by Penny Jordan
Right now the thought of all the ways he would like to pleasure her if he had her spread out on a bed underneath him was driving him wild, with the kind of ache that was rapidly becoming a sharp urgency.
For starters he certainly wanted to see that smooth hairstyle all mussed and soft and those challenging sea-green eyes hazy and dazed with the joy of what they were both experiencing, and he surely wanted to feel those full, firm lips quivering eagerly beneath his, clinging to his, whilst he slowly stroked her silky skin. Oh, yes, he surely wanted that.
He wanted to peel her clothes from her body and share with her that spiralling, giddying, breathtaking climb through the delicately, deliberately erotic foothills of shared foreplay, across the plateau of escalating desire and then on to the heights where they could look down on the rest of the universe and momentarily believe that they were superhuman, immortal; but for that it was necessary to reach out and share yourself mentally and emotionally as well as physically and Star had made it more than plain that that kind of intimacy was not on her agenda.
And he had spoken the truth when he had told her that, to him, sex without emotion was like a flower without perfume, and he felt as sad and compassionately sorry for someone who had been denied the ability to experience that emotion as he did for someone who had been denied the gift of sight.
Of course, there had been occasions when he had been growing up when he had thrown himself wholeheartedly into the experience of exploring his sexuality, but since then there had been only two serious relationships in his life—one with a fellow student whilst he’d been at college, which had ended shortly after their graduation by mutual consent, and another which had been over for several years now and which had ended when he had moved from New York City to set up in business here in this quiet, sturdily American small town.
He remained on friendly terms with both his ex-lovers and was godfather to both their eldest children.
It had been the death of Grace, his ‘surrogate’ mother, that had prompted the heart-searching which had led to the ending of his New York relationship, bringing about as it had the admission that the emotion which he felt for Andrea had become that of a close friend rather than a lover. She had begun to feel the same way, she had confessed when he had finally brought himself to broach the subject with her.
He had promised himself when he’d left New York that the next time, the next love, would be his last, his for all time and beyond time, and, perhaps because of that, or perhaps simply because he was older and wiser and maybe tired too, he had found himself reluctant to embark on any new relationship, sensing that ultimately it would not fulfil his need to form a lifetime bond with that one special woman who would accept him and love him as he was and for what he was, as he would her.
He knew that many of his friends considered him to be something of an idealist. Well, why not? He wasn’t ashamed of his feelings, his needs. Why should he be?
And it was only very, very rarely now that his body reminded him that sometimes physical desire and emotional need did not run comfortably in harness with one another—so rarely, in fact, that he couldn’t actually remember the last time. So rarely...that it had been tricky getting himself to admit that his determined restoration of Abbie and her two little girls to her roving husband’s side had had less to do with supporting her than with satisfying his own need to see if the luscious, long-legged redhead whom Clay was making such determined eye contact with looked as good from the front as she did from the back.
She had...unfortunately for him.
He glanced at his watch. It was time he left. He had some paperwork he wanted to get through. He had just about made his way to his car when Brad suddenly materialised at his side.
‘Kyle!’ he exclaimed, smiling at him. ‘Did you get to meet Star? I meant to introduce you to one another since you’ll be working closely together once you take over from Tim Burbridge in Britain... I still haven’t formalised the details of her contract with her yet, but from what I’ve seen of her work there’s no doubt in my mind that she’ll do a good job for us.
‘Tim Burbridge is taking a month’s leave from the end of next week, as you know, and I’d like the two of you to meet beforehand so that he can hand over things to you; of course, you’ll be staying on to work alongside him once he’s back at work... I think you’ll find him very co-operative and open. He understands how important it is for us to bring our British distribution network up to the same high standards we have over here in the States...
‘It won’t be easy, though,’ Brad warned him. ‘One of our biggest problems is recruiting the right calibre of technician. Not so much on the technical side—they all have the necessary skills for the job; no, the problem is more on the motivation side of things, from what I can see...’
‘Mmm...I’ve been thinking about that,’ Kyle responded. ‘I think some kind of in-house training scheme coupled with incentive awards might be one way around the problem... But, of course, first I’ll have to discuss things with Tim,’ he added diplomatically.
‘Well, that’s something you and Tim and Star can work on together,’ Brad told him. ‘Did you get to meet her?’
‘Not exactly... Not officially.’ Kyle was deliberately vague.
‘Well, I’ll make sure that the two of you do get a chance to get together before you fly out to Britain,’ Brad promised him.
‘You know how much I appreciate what you’re doing for us, don’t you, Kyle?’ Brad asked his friend. ‘So far as I am concerned, the distribution network you’ve set up for us is one of the prime forces underpinning our success. It doesn’t matter how good a product is; if you can’t get it to the customer when and where he wants it and install it and keep it in good working order, it doesn’t matter a damn how good it is.’
Kyle gave a small shrug. ‘It works both ways,’ he reminded Brad. ‘No matter how good a distribution and servicing network is, it can’t operate efficiently without a reliable product.’
