t recognised who Star was until she had made that comment about doing some PR work for Brad, Kyle acknowledged.

Listening to Claire and Sally describing her and her background as they’d explained the events surrounding the throwing of Sally’s wedding bouquet and the trio’s avowed determination to remain unwed despite having caught it, he had felt mildly sorry for the unknown Star and, if he was honest, a little smugly self-satisfied that he was too well balanced to share her warped outlook on life—and he could have done, given his own family history.

His mother had regularly dumped him on whoever she could find to take charge of him whilst she went off with her latest lover. His father had finally and unwillingly taken him under his own roof whilst making it clear how little he wanted him. But happily the bitterness which could have tainted the whole of his life had never been allowed to take root, had in fact been washed away, flooded out by the outpouring of love he had received from his stepmother’s older sister, the woman who had become a surrogate mother to him and whom he still gently mourned.

But now... now he had met Star, had witnessed at first hand the powerful, turbulent, magnetic pull of her sexuality, had felt his body respond to it and to her! And it had responded to her... Was still responding to her, if he was honest.

Intellectually he might be aware of all the pitfalls involved in following through on what was running through his head right now, but physically...

He had seen the look she had given him when he had stopped Clay from making his play for her, and the even more contemptuous one she had sent him when he had informed her of his views on sex without emotion. He suspected he knew exactly why she had been so determined to get him to have dinner with her—and it didn’t have anything to do with any desire to get him into bed. He only wished that he could say the same about his own motives in accepting.

Right now the thought of all the ways he would like to pleasure her if he had her spread out on a bed underneath him was driving him wild, with the kind of ache that was rapidly becoming a sharp urgency.

For starters he certainly wanted to see that smooth hairstyle all mussed and soft and those challenging sea-green eyes hazy and dazed with the joy of what they were both experiencing, and he surely wanted to feel those full, firm lips quivering eagerly beneath his, clinging to his, whilst he slowly stroked her silky skin. Oh, yes, he surely wanted that.

He wanted to peel her clothes from her body and share with her that spiralling, giddying, breathtaking climb through the delicately, deliberately erotic foothills of shared foreplay, across the plateau of escalating desire and then on to the heights where they could look down on the rest of the universe and momentarily believe that they were superhuman, immortal; but for that it was necessary to reach out and share yourself mentally and emotionally as well as physically and Star had made it more than plain that that kind of intimacy was not on her agenda.

And he had spoken the truth when he had told her that, to him, sex without emotion was like a flower without perfume, and he felt as sad and compassionately sorry for someone who had been denied the ability to experience that emotion as he did for someone who had been denied the gift of sight.

Of course, there had been occasions when he had been growing up when he had thrown himself wholeheartedly into the experience of exploring his sexuality, but since then there had been only two serious relationships in his life—one with a fellow student whilst he’d been at college, which had ended shortly after their graduation by mutual consent, and another which had been over for several years now and which had ended when he had moved from New York City to set up in business here in this quiet, sturdily American small town.

He remained on friendly terms with both his ex-lovers and was godfather to both their eldest children.

It had been the death of Grace, his ‘surrogate’ mother, that had prompted the heart-searching which had led to the ending of his New York relationship, bringing about as it had the admission that the emotion which he felt for Andrea had become that of a close friend rather than a lover. She had begun to feel the same way, she had confessed when he had finally brought himself to broach the subject with her.

He had promised himself when he’d left New York that the next time, the next love, would be his last, his for all time and beyond time, and, perhaps because of that, or perhaps simply because he was older and wiser and maybe tired too, he had found himself reluctant to embark on any new relationship, sensing that ultimately it would not fulfil his need to form a lifetime bond with that one special woman who would accept him and love him as he was and for what he was, as he would her.

He knew that many of his friends considered him to be something of an idealist. Well, why not? He wasn’t ashamed of his feelings, his needs. Why should he be?

