Mitchell heard the relief in her voice and realized she’d been genuinely uneasy about a discussion of illicit sex and drugs with him. That puzzled and surprised him, but then virtually everything she did either confused or intrigued him. In the ensuing minutes, he watched her usher in the waiters and supervise the process of transferring the elaborate meals onto a table on the terrace as if she’d been presiding over the process in fine houses and hotels her entire life. Less than two hours ago, she’d knelt beside an injured stray dog and looked at Mitchell with tears of pleading in her eyes, and a few minutes after that, he’d found her sitting on a curb next to a busy driveway, serenely unconcerned with her comfort, or her clothes, or the reactions of the other hotel guests. A few moments later, when he told her help was on the way, she’d lifted her face to his and smiled at him with melting gratitude.
She genuinely liked him, and she wasn’t trying to hide that … and yet, he had the feeling he made her nervous. She was vividly, almost exotically, lovely … but when he’d admired the way she looked in those flowing silk pants and a little white top held up by gossamer strings tied into bows at her shoulders, she’d seemed so self-conscious that he’d remarked on her hair, instead. A few minutes ago, they’d been on the verge of a kiss … but when the music interrupted, she backed away and tried to pretend nothing had happened.
In view of all that, Mitchell began to wonder if he’d been wrong about her feelings for the lawyer. Perhaps the reason she’d stayed with him for years was that she was emotionally committed to him—or at least determined not to stray. Mitchell fervently hoped neither was true, because she was attracted to him, and he was very attracted to her.
In fact, he was extremely attracted to her, he admitted to himself as he watched the waiters depart.
Behind him from the terrace, she said lightly, “Dinner is served.”
Mitchell turned and saw her standing in candlelight beside the table, the island breeze ruffling her fiery mantle of red hair around her shoulders.
Wildly attracted.
As he neared the table, she reached up and brushed a wayward strand of hair off her soft cheek. He watched the unconsciously feminine gesture as if he’d never seen hundreds of other women do it.
“Please sit down,” she said graciously when he started around the table to pull out her chair for her. “You’ve already had to wait too long for this meal.”
Kate’s earlier nervousness had vanished. She was on familiar territory now, standing beside an elegant, candlelit table and hovering near a special guest whom she wanted to make feel extremely important that evening. It was a role she could play to perfection. She’d studied under a master, and only he could do it better.
But she was never again going to see her father play this role.
Blinking back a sudden sheen of moisture in her eyes, Kate reached for the open wine bottle on a small table beside her. “May I pour you some wine?” she asked, smiling at his face through a blur of tears that blinded her to his sudden grin.
“That depends on where you’re planning to pour it, and how good your aim is.”
Kate’s emotions veered abruptly from anguish to laughter. “I have excellent aim,” she assured him, leaning toward his glass.
“All earlier evidence to the contrary,” Mitchell pointed out. To Mitchell’s dismay, she retaliated by smiling straight into his eyes while she poured just the right amount of red wine into his glass.
“Actually,” she informed him, “I hit exactly what I was aiming for that time, too.”
Before Mitchell could be sure whether she was serious, she turned away. He studied her closely as she slid into the chair across from his, her expression serenely blasé. “Are you implying that you intended to douse me with that Bloody Mary?” he asked.
“You know what they say about temperamental redheads,” Kate replied as she unfolded her napkin; then she leaned forward and looked at him as if a horrifying, but amusing, possibility had just occurred to her. “Surely you don’t think I deliberately dye my hair this impossible color?”
Mitchell was dumbfounded to think she’d actually thrown a drink at him in a fit of childish, uncontrolled pique. He didn’t want to believe he was wrong about her, and he didn’t want to consider why it was becoming important to him that this one woman be all the things she seemed. With deceptive nonchalance, he said, “Did you really do it on purpose?”
“Do you promise not to be angry?”
He smiled good-naturedly. “No.”