‘We make a good team,’ Brad told him, ‘and I can’t pretend that I’m not hoping you’ll be able to help us turn the British side of our business around and bring it into line with our home market success.
‘Will you be joining us for dinner this evening?’ Brad asked him as Kyle started to unlock his car.
Here was his chance to get out of his dinner date with Star, Kyle acknowledged, and he would be all kinds of a fool...asking for all kinds of trouble if he passed up on it.
Ten minutes later, driving towards his own lake-shore home, contemplating the brief, negative shake of his head and polite words of excuse with which he had responded to Brad’s question, he grimaced to himself.
OK, so he was all kinds of a fool!
CHAPTER TWO
IT TOOK Star an unusually long time to prepare for her dinner date with Kyle. It was not like her to dither over what to wear or to question the effect she was likely to have on her date; she dressed to please herself and not anyone else, and yet, for some reason, she found herself eschewing the loose silky cotton dress she had originally decided to wear in favor of a much more sophisticated and slinky one-shouldered black jersey number that she had added to her packing at the last minute on some odd impulse.
Like today’s silk and linen dress, she had bought it in Milan where they knew all about the subtle art of emphasising a woman’s sensuality rather than her sexuality.
It was not a dress that a man would immediately and necessarily see as provocative. It skimmed the curves of her body rather than clung to them, but the way it exposed the smooth, warm curve of her shoulder and bared one arm, the way it highlighted the fact that one needed a well-toned body and precious little underwear to show it off made it the kind of outfit that bemused men with its subtly sensual message and automatically had every other woman in the room narrowing her eyes warily.
To complement the dress Star had swept her hair up into a smooth chignon and put on heavy, almost baroque dull gold earrings plus a single, matching dull gold b
angle.
She was just about to apply her favourite perfume when something stopped her, and, instead of touching it lavishly to her pulse points, she sprayed a small cloud of it into the air and then walked slowly into it. This way the fragrance would be so elusive and subtle that anyone wanting to know if she was truly wearing it would have to move very close to her—very close indeed.
Smiling with satisfaction, she picked up her bag and headed for the door, pausing for a second before turning back and quickly spraying the bed with the same delicate perfume.
So, he liked his roses to be perfumed, did he...? Well, tonight he certainly wouldn’t have any complaints. Still smiling to herself, Star stepped out into the corridor.
Whoever had been responsible for the interior design of the hotel was obviously a fan of the Gone With the Wind era and had a very romantic streak. Star decided, because the bank of lifts, instead of being situated in the foyer, was actually located on a balconied mezzanine area above it so that one’s entrance into the foyer had to be made via a sweeping, curved staircase.
There were, of course, amenity lifts situated discreetly to one side of the foyer, but there was no harm in taking advantage of the props which had so usefully been loaned to her, Star reflected as she paused at the top of the flight of stairs for a moment, firmly refusing to glance downwards in the direction of the foyer to see if her dinner date was there to observe her, before moving elegantly down the stairs in a very fair imitation of the arrogantly graceful prowl that she had seen top models adopt at prestige fashion shows.
Kyle did see her, his brain grimly reinforcing what it had already told him. She looked, he acknowledged as he studied Star’s elegant descent from the shadows of the mezzanine, much as he might have imagined some fabled Greek goddess to have looked—almost slightly inhuman in the perfection of her feminine mystery, her profile sculptured, her gaze remote, her body... Hastily he forced himself not to think about exactly what that sleek, fluid stretch of matt fabric was concealing.
He was not surprised to see, when he checked the foyer, that virtually every other man there was watching her, mesmerised by the strength of her sensuality and her own indifference to it.
As she reached the last stair he started to walk towards her. For a second Star almost didn’t recognise him. For some reason she had expected him to look as he had done earlier in the day and for a moment the sight of him wearing not a white T-shirt and jeans but an immaculately cut dinner suit threw her:
It made him look taller, broader and somehow more remote, more inaccessible...more...formidable.
Giving herself a small inward shake, Star dismissed. such unproductive and over-imaginative thoughts. He was still the same man, whatever he chose to wear, whatever outward image he might try to present; inwardly he was just like all the rest of his sex and, like them, sooner or later, no matter how much he might try to deny it, he would prove himself to be as faithless, as worthless as the rest.
‘Never make the mistakes I’ve made,’ Star’s mother had told her emotionally in the first throes of her grief and anger after Star’s father had left. ‘Never trust a man, Star...any man... They’ll only hurt you in the end.’
Star, six years old at the time, had taken her mother’s words to heart and learned from them—unlike her mother, who had gone on allowing her emotions to rule her life and then regretting it.
He was only a few feet away from her now—more than close enough for her to be able to look right up into those astonishingly dense dark blue eyes.
Gravely he returned her gaze—without allowing his to slide downwards to her body. Star allowed her eyebrows to rise a little as she mentally awarded him a point for his subtlety.
‘We still haven’t introduced ourselves,’ he announced as he stepped towards her. ‘Kyle...Kyle Henson,’ he told her, extending his hand.
‘Star...Flower,’ she told him wryly, adding with a small, dismissive shrug, ‘A small folly of my mother’s and not, unfortunately, her only one.’