And it was only very, very rarely now that his body reminded him that sometimes physical desire and emotional need did not run comfortably in harness with one another—so rarely, in fact, that he couldn’t actually remember the last time. So rarely...that it had been tricky getting himself to admit that his determined restoration of Abbie and her two little girls to her roving husband’s side had had less to do with supporting her than with satisfying his own need to see if the luscious, long-legged redhead whom Clay was making such determined eye contact with looked as good from the front as she did from the back.

She had...unfortunately for him.

He glanced at his watch. It was time he left. He had some paperwork he wanted to get through. He had just about made his way to his car when Brad suddenly materialised at his side.

‘Kyle!’ he exclaimed, smiling at him. ‘Did you get to meet Star? I meant to introduce you to one another since you’ll be working closely together once you take over from Tim Burbridge in Britain... I still haven’t formalised the details of her contract with her yet, but from what I’ve seen of her work there’s no doubt in my mind that she’ll do a good job for us.

‘Tim Burbridge is taking a month’s leave from the end of next week, as you know, and I’d like the two of you to meet beforehand so that he can hand over things to you; of course, you’ll be staying on to work alongside him once he’s back at work... I think you’ll find him very co-operative and open. He understands how important it is for us to bring our British distribution network up to the same high standards we have over here in the States...

‘It won’t be easy, though,’ Brad warned him. ‘One of our biggest problems is recruiting the right calibre of technician. Not so much on the technical side—they all have the necessary skills for the job; no, the problem is more on the motivation side of things, from what I can see...’

‘Mmm...I’ve been thinking about that,’ Kyle responded. ‘I think some kind of in-house training scheme coupled with incentive awards might be one way around the problem... But, of course, first I’ll have to discuss things with Tim,’ he added diplomatically.

‘Well, that’s something you and Tim and Star can work on together,’ Brad told him. ‘Did you get to meet her?’

‘Not exactly... Not officially.’ Kyle was deliberately vague.

‘Well, I’ll make sure that the two of you do get a chance to get together before you fly out to Britain,’ Brad promised him.

‘You know how much I appreciate what you’re doing for us, don’t you, Kyle?’ Brad asked his friend. ‘So far as I am concerned, the distribution network you’ve set up for us is one of the prime forces underpinning our success. It doesn’t matter how good a product is; if you can’t get it to the customer when and where he wants it and install it and keep it in good working order, it doesn’t matter a damn how good it is.’

Kyle gave a small shrug. ‘It works both ways,’ he reminded Brad. ‘No matter how good a distribution and servicing network is, it can’t operate efficiently without a reliable product.’

‘We make a good team,’ Brad told him, ‘and I can’t pretend that I’m not hoping you’ll be able to help us turn the British side of our business around and bring it into line with our home market success.

‘Will you be joining us for dinner this evening?’ Brad asked him as Kyle started to unlock his car.

Here was his chance to get out of his dinner date with Star, Kyle acknowledged, and he would be all kinds of a fool...asking for all kinds of trouble if he passed up on it.

Ten minutes later, driving towards his own lake-shore home, contemplating the brief, negative shake of his head and polite words of excuse with which he had responded to Brad’s question, he grimaced to himself.

OK, so he was all kinds of a fool!

CHAPTER TWO

IT TOOK Star an unusually long time to prepare for her dinner date with Kyle. It was not like her to dither over what to wear or to question the effect she was likely to have on her date; she dressed to please herself and not anyone else, and yet, for some reason, she found herself eschewing the loose silky cotton dress she had originally decided to wear in favor of a much more sophisticated and slinky one-shouldered black jersey number that she had added to her packing at the last minute on some odd impulse.

Like today’s silk and linen dress, she had bought it in Milan where they knew all about the subtle art of emphasising a woman’s sensuality rather than her sexuality.

It was not a dress that a man would immediately and necessarily see as provocative. It skimmed the curves of her body rather than clung to them, but the way it exposed the smooth, warm curve of her shoulder and bared one arm, the way it highlighted the fact that one needed a well-toned body and precious little underwear to show it off made it the kind of outfit that bemused men with its subtly sensual message and automatically had every other woman in the room narrowing her eyes warily.

