by Diana Palmer
She studied his broad face. “He’ll expect one of you to take it over, won’t he?” she asked, suddenly understanding.
He nodded and turned onto the highway that led to his parents’ home.
“Would you like that?” she asked.
He frowned thoughtfully. “I don’t know. I like what I do. I’m not sure I could make the transition from attorney to businessman. Or that I’d want to.”
“But Denny would.” She was sounding him out.
He glanced at her. “Yes, he would.”
“Then, where’s the problem?”
“My father is the problem. He doesn’t think Denny’s mature enough to assume that much responsibility.”
“Denny’s very capable at law,” she remarked.
His eyes darkened. “Yes,” he agreed curtly. “But corporate administration is a far cry from running a one-man law office.”
He was right, much as she hated admitting it. It was hard enough for Denny to say no to potential clients. And, unlike Regan, he didn’t practice criminal law, confining himself instead to divorces and property settlements and business law. He didn’t have the killer instinct. But Regan did. He could hire and fire and assume responsibility for his mistakes, if there were any, without looking for scapegoats. He was strong enough to take criticism, and that was what the job called for. She could see very well why Mr. Cole would want his eldest to take over his corporation when he stepped down.
“What are you thinking about?” he asked finally.
“How you’d look in a tutu with a magic wand,” she murmured wickedly.
He glared at her. “Wait until I stop this car, and then say that again.”
“Do I look stupid?” She sighed, unable to take her eyes from him. “For a fairly ugly man, you’re not bad.”
He burst out laughing. “Does that mean you’re ready to take back your apology for calling me a beast?”
“No,” she told him. “If you remember, that particular beast changed into a handsome prince.”
“He didn’t have a nose that was broken in two places and big feet,” he reminded her.
“Stop making fun of my friend,” she chided gently.
He smiled at that, and reached out to ruffle her hair as he pulled the car into the long, paved driveway that led up to the two-story brick home where his parents lived on Lake Lanier.
Kenna had been there many times for business meetings and had always loved the house. It was gray brick, built on the order of an English Tudor home, but with unique variations, like the Victorian turret at one end, and the stained-glass skylight above the front door. All around it were trimmed boxwood, azaleas, camellias and dogwood trees, along with a glorious profusion of blooming bulbs. A white latticework gazebo stood in the middle of the rose garden.
“I don’t think I’ll ever see another place on earth as beautiful as this,” she remarked.
“It was my grandfather’s home,” he said. “He had it built to his own specifications. The gardens were my mother’s idea,” he added. “And Dad’s kept them just as they were when I was a boy.”
“How old were you when you lost your mother?” she asked.
“Eight,” he said. He smiled. “I gave my stepmother hell for two years. After that, she began to grow on me.”
“I know exactly what you mean,” she murmured. Over the years Kenna had become very fond of Abbie Cole.
He parked the car in the big garage behind the house, and opened her door for her. When she was outside, he pulled her against him and walked her toward the house with his big arm around her shoulders.
“For appearances,” he reminded her with a grin. “You’re not supposed to enjoy it.”
Her own arm snaked around his waist. “Heaven forbid that I should enjoy it,” she said demurely, flirting with her eyes.
“Watch yourself,” he muttered, pinching her arm and making her jump. “I’ve always wondered how it would feel to make love to a woman on the floor of the gazebo....”
“I’ll behave,” she promised him, “with utmost decorum. I won’t even try to rip open your shirt.”
“You’d better not,” he warned as they started toward the back door, which was just opening. “My chest is an erogenous zone. And I know just where yours is, too, baby,” he added outrageously.
Before she had time to gasp, blush or snap at him, his tall, gray-headed father was striding toward them, wearing a dark gray business suit and carrying a briefcase. Behind him was his small, very pretty wife, her platinum hair curling softly around her delicate face. She was smiling as usual.
