by Miranda Lee
‘Not like you to be standing alone at a party,’ Byron said as he wandered up to him, looking splendid in his tux.
But then, Byron would look good in anything. The man had everything. Looks. Money. Charm. And more recently a gorgeous wife and a delightful baby girl. Blake would have been jealous of the man if he didn’t like him so much. And if he wasn’t such a solid investor in his movies.
‘I’m waiting for my dancing partner to come back from the powder room,’ he grumbled. ‘She’s been gone ages.’
‘I presume you’re talking about Kate?’
‘Yes, Kate.’
‘Sweet girl. Much sweeter than her sister,’ Byron observed drily.
‘Too true,’ Blake agreed. ‘I wouldn’t want to be married to that one.’
Byron laughed. ‘You wouldn’t want to be married to anyone.’
‘You know me so well. Ah, here she is. Kate, sweetheart, what took you so long?’
Kate had no intention of telling him the truth. Certainly not in front of Byron. Or ever, actually.
She grabbed a glass of champagne from a passing waiter and smiled at the two men over the rim as she took a long swallow. They were the sort of men that women must smile at a lot, she conceded. Both very attractive, though in entirely different ways. Byron was fair-haired and traditionally handsome, with clean-cut even features and a smile which might out-dazzle Lachlan’s. He was a true gentleman. Whereas Blake looked more like a gypsy, with his wayward black hair, his dark beetling eyebrows and deeply set and very intense eyes.
They pierced her now, those eyes, making her quiver inside. Lord, but he wouldn’t have to try too hard to seduce me, came the shocking thought.
‘Kate’s an actress—did you know?’ Blake asked Byron, whilst not taking his eyes off her.
Byron’s eyebrows lifted. ‘No, I didn’t know.’
‘Neither did I until tonight. She’s a graduate of NIDA. Was in the same class as Lachlan.’
‘Really? How come he didn’t mention it?’
‘I have no idea.’
Once again Kate kept silent. After all, what could she say? She really wasn’t sure what reason was behind her supposed good friend not mentioning her acting aspirations. But she suspected it had nothing to do with protecting her virtue. Or her heart.
The thought angered her. And made her all the more determined to take whatever help Blake could give her.
‘Blake’s offered me a part in one of his movies,’ she said brightly, at which Byron’s eyes widened considerably.
It crossed Kate’s mind that maybe Byron knew of his friend’s modus operandi with actresses as well. A momentary concern tightened her chest, but it was quickly dismissed—as quickly as she swallowed the rest of her champagne. The alcohol fizzed down into her near empty stomach—she hadn’t eaten much of the formal meal—going straight to her head and giving her some much-needed Dutch courage.
She wasn’t by nature a rash person. Or a reckless one. Yet she wanted to be both tonight. She needed to be both tonight—needed to throw off her earlier wretchedness, needed to ignore her broken heart and surge boldly and bravely into a new future: a future in which her futile feelings for Lachlan had no role to play.
She had to move on. Had to. There was no alternative. Kate was tired of feeling depressed. And of being rejected both personally and professionally. It was time to tap into her acting skills. Time to channel Maddie and just go for it.
‘I think, darling Blake,’ she said, with a decidedly flirtatious sparkle in her eyes, ‘that I am in desperate need of some more dancing.’
* * *
Blake almost did a double-take. Even Byron shot him a startled glance. This wasn’t the Kate who’d dashed off to the Ladies. This was a different Kate. A saucier, sexier Kate. Maybe she had more of her sister in her than he’d realised.
In a perverse way, he wasn’t sure he liked it. His body did, however, and his erection returned with a vengeance before he’d even taken her into his arms.
Without prompting she slid her own arms up around his neck and pressed herself against him. Blake swore under his breath, knowing she had to be aware of his arousal. It discomfited him, for some reason. As much as he wanted Kate, he had never been the kind of guy who shagged sozzled bridesmaids at weddings, however much they wanted it.
‘Sweetheart...’ he murmured, noting her over-bright eyes with their dilated pupils. ‘How much have you had to drink tonight?’
