Diana Palmer
Man Of The Hour

CONTENTS

NIGHT OF LOVE

PROLOGUE

CHAPTER 1

CHAPTER 2

CHAPTER 3

CHAPTER 4

CHAPTER 5

CHAPTER 6

CHAPTER 7

CHAPTER 8

CHAPTER 9

CHAPTER 10

CHAPTER 11

SECRET AGENT MAN

CHAPTER 1

CHAPTER 2

CHAPTER 3

CHAPTER 4

CHAPTER 5

CHAPTER 6

CHAPTER 7

CHAPTER 8

CHAPTER 9

CHAPTER 10

NIGHT OF LOVE

PROLOGUE

Steven Ryker paced his office at Ryker Air with characteristic energy, smoking a cigarette that he hated while he turned the air blue in quiet muttering. A chapter of his life that he’d closed the door on four years past had reopened, leaving his emotional wounds bare and bleeding.

Meg was back.

He didn’t recognize his own fear. It wasn’t a condition he’d ever associated with himself. But things had changed. He’d gone through a period of mourning when Meg had walked out on him to begin a balletic career in New York. He’d consoled himself with woman after willing woman. But in the end, he’d been alone with the painful memories. They hurt, and because they still hurt, he blamed Meg. He wanted her to suffer as he had. He wanted to see her beautiful blue eyes fill with tears, he wanted to see pain on that exquisite face framed by soft blond hair. He wanted consolation for the hell she’d put him through by leaving without a word when she’d promised to be his wife.

He put out the cigarette. It was a habit, like loving Meg. He hated both: cigarettes and the blond memory from his past. He’d never had a woman jilt him. Of course, he’d never asked a woman to marry him, either. He’d been content to live alone, until Meg had kissed him in gratitude for the present he’d given her when she turned eighteen. His life had turned over then.

Their fathers, hers and his, had become business partners when Meg was fourteen and her brother, David, just a little older. The families had developed a closeness that tied their lives together. Meg had been a sweet nuisance that Steven had tolerated when he and David had become best friends. But the nuisance grew up into a beautiful, regal woman who’d melted the ice around his hard heart. He’d given everything he was, everything he had, to Meg. And it hadn’t been enough.

He couldn’t forgive her for not wanting him. He couldn’t admit that his obsession with her had all but cost him his sanity when she left. He wanted vengeance. He wanted Meg.

There would be a way to make her pay, he vowed. She’d hurt her leg and couldn’t dance temporarily. But that ballet company she worked for was in real financial straits. If he played his cards right, he might yet have that one magical night in Meg’s arms that he’d dreamed of for years. But this time, it wouldn’t be out of love and need. It would be out of vengeance. Meg was back. And he was going to make her pay for what she’d made of him.

1

Meg was already out of humor when she went to answer the phone. She’d been in the middle of her exercises at the bar, and she hated interruptions that diverted her concentration. An injury had forced her into this temporary hiatus at her family home in Wichita, Kansas. It was hard enough to do the exercises in the first place with a damaged ligament in her ankle. It didn’t help her mood when she picked up the receiver and found one of Steven Ryker’s women on the other end of the line.

Steven, the president of Ryker Air, had been playing tennis all afternoon with Meg’s brother, David. He’d obviously forwarded his calls here. It irritated Meg to have to talk to his women friends at all. But then, she’d always been possessive about Steven Ryker; long before she left Wichita for New York to study ballet.

“Is Steve there?” a feminine voice demanded.

Another in a long line of Steve’s corporate lovers, no doubt, Meg thought angrily. Well, this one was going to become a lost cause. Right now.

“Who’s calling, please?” Meg drawled.

There was a pause. “This is Jane. Who are you?”

“I’m Meg,” she replied pertly, trying not to laugh.

“Oh.” The voice hesitated. “Well, I’d like to speak to Steve, please.”

Meg twirled the cord around her finger and lowered her voice an octave. “Darling?” she purred, her lips close to the receiver. “Oh, darling, do wake up. It’s Jane, and she wants to speak to you.”

There was a harsh intake of breath on the other end of the line. Meg stifled a giggle, because she could almost read the woman’s mind. Her blue eyes twinkled in her soft oval face, framed by pale blond hair drawn into a disheveled bun atop her head.

“I have never…!” An outraged voice exploded in her ear.

“Oh, you really should, you know,” Meg interrupted, sighing theatrically. “He’s so marvelous in bed! Steven, darling…?”

The phone was slammed in her ear loud enough to break an eardrum. Meg put a slender hand over her mouth as she replaced the receiver in its cradle. Take that, Steven, she thought.

She turned and walked gingerly back into the room David had converted from the old ballroom into a practice room for his sister. It didn’t get a lot of use, since she was in New York most of the year now, but it was a wonderfully thoughtful extravagance on her brother’s part. David, like Meg, had shares in Ryker Air. David was a vice president of the company as well. But the old family fortune had been sacrificed by their late father in an attempt to take over the company, just before his death. He’d lost, and the company had very nearly folded. Except for the uncanny business acumen of Steven Ryker, it would have. Steve pulled the irons out of the fire and made the company solvent. He owned most of it now. And he should, Meg thought charitably. Heaven knew, he’d worked hard enough for it all these years.

As she exercised, Meg felt wicked. She shouldn’t have caused Steve problems with his current love. They hadn’t been engaged for four years, and she’d long ago relinquished the right to feel possessive about him.

Pensively she picked up her towel and wrapped it around her long, graceful neck, over the pink leotard she wore with her leg warmers and her pitiful-looking toe shoes. She stared down at them ruefully. They were so expensive that she had to wear her old ones for practice, and anyone seeing her in them would be convinced that she was penniless. That was almost the truth. Because despite the shares of stock she held in Ryker Air—the company that Steven’s father and Meg and David’s father had founded jointly—Meg was practically destitute. She was only a minor dancer in the New York ballet company she’d joined just a year ago, after three years of study with a former prima ballerina who had a studio in New York. She had yet to perform her first solo role. Presumably when she passed that landmark, she’d be higher paid, more in demand. Unless she missed a jump, that was, as she had a week ago. The memory was painful, like her ankle. That sort of clumsiness wasn’t going to get her any starring roles. And now she had the added worry of getting her damaged tendon back in shape. The exercise, recommended and outlined by a physical therapist, was helping. But it was torturously slow, and very painful, to exercise those muscles. It had to be done carefully, too, so that she wouldn’t damage them even further.

She went back into her disciplined exercises with a determined smile still on her face. She tried to concentrate on fluidity of movement and not the inevitable confrontation when Steve found out what she’d said to his girlfriend. Her whole life seemed to have been colored by him, since she was fourteen and their fathers had become business partners. Her father had worshiped Steven from the beginning. So had David. But Meg had hated him on sight.

For the first few years, she’d fought him tooth and nail, not bothering to hide her animosity. But on the eve of her eighteenth birthday, things had changed between them quite suddenly. He’d given her a delicate pearl necklace and she’d kissed him for it, a little shyly. Except that she’d missed his lean cheek and found his hard, rough mouth instead.

In all fairness, he’d been every bit as shocked as Meg. But instead of pulling away and making a joke of it, there had quite suddenly been a second kiss; one that couldn’t be mistaken for anything but a passionate, almost desperate exchange. When it ended, neither of them had spoken. Steven’s silver eyes had flashed dangerously and he’d left the room abruptly, without saying a single word.

But that kiss had changed the way they looked at each other. Their relationship had changed, too. Reluctantly, almost helplessly, Steven had started taking her out on dates and within a month, he proposed marriage. She’d wanted ballet so much by that time that despite her raging desire and love for Steve, she was torn between marriage and dancing. Steven, apparently sensing that, had turned up the heat. A long bout of lovemaking had almost ended in intimacy. Steven had lost control and his unbounded ardor had frightened Meg. An argument had ensued, and he’d said some cruel things to her.

That same evening, after their argument, Steven had taken his former mistress, Daphne, out on the town very publicly, and an incriminating photo of the couple had appeared in the society column of the daily newspaper the next day.

Meg had been devastated. She’d cried herself to sleep. Rather than face Steven and fight for a relationship with him, she’d opted to leave and go to New York to study ballet.