“Hello and goodbye,” Angus Cole said, shaking his son’s hand and grinning at Kenna. “I’m off to Seattle for a conference. Don’t eat up all my cheese crackers and keep your hands off my Napoleon brandy,” he added with a scowl in Regan’s direction. “Watch him, Abbie,” he called to his wife.
“Yes, darling,” the older woman promised. “I’ll only let him drink your thirty-year-old Scotch, is that all right?”
Angus muttered something as he climbed into his black Mercedes and roared off, tooting the horn abrasively.
“Hello, dear.” Mrs. Cole laughed, hugging Regan. “Hi, Kenna, welcome back, where have you been for the past two months, and what in the world have you done to yourself, you’re gorgeous!” she said all in one breath.
“I’ve been busy,” Kenna managed, as she hugged the shorter woman back. “How are you? You look gorgeous yourself.”
“In jeans and a sweatshirt?” She laughed, indicating her clothes. “I’ve been digging in the rose garden.”
“I told you about that buried treasure,” Regan said drily. “The pirates buried it on the coast, not here.”
“Spoilsport,” his stepmother grumbled darkly. “Anyway, I’m digging up worms, not gold. A good worm is the best fertilizer God ever made. I’m transplanting them from your father’s fish-bait bed into my petunias.”
“God help you if he catches you,” Regan replied.
“Tell him,” Mrs. Cole challenged, “and I’ll tell him what really happened to the Mercedes the night you took that Olson girl to the senior prom.”
He sighed. “I’ll keep your dark secret if you’ll keep mine, Abbie,” he promised.
“Fair enough. Denny and Margo are down by the lake feeding the swans,” she said. “Want to come in and have coffee?”
Regan shook his head. “We’ll bring them back with us and have it then.”
Abbie Cole was watching the two of them with sharp, interested eyes. She smiled. “Is there something in the air?”
“Spring,” Regan told her.
“Is that so? Well, mind the dog, he’s loose out there somewhere,” she added, waving them off.
“Pooch?” Kenna asked, scanning the landscape for the familiar toy collie.
“Pooch. And he’ll be one long furry clump of mud and leaves, as usual.” He glanced at her. “I’ll shave his fur if he gets one speck of mud on that dress. It suits you.”
She beamed. “Thank you, fairy godfather,” she murmured.
“Stop that. Uh-oh, watch out!”
The warning came almost too late. Pooch came flying up from the vicinity of the lake, his fur as sleek as a seal’s from swimming and as muddy as a rain-swollen river. He headed straight for Kenna, who always played with him despite his antisocial tendencies.
She was looking for a tree to climb when Regan swooped and lifted her like a child in his big arms. “Down, Pooch,” he said in his courtroom voice, and the dog immediately sat down and whined at him, looking so impish he might have been a furry human.
“You do that very well,” Kenna remarked, reveling in the pleasure of being held so close to him, in the sheer male strength of the big body supporting hers.
“I practice on hostile witnesses,
” he informed her. His eyes searched hers.
“You’re so strong,” she murmured, letting her hands rest around his shoulders. Her voice sounded girlish, and she flushed at the inane remark.
“Sorry,” she added demurely, “I didn’t mean to sound starstruck. Of course you’re strong, you’re as big as a tree.”
“Not quite.” He swung her around, laughing at the way she clung to him, her face flushed and radiant, her eyes laughing back.
He buried his face in her soft hair and deliberately crushed her close. “You smell delicious, woman,” he growled in her ear. “I’d like to take several bites of you.”
“You’d poison yourself,” she assured him.
“That’s not likely, or I’d have died last night.” He lifted his head and looked into her wide, misty eyes. “Why did you cry while I was loving you?” he whispered.
Shudders of wild pleasure rippled through her at his wording, and her lips parted on a trembling breath. “Because it was so beautiful,” she managed unsteadily.
