Too Wise To Wed?

‘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.