Like a coward, Meg had run. But what she’d seen spoke for itself and her heart was broken. If Steven could go to another woman that quickly, he certainly wasn’t the type to stay faithful after he was married. Steven had been so ardent that it was miraculous she was still a virgin, anyway.

All of those facts raised doubts, the biggest one being that Steven had probably only wanted to marry her to keep all the stock from the partnership in the family. It had seemed quite logical at the time. Everyone knew how ambitious Steven was, and he and his father hadn’t been too happy at some of the changes Meg’s father had wanted to make at the time of the engagement.

Meg had gone to New York on the first plane out of Wichita, to be met by one of her mother’s friends and set up in a small apartment near the retired prima ballerina with whom she would begin her studies.

Nicole, meanwhile, met Steve for coffee and explained that Meg had left town. Afterward, Meg heard later, Steven had gotten roaring drunk for the first, last and only time in his life. An odd reaction for a man who only wanted to marry her for her shares of stock, and who’d thrown her out of his life. But Steven hadn’t called or written, and he never alluded to the brief time they’d spent as a couple. His behavior these days was as cold as he’d become himself.

Steve hadn’t touched her since their engagement. But his eyes had, in a way that made her knees weak. It was a good thing that she spent most of her time in New York. Otherwise, if she’d been around Steven very much, she might have fallen headlong into an affair with him. She wouldn’t have been able to resist him, and he was experienced enough to know that. He’d made sure that she kept her distance and he kept his. But the lingering passion she felt for him hadn’t dimmed over the years. It was simply buried, so that it wouldn’t interfere with her dreams of becoming a prima ballerina. She’d forced herself to settle; she’d chosen not to fight for his love. Her life since had hardly been a happy one, but she told herself that she was content.

Steve still came to the Shannon house to see David, and the families got together at the annual company picnics and benefits. These days, the family meant Steven and his mother and Meg and her brother David, because the older Shannons were dead now.

Mason Ryker, Steven’s father, and John and Nicole Shannon had died in the years since Meg went to New York; Mason of a heart attack, and John and Nicole in a private-plane crash the very year Meg had left Wichita. Amy Ryker was as protective of Meg as if she’d been her mother instead of Steve’s, but she lived in West Palm Beach now and only came home when she had to. She and Steven had never really been able to bear each other’s company.

Steven had women hanging from the chandeliers, from what Amy told Meg on the occasions when she came to New York to watch Meg dance. He was serious about none of them, and there had never been a whisper of a serious commitment since his brief engagement to Meg.

Meg herself had become buried in her work. All she lived and breathed was the dance. The hours every day of grueling practice, the dieting and rigid life-style she lived made relationships difficult if not impossible. She often thought she was a little cold as a woman. Since Steven, she’d never felt her innocence threatened. Men had dated her, of course, but she was too conscious of the dangers to risk the easy life-styles some of the older dancers had once indulged in. These days, a one-night stand could be life-threatening. Besides, Meg thought sadly, only Steven had ever made her want intimacy. Her memories of him were devastating sometimes, despite the violent passion he’d shown her the last time they’d been together.

She stretched her aching muscles, and her mind wandered back to the mysterious Jane who’d telephoned. Who the hell was Jane? she wondered, and what did Steven want with someone who could speak that haughtily over the phone? She pictured a milky little blonde with a voluptuous figure and stretched even harder.

It was time to take off the lean roast and cottage potatoes she was cooking for supper by the time David walked in the door, still in his tennis outfit, looking as pleasant and jovial as ever. He had the same coloring his sister had, but he was shorter and a little broader than she.

He grinned at her. “Just thought I might mention that you’re in it up to your neck. Steve got a call while we were at his house, and your goose is about to be cooked.”

She stopped dead in the hall as Steven Ryker walked in behind her brother. Steve was a little over six feet tall, very dark and intimidating. He reminded her of actors who played mobsters, because he had the same threatening look about him, and even a deep scar down one cheek. It had probably been put there by some jealous woman in his checkered past, she thought venomously, but it gave him a rakish look. Even his eyes were unusual. They were a cross between ice blue and watered gray, and they could almost cut the skin when they looked as they did at the moment. The white shorts he was wearing left the muscular length of his tanned, powerful legs bare. A white knit shirt did the same for his arms. He was incredibly fit for a man on the wrong side of thirty who sat at a desk all day.

Right now he looked very casual, dressed in his tennis outfit, and that was the most deceptive thing about him. He was never casual. He always played to win, even at sports. He was also the most sensuous, sexy man she’d ever known. Or ever would. Just looking at him made her weak-kneed. She hid her reaction to him as she always had, in humor.

“Ah, Steven.” Meg sighed, batting her long eyelashes at him. “How lovely to see you. Did one of your women die, or is there some simpler reason that we’re being honored by your presence?”

“Pardon me while I go out back and skin a rock,” David mumbled with a grin, diving quickly past his sister in a most ungentlemanly way to get out of the line of fire.

“Coward!” she yelled after him as the door slammed.

“You wouldn’t need protection if you could learn to keep your mouth shut, Mary Margaret,” Steven said with a cool smile. “I’d had my calls forwarded here while I was playing tennis. Jane couldn’t believe what she’d heard, so she telephoned my home again and got me. It so happened David and I had stopped back by the house to look at a new painting I’d bought. I canceled the call forwarding just in time—or I might have been left in blissful ignorance.”

She glared at him. “It was your own fault. You don’t have to have your women telephone you here!”

The glitter in his eyes got worse. “Jealous, Meg?” he taunted.

“Of you? God forbid,” she said as casually as she could, and with a forced smile. “Of course I do remember vividly the wonderful things you can do with your hands and those hard lips, darling, but I’m quite urbane these days and less easily impressed.”

“Careful,” he warned softly. “You may be more vulnerable than you realize.”

She backed down. “Anyway,” she muttered, “why don’t you just take Jane Thingamabob out for a steak and warm her back up again?”

“Jane Dray is my mother’s maiden aunt,” he said after a minute, watching her reaction with amusement. “You might remember her from the last company picnic?”

Meg did, with horror. The old dowager was a people-eater of the first order, who probably still wore corsets and cursed modern transportation. “Oh, dear,” she began.

“She is now horrified that her favorite great-nephew is sleeping with little Meggie Shannon, who used to be such a sweet, innocent child.”

“Oh, my God,” Meg groaned, leaning against the wall.

“Yes. And she’ll more than likely rush to tell your great-aunt Henrietta, who will feel obliged to write to my mother in West Palm Beach and tell her the scandalous news that you are now a scarlet woman. And my mother, who always has preferred you to me, will naturally assume that I seduced you, not the reverse.”

“Damn!” she moaned. “This is all your fault!”

He folded his arms over his broad chest. “You brought it on yourself. Don’t blame me. I’m sure my mother will be utterly shocked at your behavior, nevertheless, especially since she’s taken great pains to try to make up for the loss of your own mother years ago.”

“I’ll kill myself!” she said dramatically.

“Could you fix supper first?” David asked, sticking his head around the kitchen door. “I’m starved. So is Steve.”

“Then why don’t the two of you go out to a restaurant?” she asked, still reeling from her horrid mistake.

“Heartless woman.” David sighed. “And I was so looking forward to the potatoes and roast I can smell cooking on the stove.”

He managed to look pitiful and thin, all at the same time. She glared at him. “Well, I suppose I can manage supper. As if you need feeding up! Look at you!”

“I’m a walking monument of your culinary skills,” David argued. “If I could cook, I’d look healthy between your vacations.”

“It isn’t exactly a vacation,” Meg murmured worriedly. “The ballet company I work for is between engagements, and when there’s no money to pay the light bill, we can’t keep the theater open. Our manager is looking for more financing even now.”

“He’ll find it,” David consoled her. “It’s an established ballet company, and he’s a good finance man. Stop brooding.”

“Okay,” she said.

“Do we have time to shower and change?” David asked.

“Sure,” she told him. “I need to do that myself. I’ve been working out all afternoon.”

“You push yourself too hard,” Steve remarked coolly. “Is it really worth it?”