His eyes dropped to her parted lips. “We’d burn each other alive if we made love completely,” he said, and his deep voice sounded as unsteady as her own. There was a tremor in the arms that held her. He moved, brushing her lips with his own, creating a shiver of sensation that made her gasp. “All I have to do is touch you,” he said, repeating the motion again and again, until her mouth followed his, pleading for more. “All I have to do is touch you, and I start aching like a boy of fifteen. I want you, Kenna, I want to lay you down in the grass and open that dress and bare your body to the sun and my eyes and my mouth...!”
Even as he spoke he was pressing her lips apart with his, so that she could feel every warm, smoky curve of his mouth meeting hers exactly. He opened her mouth with a whispering pressure, his tongue teasing, his lips brushing, cherishing in a perfect orgy of foreplay that made her moan and clutch at his broad shoulders.
“Kiss me,” she ground out, aching for it, for completion, perfection. “Kiss me, kiss me hard, and don’t stop, don’t ever stop!” she moaned against his seeking mouth.
She trembled at the sudden rough crush of it, grinding her mouth into his, loving the intimacy of it, the feel of his tongue, the taste.
He groaned something she couldn’t hear, and his big arm tightened, dragging her breasts against the fabric that separated them from his hard chest.
Only Pooch’s sudden fierce bark kept the kiss from going much further than its wild beginning. Regan drew back from her mouth with eyes blacker than midnight, his body trembling as he held her. He dragged his eyes away from the sight of her hungry, soft eyes and looked over her body at Denny and Margo.
“We’ve got company,” he said tautly. He set her back on her feet, and drew in a long, shuddering breath. “We’ve got to stop this,” he reminded her.
She searched his face with quick, possessive eyes and wondered at her wild reaction to him. “Yes,” she agreed.
He wasn’t even trying to look away. “You trembled,” he breathed.
“So did you.”
He dragged a hand through his hair and glowered down at her. “I am not taking you to bed,” he ground out.
“Wait until you’re asked,” she flashed back, her eyes sparkling, her face radiant, so that she held his appreciative gaze against his will.
“The point behind teaching you to be seductive was not to teach you how to seduce me,” he said shortly. “I am not going to get sexually involved with a virgin.”
“So you keep saying,” she returned. “Then why don’t you stop kissing me and saying outrageously suggestive things to me?”
“Why don’t you stop begging to be kissed?” he fired at her.
“Can I help it if God gave you unbelievable talents in lovemaking to compensate for your lack of looks?” she asked.
He scowled. “Kenna...”
“All right, all right.” She sighed. “If that’s how you appreciate my quite understandable weakness, then just don’t expect me to take my dress off for you, so there.”
He was fighting a chuckle. He lost. “Damn you, stop flirting with me.”
“Me, flirting?” she asked, her eyebrows going straight up in mock innocence. “I wouldn’t dream of it. You men are all alike, flaunting your gorgeous bodies at us poor women and then getting all insulted when we try to show our appreciation of them.”
He burst out laughing. “I’ve created a monster,” he observed, glancing toward Margo and Denny, who were coming along the path toward them. “Whatever happened to that blushing little virgin who used to hide in the records room to avoid me?”
“You’ll have to ask my fairy godfather,” she told him. “I haven’t the foggiest idea where the poor frumpy thing went.”
“I called you that, didn’t I?” he murmured, watching her with quiet, dark eyes. “I think I even meant it, at the time.” He sighed. “What a transformation.”
“I’m glad you appreciate your own handiwork. I hope Denny does,” she added, just to spite him, and turned a beaming smile toward his stepbrother.
Margo was glaring at her, but she pretended not to notice. “Hi, Denny, Regan brought me down for the day.”
“How nice,” Denny said, and he seemed to mean it. He stepped forward, and bent to brush his mouth over Kenna’s cheek. She felt a pleasant tingle, but nothing like the electric charge she felt in Regan’s presence. Two years of patient waiting had been rewarded, but too late. Now Denny seemed strangely unthreatening. Pleasant, fun to be around, very nice. But not stormy and physically dangerous like Regan. She stared at the shorter man and all at once knew why she felt that way.
