Whatever could the right way be?
Lord, she had to control herself or she’d be ruined. He provoked the most unnerving yearnings inside her. Every time she’d so much as looked at Colin these past several hours, visions of white picket fences and hordes of charming children swarmed into her head. Not to mention those other, darker visions, of herself and Colin tangled in the sheets of her hotel room, clinging to each other in passionate and embarrassingly intimate embraces.
Mercy, she hoped he’d chalk up the high color in her cheeks to her recent bath and not embarrassment brought about by her own salacious thoughts.
“I’ll be just another little minute, Colin,” she tittered, her voice gone high because her throat was tight.
He didn’t answer her. Oh, dear, was that because he was shocked by her outrageous boldness? He’d unquestionably heard all the lurid tales concerning actresses being fallen creatures and so forth. Would he believe her to be one of those poor women who threw themselves into the arms of any willing man who was rich enough to buy her favors?
Brenda knew full well that most of the women who allowed themselves to be supported by wealthy men were only suffering from the memory of poverty or its current influence in their lives, and that most of them were only determined never to experience want and deprivation again. The means open to women for achieving security were minuscule, and if a woman chose to sell herself to a rich man in order to lift herself from the gutter, so be it. Brenda was too wise to cast stones. She was only fortunate that she hadn’t had to make a decision of that nature. Chance had played an enormous part in her life, and she knew it.
Before she’d left the bathroom, she’d determined exactly what she planned to wear. She didn’t want to have to putter around in front of Colin in her dressing gown that sort of delay might give him doubts about her virtue. She had enough doubts of her own without adding his to the mix.
Therefore, she aimed herself directly at the closet and turned to a powder-blue, scoop-necked pinafore dress and a frilly white lawn blouse, suitable for casual afternoon wear. She’d grab fresh pantaloons and a suitable set of undergarments from the bureau drawer on her way back to the bathroom. She’d plotted her course with intricate care so as to spend as little time as possible alone Colin in the parlor of her suite.
She’d just taken the blouse and pinafore from their padded hangers when she felt his arms go around her. She uttered a small shriek that withered into a moan of pleasure when she felt his warm breath on her neck.
Chapter Fourteen
Colin’s hands were big and broad and hard. They closed across her midsection and drew her back against his chest, which was also big and broad and hard. The hardest thing she could discern on his body, however, was his masculine member, which was at present pressing against her hips like an iron rod.
Brenda’s brain screamed, No!
Her heart whispered, Yes. Oh, yes.
It was as she’d always feared. She was no better than she should be, and this was the telling moment. Everything in her cried out for her to turn into Colin’s arms and succumb to the lure of his magnificent manliness.
The tattered vestige of sanity still alive in her head told her to slap the cad’s face and run.
Lord, what a dilemma.
“You’re beautiful, Brenda. You’re the most beautiful woman in the world.”
Fortunately for her, she’d learned long ago that beauty meant next to nothing in the overall scheme of things except when it came to making a living, and that was only because men were too stupid to value women as they ought. Her sanity made a tentative step toward mending its rips.
She said, “What are you doing, Colin?” She’d aimed for a stern, icy quality in her tone, but that had been asking too much of her willpower. Her voice merely shook, which wasn’t nearly as effective.
“I’m kissing you,” Colin answered unnecessarily.
There was nothing whatever wrong with Brenda’s nervous system. She could discern without being told that he was kissing her. Which meant her question had been silly. Through the mush in her brain, she tried to compose a sentence that would more nearly get her meaning across.
He took that moment to move his hands only slightly, but the movement was enough so that his thumbs barely pressed the bottoms of her breasts. Brenda feared her bones were melting. Her knees most definitely had lost their steel and were beginning to buckle. With an enormous effort, she stiffened them.
This was terrible. It was awful. It was despicable of Colin to do this to her. It was—it was—
Oh, God, it was wonderful.
No, no, no! She couldn’t begin to think that way or she’d be lost for sure. “Colin,” she said—she was astonished that her voice held such firmness. “This isn’t right.”
“Yes, it is.”
His voice was a mere rumble, more nearly felt than heard, as it brushed across the skin of her neck. She felt gooseflesh rise all over her body. It took all the power she could command not to let her head drop back and give him better access to the tender flesh of her throat. She wanted to guide him to that little hollow between her ears and her neck that was so sensitive.
Stop it! In that direction lay ruin, and Brenda knew it, even if her emotions and nerve endings had decided to ignore the bitter truth for the nonce.
“Please let me go, Colin,” she said softly. She hadn’t intended the command to be soft. She’d wanted it to come out loud and steely.
“I don’t want to.”
Oh, great. So what was she supposed to do now?
She knew what she wanted to do, and it was scandalous. Recalling all the injustices perpetrated against women in this land of the free and home of the brave, Brenda straightened as much as she was able, with her limbs turned to jelly and her bones to water.
But she knew what was what. This sort of underhanded seduction wasn’t fair. It was as old a practice as it was an unfair one. Beastly, lust-crazed men had been perpetrating such methods on love-starved women for as long as the world had been turning. Both genders might appreciate and enjoy the act of love, but women appreciated it as an expression of that love. Men used love to get what they wanted, and that had very little to do with commitment and permanence. Brenda resented it almost much as she longed to succumb.