“Of course!” she said. She smiled outrageously. “Don’t you know that ballerinas are the ideal ornament for rich gentlemen?” she added, lying through her teeth. “I actually had a patron offer to keep me.” She didn’t add that the man had adoption, not seduction, in mind, and that he was the caretaker at her apartment house.

Incredibly Steve’s eyes began to glitter. “What did you tell him?”

“That I pay my own way, of course.” She laughed. She held on to the railing of the long staircase and leaned forward. “Tell you what, Steve. If you play your cards right, when I get to the top of the ladder and start earning what I’m really worth, I’ll keep you.”

He tried not to smile, but telltale lines rippled around his firm, sculptured mouth.

“You’re impossible.” David chuckled.

“I make your taciturn friend smile, though,” she added, watching Steve with twinkling eyes. “I don’t think he knew how until I came along. I keep his temper honed, too.”

“Be careful that I don’t hone it on you,” he cautioned quietly. There was something smoldering in his eyes, something tightly leashed. There always had been, but when he was around her, just lately, it threatened to escape.

She laughed, because the look in those gunmetal-gray eyes made her nervous. “I won’t provoke you, Steven,” she said. “I’m not quite that brave.” He scowled and she changed the subject. “I’m sorry about Aunt Jane,” she added with sincere apology. “I’ll call her and explain, if you like.”

“There’s no need,” he said absently, his gaze intent on her flushed face. “I’ve already taken care of it.”

As usual. She could have said it, but she didn’t. Steven didn’t let grass grow under his feet. He was an accomplished mover and shaker, which was why his company was still solvent when others had gone bankrupt. She made a slight movement with her shoulders and proceeded up the staircase. She felt his eyes on her, but she didn’t look back.

When Meg had showered and changed into a lacy white pantsuit, she went back downstairs. She’d left her long blond hair in a knot, because she knew how much Steven disliked it up. Her blue eyes twinkled with mischief.

Steve had changed, too, and returned from his house, which was barely two blocks away. He was wearing white slacks with a soft blue knit shirt, and he looked elegant and unapproachable. His back was broad, his shoulders straining against the expensive material of his shirt. Meg remembered without wanting to how it had felt all those years ago to run her hands up and down that expanse of muscle while he kissed her. There was a thick pelt of hair over his chest and stomach. During their brief interlude, she’d learned the hard contours of his body with delight. He could have had her anytime during that one exquisite month of togetherness, but he’d always drawn back in time. She wondered sometimes if he’d ever regretted it. Secretly she did. There would never be anyone else that she’d want as she had wanted Steve. The memories would have been bittersweet if they’d been lovers, but at least they might fill the emptiness she felt now. Her life was dedicated to ballet and as lonely as death. No man touched her, except her ballet partners, and none of them excited her.

She’d always been excited by Steven. That hadn’t faded. The past two times she’d come home to visit David, the hunger she felt for her ex-fiancé had grown unexpectedly, until it actually frightened her. He frightened her, with his vast experience of women and his intent way of looking at her.

He turned when he heard her enter the room, with a cigarette in his hand. He quit smoking periodically, sometimes with more success than others. He was restless and high-strung, and the cigarette seemed to calm him. Fortunately, the house was air-conditioned and David had, at Meg’s insistence, added a huge filtering system to it. There was no smell of smoke.

“Nasty habit,” she muttered, glaring at him.

He inclined his head toward her with a mocking smile. “Doesn’t your great-aunt Henrietta dip snuff…?”

She sighed. “Yes, she does. You look very much as your father used to,” she murmured.

He shook his head. “He was shorter.”

“But just as somber. You don’t smile, Steve,” she said quietly, and moved gracefully into the big front room with its modern black and white and chrome furniture and soft honey-colored carpet.

“Smiling doesn’t fit my image,” he returned.

“Some image,” she mused. “I saw one of your vice presidents hide in a hangar when he spotted you on the tarmac. That lazy walk of yours lets everyone know when you’re about to lose your temper. So slow and easy—so deadly.”

“It gets results,” he replied, indicating that he was aware of the stance and probably used it to advantage with his people. “Have you seen a balance sheet lately? Aren’t you interested in what I’m doing with your stock?”

“Finance doesn’t mean much to me,” she confessed. “I’m much more interested in the ballet company I’m working with. It really is in trouble.”

“Join another company,” he said.

“I’ve spent a year working my way up in this one,” she returned. “I can’t start all over again. Ballerinas don’t have that long, as a rule. I’m going on twenty-three.”

“So old?” His eyes held hers. “You look very much as you did at eighteen. More sophisticated, of course. The girl I used to know would have died before she’d have insinuated to a perfect stranger that she was sharing my bed.”

“I thought she was one of your women,” Meg muttered. “God knows, you’ve got enough of them. I’ll bet you have to keep a computer file so you won’t forget their names. No wonder Jane believed I was one of them without question!”

“You could have been, once,” he reminded her bluntly. “But I got noble and pushed you away in the nick of time.” He laughed without humor. “I thought we’d have plenty of time for intimate discoveries after we were married. More fool me.” He lifted the cigarette to his mouth, and his eyes were ice-cold.

“I was grass green back then,” she reminded him with what she hoped was a sophisticated smile. “You’d have been disappointed.”

He blew out a soft cloud of smoke and his eyes searched hers. “No. But you probably would have been. I wanted you too badly that last night we were together. I’d have hurt you.”

It was the night they’d argued. But before that, they’d lain on his black leather sofa and made love until she’d begged him to finish it. She hadn’t been afraid, then. But he hadn’t. Even now, the sensations he’d kindled in her body made her flush.

“I don’t think you would have, really,” she said absently, her body tingling with forbidden memories as she looked at him. “Even so, I wanted you enough that I wouldn’t have cared if you hurt me. I was wild to have you. I forgot all my fears.”

He didn’t notice the implication. He averted his eyes. “Not wild enough to marry me, of course.”

“I was eighteen. You were thirty and you had a mistress.”

His back stiffened. He turned, his eyes narrow, scowling. “What?”

“You know all this,” she said uncomfortably. “My mother explained it to you the morning I left.”

He moved closer, his lean face hard, unreadable. “Explain it to me yourself.”

“Your father told me about Daphne,” she faltered. “The night we argued, she was the one you took out, the one you were photographed with. Your father told me that you were only marrying me for the stock. He and your mother cared about me—perhaps more than my own did. When he said that you always went back to Daphne, no matter what, I got cold feet.”

His high cheekbones flushed. He looked…stunned. “He told you that?” he asked harshly.

“Yes. Well, my mother knew about Daphne, too,” she said heavily.

“Oh, God.” He turned away. He leaned over to crush out his cigarette, his eyes bleak, hopeless.

“I knew you weren’t celibate, but finding that you had a mistress was something of a shock, especially when we’d been seeing each other for a month.”

“Yes. I expect it was a shock.” He was staring down into the ashtray, unmoving. “I knew your mother was against the engagement. She had her heart set on helping you become a ballerina. She’d failed at it, but she was determined to see that you succeeded.”

“She loved me…”

He turned, his dark eyes riveting to hers. “You ran, damn you.”

She took a steadying breath. “I was eighteen. I had reasons for running that you don’t know about.” She dropped her eyes to his broad chest. “But I think I understand the way you were with me. You had Daphne. No wonder it was so easy for you to draw back when we made love.”

His eyes closed. He almost shuddered with reaction. He shook with the force of his rage at his father and Meg’s mother.

“It’s all water under the bridge now, though,” she said then, studying his rigid posture with faint surprise. “Steve?”

He took a long, deep breath and lit another cigarette. “Why didn’t you say something? Why didn’t you wait and talk to me?”

“There was no point,” she said simply. “You’d already told me to get out of your life,” she added with painful satisfaction.

“At the time, I probably meant it,” he replied heavily. “But that didn’t last long. Two days later, I was more than willing to start over, to try again. I came to tell you so. But you were gone.”

“Yes.” She stared at her slender hands, ringless, while her mind fought down the flood of misery she’d felt when she left Wichita. The fear had finally defeated her. And he didn’t know…

“If you’d waited, I could have explained,” he said tautly.

