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‘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.
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.
‘My parents split up before I was born. My mother had never wanted a child. Her ambition was to be an actress.’
Star frowned as she heard not condemnation in his voice, as she had expected, but, instead, compassion. He felt compassion for a mother who had rejected him? A tiny feather-brushing of unease—no more—disturbed the deep waters of her conviction that all men were the same, that all men were, in essence, her father—a feeling so vague that it was easy for her to dismiss and ignore it and tell herself that Kyle was even more devious than she had first suspected and adept at manipulating the vulnerability of the female psyche.
‘Unfortunately she died before she could realise it,’ Kyle continued. ‘An undiagnosed heart defect. Before her death, though, there had been...problems...and ultimately my father agreed to take me in and bring me up alongside his second family... I was very lucky...’
‘How—in being allowed to grow up alongside them?’ Star enquired mockingly.
He couldn’t deceive her. She knew all about how it felt to watch the father who didn’t want you favouring some other child whilst you looked on in impotent grief and rage.
‘In a sense, yes,’ Kyle told her evenly, ignoring her sarcasm. ‘You see, my stepmother had an older sister who... Well, let’s just say she was a very, very special person and she kinda took me under her wing...helped me to understand...to develop a proper sense of myself... taught me what it was like to be loved and valued... and that’s something I guess every child, and every adult too, needs...’
‘Here endeth the first lesson,’ Star taunted softly under her breath, but if Kyle had heard her he wasn’t responding to her taunt. Instead he was looking at the menu.
‘Would you recommend the sea-bass?’ Star queried with mock-feminine deference.
But Kyle refused to be drawn, commenting only, ‘I certainly like it.’
‘Well, then, I’ll just have to try a taste of yours, won’t I?’ Star flirted, refusing to give up.
It was only a matter of time, Star told herself confidently. With time and persistence she would be able to prove to her own satisfaction that underneath the disguise of chivalrous knighthood that he chose to wear he was just as untrustworthy, as selfish and careless of other people’s feelings as the rest of his sex.
Not that it was going to be all hard work getting him to back down from his claim that, for him, sex meant nothing without emotion. Unlike men, she did not need the crutch of self-deceit for her ego. It wasn’t simply to prove a point that she intended to challenge him—and to win. She had already acknowledged the heightened buzz of sexual awareness that being with him was giving her.
The maître d’ was hovering, waiting to take their order. Star’s mouth curled in a small feline smile as she chose one of the vegetarian options, her smile deepening as Kyle ordered the sea-bass. Before handing the menu back to the maître d’ he murmured something to him that Star couldn’t hear.
Several minutes later, as a waiter escorted them to their table, Star was amused to see the way the other diners watched them whilst trying to pretend that they were not doing so.
‘We seem to be causing something of a stir.’ she murmured dulcetly to Kyle as they sat down. ‘I wonder why...?’
‘Oh, no, you don’t,’ Kyle countered evenly, smiling at her. ‘You know perfectly well that there isn’t a single man in the place who has been able to take his eyes off you since you came down those stairs.’
Kyle wasn’t quite sure how he expected her to react to his comment, but the sudden warm peal of totally genuine laughter she gave as she acknowledged the truth of his comment made him realise that she was not as predictable and true to type as he had originally assumed, and that whilst with a little conscious effort he should be able to withstand the sensual heat of her deliberate come-ons to him, resisting the effect of that wholly natural laughter and the rueful intelligence in her eyes was going to be much, much harder.
So it was with relief that he observed her revert to type, and he was thrown as she asked him softly, ‘Not a single man... Does that include you?’
‘I’m as visually attracted to a beautiful, sensually dressed woman as the next man,’ Kyle replied drily.
It was not exactly the reaction she had hoped for but it would do—for a start, Star told herself as the waiter brought their starters.
Star had ordered mussels, which she picked up with her fingers and ate with a deliberate, almost greedy relish, triumphantly conscious of the fact that although Kyle affected not to be he was acutely aware, as he ate his way stoically through his seafood platter, of the sensuality in the way she was eating.
When she had had enough she licked the juice from the tips of her fingers with deliberate enjoyment, enthusing, ‘Mmm...that was delicious.’
. There were several mussels still left on her plate and as she made eye contact with him she picked one up and held it out to him, offering, ‘Here, why don’t you try one?’
His calm, ‘I already have, thank you,’ as he indicated the empty shells on his own plate, would have caused a lesser woman to retreat in a self-conscious fluster of embarrassment, Star acknowledged, but she was not so easily discomposed. Why should she be? She knew already that he wanted her. Now it was simply a matter of making him admit it.
As she smiled into the bemused eyes of the young waiter who had come to take their plates, she mentally congratulated herself on her inevitable victory and settled back to enjoy the rest of the game.
Their main courses arrived and were served—her own very appetising vegetarian dish and Kyle’s sea-bass.
Star waited until they had been served before recommencing her attack, pouting slightly as she eyed her own plate and then Kyle’s.
‘The bass does look good...’ she began.