“Stop doing that, Colin.”
“Don’t you like it?”
Fiddlesticks! If that wasn’t an unethical question, she didn’t know what was. “Liking it has nothing to do with it.”
“It has everything to do with it. I need you, Brenda. I need you more than anything else on earth.”
Right. Sure he did. Even in her fuddled state, Brenda knew that was untrue.
Well, perhaps it was true right this minute, but if wouldn’t be true as soon as he’d had what he wanted. She’d seen too much misery engendered by just such belief in men’s soft lies to fall for that old line. Many’s the time she’d comforted a woman who’d been led astray by sugary words murmured by a scoundrel.
“Nonsense.” Blast, her voice was quivering again.
His hands covered her breasts, and she nearly lost control completely. She couldn’t afford to do that. As surely as she gave herself to Colin—and she dearly wanted to—he’d just as surely begin looking upon her as a wanton hussy, sort of like a piece of candy to be tasted and discarded. If she succumbed to him now, she’d be proving what he assumed about her was true: that she was just like any other actress in the world and was, therefore, no better than a prostitute. She’d never be able to hold her bead up again.
Not only that, but she’d be betraying her family. Her mother had told her over and over again that she’d rather starve in a ditch than to learn Brenda had sold herself to some man for her family’s sake.
Thinking of her family strengthened her. Although Colin’s fingertips were at present setting fire to her body, through the agency of her breasts, which he was caressing, she slapped her own hands over his, grabbed his fingers, and yanked them away from her.
>
She felt bereft. She also felt justified, and she wasn’t about to lose the momentum she’d gained thanks to her mother’s wisdom. “Stop that this instant!” she snapped—and she even sounded moderately irate, if a little shaky.
“But—but—”
“No buts!” She jerked away from him. A cold breeze hit her back where his warm body had been, and she shivered. “If you can’t behave yourself, Colin Peters, I’m going to have to ask you to leave my room.” She considered pointing at the door, but that might have made her dressing gown gape, and she was having a hard enough time rejecting him as it was.
He looked as if she’d hit him with a baseball bat instead of merely refused his advances. His befuddlement rankled and allowed her to gather her wits together more quickly than she might otherwise have done. She’d have slammed her hand on her hips except for the dressing gown problem.
“But—” He looked utterly helpless.
Brenda didn’t buy it for a second. He was about as helpless as a wasp. Wasps looked pretty enough—sometimes—but they packed a wallop that could fell a sensitive person. While Brenda didn’t claim to be the most sensitive female on earth—she’d had to learn how to parry the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune when she was quite young—she retained enough sensitivity to be offended by his evident bewilderment.
So the knave had believed she’d fall for that old you’re-the-most-beautiful-woman-in-the-world routine, had he? He’d thought she’d be flattered by his scandalous attentions, had he? He’d believed her to be so lost to virtue that she’d climb into bed with him as soon as he gave the signal, had he?
Well, she’d show him Now that she was no longer encircled by those maddeningly deceptive arms—deceptive because, while they felt as though they belonged on an athlete, they were on the body of a total scholar—she was beginning to gather herself together. She marched up to him, stopping far enough away so that if he made a swoop, she’d be out of his reach. She didn’t trust herself that far.
“Get out of this room, Colin. I had believed you to be a gentleman, but I can see now how deceived in you I was.”
“Deceived? Deceived?” He both sounded and looked as if he’d never heard the word before.
“Deceived,” she said firmly. “I shall go downstairs and join the others as soon as—in a moment.” She’d been going to say as soon as she was dressed but didn’t want to point out her relative nudity in case he’d forgotten about it. She made the mistake of letting her gaze drop to his trousers and gasped.
He hadn’t forgotten. Good God, he was huge. She knew stage actors who liked to parade around in their drawers in order to show off their assets, but she’d never seen anything like this before.
Swallowing, she allowed as to how she might be the slightest bit naive about this man-woman thing, even though she’d been an actress for half her life. She’d heard tales enough, but she’d never actually seen a hard male member before.
What was worse was that she had a compelling and completely illogical, not to mention wicked, desire to see one now. On Colin.
Merciful heavens, this was just awful. She stamped her foot to get her own attention. “I’ll be back in a moment. If you can behave yourself, you may remain in my room and escort me downstairs.”
She saw him swallow. “I’ll behave. I mean—I mean, I’ll stay here and wait for you.”
“Very well.” She grabbed her clothes, rushed to the bureau and snatched out some underwear—she didn’t even look to see what she’d chosen—and hurried back to the bathroom. As soon as the door closed behind her, she locked it with a hand that shook as if with palsy, threw her clothes on a dressing table covered with bottles of scent, bowls of dusting powder, and her tooth powder, sank onto the pretty wicker chair with the flowered seat cushion, pressed a hand to her pounding heart, and tried to catch her breath. It took a long time
Colin was still trying to figure out what had gone wrong with his carefully constructed plan of action when Brenda emerged from the bathroom again, this time covered from head to toe with clothing. Dash it.
