Nighttime Sweethearts

He had touched her, the palm of his hand rough and masculine against the softness of her cheek as he had guided her lips to his.

Why hadn’t she pulled away?

“A deal’s a deal,” she told herself righteously, “even if it is with the devil.”

But she knew she was lying to herself. She had not lingered over that kiss on the flimsy excuse that she had made a deal. No, she had been drawn into the unsavory deal because his mouth had tasted faintly of cigars, and, unlike her vow, the taste had not given her the least desire to upchuck on his shoes.

No, there had been nothing repelling about the taste on his firm lips—smokey and faintly sweet—like perfectly aged port wine. And his kiss had been that rich, that intoxicating, that compelling.

From the moment her lips had touched his, the world she knew had faded away, replaced with a far different one. A world of hammering hearts, of sweet-tasting lips, of a scent so masculine it could be bottled and sold. She had entered, without warning, a world of wanting, as unfamiliar and exotic to her as visiting a foreign land. Yet that world had opened to her with the hesitant parting of her lips beneath the command of his.

“That’s a little much to read into one kiss,” she told herself, but even as she said it, she knew her world was already altered. When was the last time she had felt the simple joy of bare feet on warm pavement, felt night air tingle against her skin like a lover’s touch? Not just noticed it, but felt it, as if her eyes and her pores and her heart were suddenly wide open?

Cynthia felt alive.

“Like a sleeping princess awakened by a kiss,” she whispered to the night and then snorted at her fancifulness. Goddesses. Princesses. Pirates. Wild creatures.

Obviously her life had become just a little too dull and predictable. She slid in the door of her suite, noting, thankfully, that her mother had not returned to the room next door. Her mother had a gift for knowing things she had no business knowing.

Her back against the door, Cynthia closed her eyes. Her senses were filled with the taste of him and the smell of him once more. She yearned.

“Stop it,” she ordered herself, appalled. She pushed off from the door and then noticed the book she had left open on the couch.

Hot Desert Kisses, it was called. Jasmine and the sheik. Did Cynthia have to look any further than her reading material for the reason she was feeling this way? All hot and bothered and unfulfilled? Her mother was right. This type of book was trashy. And it led to all kinds of ridiculous fantasies. Reading this could lead to nothing but restlessness and discontent. No wonder that kiss had affected her so terribly! With stony determination, she plopped the book into the garbage can.

Then Cynthia went into her bedroom, peeled off the damp swimsuit and stared at the shapeless pants and jacket of the pajamas she had taken off just a short while ago. The design had rabbits in it! Had she ever noticed that before? She studied the pajamas with distaste. Cute bunnies with mischievous eyes and pink bows and ridiculously large feet cavorted all over her sleepwear!

In the last hour she had made three rather startling discoveries about herself: She liked walking barefoot in warm sand; she liked swimming naked in the night; and she would die to be kissed like that again! She was not the kind of woman who wore bunny pajamas to bed!

In bed, moments later, clad in a T-shirt and underwear, Cynthia talked sense to herself. “So, you need a new pair of pajamas,” she scolded herself, “and maybe a new hobby. Something you can feel excited about. Photography. Bird-watching.”

Not quite, a voice inside her insisted, something exciting.

“Okay, then, skateboarding. Downhill skiing.”

Nope.

“Skydiving. Bungee-jumping.”

But the voice inside her said hot tropical kisses.

“Shut up,” she told the voice firmly.

But just before she slept, she thought she heard a voice, rough as a gravel road, scraping along her spine and making her skin feel hot and tender.

Good night, sweet lady.

“Good night,” she murmured.

The next thing she knew she was awake, and it was morning. She was drenched in the peach-colored light of post dawn. Cynthia lay very still, contemplating the deep sense of delight within her. When was the last time she had awoken feeling like this? With this kind of tingling anticipation for what the day might hold? With a strange desire to embrace the unexpected?

She was probably never going to see that man again, Cynthia reminded herself sharply. Or encounter him. “Seeing” him was stretching the experience a bit.

She was becoming an old maid—desperate and pathetic—building dream castles out of a ridiculous and demeaning encounter that any woman with an ounce of good sense would have found insulting!

If she ever encountered that man again, what was she going to do? Swoon? Of course not! She would never give him the satisfaction of knowing the chaos and confusion he had stirred up inside her. She would be cool. Composed. Icy, even. Daring him to steal another kiss…

A knock came on her door, and she pulled a pillow over her head, not willing to encounter the real world.

But then the possibility entered her head that, now that her life had expanded to include the potential for unpredictable moments, it might actually be him!

What if he had tracked her down, as enthralled and intrigued by that kiss as she had been? What if he stood outside her door, with a bouquet of red roses and an apologetic smile on his face? She’d let him have a piece of her mind…before she forgave him.