‘I’m sorry, I don’t quite follow you,’ Kyle said.
‘It was a joke.’ Star shrugged. ‘But obviously not a very good one. I was trying to say that my mother’s larger folly was not so much in the choice of my name as in the choice of my father...’
‘Ah... You don’t get on well with him.’
‘Well enough,’ Star countered. ‘Or at least as well as any of the other half a dozen or so offspring he has fathered...and perhaps rather better than most. You see, I have the distinction of having known him the longest and therefore having had the greatest time in which to grow accustomed to his...foibles...’
‘You don’t like him,’ Kyle suggested.
‘No, I don’t like him,’ Star agreed. ‘So go on,’ she mocked as they walked towards the restaurant bar. ‘Tell me how shocked you are by my undaughterly emotions and how devoted you are to your own wonderful parents... They are wonderful, of course,’ she added, giving him a thin smile.
A man like him would have wonderful parents: a mother who adored and cosseted him, had brought him up to think he was the most wonderful human being that ever lived. And his father would have been stern and silently proud of the boy-child he had produced, reinforcing with everything he did the growing child’s belief in himself and his invincibility, his right to live exactly how he chose.
‘No, as a matter of fact they weren’t,’ Kyle told her evenly, and then, before she could cover her shock, asked her, ‘Are you always this open and frank with strangers?’
‘No,’ Star told him, giving him a deliberately seductive half-smile. What she had been intending to do was to shock him a little bit, needle him slightly, but his quiet denial of her comment about his parents, coupled with his obvious lack of any intention of expanding on what he had said, had caused her to change tack. If she couldn’t shock him into taking notice of her, then she would have to seduce him into doing so.
In the bar they both ordered spritzers before sitting down to study the menus they were handed.
Although Star was well aware of the interest she was exciting amongst the other diners, she gave no sign of it, and Kyle, who was watching her, wondered wryly how long it had taken her to grow the outer skin of cool self-confidence that she armoured herself in.
That remark about her parents—her father—had been deliberately provocative and he sensed that he had caught her off guard with his response to her taunting comment about his own family background.
Despite the information about herself that she seemed to hand out so freely, he sensed that she was an extremely private person, deeply protective of her innermost self.
‘So,’ Kyle invited, putting down his menu and smiling across the table at her, ‘tell me more about this interesting-sounding family of yours.’
‘Interesting?’ Star raised her eyebrows and gave him a wry look. ‘My mother is currently in the throes of a traumatic love affair with the son of one of her oldest and closest friends. It’s supposed to be a secret but, of course, it isn’t. My mother couldn’t keep a secret if her life depended on it and she certainly can’t seem to see that what she’s doing is bound to lead to disaster. She’s bound to lose her friend, and as for her toy-boy lover...’
‘You don’t approve?’
Star looked at him. He had surprised her with his invitation to talk about her family. Normally, in her experience, the subject most men preferred to discuss was themselves. Star wasn’t used to being asked such unexpectedly intimate questions. One of her strongest character traits was a refusal to deal in any kind of deceit—a fact which put her at a disadvantage now, she recognised, as she found it impossible not to reply honestly to Kyle’s questions.
‘It isn’t a matter of whether or not I approve,’ she told him. ‘It’s more a matter of knowing what’s going to happen, of knowing that someone else is going to have to pick up the pieces of the mayhem that my mother’s emotional overload always causes...’
‘That someone perhaps being you?’ Kyle probed.
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This time Star could not answer. The anxiety and sense of guilt she had felt as a child, listening to her mother, watching her go through the turmoil of a series of destructive relationships, was something that even now, as an adult, she found impossible to discuss.
The fear she had experienced then, the sense of being alone with no one to turn to, the panic at knowing that she was her mother’s emotional support rather than the other way round still sometimes surfaced to attack her present-day, adult self-assurance, even if nowadays, outwardly at least, she had learned the trick of transmuting it into angry contempt for her mother’s way of life.
‘Why don’t we talk about you?’ she suggested softly. ‘I’m sure that would be far more...interesting...’
Lifting her glass to her lips, she looked across at him as she took a slow, deliberate sip, letting her lips stay slightly parted whilst she looked at his mouth.
At first she thought that her deliberate sensuality had had no effect on him, and then, to her delight, she saw the small, betraying movement he made, the slight shifting of his body, as though suddenly he wasn’t quite at ease with himself.
‘There isn’t much to tell,’ Kyle responded, and Star smiled to herself as she caught the slightly roughened edge to his voice and knew what had caused it.
No matter what he might be trying to tell her, she suspected that he was far from lacking in sexual experience, and from what she could see of it she could sense that his body had just the kind of sensual appeal she most liked.
Star did not believe in being a passive lover and, whilst not having any specific desire to be dominant or aggressive, she did like to be able to take the initiative to touch and taste the man in bed with her, to reach out and stroke his skin, to discover where and how she could most arouse him, even to tease him a little bit sometimes, testing his self-control. And something told her that Kyle would be very self-controlled.