by Diana Palmer
She glared at him. “It was your own fault. You don’t have to have your women telephone you here!”
The glitter in his eyes got worse. “Jealous, Meg?” he taunted.
“Of you? God forbid,” she said as casually as she could, and with a forced smile. “Of course I do remember vividly the wonderful things you can do with your hands and those hard lips, darling, but I’m quite urbane these days and less easily impressed.”
“Careful,” he warned softly. “You may be more vulnerable than you realize.”
She backed down. “Anyway,” she muttered, “why don’t you just take Jane Thingamabob out for a steak and warm her back up again?”
“Jane Dray is my mother’s maiden aunt,” he said after a minute, watching her reaction with amusement. “You might remember her from the last company picnic?”
Meg did, with horror. The old dowager was a people-eater of the first order, who probably still wore corsets and cursed modern transportation. “Oh, dear,” she began.
“She is now horrified that her favorite great-nephew is sleeping with little Meggie Shannon, who used to be such a sweet, innocent child.”
“Oh, my God,” Meg groaned, leaning against the wall.
“Yes. And she’ll more than likely rush to tell your great-aunt Henrietta, who will feel obliged to write to my mother in West Palm Beach and tell her the scandalous news that you are now a scarlet woman. And my mother, who always has preferred you to me, will naturally assume that I seduced you, not the reverse.”
“Damn!” she moaned. “This is all your fault!”
He folded his arms over his broad chest. “You brought it on yourself. Don’t blame me. I’m sure my mother will be utterly shocked at your behavior, nevertheless, especially since she’s taken great pains to try to make up for the loss of your own mother years ago.”
“I’ll kill myself!” she said dramatically.
“Could you fix supper first?” David asked, sticking his head around the kitchen door. “I’m starved. So is Steve.”
“Then why don’t the two of you go out to a restaurant?” she asked, still reeling from her horrid mistake.
“Heartless woman.” David sighed. “And I was so looking forward to the potatoes and roast I can smell cooking on the stove.”
He managed to look pitiful and thin, all at the same time. She glared at him. “Well, I suppose I can manage supper. As if you need feeding up! Look at you!”
“I’m a walking monument of your culinary skills,” David argued. “If I could cook, I’d look healthy between your vacations.”
“It isn’t exactly a vacation,” Meg murmured worriedly. “The ballet company I work for is between engagements, and when there’s no money to pay the light bill, we can’t keep the theater open. Our manager is looking for more financing even now.”
“He’ll find it,” David consoled her. “It’s an established ballet company, and he’s a good finance man. Stop brooding.”
“Okay,” she said.
“Do we have time to shower and change?” David asked.
“Sure,” she told him. “I need to do that myself. I’ve been working out all afternoon.”
“You push yourself too hard,” Steve remarked coolly. “Is it really worth it?”
“Of course!” she said. She smiled outrageously. “Don’t you know that ballerinas are the ideal ornament for rich gentlemen?” she added, lying through her teeth. “I actually had a patron offer to keep me.” She didn’t add that the man had adoption, not seduction, in mind, and that he was the caretaker at her apartment house.
Incredibly Steve’s eyes began to glitter. “What did you tell him?”
“That I pay my own way, of course.” She laughed. She held on to the railing of the long staircase and leaned forward. “Tell you what, Steve. If you play your cards right, when I get to the top of the ladder and start earning what I’m really worth, I’ll keep you.”
He tried not to smile, but telltale lines rippled around his firm, sculptured mouth.
“You’re impossible.” David chuckled.
“I make your taciturn friend smile, though,” she added, watching Steve with twinkling eyes. “I don’t think he knew how until I came along. I keep his temper honed, too.”
“Be careful that I don’t hone it on you,” he cautioned quietly. There was something smoldering in his eyes, something tightly leashed. There always had been, but when he was around her, just lately, it threatened to escape.
She laughed, because the look in those gunmetal-gray eyes made her nervous. “I won’t provoke you, Steven,” she said. “I’m not quite that brave.” He scowled and she changed the subject. “I’m sorry about Aunt Jane,” she added with sincere apology. “I’ll call her and explain, if you like.”
“There’s no need,” he said absently, his gaze intent on her flushed face. “I’ve already taken care of it.”
As usual. She could have said it, but she didn’t. Steven didn’t let grass grow under his feet. He was an accomplished mover and shaker, which was why his company was still solvent when others had gone bankrupt. She made a slight movement with her shoulders and proceeded up the staircase. She felt his eyes on her, but she didn’t look back.
When Meg had showered and changed into a lacy white pantsuit, she went back downstairs. She’d left her long blond hair in a knot, because she knew how much Steven disliked it up. Her blue eyes twinkled with mischief.