She looked at him sadly. “Steve, what could you have said? It was perfectly obvious that you weren’t ready to make a real commitment to me, even if you were willing to marry me for your own reasons. And I had some terrors that I couldn’t face.”

“Did you?” he asked dully. He lifted the cigarette to his chiseled mouth and stared into space. “Your father and mine were involved in a subtle proxy fight about that time, did anyone tell you?”

“No. Why would they have needed to?”

“No reason,” he said bitterly. “None at all.”

She hated the way he looked. Surely what had happened in the past didn’t still bother him. His pride had suffered, though, that might explain it.

She moved closer, smiling gently. “Steve, it was forever ago,” she said. “We’re different people now, and all I did really was to spare us both a little embarrassment when we broke up. If you’d wanted me that badly, you’d have come after me.”

He winced. His dark silver eyes caught hers and searched them with anguish. “You’re sure of that.”

“Of course. It was no big thing,” she said softly. “You’ve had dozens of women since, and your mother says you don’t take any of them any more seriously than you took me. You enjoy being a bachelor. If I wasn’t ready for marriage, neither were you.”

His face tautened. He smiled, but it was no smile at all. “You’re right,” he said coldly, “it was no big thing. One or two nights together would have cured both of us. You were a novelty, you with your innocent body and big eyes. I wanted you, all right.”

She searched his face, looking for any trace of softening. She didn’t find it. She hated seeing him that way, so somber and remote. Impishly she wiggled her eyebrows. “Do you still? Feel like experimenting? Your bed or mine?”

He didn’t smile. His eyes flashed, and one of them narrowed a little. That meant trouble.

He lifted the cigarette to his lips one more time, drawing out the silence until she felt like an idiot for what she’d suggested. He bent his tall frame to put it out in the ashtray, and she watched. He had beautiful hands: dark and graceful and long-fingered. On a woman’s body, they were tender magic…

“No, thanks,” he said finally. “I don’t like being one in a queue.”

Her eyebrows arched. “I beg your pardon?”

He straightened and stuck his hands deep into his pockets, emphasizing the powerful muscles in his thighs, his narrow hips and flat stomach. “Shouldn’t you be looking after your roast? Or do you imagine that David and I don’t have enough charcoal in our diets already?”

She moved toward him gracefully. “Steve, I dislike very much what you’ve just insinuated.” She stared up at him fearlessly, her eyes wide and quiet. “There hasn’t been a man. Not one. There isn’t time in my life for the sort of emotional turmoil that comes from involvement. Emotional upsets influence the way I dance. I’ve worked too hard, too long, to go looking for complications.”

She started to turn away, but his lean, strong hands were on her waist, stilling her, exciting her.

“Your honesty, Mary Margaret, is going to land you in hot water one day.”

“Why lie?” she asked, peering over her shoulder at him.

“Why, indeed?” he asked huskily.

He drew her closer, resting his chin on the top of her blond head, and her heart raced wildly as his fingers slid slowly up and down from her waist to her rib cage.

“What if I give in to that last bit of provocation?” he whispered roughly.

“What provocation?”

His teeth closed softly on her earlobe, his warm breath brushing her cheek. “Your bed or mine, Meg?” he whispered.

2

Meg wondered if she was still breathing. She’d been joking, but Steve didn’t look or sound as if he were.

“Steve…” she whispered.

His eyes fell to her mouth as her head lay back against his broad chest. His face changed at the sound of his name on her lips. His hands on her waist contracted until they bruised and his face went rigid. “Mouth like a pink rose petal,” he said in an oddly rough tone. “I almost took you once, Meg.”

She felt herself vibrating, like drawn cord. “You pushed me away,” she whispered.

“I had to!” There was anger in the silvery depths of his eyes. “You blind little fool.” He bit off the words. “Don’t you know why even now?”

She didn’t. She simply stared at him, her blue eyes wide and clear and curious.

He groaned. “Meg!” He let out a long, rough breath and forcibly eased the grip of his lean hands and pushed her away. He shoved his hands into his pockets and stared for a long time into her wide, guileless eyes. “No, you don’t understand, do you?” he said heavily. “I thought you might mature in New York.” His eyes narrowed and he frowned. “What was that talk about some man wanting to keep you, then?”

She smiled sheepishly. “He’s the caretaker of my apartment house. He wanted to adopt me.”

“Good God!”

She rested her fingers on his arms, feeling their strength, loving them. She leaned against him gently with subdued delight that heightened when his hands came out of his pockets and smoothed over her shoulders. “There really isn’t room in my life for complications,” she said sadly. “Even with you. It wouldn’t be wise.” She forced a laugh from her tight throat. “Besides, I’m sure you have all the women you need already.”

“Of course,” he agreed with maddening carelessness and a curious watchfulness. “But I’ve wanted you for a very long time. We started something that we never finished. I want to get you out of my system, Meg, once and for all.”

“Have you considered hiring an exorcist?” she asked, resorting to humor. She pushed playfully at his chest, feeling his heartbeat under her hands. “How about plastering a photo of me on one of your women…?”

He shook her gently. “Stop that.”

“Besides,” she said, sighing and looping her arms around his neck, “I’d probably get pregnant and there’d be a scandal in the aircraft community. My career would be shot, your reputation would be ruined and we’d have a baby that neither of us wanted.” Odd that the threat of pregnancy no longer terrified her, she thought idly.

“Mary Margaret, this is the twentieth century,” he murmured on a laugh. “Women don’t get pregnant these days unless they want to.”

She turned her head slightly as she looked up at him, wide-eyed. “Why, Mr. Ryker, you sound so sophisticated. I suppose you keep a closetful of supplies?”

He burst out laughing. “Hell.”

She smiled up at him. “Stop baiting me,” she said. “I don’t want to sleep with you and ruin a beautiful friendship. We’ve been friends for a long time, Steve, even if cautious ones.”

“Friend, enemy, sparring partner,” he agreed. The smile turned to a blank-faced stare with emotion suddenly glittering dangerously in his silver eyes. His chest rose and fell roughly and he moved a hand into the thick hair knotted at her nape and grasped it suddenly. He held her head firmly while he started to bend toward her.

“Steve…” she protested uncertainly.

“One kiss,” he whispered back gruffly. “Is that so much to ask?”

“We shouldn’t,” she whispered at his lips.

“I know…” His hard mouth brushed over hers slowly, suggestively. His powerful body went very still and his free hand moved to her throat, stroking it tenderly. His thumb tugged at the lower lip that held stubbornly to its mate and broke the taut line.

Her hands pressed at his shirtfront, fascinated by warm, hard muscle and a heavy heartbeat. She couldn’t quite manage to push him away.

“Mary Margaret,” he breathed jerkily, and then he took her mouth.

“Oh, glory…!” she moaned, shivering. It was a jolt like diving into ice water. It burned through her body and through her veins and made her go rigid with helpless pleasure. He was far more expert than he’d been even four years ago. His tongue gently probed its way into the warm darkness of her mouth and she gasped at the darting, hungry pressure of its invasion. He tasted of smoke and mint, and his mouth was rough, as if he’d gone hungry for kisses.

While she was gathering up willpower to resist him, he reached down and lifted her in his hard arms, crushing her into the wall of his chest while his devouring kisses made her oblivious to everything except desire. At the center of the world was Steve and his hunger, and she was suddenly, shockingly, doing her very best to satisfy it, to satisfy him, with her arms clinging helplessly around his neck.

He lifted his mouth to draw in a ragged breath, and she hung there with swollen lips, wide-eyed, breathing like a distance runner.

“If you don’t stop,” she whispered unsteadily, “I’ll tear your clothes off and ravish you right here on the carpet!”

Despite his staggering hunger, the humor broke through, as it always had with her, only with her. There had never been another woman who could make him laugh, could make him feel so alive.

“Oh, God, why can’t you shut up for five minutes?” he managed through reluctant laughter.

“Self-defense,” she said, laughing, too, her own voice breathless with traces of passion. “Oh, Steve, can you kiss!” she moaned.

He shook his head, defeated. He let her slide down his body to the floor, close enough to feel what had happened to him.