To complement the dress Star had swept her hair up into a smooth chignon and put on heavy, almost baroque dull gold earrings plus a single, matching dull gold bangle.

She was just about to apply her favourite perfume when something stopped her, and, instead of touching it lavishly to her pulse points, she sprayed a small cloud of it into the air and then walked slowly into it. This way the fragrance would be so elusive and subtle that anyone wanting to know if she was truly wearing it would have to move very close to her—very close indeed.

Smiling with satisfaction, she picked up her bag and headed for the door, pausing for a second before turning back and quickly spraying the bed with the same delicate perfume.

So, he liked his roses to be perfumed, did he...? Well, tonight he certainly wouldn’t have any complaints. Still smiling to herself, Star stepped out into the corridor.

Whoever had been responsible for the interior design of the hotel was obviously a fan of the Gone With the Wind era and had a very romantic streak. Star decided, because the bank of lifts, instead of being situated in the foyer, was actually located on a balconied mezzanine area above it so that one’s entrance into the foyer had to be made via a sweeping, curved staircase.

There were, of course, amenity lifts situated discreetly to one side of the foyer, but there was no harm in taking advantage of the props which had so usefully been loaned to her, Star reflected as she paused at the top of the flight of stairs for a moment, firmly refusing to glance downwards in the direction of the foyer to see if her dinner date was there to observe her, before moving elegantly down the stairs in a very fair imitation of the arrogantly graceful prowl that she had seen top models adopt at prestige fashion shows.

Kyle did see her, his brain grimly reinforcing what it had already told him. She looked, he acknowledged as he studied Star’s elegant descent from the shadows of the mezzanine, much as he might have imagined some fabled Greek goddess to have looked—almost slightly inhuman in the perfection of her feminine mystery, her profile sculptured, her gaze remote, her body... Hastily he forced himself not to think about exactly what that sleek, fluid stretch of matt fabric was concealing.

He was not surprised to see, when he checked the foyer, that virtually every other man there was watching her, mesmerised by the strength of her sensuality and her own indifference to it.

As she reached the last stair he started to walk towards her. For a second Star almost didn’t recognise him. For some reason she had expected him to look as he had done earlier in the day and for a moment the sight of him wearing not a white T-shirt and jeans but an immaculately cut dinner suit threw her:

It made him look taller, broader and somehow more remote, more inaccessible...more...formidable.

Giving herself a small inward shake, Star dismissed. such unproductive and over-imaginative thoughts. He was still the same man, whatever he chose to wear, whatever outward image he might try to present; inwardly he was just like all the rest of his sex and, like them, sooner or later, no matter how much he might try to deny it, he would prove himself to be as faithless, as worthless as the rest.

‘Never make the mistakes I’ve made,’ Star’s mother had told her emotionally in the first throes of her grief and anger after Star’s father had left. ‘Never trust a man, Star...any man... They’ll only hurt you in the end.’

Star, six years old at the time, had taken her mother’s words to heart and learned from them—unlike her mother, who had gone on allowing her emotions to rule her life and then regretting it.

He was only a few feet away from her now—more than close enough for her to be able to look right up into those astonishingly dense dark blue eyes.

Gravely he returned her gaze—without allowing his to slide downwards to her body. Star allowed her eyebrows to rise a little as she mentally awarded him a point for his subtlety.

‘We still haven’t introduced ourselves,’ he announced as he stepped towards her. ‘Kyle...Kyle Henson,’ he told her, extending his hand.

‘Star...Flower,’ she told him wryly, adding with a small, dismissive shrug, ‘A small folly of my mother’s and not, unfortunately, her only one.’

‘I’m sorry, I don’t quite follow you,’ Kyle said.

‘It was a joke.’ Star shrugged. ‘But obviously not a very good one. I was trying to say that my mother’s larger folly was not so much in the choice of my name as in the choice of my father...’

‘Ah... You don’t get on well with him.’

‘Well enough,’ Star countered. ‘Or at least as well as any of the other half a dozen or so offspring he has fathered...and perhaps rather better than most. You see, I have the distinction of having known him the longest and therefore having had the greatest time in which to grow accustomed to his...foibles...’