A startled giggle nearly escaped Kate at the vast contrast between his agreeable expression and his negative reply. “Then, will you promise never to bring the subject up again if I tell you the truth?”
Another lazy smile accompanied his answer. “No.”
Kate bit her lip to keep from laughing. “At least you’re honest and direct—in a misleading sort of way.” Needing to avert her gaze from his, she picked up a basket of crusty rolls from the center of the table and offered it to him.
“Are you being honest and direct?” he inquired with amusement, taking a roll from the basket. Despite his affable attitude, Kate had a sudden, inexplicable sensation of an undercurrent. He was playing cat and mouse with her, she knew, and he was obviously a world-champion “cat,” but she sensed that he wasn’t actually enjoying the game. Since her goal was to repay his wonderful kindnesses by making the rest of the evening as pleasant for him as she could, she put an end to the whole charade.
Meeting his gaze, she said with quiet sincerity, “I didn’t do it on purpose. I was only pretending I did in order to get even with you for teasing me twice about the Bloody Mary.”
Mitchell heard her words, but the softness in her eyes and the expression on her lovely face were interfering with the pathways to his brain, and he decided it didn’t matter if she’d done it on purpose. Then he realized she hadn’t, and that mattered much more than he thought it should. What sort of family, he wondered, in what city, on what planet, had yielded up this jaunty, prim, unpredictable woman with a wayward sense of humor, a heart-stopping smile, and a fierce passion for wounded mongrel dogs?
Mitchell reached for his butter knife. “Where in the hell are you from?”
“Chicago,” she said with a startled smile at his tone.
He looked up so sharply and with such narrowed disbelief that Kate felt compelled to reaffirm and amplify her answer. “Chicago,” she repeated. “I was born and raised there. What about you?”
Chicago. Mitchell managed to smooth his distaste for her answer from his expression, but his guard was up. “I’ve never lived anywhere long enough to be ‘from’ there,” he replied, giving her the same vague answer that had always satisfied anyone who asked. The question was perfunctory anyway, he knew. People asked because it was a convenient conversational item among strangers. People never really cared what the answer was. Unfortunately, Kate Donovan was not one of those people.
“What places did you live in when you were growing up—” she persevered, and teasingly added, “but not long enough to actually be ‘from’ any of them?”
“Various places in Europe,” Mitchell replied, intending to immediately change the subject.
“Where do you live now?” she asked, before he could.
“Wherever my work takes me. I have apartments in several cities in Europe and New York.” His work occasionally took him to Chicago too, but he didn’t want to mention that to Kate, because he wanted to avoid the inevitable discussion about whom they might know in common. There was little chance she actually knew anyone within the Wyatts’ lofty social circle, but the Wyatt name was known to any Chicagoan who read a newspaper. Since Mitchell’s last name was also Wyatt, there was a chance Kate would ask him if he was related to those Wyatts, and the last thing he wanted to do was admit to that relationship, let alone discuss what it actually was.
Kate waited for him to offer a clue as to what cities those apartments were in, or what his “work” was. When he didn’t, she assumed he wanted
to skip those specific topics. That struck her as odd. In her experience, men loved to talk about their work and achievements. She didn’t want to pry into information Mitchell didn’t want to offer, but she couldn’t gracefully switch immediately to another topic, so she said instead, “No roots?”
“None at all.” When she looked at him strangely, Mitchell said, “From the expression on your face, I gather you find that a little odd?”
“Not odd, just difficult to imagine.” On the assumption that if she offered personal information freely, he might be inclined to follow suit, Kate said. “I grew up in the same Irish neighborhood I was born in. My father owned a little restaurant there, and for many years we lived in an apartment above it. At night, people in the neighborhood gathered there to eat and socialize. During the day, I went to St. Michael’s grade school with kids from the same neighborhood. Later on, I went to Loyola University in the city. After I graduated, I went to work near the old neighborhood, although it had changed a lot by then.”