“Sorry,” she murmured impishly.

“Only with you, honey,” he said heavily, the endearment coming easily when he never used them. He held her arms firmly for a minute before he let her go with a rueful smile and turned away to light another cigarette. “Odd, that reaction. I need a little time with most women. It was never that way with you.”

She hadn’t thought about it in four years. Now she had to, and he was right. The minute he’d touched her, he’d been capable. She’d convinced herself that he never wanted her, but her memory hadn’t dimmed enough to forget the size and power of him in arousal. She’d been a little afraid of him the first time it had happened, in fact, although he’d assured her that they were compatible in every way, especially in that one. She didn’t like remembering how intimate they’d been, because it was still painful to remember how it had all ended. Looking back, it seemed impossible that he could have gone to Daphne after they argued, unless…

She stiffened as she remembered how desperately he’d wanted her. Had he been so desperate that he’d needed to spend his desire with someone else?

“Steve,” she began.

He glanced at her. “What?”

“What you said, earlier. Was it difficult for you,” she said slowly. “Holding back?”

“Yes.” His face changed. “Apparently that didn’t occur to you four years ago,” he said sarcastically.

“A lot of things didn’t occur to me four years ago,” she said. She felt a dawning fear that she didn’t want to explore.

“Don’t strain your memory,” he said with a mocking smile. “God forbid that you might have to reconsider your position. It’s too damned late, even if you did.”

“I know that. I wouldn’t…I have my career.”

“Your career.” He nodded, but there was something disconcerting in the way he said it, in the way he looked at her.

“I’d better see about the roast,” she murmured, retreating.

He studied her face with a purely masculine appreciation. “Better fix your lipstick, unless you want David making embarrassing remarks.”

“David is terrified of me,” she informed him. “I once beat him up in full view of half our classmates.”

“So he told me, but he’s grown.”

“Not too much.” She touched her mouth. It was faintly sore from the pressure of his hard kisses. She wouldn’t have expected so much passion from him after four years.

“Did I hurt?” he asked quietly. “I didn’t mean to.”

“You always were a little rough when we made love,” she recalled with a wistful smile. “I never minded.”

His eyes kindled and before he could make the move his expression telegraphed, she beat a hasty retreat into the kitchen. He was overwhelming at close range, and she couldn’t handle an affair with him. She didn’t dare try. Having lived through losing him once, she knew she’d never survive having to go through it again. He still wanted her, but that was all. She was filed under unfinished business, and there was something a little disturbing about his attitude toward her. It wasn’t quite unsatisfied passion on his part, she thought nervously. It was more like a deeply buried, long-nurtured vendetta.

It was probably a good thing that she was going back to New York soon, she thought dimly. And not a minute too soon. Her knees were so wobbly she could barely walk, and just from one kiss. If he turned up the heat, as he had during their time together, she would never be able to resist him. The needs she felt were overpowering now. She was a woman and she reacted like one. It was her bad luck that the only man who aroused her was the one man she daren’t succumb to. If Steve really was holding a grudge against her for breaking off their engagement, giving in to him would be a recipe for disaster.

Supper was a rather quiet affair, with Meg introspective and Steven taciturn while David tried to carry the conversation alone.

“Can’t you two say something? Just a word now and again while I try to enjoy this perfectly cooked pot roast?” David groaned, glancing from one set face to the other. “Have you had another fight?”

“We haven’t been fighting,” Meg said innocently. “Have we, Steve?”

Steven looked down at his plate, deliberately cutting a piece of meat without replying.

David threw up his hands. “I’ll never understand you two!” he muttered. “I’ll just go see about dessert, shall I? I shall,” he said, but he was talking to himself as he left the room.

“I don’t want any,” she called after him.

“Yes, she does,” Steve said immediately, catching her eyes. “You’re too thin. If you lose another two or three pounds, you’ll be able to walk through a harp.”

“I’m a dancer,” she said. “I can’t dance with a fat body.”

He smiled gently. “That’s right. Fight me.” Something alien glittered in his eyes and his breathing quickened.

“Somebody needs to,” she said with forced humor. “All that feminine fawning has ruined you. Your mother said that lines of women form everywhere you go these days.”

His eyes contemplated his coffee cup intensely and his brow furrowed. “Did she?” he asked absently.

“But that you never take any of them seriously.” She laughed, but without much humor. “Haven’t you even thought about marrying?”

He looked up, his expression briefly hostile. “Sure. Once.”

She felt uncomfortable. “It wouldn’t have worked,” she said stiffly. “I wouldn’t have shared you, even when I was eighteen and naive.”

His eyes narrowed. “You think I’m modern enough in my outlook to keep a wife and a mistress at the same time?”

The question disturbed her. “Daphne was beautiful and sophisticated,” she replied. “I was green behind the ears. Totally uninhibited. I used to embarrass you…”

“Never!”

There was muted violence in the explosive word.

She glanced up at him curiously. “But I did! Your father said that’s why you never liked to take me out in public…”

“My father. What a champion.” He lifted the cold coffee to his lips and sipped it. It felt as cold as he did inside. He looked at Meg and ached. “Between them, your mother and my father did a pretty damned good job, didn’t they?”

“Daphne was a fact,” she replied stubbornly.

He drew in a long, weary breath. “Yes. She was, wasn’t she? You saw that for yourself in the newspaper.”

“I certainly did.” She sounded bitter. She hated having given her feelings away. She forced a smile. “But, as they say, no harm done. I have a bright career ahead of me and you’re a millionaire several times over.”

“I’m that, all right. I look in the mirror twice a day and say, ‘lucky me.’”

“Don’t tease.”

He turned his wrist and glanced at the face of the thin gold watch. “I have to go,” he said, pushing back his chair.

“Are you off to a business meeting?” she probed gently.

He stared at her without speaking for a few seconds, just long enough to give him a psychological advantage. “No,” he said. “I have a date. As my mother told you,” he added with a cold smile, “I don’t have any problem getting women these days.”

Meg didn’t know how she managed to smile, but she did. “The lucky girl,” she murmured on a prolonged sigh.

Steve glowered at her. “You never stop, do you?”

“Can I help it if you’re devastating?” she replied. “I don’t blame women for falling all over you. I used to.”

“Not for long.”

She searched his hard face curiously. “I should have talked to you about Daphne, instead of running away.”

“Let the past lie,” he said harshly. “We’re not the same people we were.”

“One of us certainly isn’t,” she mused dryly. “You never used to kiss me like that!”

He cocked an eyebrow. “Did you expect me to remain celibate when you defected?”

“Of course not,” she replied, averting her eyes. “That would have been asking the impossible.”

“Fidelity belongs to a committed relationship,” he said.

She was looking at her hands, not at him. Life seemed so empty lately. Even dancing didn’t fill the great hollow space in her heart. “Being in a committed relationship wouldn’t have mattered,” she murmured. “I doubt if you’d have been capable of staying faithful to just one woman, what with your track record and all. And I’m hardly a raving beauty like Daphne.”

He stiffened slightly, but no reaction showed in his face. He watched her and glowered. “Nice try, but it doesn’t work.”

She glanced up, surprised. “What doesn’t?”

“The wounded, downcast look,” he said. He stretched, and muscles rippled under his knit shirt. “I know you too well, Meg,” he added. “You always were theatrical.”

She stared at him without blinking. “Would you have liked it if I’d gone raging to the door of your apartment after I saw you and Daphne pictured in that newspaper?”

His face hardened to stone. “No,” he admitted, “I loathe scenes. All the same, there’s no reason to lie about the reason you wanted to break our engagement. You told your mother that dancing was more important than me, that you got cold feet and ran for it. That’s all she told me.”

Meg was puzzled, but perhaps Nicole had decided against mentioning Daphne’s place in Steven’s life. “I suppose she decided that the best course all around was to make you believe my career was the reason I left.”

“That’s right. Your mother decided,” he corrected, and his eyes glittered coldly. “She yelled frog, and you jumped. You always were afraid of her.”

“Who wasn’t?” she muttered. “She was a world-beater, and I was a sheltered babe in the woods. I didn’t know beans about men until you came along.”