‘You don’t like him,’ Kyle suggested.

‘No, I don’t like him,’ Star agreed. ‘So go on,’ she mocked as they walked towards the restaurant bar. ‘Tell me how shocked you are by my undaughterly emotions and how devoted you are to your own wonderful parents... They are wonderful, of course,’ she added, giving him a thin smile.

A man like him would have wonderful parents: a mother who adored and cosseted him, had brought him up to think he was the most wonderful human being that ever lived. And his father would have been stern and silently proud of the boy-child he had produced, reinforcing with everything he did the growing child’s belief in himself and his invincibility, his right to live exactly how he chose.

‘No, as a matter of fact they weren’t,’ Kyle told her evenly, and then, before she could cover her shock, asked her, ‘Are you always this open and frank with strangers?’

‘No,’ Star told him, giving him a deliberately seductive half-smile. What she had been intending to do was to shock him a little bit, needle him slightly, but his quiet denial of her comment about his parents, coupled with his obvious lack of any intention of expanding on what he had said, had caused her to change tack. If she couldn’t shock him into taking notice of her, then she would have to seduce him into doing so.

In the bar they both ordered spritzers before sitting down to study the menus they were handed.

Although Star was well aware of the interest she was exciting amongst the other diners, she gave no sign of it, and Kyle, who was watching her, wondered wryly how long it had taken her to grow the outer skin of cool self-confidence that she armoured herself in.

That remark about her parents—her father—had been deliberately provocative and he sensed that he had caught her off guard with his response to her taunting comment about his own family background.

Despite the information about herself that she seemed to hand out so freely, he sensed that she was an extremely private person, deeply protective of her innermost self.

‘So,’ Kyle invited, putting down his menu and smiling across the table at her, ‘tell me more about this interesting-sounding family of yours.’

‘Interesting?’ Star raised her eyebrows and gave him a wry look. ‘My mother is currently in the throes of a traumatic love affair with the son of one of her oldest and closest friends. It’s supposed to be a secret but, of course, it isn’t. My mother couldn’t keep a secret if her life depended on it and she certainly can’t seem to see that what she’s doing is bound to lead to disaster. She’s bound to lose her friend, and as for her toy-boy lover...’

‘You don’t approve?’

Star looked at him. He had surprised her with his invitation to talk about her family. Normally, in her experience, the subject most men preferred to discuss was themselves. Star wasn’t used to being asked such unexpectedly intimate questions. One of her strongest character traits was a refusal to deal in any kind of deceit—a fact which put her at a disadvantage now, she recognised, as she found it impossible not to reply honestly to Kyle’s questions.

‘It isn’t a matter of whether or not I approve,’ she told him. ‘It’s more a matter of knowing what’s going to happen, of knowing that someone else is going to have to pick up the pieces of the mayhem that my mother’s emotional overload always causes...’

‘That someone perhaps being you?’ Kyle probed.

This time Star could not answer. The anxiety and sense of guilt she had felt as a child, listening to her mother, watching her go through the turmoil of a series of destructive relationships, was something that even now, as an adult, she found impossible to discuss.

The fear she had experienced then, the sense of being alone with no one to turn to, the panic at knowing that she was her mother’s emotional support rather than the other way round still sometimes surfaced to attack her present-day, adult self-assurance, even if nowadays, outwardly at least, she had learned the trick of transmuting it into angry contempt for her mother’s way of life.

‘Why don’t we talk about you?’ she suggested softly. ‘I’m sure that would be far more...interesting...’

Lifting her glass to her lips, she looked across at him as she took a slow, deliberate sip, letting her lips stay slightly parted whilst she looked at his mouth.

At first she thought that her deliberate sensuality had had no effect on him, and then, to her delight, she saw the small, betraying movement he made, the slight shifting of his body, as though suddenly he wasn’t quite at ease with himself.

‘There isn’t much to tell,’ Kyle responded, and Star smiled to herself as she caught the slightly roughened edge to his voice and knew what had caused it.