Steve had changed, too, and returned from his house, which was barely two blocks away. He was wearing white slacks with a soft blue knit shirt, and he looked elegant and unapproachable. His back was broad, his shoulders straining against the expensive material of his shirt. Meg remembered without wanting to how it had felt all those years ago to run her hands up and down that expanse of muscle while he kissed her. There was a thick pelt of hair over his chest and stomach. During their brief interlude, she’d learned the hard contours of his body with delight. He could have had her anytime during that one exquisite month of togetherness, but he’d always drawn back in time. She wondered sometimes if he’d ever regretted it. Secretly she did. There would never be anyone else that she’d want as she had wanted Steve. The memories would have been bittersweet if they’d been lovers, but at least they might fill the emptiness she felt now. Her life was dedicated to ballet and as lonely as death. No man touched her, except her ballet partners, and none of them excited her.
She’d always been excited by Steven. That hadn’t faded. The past two times she’d come home to visit David, the hunger she felt for her ex-fiancé had grown unexpectedly, until it actually frightened her. He frightened her, with his vast experience of women and his intent way of looking at her.
He turned when he heard her enter the room, with a cigarette in his hand. He quit smoking periodically, sometimes with more success than others. He was restless and high-strung, and the cigarette seemed to calm him. Fortunately, the house was air-conditioned and David had, at Meg’s insistence, added a huge filtering system to it. There was no smell of smoke.
“Nasty habit,” she muttered, glaring at him.
He inclined his head toward her with a mocking smile. “Doesn’t your great-aunt Henrietta dip snuff…?”
She sighed. “Yes, she does. You look very much as your father used to,” she murmured.
He shook his head. “He was shorter.”
“But just as somber. You don’t smile, Steve,” she said quietly, and moved gracefully into the big front room with its modern black and white and chrome furniture and soft honey-colored carpet.
“Smiling doesn’t fit my image,” he returned.
“Some image,” she mused. “I saw one of your vice presidents hide in a hangar when he spotted you on the tarmac. That lazy walk of yours lets everyone know when you’re about to lose your temper. So slow and easy—so deadly.”
“It gets results,” he replied, indicating that he was aware of the stance and probably used it to advantage with his people. “Have you seen a balance sheet lat
ely? Aren’t you interested in what I’m doing with your stock?”
“Finance doesn’t mean much to me,” she confessed. “I’m much more interested in the ballet company I’m working with. It really is in trouble.”
“Join another company,” he said.
“I’ve spent a year working my way up in this one,” she returned. “I can’t start all over again. Ballerinas don’t have that long, as a rule. I’m going on twenty-three.”
“So old?” His eyes held hers. “You look very much as you did at eighteen. More sophisticated, of course. The girl I used to know would have died before she’d have insinuated to a perfect stranger that she was sharing my bed.”
“I thought she was one of your women,” Meg muttered. “God knows, you’ve got enough of them. I’ll bet you have to keep a computer file so you won’t forget their names. No wonder Jane believed I was one of them without question!”
“You could have been, once,” he reminded her bluntly. “But I got noble and pushed you away in the nick of time.” He laughed without humor. “I thought we’d have plenty of time for intimate discoveries after we were married. More fool me.” He lifted the cigarette to his mouth, and his eyes were ice-cold.
“I was grass green back then,” she reminded him with what she hoped was a sophisticated smile. “You’d have been disappointed.”
He blew out a soft cloud of smoke and his eyes searched hers. “No. But you probably would have been. I wanted you too badly that last night we were together. I’d have hurt you.”
It was the night they’d argued. But before that, they’d lain on his black leather sofa and made love until she’d begged him to finish it. She hadn’t been afraid, then. But he hadn’t. Even now, the sensations he’d kindled in her body made her flush.
“I don’t think you would have, really,” she said absently, her body tingling with forbidden memories as she looked at him. “Even so, I wanted you enough that I wouldn’t have cared if you hurt me. I was wild to have you. I forgot all my fears.”
He didn’t notice the implication. He averted his eyes. “Not wild enough to marry me, of course.”
“I was eighteen. You were thirty and you had a mistress.”
His back stiffened. He turned, his eyes narrow, scowling. “What?”
“You know all this,” she said uncomfortably. “My mother explained it to you the morning I left.”
He moved closer, his lean face hard, unreadable. “Explain it to me yourself.”
“Your father told me about Daphne,” she faltered. “The night we argued, she was the one you took out, the one you were photographed with. Your father told me that you were only marrying me for the stock. He and your mother cared about me—perhaps more than my own did. When he said that you always went back to Daphne, no matter what, I got cold feet.”
His high cheekbones flushed. He looked…stunned. “He told you that?” he asked harshly.
“Yes. Well, my mother knew about Daphne, too,” she said heavily.
“Oh, God.” He turned away. He leaned over to crush out his cigarette, his eyes bleak, hopeless.
“I knew you weren’t celibate, but finding that you had a mistress was something of a shock, especially when we’d been seeing each other for a month.”
“Yes. I expect it was a shock.” He was staring down into the ashtray, unmoving. “I knew your mother was against the engagement. She had her heart set on helping you become a ballerina. She’d failed at it, but she was determined to see that you succeeded.”
“She loved me…”
He turned, his dark eyes riveting to hers. “You ran, damn you.”
She took a steadying breath. “I was eighteen. I had reasons for running that you don’t know about.” She dropped her eyes to his broad chest. “But I think I understand the way you were with me. You had Daphne. No wonder it was so easy for you to draw back when we made love.”