There was something in the dark blue steadiness of his gaze as he returned her eye contact that wasn’t, somehow, quite in line with his predictable, ‘Would you like some?’
‘I thought you’d never ask,’ Star responded softly, already leaning towards him, reaching out with one hand to hold his wrist as he lifted his fork towards her mouth, when out of the corner of her eye she saw him make a small gesture towards the maître d’ and then saw, to her chagrin, their waiter hurrying towards their table, carrying a small portion of the sea-bass.
She could see Kyle watching her urbanely as the waiter served her with the fish, all her earlier good humour and sense of triumph evaporating in the smouldering fury of knowing that he had not only anticipated her move but very skilfully sidestepped it as well.
Star wasn’t used to men rejecting her sexual advances; she wasn’t used, in fact, to having to make them. It wasn’t normally necessary and for a moment the sheer shock of having the tables so neatly and unexpectedly turned on her held her completely silent.
‘So you’re a PR consultant,’ Kyle commented as he calmly ate his own fish.
‘Yes,’ Star agreed coolly. ‘I trained with one of the large London agencies and then decided to set up on my own...’
‘It’s a very stressful and competitive business, especially—’
‘For a woman?’ Star supplied challengingly for him.
‘For anyone,’ Kyle corrected her. ‘Especially when you’re working on your own.’
‘I like stress...and competition,’ Star told him. Was he trying to find out if she was involved with someone? If she had a partner...a backer...another man in her life? Determinedly she pushed her chagrin at his refusal to respond to her flirtatious teasing over the fish to one side. If he was interested in finding out if there was another man in her life then that was a good sign.
‘And I’m certainly far from being the only woman to set up in business on her own,’ she added.
‘True,’ he agreed. ‘They do say that the type of person most likely to succeed in business on their own is one who enjoys taking control of their own life.’
‘And you don’t approve of the female sex wanting to take control?’ Star asked softly, feeling that she was getting back on firmer ground.
‘Not at all,’ Kyle contradicted her. ‘It’s just that I often wonder if it isn’t so much a need to take control of their own lives as a fear of being in a situation where they are not in control that is the real emotion motivating such people—a fear of making contact with others, of being open to them...and vulnerable to them...that drives them into isolating themselves—’
Star stared at him across the table as he broke off to shake his head as the waiter offered him more wine; she was torn between an aggressive desire to deny what he was saying and a passively wary one to ignore it.
‘I own and run my own business too,’ she heard him saying as the waiter left, ‘and...’ He started to frown as he realised that she had stopped eating, and asked her solicitously, ‘Didn’t you like the bass, after all?’
‘The bass is fine,’ Star told him stonily, ‘but the conversation isn’t.’
Kyle gave her a thoughtful look.
Those dark blue eyes really were dangerously deceptive, Star acknowledged. The extraordinary depth of their colour tended to make one focus on that, rather than on the intelligence behind them.
Suddenly she felt extraordinarily tired. Delayed jet lag, she told herself. She had a meeting with Brad in the morning, for which she needed to be fresh and alert. The last thing she needed was to spend the evening with some pseudo new man whose idea of foreplay was to psychoanalyse her. But she couldn’t retreat now without getting at least some tacit admission from him that he did want sex with her; her pride wouldn’t let her.
She thought quickly and then decided what to do.
‘I’m sorry,’ she apologised faintly, ‘but I’m not feeling very well.’ She gave him a softly rueful look. ‘I wonder if you could help me to my room...?’
‘Of course.’
Star could see him frowning as he quickly summoned the waiter.
‘Would you like me to arrange a house call from the hotel’s doctor?’ he asked her concernedly.
Star shook her head.
‘No...no...it’s nothing, really... Just delayed jet lag mixed with too much sun this afternoon,’ she explained. ‘Nothing a good night’s sleep won’t put right...’
He had certainly been very efficient at settling their bill and getting them out of the restaurant with the minimum fuss and delay, Star had to acknowledge a few minutes later as they waited for the lift.
Once it arrived and the doors opened Star gave a delicately nervous shiver before reluctantly stepping inside.
‘I know it’s silly but I don’t really like them,’ she confessed only semi-untruthfully to Kyle as she stepped inside.
‘It’s a perfectly natural feeling,’ he assured her as he followed her in and waited for her to tell him her floor number. ‘I doubt there are many of us who actually enjoy being confined in such a small space, if we’re honest about it.’
When the lift came to a halt at Star’s floor Kyle politely stood back to allow her to precede him out of the lift before falling into step beside her.
Star deliberately waited until they were outside her bedroom door before starting to search her bag for her passkey, and then, when she did find it, she deliberately let it slip through her fingers so that Kyle had no option but to bend down to retrieve it for her, thus allowing her to close the small gap between them so that when he stood up again they were virtually standing body to body.
As she looked at his mouth Star deliberately let her own lips part slightly, her voice softly breathless as she thanked him for her key. She leaned forward, letting her body sway provocatively against his, her eyes starting to close on a small, whispered breath.