No matter what he might be trying to tell her, she suspected that he was far from lacking in sexual experience, and from what she could see of it she could sense that his body had just the kind of sensual appeal she most liked.

Star did not believe in being a passive lover and, whilst not having any specific desire to be dominant or aggressive, she did like to be able to take the initiative to touch and taste the man in bed with her, to reach out and stroke his skin, to discover where and how she could most arouse him, even to tease him a little bit sometimes, testing his self-control. And something told her that Kyle would be very self-controlled.

‘My parents split up before I was born. My mother had never wanted a child. Her ambition was to be an actress.’

Star frowned as she heard not condemnation in his voice, as she had expected, but, instead, compassion. He felt compassion for a mother who had rejected him? A tiny feather-brushing of unease—no more—disturbed the deep waters of her conviction that all men were the same, that all men were, in essence, her father—a feeling so vague that it was easy for her to dismiss and ignore it and tell herself that Kyle was even more devious than she had first suspected and adept at manipulating the vulnerability of the female psyche.

‘Unfortunately she died before she could realise it,’ Kyle continued. ‘An undiagnosed heart defect. Before her death, though, there had been...problems...and ultimately my father agreed to take me in and bring me up alongside his second family... I was very lucky...’

‘How—in being allowed to grow up alongside them?’ Star enquired mockingly.

He couldn’t deceive her. She knew all about how it felt to watch the father who didn’t want you favouring some other child whilst you looked on in impotent grief and rage.

‘In a sense, yes,’ Kyle told her evenly, ignoring her sarcasm. ‘You see, my stepmother had an older sister who... Well, let’s just say she was a very, very special person and she kinda took me under her wing...helped me to understand...to develop a proper sense of myself... taught me what it was like to be loved and valued... and that’s something I guess every child, and every adult too, needs...’

‘Here endeth the first lesson,’ Star taunted softly under her breath, but if Kyle had heard her he wasn’t responding to her taunt. Instead he was looking at the menu.

‘Would you recommend the sea-bass?’ Star queried with mock-feminine deference.

But Kyle refused to be drawn, commenting only, ‘I certainly like it.’

‘Well, then, I’ll just have to try a taste of yours, won’t I?’ Star flirted, refusing to give up.

It was only a matter of time, Star told herself confidently. With time and persistence she would be able to prove to her own satisfaction that underneath the disguise of chivalrous knighthood that he chose to wear he was just as untrustworthy, as selfish and careless of other people’s feelings as the rest of his sex.

Not that it was going to be all hard work getting him to back down from his claim that, for him, sex meant nothing without emotion. Unlike men, she did not need the crutch of self-deceit for her ego. It wasn’t simply to prove a point that she intended to challenge him—and to win. She had already acknowledged the heightened buzz of sexual awareness that being with him was giving her.

The maître d’ was hovering, waiting to take their order. Star’s mouth curled in a small feline smile as she chose one of the vegetarian options, her smile deepening as Kyle ordered the sea-bass. Before handing the menu back to the maître d’ he murmured something to him that Star couldn’t hear.

Several minutes later, as a waiter escorted them to their table, Star was amused to see the way the other diners watched them whilst trying to pretend that they were not doing so.

‘We seem to be causing something of a stir.’ she murmured dulcetly to Kyle as they sat down. ‘I wonder why...?’

‘Oh, no, you don’t,’ Kyle countered evenly, smiling at her. ‘You know perfectly well that there isn’t a single man in the place who has been able to take his eyes off you since you came down those stairs.’

Kyle wasn’t quite sure how he expected her to react to his comment, but the sudden warm peal of totally genuine laughter she gave as she acknowledged the truth of his comment made him realise that she was not as predictable and true to type as he had originally assumed, and that whilst with a little conscious effort he should be able to withstand the sensual heat of her deliberate come-ons to him, resisting the effect of that wholly natural laughter and the rueful intelligence in her eyes was going to be much, much harder.

So it was with relief that he observed her revert to type, and he was thrown as she asked him softly, ‘Not a single man... Does that include you?’

‘I’m as visually attracted to a beautiful, sensually dressed woman as the next man,’ Kyle replied drily.