She looked as if she’d been born fully clothed, as if she didn’t even possess breasts, but only those two slight protuberances on the bodice of her gown. Colin knew better. Not only did she possess breasts, but they weren’t slight. They were large and succulent and he wanted to feel them again. And again and again and again. And the rest of her, too.
This was awful.
She stood as straight and stiff as his sex had been only moments earlier, but she appeared much less happy. In fact, she scowled at him in a manner that might have been described as frightful if it had been on the face of another woman when she said, “I’m ready.”
So was he, although he meant something different by the words than she. He sighed. “Allow me, please.” He opened the door and stood aside. She sailed out of her room on a cloud of indignation and dignity. Colin saw several damp curls caressing the nape of her neck that must have escaped her brush and hairpins. They made his heart lurch. Not to mention his sex. Grinding his teeth and telling himself to calm down, he followed her.
But the Peerless crowd in the bar was cheerful, Brenda visibly relaxed as soon as she saw them, and Colin decided he might as well join in the fun. Unfortunately, there wasn’t anything else more pleasurable to do at the moment.
He’d been sitting with Leroy Carruthers and a member of the Peerless crew when he heard his brother’s voice.
“H’lo, Colin.”
Colin glanced up and saw George smiling at him shyly. Feeling guilty that he should inspire guilt in his own brother, he gestured at an empty chair at his table. “Have a seat, George.”
“Thanks.” George nodded at Carruthers and the other man and sat. He looked as if he’d as soon the two non-Peters fellows would take themselves off.
Colin wasn’t sure he wanted them to go; he feared George wanted to bring up unpleasant subjects and preferred to study the Brenda problem for a while. Since was accustomed to thinking his own thoughts while in the company of others, he hadn’t been having any trouble considering Brenda until George showed up. He sighed and paid attention to his brother, who seemed to be winding up to speak some more.
“I, um, asked the long-distance operator to place a call to Mother and. Father, Colin,” George said after taking a swig of his drink.
Colin frowned at the mug in George’s hand which, he presumed, contained beer. He didn’t think George should be drinking an alcoholic beverage at his tender age, although he opted not to mention it. No sense in humiliating his brother again. He’d already made George feel bad enough—and he was sorry for it, too.
George apparently caught Colin’s severe glance, because he colored slightly and lifted the mug. “Root beer,” he said, embarrassed about it. “I’m not old enough to drink.”
Dash it, Colin wished he’d stop making mistakes with people. He hadn’t meant to appear so disapproving of his brother. He really wanted to help George, but he kept embarrassing him instead. That was no help. And he was failing completely in his campaign to lure Brenda into a sexual liaison, as well.
This was ridiculous. The laws of nature dictated sexual behavior in various species. Surely he couldn’t have strayed so far from the path set out by nature that his instincts no longer worked properly. Could he? It seemed unlikely, although something had definitely gone wrong with his plan of attack.
George said, “Well?” and Colin realized his brother had asked him a question.
It was his turn to flush. “I’m sorry, George. I was thinking over a—a problem—and didn’t hear what you asked.”
George didn’t seem much surprised by Colin’s lack of attention. He looked resigned, actually. Colin was ashamed of himself. “I just asked if you wanted to talk to them when the call goes through,” George said, fiddling with his glass. “Our parents, I mean.”
“Oh. Well—sure. Why not? I don’t have any news to report or anything, but I’ll talk to them.”
“I’m sure they
don’t care if you have news. They’ll be pleased to hear from you. I know they miss you.”
“They do?” This was news to Colin, who never communicated with his parents unless he had something of an uplifting or, educational quality to report. He didn’t communicate with anyone at all merely to blather on about nothing, and he never placed calls over the telephone. He’d been operating under the assumption that, while he enjoyed hearing from his parents, they didn’t much care to hear anything but newsworthy incident from him
Perhaps he’d been wrong about them, too. Perhaps parents enjoyed hearing from their children simply because they loved them.
Bother. Life could be very complicated sometimes. All of his carefully constructed theories seemed to be going up in smoke before his eyes.
He shot a glance at Brenda, who was playing some sort of lively card game that entailed a lot of slapping of hands on the table and laughing, and he frowned. Up in smoke, hell. His theory about her had been blown sky high. Shaking his head, he decided she was worth constructing another strategy for, although what it might be he had no idea.
“Of course they miss you.” George sounded incredulous. “They talk about you all the time. They’re awfully proud of you, Colin.”
Wrenching his gaze from Brenda, Colin blinked at his brother. “They are?”
George laughed. “Oh, I get it. You’re pulling my leg.”
Colin had glanced at his brother’s long legs before he realized George had used a figure of speech. “Er, no, George. I’m not pulling your legs.”
“Leg,” George corrected. “Just one of them.” He shook his head, as if in amazement. “I swear, Colin, you really do have your head in the clouds, don’t you? I’m surprised you ever come down to commune with us lesser beings here on earth.”
“I beg your pardon?” Now it was Colin who was incredulous.
Beauty and the Brain Page 21