“You still don’t,” he said flatly. “I’m surprised that living in New York hasn’t changed you.”

“What you are is what you are, despite where you live,” she reminded him. She looked down again, infuriated with him. “I dance. That’s what I do. That’s all I do. I’ve worked hard all my life at ballet, and now I’m beginning to reap the rewards for it. I like my life. So it was probably a good thing that I found out how you felt about me in time, wasn’t it? I had a lucky escape, Steve,” she added bitterly.

He moved close, just close enough to make her feel threatened, to make her aware of him so that she’d look up.

He smiled with faint cruelty. “Does your good fortune compensate?” he asked with soft sarcasm.

“For what?”

“For knowing how much other women enjoy lying in my arms in the darkness.”

She felt her composure shatter, and knew by the smile that he’d seen it in her eyes.

“Damn you!” she choked.

He turned away, laughing. “That’s what I thought.” He paused at the doorway. “Tell your brother I’ll call him tomorrow.” His eyes narrowed. “I hated you when your mother handed me the ring you’d left with her. You were the biggest mistake of my life. And, as you said, it was a lucky escape. For both of us.”

He turned and left, his steady footsteps echoing down the hall before the door opened and closed with firm control behind him. Meg stood where he’d left her, aching from head to toe with renewed misery. He said he’d hated her in the past, but it was still there, in his eyes, when he looked at her. He hadn’t stopped resenting her for what she’d done, despite the fact that he’d been unfaithful to her. He was in the wrong, so why was he blaming Meg?

“Where’s Steve?” her brother asked when he reappeared.

“He had to go. He had a hot date,” she said through her teeth.

“Good old Steve. He sure can draw ’em. I wish I had half his…Where are you going?”

“To bed,” Meg said from the staircase, and her voice didn’t encourage any more questions.

Meg only wished that she had someplace to go, but she was stuck in Wichita for the time being. Stuck with Steven always around, throwing his new conquests in her face. She limped because of the accident, and the tendons were mending, but not as quickly as she’d hoped. The doctor had been uncertain as to whether the damage would eventually right itself, and the physical therapist whom Meg saw three times a week was uncommunicative. Talk to the doctor, she told Meg. But Meg wouldn’t, because she knew she wasn’t making much progress and she was afraid to know why.

Besides her injury, there was no work in New York for her just now. Her ballet company couldn’t perform without funds, and unless they raised some soon, she wouldn’t have a job. It was a pity to waste so many years of her life on such a gamble. She loved ballet. If only she were wealthy enough to finance the company herself, but her small dividends from her stock in Ryker Air wouldn’t be nearly enough.

David didn’t have the money, either, but Steve did. She grimaced at just the thought. Steve would throw the money away or even burn it before he’d lend any to Meg. Not that she’d ever ask him, she promised herself. She had too much pride.

She’d tried not to panic at the thought of never dancing again. She consoled herself with a small dream of her own, of opening a ballet school here in Wichita. It would be nice to teach little girls how to dance. After all, Meg had studied ballet since her fourth birthday. She certainly had the knowledge, and she loved children. It was an option that she’d never seriously considered before, but now, with her injury, it became a security blanket. It was there to keep her going. If she failed in one area, she still had prospects in another. Yes, she had prospects.

The next morning, it was raining. Meg looked out the front window and smiled wistfully, because the rain pounding down on the sprouting grass and leafing trees suited her mood. It was late spring. There were flowers blooming and, thank God, no tornadoes looming with this shower. The rain was nice, if unexpected.

She did her exercises, glowering at the ankle that was still stiff and painful after weeks of patient work. David was at the office and no doubt so was Steve—if he wasn’t too worn out from the night before, she thought furiously. How dare he rub his latest conquest in her face and make sarcastic and painful remarks about it?

He wasn’t the person she’d known at eighteen. That Steve had been a quiet man without the cruelty of this new man who used women and tossed them aside. Or perhaps he’d always been like this, except that Meg had been looking at him through loving eyes and missed all his flaws.

She didn’t expect to see him again after his harshness the night before, but David telephoned just before he left the office with an invitation to dinner from Steve.

“We’ve just signed a new contract with a Middle-Eastern potentate. We’re taking his representative out for dinner and Steve wants you to come with us.”

“Why me?” she asked with faint bitterness. “Am I being offered as a treat to his client or is he thinking of selling me into slavery on the Barbary Coast? I understand blondes are still much in demand there.”

David didn’t catch the bitterness in her voice. He laughed uproariously, covered the mouthpiece and mumbled something. “Steve says that’s not a bad idea, and for you to wear a harem outfit.”

“Tell him fat chance,” she mumbled. “I don’t know if I want to go. Surely Steven has plenty of women who could help him entertain his business friends.”

“Don’t be difficult,” David chided. “A night out would do you good.”

“All right. I’ll be ready when you get home.”

“Good.”

She hung up, wondering why she’d given in. Steven had probably invited one of his women and was going to rub Meg’s face in his latest conquest. She herself would no doubt be tossed to the Arab for dessert. Well, he was due for a surprise if he thought she’d go along with his plotting!

By the time David opened the front door, Meg was dressed in an outfit she’d bought for a Halloween party in New York: a black dress that covered her from just under her ears to her ankles, set off by a wide silver belt and silver-sprayed flat shoes. It was impossible to wear high heels just yet, and even though her limp wasn’t pronounced, walking was difficult enough in flats. Her hair was in its neat bun and she wore no makeup. She didn’t realize that her fair beauty made makeup superfluous anyway. She had an exquisitely creamy complexion with a natural blush all its own.

“Wow!” David whistled.

She glowered at him. “You aren’t supposed to approve. I’m rebelling. This is a revolutionary outfit, not debutante dressing.”

“I know that, and so will Steve. But—” he grinned as he took her arm and herded her out the door “—believe me, he’ll approve.”

3

David’s remark made sense until he escorted Meg into the restaurant where Steve—surprisingly without a woman in tow—and a tall, very dark Arab in an expensive European suit were seated. The men stood up as Meg and David approached. The Arab’s gaze was approving. The puzzle pieces as to why Steve would be happy with her outfit fell into place.

“Remember that the Middle East isn’t exactly liberated territory,” David whispered. “You’re dressed very correctly for this evening.”

“Oh, boy,” she muttered angrily. If she’d thought about it, she’d have worn her backless yellow gown….

“Enchanté, mademoiselle,” the foreigner said with lazy delight as he was introduced to her. He smiled and his black mustache twitched. He was incredibly handsome, with eyes that were large and almost a liquid black. He was charming without being condescending or offensive. “You are a dancer, I believe? A ballerina?”

“Yes,” Meg murmured demurely. She smiled at him. “And you are the representative of your country?”

He quirked an eyebrow and glanced at Steve. “Indeed, I am.”

“Do tell me about your part of the world,” she said with genuine interest, totally ignoring Steve and her brother.

He did, to the exclusion of business, until Steve sat glowering at her over dessert and coffee. She shifted a little uncomfortably under that cold look, and Ahmed suddenly noticed his business colleague.

He chuckled softly. “Steven, my friend, I digress. Forgive me. But mademoiselle is such charming company that she chases all thought of business from my poor mind.”

“No harm done,” Steve replied quietly.

“I’m sorry,” Meg said genuinely. “I didn’t mean to distract you, but I do find your culture fascinating. You’re very well educated,” Meg said.

He smiled. “Oxford, class of ’82.”

She sighed. “Perhaps I should have gone to college instead of trying to study ballet.”

“What a sad loss to the world of the arts if that had been so, mademoiselle. Historians are many. Good dancers, alas, are like diamonds.”

Her cheeks flushed with flattery and excitement.

Steven’s fingers closed around his fork and he stared at it. “About these new jets we’re selling you, Ahmed,” he persisted.

“Yes, we must discuss them. I have been led astray by a lovely face and a kind heart.” He smiled at Meg. “But my duty will not allow me to divert my interests too radically from my purpose in coming here. You will forgive us if we turn our minds to the matter at hand, mademoiselle?”

“Of course,” she replied softly.

“Kind of you,” Steven murmured, his dagger glance saying much more than the polite words.

“For you, Steven, anything,” she replied in kind.