His eyes closed. He almost shuddered with reaction. He shook with the force of his rage at his father and Meg’s mother.
“It’s all water under the bridge now, though,” she said then, studying his rigid posture with faint surprise. “Steve?”
He took a long, deep breath and lit another cigarette. “Why didn’t you say something? Why didn’t you wait and talk to me?”
“There was no point,” she said simply. “You’d already told me to get out of your life,” she added with painful satisfaction.
“At the time, I probably meant it,” he replied heavily. “But that didn’t last long. Two days later, I was more than willing to start over, to try again. I came to tell you so. But you were gone.”
“Yes.” She stared at her slender hands, ringless, while her mind fought down the flood of misery she’d felt when she left Wichita. The fear had finally defeated her. And he didn’t know…
“If you’d waited, I could have explained,” he said tautly.
She looked at him sadly. “Steve, what could you have said? It was perfectly obvious that you weren’t ready to make a real commitment to me, even if you were willing to marry me for your own reasons. And I had some terrors that I couldn’t face.”
“Did you?” he asked dully. He lifted the cigarette to his chiseled mouth and stared into space. “Your father and mine were involved in a subtle proxy fight about that time, did anyone tell you?”
“No. Why would they have needed to?”
“No reason,” he said bitterly. “None at all.”
She hated the way he looked. Surely what had happened in the past didn’t still bother him. His pride had suffered, though, that might explain it.
She moved closer, smiling gently. “Steve, it was forever ago,” she said. “We’re different people now, and all I did really was to spare us both a little embarrassment when we broke up. If you’d wanted me that badly, you’d have come after me.”
He winced. His dark silver eyes caught hers and searched them with anguish. “You’re sure of that.”
“Of course. It was no big thing,” she said softly. “You’ve had dozens of women since, and your mother says you don’t take any of them any more seriously than you took me. You enjoy being a bachelor. If I wasn’t ready for marriage, neither were you.”
His face tautened. He smiled, but it was no smile at all. “You’re right,” he said coldly, “it was no big thing. One or two nights together would have cured both of us. You were a novelty, you with your innocent body and big eyes. I wanted you, all right.”
She searched his face, looking for any trace of softening. She didn’t find it. She hated seeing him that way, so somber and remote. Impishly she wiggled her eyebrows. “Do you still? Feel like experimenting? Your bed or mine?”
He didn’t smile. His eyes flashed, and one of them narrowed a little. That meant trouble.
He lifted the cigarette to his lips one more time, drawing out the silence until she felt like an idiot for what she’d suggested. He bent his tall frame to put it out in the ashtray, and she watched. He had beautiful hands: dark and graceful and long-fingered. On a woman’s body, they were tender magic…
“No, thanks,” he said finally. “I don’t like being one in a queue.”
Her eyebrows arched. “I beg your pardon?”
He straightened and stuck his hands deep into his pockets, emphasizing the powerful muscles in his thighs, his narrow hips and flat stomach. “Shouldn’t you be looking after your roast? Or do you imagine that David and I don’t have enough charcoal in our diets already?”
She moved toward him gracefully. “Steve, I dislike very much what you’ve just insinuated.” She stared up at him fearlessly, her eyes wide and quiet. “There hasn’t been a man. Not one. There isn’t time in my life for the sort of emotional turmoil that comes from involvement. Emotional upsets influence the way I dance. I’ve worked too hard, too long, to go looking for complications.”
She started to turn away, but his lean, strong hands were on her waist, stilling her, exciting her.
“Your honesty, Mary Margaret, i
s going to land you in hot water one day.”
“Why lie?” she asked, peering over her shoulder at him.
“Why, indeed?” he asked huskily.
He drew her closer, resting his chin on the top of her blond head, and her heart raced wildly as his fingers slid slowly up and down from her waist to her rib cage.
“What if I give in to that last bit of provocation?” he whispered roughly.
“What provocation?”
His teeth closed softly on her earlobe, his warm breath brushing her cheek. “Your bed or mine, Meg?” he whispered.
2
Meg wondered if she was still breathing. She’d been joking, but Steve didn’t look or sound as if he were.
“Steve…” she whispered.
His eyes fell to her mouth as her head lay back against his broad chest. His face changed at the sound of his name on her lips. His hands on her waist contracted until they bruised and his face went rigid. “Mouth like a pink rose petal,” he said in an oddly rough tone. “I almost took you once, Meg.”
She felt herself vibrating, like drawn cord. “You pushed me away,” she whispered.
“I had to!” There was anger in the silvery depths of his eyes. “You blind little fool.” He bit off the words. “Don’t you know why even now?”
She didn’t. She simply stared at him, her blue eyes wide and clear and curious.
He groaned. “Meg!” He let out a long, rough breath and forcibly eased the grip of his lean hands and pushed her away. He shoved his hands into his pockets and stared for a long time into her wide, guileless eyes. “No, you don’t understand, do you?” he said heavily. “I thought you might mature in New York.” His eyes narrowed and he frowned. “What was that talk about some man wanting to keep you, then?”