Cynthia flew from the bed, tugged a hand through the tangle of her hair, tossed a housecoat over her T-shirt and panties and stormed to the door.

She threw it open, and no one was there.

Fantasy collided abruptly and painfully with reality when she realized the knock was coming from the door that adjoined her suite to her mother’s.

Trying to bite back her disappointment, resigned, she opened that door. Her mother stood there, perfectly coiffed, not looking the least as if she had danced the night away.

“Darling, time for breakfast.”

“You don’t eat breakfast,” Cynthia reminded her mother, shocked. “Mother, you are never up before the crack of noon.”

“Baron Gunterburger—Wilhelm—talked me into joining him. He was so disappointed that you couldn’t join us last night. He left early, but made me promise to drag you along to breakfast.”

Her mother stopped abruptly and studied her daughter. One eyebrow shot up and her lips pursed thoughtfully.

“What on earth have you been up to?”

“Excuse me? I just got out of bed.” Why did she feel guilty? As if she had been up to something? Was there a law against fantasizing about the man who had kissed you showing up at your door to ply you with roses, apologies and promises? Well, probably in her mother’s world. There were rules about everything in her mother’s world!

“That’s just it. It’s not like you to sleep late, and,” her mother’s eyes narrowed, “you have a look about you.”

“A look?” Cynthia asked with feigned innocence.

“You don’t have pajamas on. You aren’t naked under that housecoat, are you?”

“Mother!”

“Well, you look as if you’ve just been, er, tumbled.”

“Tumbled?” Cynthia repeated, nonplused. “Tumbled?”

Her mother looked her up and down and then asked softly, shocked, “Is there someone in there with you?”

She was twenty-six years old. Her mother knew as well as anyone else that there was never anyone with her. But instead of reassuring her mother, she wished she had the nerve to tell her it was none of her business. She wished she was the woman who had swum naked last night, because that woman would have men in her bedroom at dawn if she damn well pleased!

Instead, Cynthia found herself stepping back from the door, so her mother could see through the suite to the open bedroom door and her rumpled—and very empty—bed.

“Well, then, you look as if you wish you’d been, er, tumbled.” This was said as if wishing for it was just as great a crime as having done it.

“Tumbled,” Cynthia muttered. “What is that? Some seventeenth-century term you’ve been waiting for an opportunity to use?”

Still, she turned away before her mother could see the blush she could feel burning in her own cheeks. She looked at the clock and gave a theatrical little squeak.

“I have overslept, haven’t I?” she said, forcing a breezy note into her voice. “I’ll meet you for breakfast in fifteen. Save me a place beside the baron.”

If there was one way to distract her mother, it was to play her game.

It worked. Her mother cooed with startled pleasure. “You won’t be sorry. You’re going to love him, Cynthia.”

So love was okay, and probably tumbling, too, as long as the suitor was mommy-approved. Her own cynicism took her by surprise. As she got ready, she managed to salvage a tiny bit of the enthusiasm she had first felt this morning by entertaining a fantasy just as probable as red roses and apologies.

What if it was him? What if the baron was the mystery man who had kissed her last night? Her mother had said he’d left early. Had he wandered down to the beach?

Not that she had detected even a trace of an accent. But then wasn’t it possible that a wealthy, well-traveled, well-educated German might speak without an accent? Maybe the raspiness of that voice had been a disguise.

She remembered that voice with a shiver. A voice made of gravel and silk. Impossibly sexy, utterly masculine.

An hour later Cynthia wondered if her mother might have been right.

What was not to love about the singularly handsome and charming young baron? If she had met him twenty-four hours ago, would she have considered him?

He was blond. He had intense blue eyes and a perfect cut of feature. He was casually, but tastefully, dressed, tan and extremely athletic looking.

But he was most definitely not the man she had met last night. She had known before she had even heard him speak, known as soon as she had seen him sharing the table with her mother as she entered the restaurant.

She was not sure how she had been so certain, but she had felt the ache of deep disappointment, which she was willing to admit was a funny reaction given the fact that if it had been her mystery man, she fully intended to greet him by slapping him across the face!

“You’re as lovely as your mother promised,” the baron said, giving her the full wattage of his smile.

Cynthia was pretty sure the young woman at the next table nearly fainted when he bent over Cynthia’s hand and placed a kiss on it.

It was a gesture of such old-world courtliness that she really should have appreciated it. Instead, she snuck a quick look around the room. The man from last night could be anyone here! He could be watching her right now! She felt a tingle of excitement as she contemplated that possibility.

The baron pulled back her chair, and over the next hour proved himself to be attentive, witty and charming.

To Cynthia, despite his considerable charm, the baron did not seem quite real.

She was not sure how it was possible that a man who had emerged from the shadows and then melted back into them, who had been far more dream than reality, could seem so much more real than the handsome flesh-and-blood man vying so nobly and sweetly for her attention.