The evening was both long and short. All too soon, David found himself accompanying the tall Arab back to his suite at the hotel while Steven appropriated Meg and eased her into the passenger seat of his Jaguar.

“Why is it always a Jaguar?” she asked curiously when he was inside and the engine was running.

“I like Jaguars.”

“You would.”

He pulled the sleek car out into traffic. “Leave Ahmed alone,” he said without preamble.

“Ah. I’m being warned off.” She nodded. “It’s perfectly obvious that you consider me a woman of international intrigue, out to filch top-secret information and sell it to enemy agents.” She frowned. “Who is the enemy these days, anyway?”

“Mata Hari, you aren’t.”

“Don’t insult me. I have potential.” She struck a pose, with her hand suspended behind her nape and her perfect facial profile toward him. “With a little careful tutoring, I could be devastating.”

“With a little careful tutoring, you could be concealed in an oil drum and floated down the river to Oklahoma.”

“You have no sense of humor.”

He shrugged. “Not much to laugh about these days. Not in my life.”

She leaned her cheek against the soft seat and watched him as he controlled the powerful car. It was odd that she always felt safe with him. Safe, and excited beyond words. Just looking at him made her tremble.

“What are you thinking?” he asked.

“That I’m sorry you never made love to me,” she said without thinking.

The car swerved and his face tautened. He never looked at her. “Don’t do that.”

She drew in a slow breath, tracing patterns in the upholstery. “Aren’t you, really?”

“You might have been addictive. I don’t like addiction.”

“That’s why you smoke,” she agreed, staring pointedly at the glowing cigarette in his lean, dark hand.

He did glance at her then, to glare. “I’m not addicted to nicotine. I can quit anytime I feel like it.”

“What’s wrong with right now?”

His dark eyes narrowed.

“What’s wrong? Are you afraid you can’t do without it?” she coaxed.

He pressed the power window switch, then threw the cigarette out when there was an opening. The window went back up again.

Meg grinned at him. “You’ll be shaking in seconds,” she predicted. “Combing the floor for old cigarette butts with a speck of tobacco left in them. Begging stubs from strangers.”

“Unwise, Meg.”

“What is? Taunting you?”

“I might decide to find another way to occupy my hands,” he said suggestively.

She threw her arms out to the sides and closed her eyes. “Go ahead!” she invited theatrically. “Ravish me!”

The car slammed to a halt and Meg’s eyes opened as wide as cups. She stared at him, horrified.

He lifted an eyebrow as her arms clutched her breasts and a blush flamed on her face.

“Why, Meg, is anything wrong?” he asked pleasantly. “I just stopped to let the ambulance by.”

“What amb—”

Sirens and flashing red lights swept past them and vanished quickly into the distance. Meg felt like sinking through the floorboard with embarrassment.

Steven’s eyes narrowed just a little. He looped one long arm over the back of her seat and studied her in the darkened car.

“All bluff, aren’t you?” he chided. “Didn’t I warn you that playing games with me would get you into trouble?”

“Yes,” she said. “But you’ve done nicely without me for four years.”

He didn’t answer. His hand lowered to her throat and he toyed with a wisp of her hair that had come loose from her bun, teasing her skin until her pulse began to race and her body grew hot in the tense silence.

“Steven, don’t,” she whispered huskily, staying his hand.

“Let me excite you, Meg,” he replied quietly. He moved closer, easing her hand aside. His mouth poised over hers and he began all over again, teasing, touching, just at her throat while his coffee-scented breath came into her mouth and made her body ache. “It was like this the first night I took you out. Do you remember?” His voice was a deep, soft caress, and his hand made her shiver with its tender tracing. “I parked the car in your own driveway after we’d had dinner. I touched you, just like this, while we talked. You were more impulsive then, much less inhibited. Do you remember what you did, Meg?”

She was finding it difficult to talk and breathe at the same time. “I was very…young,” she said, defending herself.

“You were hungry.” His lips parted and brushed her mouth open, softly nibbling at it until he heard the sound she made deep in her throat. “You unbuttoned my shirt and slid your hand inside it, right down to my waist.”

She shivered, remembering what that had triggered. His mouth had hit hers like a tidal wave, with a groan that echoed in the silence of the car. He’d lifted her, turned her, and his hand had gone down inside the low bodice of her black dress to cup her naked breast. She’d come to her senses all too soon, fighting the intimacy. He’d stopped at once, and he’d smiled down at her as she lay panting in his arms, on fire with the first total desire she’d ever felt in her life. He’d known. Then, and now…

“You were so innocent,” he said quietly, remembering. “You had no idea why I reacted so violently to such a little caress. It was like the first time I let you feel me against you when I was fully aroused. You were shocked and frightened.”

“My parents never told me anything, and my girlfriends were just as stupid as I was, they made sure of it,” she said hesitantly. “All the reading in the world doesn’t prepare you for what happens, for what you feel when a man touches you intimately.”

His hand smoothed over the shoulder of her black dress, back to the zipper. Slowly, gently, he eased it down, controlling her panicked movement with careless ease.

“It’s been four years and you want it,” he said. “You want me.”

She couldn’t believe that she was allowing him to do this! She felt like a zombie as he eased the fabric below the soft, lacy cup of her strapless bra and looked at her. His big, lean hand, darkly tanned, stroked her collarbone and down, smoothing over the swell of her breasts while he looked at her in the semidarkness.

His mouth touched her forehead. His breath was a little unsteady. So was hers.

“Let me unhook it, Meg. I want you in my mouth.”

This had always been his sharpest weapon, this way of talking to her that made her body burn with dark, wicked desires. Her forehead rested against his chin while his fingers quickly disposed of three small hooks. She felt the cool air on her body even as he moved her back and looked down, his posture suddenly stiff and poised, controlled.

“My God.” It was reverent, the way he spoke, the way he looked at her. His hands contracted on her shoulders as if he were afraid that she might vanish.

“I let you look at me…that last night,” she whispered unsteadily. “And you went to her!”

“No. No,” he whispered, bending his head. “No, Meg!”

His mouth fastened on her taut nipple and he groaned as he lifted her, turned her, suckling her in a silence that blazed with tension and promise.

Her fingers gripped his thick hair and held on while his mouth gave her the most intense pleasure she’d ever known. He’d tried to kiss her this way that long-ago night and she’d fought him. It had been too much for her already overloaded senses and, coupled with his raging arousal and the sudden determination of his weight on her body, she’d panicked. But she was older now, with four years of abstinence to heighten her need, strip her nerves raw. She was starved for him.

His mouth fed on her while his fingers traced around the firm softness he was enjoying. She felt his tongue, his teeth, the slow suction that seemed to draw the heart right out of her body. She shuddered, helpless, anguished, as the ardent pressure of his mouth only made the hunger grow.

He felt her tremble and slowly lifted his head.

“Noo…!” She choked, clutching at him, trying to draw his mouth back to her body. “Steve…please…please!”

He drew her face into his throat and held her, his arms punishing, his breath as ragged as her own.

“Please!” she sobbed, clinging.

“Here…!” He fought the buttons of his shirt open and dragged her inside it, pressing her close to him, so that her bare breasts were rubbing against the thick hair on his chest, teasing his tense muscles. “Meg,” he breathed tenderly. “Oh, Meg, Meg…!” His hands found their way around her, sweeping down her bare back in long, hungry caresses that made the intimacy even more dangerous, more threatening.

Her mouth pressed soft kisses into his throat, his neck, his collarbone, and she felt the need like a knife.

He turned her head and kissed her again, a long, slow, deep kiss that never seemed to end while around them the night darkened and the wind blew.

Somewhere in the middle of it, she began to cry—great, broken sobs of guilt and grief and unappeased hunger. He held her, cradled her against him, his eyes as anguished as his unsatisfied body. But slowly, finally, the desire in both of them began to relax.

“Don’t cry,” he whispered, kissing the tears from her eyes. “It was inevitable.”

She turned her face so that he could kiss the other side of it, her eyes closed while she savored the rare, exquisite tenderness.

When she felt his lips reluctantly draw away, she opened her eyes and looked into his. They were soft, just for her, just for the moment. Soft and hungry, and somehow violent.