She blinked up at him, then laughed. ‘Not all that much. But I could do with some fresh air. It’s rather warm in here. Fancy a walk in the garden? It’s lovely down by the water. Not cold at all. We could go and sit in the gazebo whilst you tell me about this wonderful part you have for me.’
* * *
Kate knew she was prattling on, but she really wasn’t comfortable in the role of vamp, or seductress, or whatever it was she was trying to be. Not that it mattered. Blake already fancied her. She’d felt the evidence more than once. She didn’t have to act like this. It wasn’t her.
She had no doubt that once they were alone in the gazebo he would make a pass. Kiss her at least.
But what if he wanted to go further than that?
As attractive and sexy as she found him, Kate didn’t really want to have sex with Blake tonight. So tacky to act like that at a wedding! Her sister’s wedding, no less. No, she couldn’t throw caution to the wind to that extent. And to go outside with him—to be alone with him in the vast, rather romantically lit grounds—was dangerous in the extreme.
Because she wasn’t sure that if he started kissing her she would want him to stop. The way he kept looking at her was powerfully seductive. His hot gaze bored into her like a laser beam, searing her insides and making her want to be even more reckless than she’d vowed to be. She couldn’t recall ever feeling quite so...stirred.
‘Let’s go, then,’ he said firmly, a possessive hand on her elbow, steering her towards the exit of the marquee.
Fortunately—or perhaps unfortunately, as it turned out—they were interrupted before they could make their escape. It was her mother, still looking like the very proud mother of the bride, all puffed up and flushed in her very pretty and very expensive pink suit, an older version of Maddie with her bottle blonde hair, but just a little too much make-up for a woman of fifty.
‘Maddie sent me to get you, Kate,’ Janine Holiday said somewhat breathlessly. ‘She wants you to help her change into her going-away outfit.’
‘What? So soon? But it’s still quite early and—’
‘The poor love says she’s terribly tired,’ Janine cut in. ‘As you know, she’s been up since the crack of dawn.’
Kate did know. She’d been got up as well, and then dragged off to the beauty salon so that she could be plucked and primped and polished until she hardly recognised herself. But she supposed it had been worth it in the end. Blake thought she looked lovely.
Kate didn’t believe for a moment that Maddie was ‘terribly tired’. That girl was like one of those batteries which never ran down. She knew exactly why Maddie wanted to leave. She’d whispered the reason to Kate earlier. She wanted to have sex with her new husband.
An hour or two ago Kate would have been overwhelmed with jealousy. Now her only feeling was distaste. She might still be in love with Lachlan, but she no longer liked him or wanted him. After what Blake had told her about his cheating behaviour Maddie was welcome to him.
‘You’d better go,’ Blake said, a wry note in his voice. ‘I’ll catch you later.’
Kate threw him an apologetic glance before allowing herself to be drawn away by her mother.
‘Maddie’s already gone upstairs,’ Janine said as they headed for the house together. ‘I think, Kate, that after she and Lachlan have left your father and I will go home too. I’m pretty tired myself. It’s been a long day. Marvellous, but exhausting. Wh
at about you?’ she added. ‘I suppose you won’t want to leave that early.’
‘No.’
In truth, Kate was horrified at the thought of listening to her parents rave on about Maddie’s wedding all the way home. Strathfield was an inner Western Sydney suburb which was a good half-hour drive from Byron’s harbour-side mansion.
‘That would be rather rude. The party’s only just started. We can’t all leave early. Besides, Cleo said I could stay the night if I liked, so I think I’ll take her up on that offer.’
‘Cleo?’
‘Byron’s wife. You must have met her.’
‘I suppose I must have. I’ve been a bit distracted today. What does she look like?’
‘Brunette. Burgundy dress. Very stylish. And very nice. Look, I’ll catch a taxi home in the morning. I’ll bring the dresses with me when I come.’
‘Oh, all right. But perhaps I’d best take Maddie’s wedding dress home with me tonight. I wouldn’t like anything to happen to it.’
‘What on earth could possibly happen to it?’ Kate asked, amazed and a little hurt.