It was not exactly the reaction she had hoped for but it would do—for a start, Star told herself as the waiter brought their starters.

Star had ordered mussels, which she picked up with her fingers and ate with a deliberate, almost greedy relish, triumphantly conscious of the fact that although Kyle affected not to be he was acutely aware, as he ate his way stoically through his seafood platter, of the sensuality in the way she was eating.

When she had had enough she licked the juice from the tips of her fingers with deliberate enjoyment, enthusing, ‘Mmm...that was delicious.’

. There were several mussels still left on her plate and as she made eye contact with him she picked one up and held it out to him, offering, ‘Here, why don’t you try one?’

His calm, ‘I already have, thank you,’ as he indicated the empty shells on his own plate, would have caused a lesser woman to retreat in a self-conscious fluster of embarrassment, Star acknowledged, but she was not so easily discomposed. Why should she be? She knew already that he wanted her. Now it was simply a matter of making him admit it.

As she smiled into the bemused eyes of the young waiter who had come to take their plates, she mentally congratulated herself on her inevitable victory and settled back to enjoy the rest of the game.

Their main courses arrived and were served—her own very appetising vegetarian dish and Kyle’s sea-bass.

Star waited until they had been served before recommencing her attack, pouting slightly as she eyed her own plate and then Kyle’s.

‘The bass does look good...’ she began.

There was something in the dark blue steadiness of his gaze as he returned her eye contact that wasn’t, somehow, quite in line with his predictable, ‘Would you like some?’

‘I thought you’d never ask,’ Star responded softly, already leaning towards him, reaching out with one hand to hold his wrist as he lifted his fork towards her mouth, when out of the corner of her eye she saw him make a small gesture towards the maître d’ and then saw, to her chagrin, their waiter hurrying towards their table, carrying a small portion of the sea-bass.

She could see Kyle watching her urbanely as the waiter served her with the fish, all her earlier good humour and sense of triumph evaporating in the smouldering fury of knowing that he had not only anticipated her move but very skilfully sidestepped it as well.

Star wasn’t used to men rejecting her sexual advances; she wasn’t used, in fact, to having to make them. It wasn’t normally necessary and for a moment the sheer shock of having the tables so neatly and unexpectedly turned on her held her completely silent.

‘So you’re a PR consultant,’ Kyle commented as he calmly ate his own fish.

‘Yes,’ Star agreed coolly. ‘I trained with one of the large London agencies and then decided to set up on my own...’

‘It’s a very stressful and competitive business, especially—’

‘For a woman?’ Star supplied challengingly for him.

‘For anyone,’ Kyle corrected her. ‘Especially when you’re working on your own.’

‘I like stress...and competition,’ Star told him. Was he trying to find out if she was involved with someone? If she had a partner...a backer...another man in her life? Determinedly she pushed her chagrin at his refusal to respond to her flirtatious teasing over the fish to one side. If he was interested in finding out if there was another man in her life then that was a good sign.

‘And I’m certainly far from being the only woman to set up in business on her own,’ she added.

‘True,’ he agreed. ‘They do say that the type of person most likely to succeed in business on their own is one who enjoys taking control of their own life.’

‘And you don’t approve of the female sex wanting to take control?’ Star asked softly, feeling that she was getting back on firmer ground.

‘Not at all,’ Kyle contradicted her. ‘It’s just that I often wonder if it isn’t so much a need to take control of their own lives as a fear of being in a situation where they are not in control that is the real emotion motivating such people—a fear of making contact with others, of being open to them...and vulnerable to them...that drives them into isolating themselves—’

Star stared at him across the table as he broke off to shake his head as the waiter offered him more wine; she was torn between an aggressive desire to deny what he was saying and a passively wary one to ignore it.

‘I own and run my own business too,’ she heard him saying as the waiter left, ‘and...’ He started to frown as he realised that she had stopped eating, and asked her solicitously, ‘Didn’t you like the bass, after all?’

‘The bass is fine,’ Star told him stonily, ‘but the conversation isn’t.’