With a feeling approaching amused disbelief, Mitchell realized that he was wildly attracted to a nice, redheaded, Irish Catholic girl from a solid, middle-class American family. How totally atypical for him, and no wonder she seemed like such an enigma to him. “What sort of work did you go into after college?”
“I went to work for the Department of Children and Family Services as a social worker.”
Mitchell bit back a bark of laughter. Actually, he was wildly attracted to a redheaded, middle-class, Irish Catholic girl with a strong social conscience.
“Why did you decide on social work instead of the restaurant business? I suppose you probably had enough of that business when you were growing up,” he added, answering his own question.
“It wasn’t exactly a restaurant. It was more of a cozy Irish pub that served a limited menu of tasty Irish dishes and sandwiches, and I loved everything about that place—especially the nights when someone played the piano and people sang Irish songs. Karaoke,” she added with a smile, “has been a time-honored form of entertainment in Irish pubs for hundreds of years, only we never called it that.”
Mitchell was familiar with the term karaoke, and intimately familiar with several pubs in Ireland, so he knew exactly what she meant. “Go on,” he urged as he reached for his wineglass. “You loved the music …?”
He was an attentive listener, Kate realized. Still harboring the belief that he might become a little more forthcoming about his own life if she chatted freely about hers, she did exactly that. “I loved the music, but I couldn’t hear the music very well from my bedroom, and I wasn’t allowed downstairs after five PM, so I used to sneak into the living room after my babysitter fell asleep, and listen to the music from there. By the time I was seven years old, I knew all the songs by heart—sad songs, revolutionary songs, bawdy songs. I didn’t understand all the words, but I could pronounce them with the Irish brogue of a native. The truth is,” she confided after taking a bite of her salad, “I’d watched a lot of old musicals on television, and I wanted to become a nightclub singer and wear beautiful gowns like the women in those movies. I used to pretend our kitchen table was a grand piano, and I practiced draping myself across it while I sang into a pretend microphone—usually a broom handle.”
Mitchell chuckled at the image she’d painted of herself. “Did you ever get to sing in front of an audience downstairs?”
“Oh, yes. I made my official singing debut there at seven.”
“How did it go?”
The story was humorous, but it involved Kate’s father, and she shifted her gaze to the garden, trying to decide if she could tell it without feeling sad. “Let’s just say that—it didn’t quite go the way I’d imagined,” she said finally.
Mitchell was finding it difficult to pay any attention to his meal. She had been so candid before that now her winsome, hesitant expression when she thought back on her singing debut at the pub intrigued him and made him determined to pry out the details. Since courtesy demanded that he at least give her a chance to eat some of her meal, he stifled his curiosity, temporarily postponing his question.
The chef at the Island Club was world-renowned, and the prawn and avocado salad Mitchell had ordered for both of them was served with a wonderful Parmesan caper dressing. The red snapper he’d ordered for himself was sautéed to perfection and served with pine nuts and fresh asparagus, but the redhead sitting across from him was more to his liking, and he barely tasted what he ate. He waited until she’d eaten some of her salad and her main course; then he reached for his wine and said half seriously, “I have no intention of letting you ignore my question about your singing debut at the pub.”
After the silence between them, the sudden sound of his rich baritone voice had an electrifying effect on Kate’s senses, and her head jerked up. Trying to cover her reaction, she regarded him with what she hoped was an expression of amused hauteur. “I refuse to tell you that story until you’ve told me a story that makes you look ridiculous.”
Instead of agreeing or giving up, he leaned back in his chair, toying with the stem of his wineglass, and eyed her in prolonged, thoughtful silence.
Kate tried to return his gaze unflinchingly, and ended up laughing and surrendering. “I give up—what on earth are you thinking?”
“I’m trying to decide whether to resort to bribery or coercion.”
“Go for bribery,” Kate advised him outrageously, because the stake was merely a story and she was positive he was going to offer a silly enticement.