She found herself scanning the restaurant over and over again, hoping to see someone who would be familiar in some way. In what way she wasn’t quite sure. She had not even seen the face of the man who had claimed her lips last night.

But as he had walked away, leaving her lips still tingling from the sensuousness of his kiss, she had seen the dark silhouette of his powerful build, been captivated by his grace, had been left with the sensation she would know him anywhere.

Restless thoughts stirred within her. Was she ever going to see him again? How? It felt as if she had to see him again, as if she could be returned to the sleeping state she had been locked in for so many years if she did not see him again.

Suddenly the baron and her mother seemed like a trap, a trap that would return her to that state of not quite living that she had accepted for far too long.

“Excuse me,” she said abruptly. “I just thought of something I have to do.”

“Nonsense,” her mother said, blinking at her with sweet warning. “Everything you have to do is for me, and we have nothing so urgent that we can’t spend a few more minutes with our charming companion.”

Cynthia stared at her mother, but she was seeing something else.

A young girl—herself—leaning over the bed of her dying father.

“Promise me,” he whispered, his last words, “Cynthia, promise me.”

“What?” she asked desperately. “Anything.”

“I’ve brought her nothing but unhappiness,” he said sadly.

They both knew he meant her mother. It had been a marriage made in hell, the spell of her father’s great looks soon waning in the face of his desperate unsuitability for her mother’s blue-blooded world.

“Cynthia, always look after her. Make her happy.”

She had promised, and it was that simple. Had it been a hard promise to keep? Yes. But duty came before passion. Those were the rules in the real world, the rules of her mother’s world.

There had been a boy in high school who had tested that resolve, from the wrong side of the tracks, as surely as her father had been. She could still remember the way her arms had felt wrapped around the leather of his jacket as she rode the back of his motorcycle.

She could still remember his name.

Rick Barnett.

Her mother had found out about him and had ordered her to end it. And she had. Cynthia had witnessed firsthand her mother and father’s exhausting and impossible efforts to marry two worlds. But more, Rick had brought out a wild side she would have been just as pleased not to make acquaintance with. That long-ago boy had brought her to the edge of her self-control—

“Cynthia,” her mother said sharply, bringing her back to earth. “Quit looking at me like that, as though you’ve seen a ghost.”

She felt as if she had seen a ghost. What had made her think of Rick, now, after all these years? When the pain of that loss finally had seemed dull and a long, long way away?

The baron’s hand covered Cynthia’s, and he smiled at her. “On the other hand, my dear, you may look at me any way you choose.”

Her mother giggled. “Oh, how utterly lovely you are, Wilhelm.”

Cynthia snatched her hand away, feeling oddly as though she had been unfaithful by letting another man touch her. She leapt up from the table.

“Really,” she said, “I must go.”

“But I was just going to ask Wilhelm to tell you about his yacht. That’s how he arrived here at La Torchere. He’s moored—”

Cynthia scrambled away, not even glancing back when her mother called after her indignantly.

She knew exactly where she was going and she didn’t stop until she arrived back at the beach that had enticed her last night.

It looked different in the day. A scene off a postcard of a perfect vacation—white sands reaching out to turquoise waters, palm trees swaying in a light breeze—but something essential was missing. The magic. The mystery.

Cynthia settled on a lovely wrought-iron bench that had been placed strategically at the sand’s edge overlooking the beach. She looked out over the tranquil waters, jade-shaded in the early morning light, trying to recapture something of what she had felt last night. Was it possible she had dreamed it?

Her gaze stopped on a large rock protruding from the tranquil waters of the cove and her breath caught in her throat. Something of what she was looking for—the essence of her experience—was in that rock.

Had it been there last night?

Had it been there before?

Of course it had to have been there! Huge rocks didn’t just appear in the water off the shore. The rock had the shape and size of a bear, massive and restless, the power unmistakable.

“Hello, my dear.”

Cynthia glanced up, startled to find she was no longer alone. A woman she recognized vaguely from the resort’s front office was standing beside the bench, one hand resting on it, her eyes fastened on the rock.

Despite her stylish dress, the woman bore an unfortunate resemblance to the wicked witch in Snow White, but when she turned her eyes to Cynthia, Cynthia saw a startling beauty in them. They were an astonishing shade of violet.

“Has that rock always been there?” she asked, even though it seemed a foolish question. “I can’t believe I never noticed it before.”

“Oh.” The woman waved her hand dismissively. “You know. The tides.”

Of course. The tides would come and go, revealing things and hiding things with the water’s changing depths.

“Could I join you for a moment?”

Considering how eager she had been to divest herself of her mother’s and the baron’s company, Cynthia felt strangely open to sharing her bench with the old woman.

“Merry Montrose,” the woman said, extending her hand.

Cynthia was startled by the handshake. There was nothing old about it. In fact she felt a shiver of pure energy run up and down her arm as she accepted the woman’s hand.

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