Regan was handing her Denny on a silver platter. And quite suddenly she knew that she didn’t want Denny, because she was hopelessly in love with Regan. Regan, who didn’t want involvement, who was going to be her friend from now on, because he only desired her. But he didn’t seduce virgins and he was through with love. The irony of it almost made her cry.
“We are glad that you were free to join us,” Margo said with cold courtesy, clinging to Denny’s arm with the tenacity of flypaper.
“We thought we’d sprawl under the trees and watch the lake for a while,” Regan said, moving close to Kenna. He caught her hand in his and smiled down at her with every part of his face except his eyes. “I’d planned to spend some time with Dad, but we passed him on his way out, and Abbie’s hunting worms with a spade. On the Sabbath, too.”
Margo looked puzzled, but Denny laughed and squeezed her hand. She was wearing a red silk blouse with white slacks and shoes, and against her dark coloring, the combination was devastating. Even in her new finery, Kenna felt dowdy by comparison and envied Margo her perfect sight. Glasses were the pits.
She pushed the frames up over her hair with a flourish. “I love your blouse,” she told Margo. “I wish I could wear red, but I look washed-out in it.”
Margo started, as if the compliment were unexpected. “Oh,” she murmured. “Thank you.”
“We could go and sit with you, but Margo has to catch a plane at eight,” Denny said apologetically, and his eyes kept going back to Kenna and her wispy, sexy dress. “I have to drive her to the airport.”
“Going home for a visit?” Regan asked politely.
Margo smiled. “A necessary one,” she agreed. “Some European breeders are coming to see our bloodstock. Papa insists that I help him decide which of the Thoroughbreds to sell. It will be a difficult choice.” She sighed. “I love them, every one.”
“Thoroughbreds?” Regan murmured, glancing toward Denny with a frown.
“Margo’s family breeds champion racing horses,” the younger man replied. “Among their other interests. They also own several hundred thousand acres of land, herds of cattle, international real estate...”
“Please, you embarrass me,” Margo sai
d quickly, touching Denny’s arm. “It is not proper to speak of such things. It is like, how you say, blowing one’s pipe?”
“Horn,” Denny corrected. He threw an arm around Margo. “Care to have coffee with us before we leave?” he asked his stepbrother. “The lake will still be there later.”
“I think we would,” Regan replied. “Honey?” he added, glancing down at Kenna.
“I’m pretty thirsty,” she confided.
He nodded, tugging at her hand. “Then let’s sit down and rescue the worms from Abbie.”
Kenna walked quietly at his side, puzzling over Margo’s confession. So the foreign woman wasn’t a mercenary poverty case. She wondered how that tidbit of information was going to affect Regan’s point of view. Not that it mattered to her anymore. She was in enough mental turmoil as it was.
They spent an hour inside, drinking coffee and talking. Regan was obviously impressed by Margo’s intelligence, and the South American woman warmed to his interest. She even managed a kind word for Kenna, although she kept darting concerned glances in Denny’s direction. The younger man’s fascination with Kenna was becoming more obvious by the minute. Great, Kenna thought miserably, staring down into her coffee. She’d spent two years mooning over Denny, and now he was interested, when it was too late, when her heart had been taken over by a man she had thought she hated, and there was no hope of her ever getting it back whole.
“I like your new look, Kenna,” Denny told her while Margo was saying her goodbyes to Abbie in the kitchen. “So different...”
She avoided his eyes and tried not to look at Regan, because she didn’t want to see the contempt in his face. “I had help,” she murmured with a smile.
“Yes, I know,” Denny said curtly, glancing toward Regan, who was idly thumbing through a book over by the bookcase. “Are you getting involved with him?” he asked, moving closer and lowering his voice.
Kenna looked startled. “What do you mean?”
“I mean,” he said shortly, glancing apprehensively at Regan, “there’s no future in it.”