“In that case, I will bring a collar and leash with me tomorrow—”
She rolled her eyes in mock horror. “Either you’re a very sick man, or else you have absolutely no talent for accessorizing. Stick with neckties—”
“—And I’ll help you get your Max to a vet over on St. Maarten,” he continued, ignoring her gibe.
Understanding dawned and Kate’s laughter faded. She looked at him, filled with gratitude and the strangest feeling that they were destined to become the best of friends—that it was somehow preordained. He returned her gaze, his blue eyes smiling warmly into hers … no, not warmly, Kate realized. Intimately! Hastily, she tried to divert him with humor. “That’s a clever bribe. What were you going to say to coerce me?”
He quirked a thoughtful brow, a smile tugging at his lips. “‘You owe me’?” he suggested.
Kate felt like covering her face and ears to block out the sight and sound of him. Even relaxing in his chair, he exuded potent sexual vitality. When he laughed, he looked sexy. When he smiled, he looked dangerously inviting. And when he was silent and thoughtful, as he’d been just a moment before, he looked intriguing … and wonderful. He was so physically attractive, so witty and urbane, and so infuriatingly likable that she kept wanting to trust him and befriend him, even though he was probably the last man in the Caribbean who could be trusted or befriended in a hotel room, especially by someone like her. He was like a powerful, two-hundred-pound magnet, and she felt like a little paper clip, struggling against his pull but being tugged inexorably, inch by inch, across the table to him.
It was actually easier on her nervous system to distract and amuse him than it was to spend three silent seconds trying to resist him, she realized, and so she gave in and decided to tell the story.
He knew the instant she made the decision. “What did it?” he inquired with amused satisfaction. “The bribery or the coercion?”
“I’m completely impervious to bribery,” Kate replied smugly, and was about to add that she was also impervious to coercion, but before she could do that, he said, “Good. I’ll pick you up tomorrow morning at ten. Now, let’s have the story of your singing debut at the pub.”
With a sigh, Kate began the tale. “It was Saint Patrick’s Day, so by seven PM the place was packed and the singing and drinking were in high gear. I knew my father was on an errand, because he’d come upstairs earlier to get his wallet, so I snuck downstairs even though the rule was that if my father wasn’t on
the premises, I was not allowed down there at any hour of the day. Our bartender knew the rule, too, but the place was so crowded, and I was so little, that nobody noticed me. At first, I just hovered on the bottom step, singing quietly to the music; but I couldn’t see anything, so I moved a little farther into the room … and a little farther … and a little farther, until I ended up standing near the end of the bar. The piano was behind me and to my left, and on my right there was a middle-aged couple sitting at the bar. I didn’t realize they’d been watching me doing my little sing-along, until the man leaned over and smiled and asked me what my favorite song was. I told him my favorite song was ‘Danny Boy,’ because my daddy’s name was Daniel—” Kate reached for her wineglass to conceal her sharp, emotional reaction to the mention of the song she’d sung for her father for the last time, standing at his graveside with tears streaming down her face and mourners weeping into handkerchiefs.
“I’m not giving you much chance to eat,” Mitchell apologized.
Kate ate a scallop and some rice to give herself time to compose herself, but Mitchell barely touched his food. For a tall, muscular man who should have been starving by now, he wasn’t eating much, she realized.
“Any time you’re ready to go on—” he prompted after a couple of minutes.
His grin was so uplifting that Kate smiled back at him and continued her story without the choking grief she’d felt moments before. “The man at the bar got up and apparently gave whoever was playing the piano some money, because the very next song was ‘Danny Boy.’ As soon as it started, he whisked me off the floor onto his chair and shouted to everyone to quiet down because I wanted to sing ‘Danny Boy.’” Kate stopped again, but this time it was because she was trying not to giggle at the memory. “So there it was: my big moment. I was so nervous that I had to clasp my hands behind my back to keep my arms from shaking out of their sockets, and when I tried to sing, my voice came out a squeaky whisper.”
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