Kyle gave her a thoughtful look.

Those dark blue eyes really were dangerously deceptive, Star acknowledged. The extraordinary depth of their colour tended to make one focus on that, rather than on the intelligence behind them.

Suddenly she felt extraordinarily tired. Delayed jet lag, she told herself. She had a meeting with Brad in the morning, for which she needed to be fresh and alert. The last thing she needed was to spend the evening with some pseudo new man whose idea of foreplay was to psychoanalyse her. But she couldn’t retreat now without getting at least some tacit admission from him that he did want sex with her; her pride wouldn’t let her.

She thought quickly and then decided what to do.

‘I’m sorry,’ she apologised faintly, ‘but I’m not feeling very well.’ She gave him a softly rueful look. ‘I wonder if you could help me to my room...?’

‘Of course.’

Star could see him frowning as he quickly summoned the waiter.

‘Would you like me to arrange a house call from the hotel’s doctor?’ he asked her concernedly.

Star shook her head.

‘No...no...it’s nothing, really... Just delayed jet lag mixed with too much sun this afternoon,’ she explained. ‘Nothing a good night’s sleep won’t put right...’

He had certainly been very efficient at settling their bill and getting them out of the restaurant with the minimum fuss and delay, Star had to acknowledge a few minutes later as they waited for the lift.

Once it arrived and the doors opened Star gave a delicately nervous shiver before reluctantly stepping inside.

‘I know it’s silly but I don’t really like them,’ she confessed only semi-untruthfully to Kyle as she stepped inside.

‘It’s a perfectly natural feeling,’ he assured her as he followed her in and waited for her to tell him her floor number. ‘I doubt there are many of us who actually enjoy being confined in such a small space, if we’re honest about it.’

When the lift came to a halt at Star’s floor Kyle politely stood back to allow her to precede him out of the lift before falling into step beside her.

Star deliberately waited until they were outside her bedroom door before starting to search her bag for her passkey, and then, when she did find it, she deliberately let it slip through her fingers so that Kyle had no option but to bend down to retrieve it for her, thus allowing her to close the small gap between them so that when he stood up again they were virtually standing body to body.

As she looked at his mouth Star deliberately let her own lips part slightly, her voice softly breathless as she thanked him for her key. She leaned forward, letting her body sway provocatively against his, her eyes starting to close on a small, whispered breath.

It was inevitable, of course, that he should respond to her, his head bending towards hers as he reached out to take hold of her.

It wasn’t just triumph that she could feel as her small ploy worked, Star acknowledged. The pleasure warming her body was not purely that of victory. She could feel his body against her own now, satisfyingly male and hard-packed with muscle. His skin smelt clean and fresh and she was already anticipating how good it would be to give in to the feminine urge to bury her fingers in the thick darkness of his hair when they kissed. And she knew that he would kiss well. His mouth had already told her that. She looked at it now, not needing to fake the look of sensual appreciation in her eyes as she lifted them to meet his.

She would be generous in victory, she decided dizzily, very generous, when she showed him just how good it could be, when she made him admit that he wanted her—and she would make him admit it.

She saw the way his eyes changed as he felt the full warmth of her breasts pressing against his chest and a sharp thrill of arousal ran through her as she saw the dark burn of desire igniting his gaze.

‘Kiss me,’ she whispered compellingly to him as she finally closed the small space between her own mouth and his and placed her lips on his.

He responded immediately, as she had expected, his arms tightening around her, his mouth reacting to the soft pressure of hers whilst she teased him a little bit with delicate butterfly kisses which ended, as she had known they would, with his opening his mouth over hers.

She had been right about him being good, she decided dazedly several minutes later. It wasn’t fiction any longer that she felt slightly light-headed and needed to cling to him for support, and there was certainly nothing faked about the way her heart was racing, nor the growing tumult of sensation threatening to flood her body.

She couldn’t remember the last time a man had affected her so powerfully or so immediately. In fact, she didn’t think there had ever been such a time...nor such a man. And she knew that he was equally affected. They were. standing body to body after all, and there was no mistaking or concealing his own, very male arousal and response to her, even if he had tried to move discreetly away from her—but Star was perfectly well aware that her own body was betraying her as flagrantly as his was him.