Janine looked irritated. ‘I don’t know. I just think it’s better to be safe than sorry. Now, off you go. I need to get back to your father before he gets himself into trouble.’
Kate almost laughed. Her father was not the type of man who ever got himself into trouble. An insurance assessor, he was as conservative as his job, his only passion in life a collection of rare stamps. And, of course, his second and much adored daughter, who’d played Daddy’s girl to perfection from the time she was just a tot.
Whenever Maddie perched herself on her father’s knee and wrapped her arms around him he could deny her nothing. And he never had. Whatever she wanted, she got. Toys. Clothes. Expensive school excursions. A boob job. And finally, when she turned twenty-one, a car. Which she had promptly wrecked, losing her driving licence as well. This hadn’t overly bothered Maddie, because by then she’d always had some obsessed boyfriend very eager to drive her wherever she wanted to go.
Kate trudged up the stairs, sighing as she went. She wished she could hate Maddie. But she didn’t. She just couldn’t. Yes, her sister was vain, and manipulative, and terribly self-centred. But, despite all that, she was an engaging personality, irrepressible and outgoing, and very, very charming. Kate couldn’t help admiring her, in a way. And loving her.
More was the pity.
CHAPTER EIGHT
‘OH, THERE YOU ARE!’ Maddie exclaimed as Kate walked in.
She’d already taken off her wedding dress and tossed it carelessly onto a nearby chair. She was standing by the bed in nothing but a strapless white lace corset, her double D cup boobs almost spilling over the top. Her stockings and shoes lay in an untidy heap on the floor.
‘Join me?’ she said as she swept up the bottle of champagne which was sitting in an ice bucket on the bedside table.
Next to it were two flutes, delivered to the room when they’d been getting dressed earlier. Neither of them had felt like drinking at the time. Maddie had been too excited and Kate too wretched.
‘For pity’s sake, watch what you’re doing!’ Kate groaned when the cork popped off and champagne started fizzing out of the bottle. Hurrying over, she rescued the precious wedding dress in time, returning it to the plastic cover where it had been residing for the last two weeks.
‘Oh, don’t be such a worrywart. It’s not red wine. Champagne won’t even stain. Besides, it’s not like I’ll be wearing the damned thing ever again. Mum will put it into her treasure box so that she can bring it out and drool over it every now and then. She’s got all our grad dresses in there too. Even our christening dresses. Here—have some champers. You might need it.’
‘What do you mean, I might need it?’ Kate asked as she took the glass.
Maddie flashed her one of her mischievous glances. ‘Blind Freddie could see that Blake Randall is very taken with you, darls. All thanks to moi, of course. If you’d turned up today looking like your usual drack sack he wouldn’t be all over you like a rash the way he was on that dance floor a little while ago. Now, does he know you graduated from NIDA?’
‘I told him.’ Kate took a deep swallow of the cold champagne. ‘Your dear husband never even mentioned it to him. Which I find quite odd, since we were supposedly good friends there.’
Maddie laughed. ‘Never underestimate the male ego, darls. Lachlan wouldn’t want any of his NIDA buddies stealing his thunder, so to speak. Especially not you, Kate. You’re too good an actress. And then there was that other matter...’
‘What other matter?’
‘Your crush on him,’ she stated with bald honesty.
‘My what?’
Maddie rolled her eyes. ‘Please don’t pretend you don’t know what I’m talking about. It was obvious—even at home. You never stopped talking about him from day one at NIDA. Lachlan tells me it was quite embarrassing...the way you followed him around like a puppy. He said he couldn’t even go for coffee without you inviting yourself along.’
Kate could hardly believe what she was hearing. Lachlan was the one who had kept inviting her for coffee. His wanting to talk to her all the time had been very flattering. It hadn’t been just his looks which had made her fall in love with him. But now she saw that he’d just been picking her brain, as most of their conversations had revolved around her acting methods.
A very real fury welled up inside her. Fury plus a degree of humiliation. How could she have been so taken in by him? But she had. Oh, yes, she had.