It was inevitable, of course, that he should respond to her, his head bending towards hers as he reached out to take hold of her.
It wasn’t just triumph that she could feel as her small ploy worked, Star acknowledged. The pleasure warming her body was not purely that of victory. She could feel his body against her own now, satisfyingly male and hard-packed with muscle. His skin smelt clean and fresh and she was already anticipating how good it would be to give in to the feminine urge to bury her fingers in the thick darkness of his hair when they kissed. And she knew that he would kiss well. His mouth had already told her that. She looked at it now, not needing to fake the look of sensual appreciation in her eyes as she lifted them to meet his.
She would be generous in victory, she decided dizzily, very generous, when she showed him just how good it could be, when she made him admit that he wanted her—and she would make him admit it.
She saw the way his eyes changed as he felt the full warmth of her breasts pressing against his chest and a sharp thrill of arousal ran through her as she saw the dark burn of desire igniting his gaze.
‘Kiss me,’ she whispered compellingly to him as she finally closed the small space between her own mouth and his and placed her lips on his.
He responded immediately, as she had expected, his arms tightening around her, his mouth reacting to the soft pressure of hers whilst she teased him a little bit with delicate butterfly kisses which ended, as she had known they would, with his opening his mouth over hers.
She had been right about him being good, she decided dazedly several minutes later. It wasn’t fiction any longer that she felt slightly light-headed and needed to cling to him for support, and there was certainly nothing faked about the way her heart was racing, nor the growing tumult of sensation threatening to flood her body.
She couldn’t remember the last time a man had affected her so powerfully or so immediately. In fact, she didn’t think there had ever been such a time...nor such a man. And she knew that he was equally affected. They were. standing body to body after all, and there was no mistaking or concealing his own, very male arousal and response to her, even if he had tried to move discreetly away from her—but Star was perfectly well aware that her own body was betraying her as flagrantly as his was him.
The fluid fabric of her dress could not possibly conceal the taut peaks of her nipples, but Star was not ashamed of nor embarrassed by her body’s response to him. Why should she be?
She was even tempted to lift his hand and place it on her breast so that he could experience for himself the effect he was having on her, but there was no need for them to rush things. They had the whole night ahead of them and there was something to be said for drawing out the pleasure of mutual discovery and its even more pleasurable culmination.
There was no doubt in Star’s mind that his mouth would feel every bit as good against her body as it did against her lips and that when he finally placed it against her naked breasts and slowly caressed each sensually aroused peak the pleasure she would experience would more than compensate for the control she was forcing herself to exercise now.
And besides...
Besides, it had been a long time—a long, long time—since she had last experienced something like this, since she had last been held and kissed by a man who seemed to read her mind and her desires so exactly that all she wanted to do was cling to him and let his mouth...
With a tiny little moan, Star moved closer and opened her mouth beneath his, inviting him to deepen his kiss with the thrust of his tongue, her body quivering with aching arousal as she waited for him to do so...and waited...and waited. Confused, Star opened her eyes.
Kyle had stopped kissing her now and his hands were cupping her face.
As she read the message in his eyes, Star’s own eyes widened, at first in disbelief and then in anger, her hands dropping to her sides as he kissed her lightly on the mouth once and then a second time a little more lingeringly. But even as she made to return to his arms he was gently releasing her, saying quietly but oh, so firmly, ‘I’m sorry...’
Sorry... He was sorry! Star couldn’t believe it.
Confused and wrought-up by the messages her body was sending her, Star couldn’t control the sharp-toothed bite of her shocked chagrin and the dismay that followed it as she exclaimed, ‘You’re sorry!’
How dared he do this to her? How dared he hold her, touch her, kiss her as though...as though...
Struggling to contain and control her emotions, Star took a deep lungful of air, trying to find a suitably acerbic response to his unbelievable withdrawal. But all she could think of was how his body had felt against hers, how she could have sworn he wanted her, how she knew that he had been aroused and that men, in her experience of them, did follow up on that kind of arousal, especially when...especially with her...
As she looked in furious disbelief from his mouth—stiffening her body against the treacherous memory of just how good it had felt to have it moving against her own—and up to his eyes Star realised that the expression she could see in their navy blue depths was not one of male sexual triumph as she had expected but instead a totally unfamiliar mix of warmth and compassion.
Compassion... He felt sorry for her. How dared he...? How dared he?
Immediately her defensive reflexes, honed over the years until they were needle-sharp, sprang into action, her spine straightening, her head lifting, her eyes flashing a fierce message of warning and pride as she stepped back from him and told him icily, with a disdainful shrug, ‘Don’t be. After all, I’m hardly missing out on the world’s most exciting sexual experience, am I? You aren’t the only man to feel threatened and emasculated by the strength and honesty of a woman’s sexuality... I suppose I should have realised what kind of man you were when you tried to hide behind that claim that you could only have sex with someone you “lurved”,’ she taunted him mockingly. ‘It’s the classic get-out for men like you, isn’t it...?’