The fluid fabric of her dress could not possibly conceal the taut peaks of her nipples, but Star was not ashamed of nor embarrassed by her body’s response to him. Why should she be?

She was even tempted to lift his hand and place it on her breast so that he could experience for himself the effect he was having on her, but there was no need for them to rush things. They had the whole night ahead of them and there was something to be said for drawing out the pleasure of mutual discovery and its even more pleasurable culmination.

There was no doubt in Star’s mind that his mouth would feel every bit as good against her body as it did against her lips and that when he finally placed it against her naked breasts and slowly caressed each sensually aroused peak the pleasure she would experience would more than compensate for the control she was forcing herself to exercise now.

And besides...

Besides, it had been a long time—a long, long time—since she had last experienced something like this, since she had last been held and kissed by a man who seemed to read her mind and her desires so exactly that all she wanted to do was cling to him and let his mouth...

With a tiny little moan, Star moved closer and opened her mouth beneath his, inviting him to deepen his kiss with the thrust of his tongue, her body quivering with aching arousal as she waited for him to do so...and waited...and waited. Confused, Star opened her eyes.

Kyle had stopped kissing her now and his hands were cupping her face.

As she read the message in his eyes, Star’s own eyes widened, at first in disbelief and then in anger, her hands dropping to her sides as he kissed her lightly on the mouth once and then a second time a little more lingeringly. But even as she made to return to his arms he was gently releasing her, saying quietly but oh, so firmly, ‘I’m sorry...’

Sorry... He was sorry! Star couldn’t believe it.

Confused and wrought-up by the messages her body was sending her, Star couldn’t control the sharp-toothed bite of her shocked chagrin and the dismay that followed it as she exclaimed, ‘You’re sorry!’

How dared he do this to her? How dared he hold her, touch her, kiss her as though...as though...

Struggling to contain and control her emotions, Star took a deep lungful of air, trying to find a suitably acerbic response to his unbelievable withdrawal. But all she could think of was how his body had felt against hers, how she could have sworn he wanted her, how she knew that he had been aroused and that men, in her experience of them, did follow up on that kind of arousal, especially when...especially with her...

As she looked in furious disbelief from his mouth—stiffening her body against the treacherous memory of just how good it had felt to have it moving against her own—and up to his eyes Star realised that the expression she could see in their navy blue depths was not one of male sexual triumph as she had expected but instead a totally unfamiliar mix of warmth and compassion.

Compassion... He felt sorry for her. How dared he...? How dared he?

Immediately her defensive reflexes, honed over the years until they were needle-sharp, sprang into action, her spine straightening, her head lifting, her eyes flashing a fierce message of warning and pride as she stepped back from him and told him icily, with a disdainful shrug, ‘Don’t be. After all, I’m hardly missing out on the world’s most exciting sexual experience, am I? You aren’t the only man to feel threatened and emasculated by the strength and honesty of a woman’s sexuality... I suppose I should have realised what kind of man you were when you tried to hide behind that claim that you could only have sex with someone you “lurved”,’ she taunted him mockingly. ‘It’s the classic get-out for men like you, isn’t it...?’

She gave him a falsely compassionate smile and touched him contemptuously on the arm as she added, ‘We can’t all be the same, of course. But it must be hard, I know, for a man to admit that he’s only got a very low sex drive. Thanks for warning me about yours before things went any further. There’s nothing more disappointing for a normal, healthy, sexually motivated woman than a man who can’t...whose libido doesn’t match hers...’

Before she turned away from him and swept into her room Star paused to look tauntingly into his eyes, but, to her surprise, instead of betraying the chagrin and anger she had expected—after all, no man could endure having his masculinity, his sexuality called into question, especially by a woman—he was just standing watching her steadily.

The man was an idiot...a total blockhead. Star was still fuming half an hour later as she slipped between the cool, fresh sheets of her hotel bed. He had to be to have behaved the way he had.

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