In her defence, all the attractive female students at NIDA had gone ga-ga over him. And most of them had become a girlfriend of Lachlan’s at some stage—each of them dated for a while and then dumped, not harshly but cleverly. Lachlan had used buckets of his boyish charm to smooth over each break-up, with the result that they had never had anything bad to say about him, even after he’d moved on.
Kate had waited and waited for him to move on to her. She was the only one he hadn’t dated, and whilst she knew she couldn’t compare with Maddie, she wasn’t a total dog. Lots of people said she was quite attractive. But he had never asked her out. Not once.
Just thinking about those wasted years had Kate finishing her first glass of champagne in no time and seeking a refill.
‘Oh, come, now,’ Kate said as she put the bottle down. ‘I wasn’t as bad as that. And I wasn’t the only girl at NIDA to be impressed. I mean, he is so very good-looking. But we all got over that once we realised how up himself he is.’
Kate felt rather proud of her well-delivered lie. Studying acting had come in handy more than once today.
‘I certainly don’t have a crush on him any more, I can assure you,’ she said with a straight face as she lifted the glass to her lips again.
‘So you say,’ Maddie said, putting down her own glass on a side table and standing with her hands on her hips, eyes narrowed and lips pursed. ‘I guess I’d be more inclined to believe you if you had a boyfriend. Look, Lachlan is my husband now, and I don’t want to go through my life thinking my sister still has the hots for him. Do you?’
Kate drew herself up tall, squared her shoulders and fixed Maddie with uncompromising eyes. ‘Now you are being seriously silly. Okay, I admit I did have a small crush on him. Once. But trust me when I say I don’t any longer.’
Maddie gave her a long hard glare before shrugging dismissively. ‘Well, I’ll just have to take your word for it, I suppose. But I did wonder why you seemed so uptight earlier. If I thought that—’
‘Maddie, please stop! You’ve totally got the wrong idea. The reason I was uptight earlier was because I was nervous.’
‘Nervous! What about?’
‘About being a bridesmaid. I’ve never been one before.’
‘For heaven’s sake! I’ve never been a bride before and I wasn’t nervous.’
‘You’r
e never nervous about anything.’
‘True...’ Maddie preened. ‘Okay, now that’s all sorted, let’s get back to what I originally wanted to talk to you about. Blake Randall’s obvious interest in you...’
‘Oh, yes?’
‘Yes. Now, I don’t want you to waste this opportunity,’ Maddie said as she went over to the walk-in wardrobe and came out carrying the very stylish ice-blue woollen dress which her mother had chosen and for which her father had paid a small fortune. ‘That’s why I said you might need to get a bit tipsy. To give you some Dutch courage,’ Maddie added, unzipping the dress and laying it out across the bed. ‘Because I know you, Kate. You let opportunities go by because you simply won’t go for them. So go on—drink up.’
Kate did as she was ordered, glad that the alcohol was already hurrying through her veins and reaching her brain, bringing with it a much-needed devil-may-care attitude.
‘You have to have tunnel vision in this world,’ Maddie rattled on, stepping into the blue sheath and pulling it up onto her shoulders. ‘You can’t wait for things to just happen. You have to make them happen.’
This was hardly news to Kate. She’d thought exactly the same thing earlier this evening.
‘Now, I have a confession to make,’ her sister went on, doing up the side zipper and then slipping her bare feet into the pair of nude high heels which were sitting ready for her at the foot of the bed. ‘When you brought Lachlan home last Christmas even though I’d almost decided to marry Riley I knew I didn’t love him. But I liked him, and I knew he’d give me a good life money-wise. He owns his own plumbing business and everyone knows that plumbers earn heaps. But then I took one look at Lachlan and saw an opportunity for a much better life—a life which would be very exciting and very glamorous, with a husband who was gorgeous and brilliant and seriously sexy. I realised suddenly that I couldn’t settle for Riley, even though he was very good in bed. I wanted more. I wanted Lachlan and what he could give me. I mean, the temptation to go for him was overwhelming.’
She hesitated briefly and sent Kate an apologetic glance.