“You’re untouched,” he said huskily, his face setting into hard, familiar lines. “Even here.” His hand smoothed over her bare, swollen breast and as if the feel of it drove him mad, he bent his head and tenderly drew his lips over it, breathing in the scent of her body. “Totally, absolutely untouched.”

“I…can’t feel like this with any other man,” she confessed, shaken to her soul by what they were sharing. “I can’t bear another man’s eyes to touch me, much less his hands.”

His breath drew in raggedly. “Why in God’s name did you leave, damn you?”

“I was afraid!”

“Of this?” His mouth opened over her nipple and she cried out at the flash of pleasure it gave her to feel it so intimately.

“I was a virgin,” she gasped.

“You still are.” He drew her across him, one big hand gathering her hips blatantly into the hard thrust of his, holding her there while he searched her eyes. “And you’re still afraid,” he said finally, watching the shocked apprehension grow on her face. “Terrified of intimacy with me.”

She swallowed, then swallowed again. Her eyes dropped to his bare chest. “Not…of that.”

“Then what?”

His body throbbed. She could feel the heat and power of it and she felt faint with the knowledge of how desperately he wanted her. “Steven, my sister died in childbirth.”

“Yes, I know. Your father told me. It was such a private thing, I didn’t feel it was my place to ask questions. I just know she was twelve years older than you.”

She looked up at him. “She was…like me,” she whispered slowly. “Thin and slender, not very big in the hips at all. They lived up north. It snowed six feet the winter she was ready to deliver and her husband couldn’t get her to a hospital in time. She died. So did the baby.” Meg hesitated, nibbling her lower lip. “Childbirth is difficult for the women in my family. My mother had to have a cesarean section when I was born. I was very sheltered and after my sister died, mother made it sound as if pregnancy would be a death sentence for me, too. She made me terrified of getting pregnant,” she added miserably, hiding her face from him.

He eased his intimate hold on her, stunned. His hand guided her cheek to his broad, hair-roughened chest and he held her there, letting her feel the heat of his body, the heavy slam of his heart under her ear.

“We never discussed this.”

“I was very young, as you said,” she replied, closing her eyes. “I couldn’t tell you. It was so intimate a thing to say, and I was already overwhelmed by you physically. Every time you touched me, I went light-headed and hot and shaky all over.” Her eyes closed. “I still do.”

His fingers tangled gently in her hair, comforting now instead of arousing. “I could have reassured you, if you’d only told me.”

“Perhaps.” She nuzzled her cheek against him. “But I had terrors of getting pregnant, and you came on very strong that night. The argument…seemed like a reprieve at the time. You told me to get out, and then you took Daphne to a public place so that it would be in all the papers. I told myself that choosing dancing made more sense than choosing you. It made it easier to go away.”

He lifted his head, staring out the darkened window. Seconds later, he looked down at her, his eyes lingering on her breasts.

She smiled sadly. “You don’t believe me, do you? You’re still bitter, Steven.”

“You don’t think I’m entitled to be?”

She shifted against him, her eyes adoring his hard face, totally at peace with him even in this intimacy now. “I didn’t think you cared enough to be hurt.”

“I didn’t,” he agreed readily. “But my pride took a few blows.”

“Nicole said you got drunk…”

He smiled cruelly. “Did she add that I was with Daphne at the time?”

She stiffened, hating him.

His warm hand covered her breast blatantly, feeling her heartbeat race even through her anger. He searched her eyes. “I still want you,” he said flatly. “More than ever.”

She knew it. His face was alive with desire. “It wouldn’t be wise,” she said quietly. “As you once said, Steven, addictions are best avoided.”

“You flatter yourself if you think I’m crazy enough to become addicted to you again,” he said with a faintly mocking smile as all the anguish of those four years sat on him.

Meg was arrested by his expression. The mention of the past seemed to have brought all the bitterness back, all the anger. She didn’t know what to say. “Steven…”

His hand pressed closer, warm against her bare skin in the faint chill of the car. “Your ballet company needs money. All right, Meg,” he said softly. “I’ll get you out of the hole.”

“You will!” she exclaimed.

“Oh, yes. I’ll be your company angel. But there’s a price.”

His voice was too silky. She felt the apprehension as if it were tangible. “What is the price?” she asked.

“Can’t you figure it out?” he asked with faint hauteur in his smile. “Then I’ll tell you. Sleep with me. Give me one night, Meg, to get you out of my system. And in return, I’ll give you back your precious dancing.”

4

Meg spent a long, sleepless night agonizing over Steven’s proposal. She couldn’t really believe that he’d said such a thing, or that he’d actually expected her to agree. How could his feverish ardor have turned to contempt in so short a time? It must be as she thought: he wanted nothing more than revenge because she’d run out on him. Even her explanation had fallen on deaf ears. Or perhaps he hadn’t wanted to believe it. And hadn’t he been just as much at fault, after all? He was the one who’d sent her away. He’d told her to get out of his life.

She wished now that she’d reminded him of that fact more forcibly. But his slowly drawled insult had made her forget everything. She’d torn out of his arms, putting her clothes to rights with trembling hands while he laughed harshly at her efforts.

“That was cruel, Steven,” she’d said hoarsely, glaring at him when she was finally presentable again.

“Really? In fact, I meant it,” he added. “And the offer still stands. Sleep with me and I’ll drag your precious company back from the brink. You won’t have to worry about pregnancy, either,” he added as he started the car. “I’ll protect you from it with my last breath. You see, Meg, the last thing in the world I want now is to be tied to you by a child.” His eyes had punctuated the insult, going slowly over her body as if he could see under her clothes. “All I want is for this madness to be over, once and for all.”

As if it ever would be, she thought suddenly, when he’d left her at her door without a word and driven off. The madness, as he called it, was going to be permanent, because she’d taken the easy way out four years ago. She hadn’t confessed her fears and misgivings about intimacy with him, or challenged him about Daphne. She’d been afraid to say what she thought, even more afraid to fight for his love. Instead, she’d listened to others—his father and her own mother, who’d wanted Meg to have a career in ballet and never risk pregnancy at all.

But Steven’s motives were even less clear. She’d often thought secretly that Steven was rather cold in any emotional way, that perhaps he’d been relieved when their engagement ended. His very courtship of her had been reluctant, forced, as if it was totally against his better judgment. Meg had thought at the time that love was something he would never understand completely. He had so little of it in his own life. His father had wanted a puppet that he could control. His mother had withdrawn from him when he was still a child, unable to understand his tempestuous nature much less cope with his hardheaded determination in all things.

Steven had grown up a loner. He still was. He might use a woman to ease his masculine hungers, but he avoided emotional closeness. Meg had sensed that, even at the age of eighteen. In a way, it was Steven’s very detachment that she’d run from. She had the wisdom to know that her love for him and his desire for her would never make a relationship. And at the back of her mind, always in those days, was her unrealistic fear of childbirth. She wondered now if her mother hadn’t deliberately cultivated that fear, to force Meg into line. Her mother had been a major manipulator. Just like Steven’s father.

Meg had gone quickly upstairs the night before, calling a cheerful good-night to her brother, who was watching a late movie in the living room. She held up very well until she got into her own room, and then the angry tears washed down from her eyes.

A night of love in return for financing. Did he really think she held herself so cheaply? Well, Steven could hold his breath until she asked him for financial help, she thought furiously! The ballet company would manage somehow. She wouldn’t meet his unreasonable terms, not even to save her career.

By the time Meg was up and moving around the next morning, David had already gone to the office. She had a headache and a very sore ankle from just the small amount of walking she’d done the night before. She couldn’t quite meet her own eyes in the mirror, though, remembering how easily she’d surrendered to Steven’s hot ardor. She had no resistance when she got within a foot of him.

She washed her face, brushed her teeth and ate breakfast. She went to the hospital for her physical therapy and then came back home and did stretches for several minutes. All the while, she thought of Steven and how explosive their passion had been. It didn’t help her mood.

David came home looking disturbed.

“Why so glum?” Meg teased gently.

He glanced at her. “What? Oh, there’s nothing,” he said quickly, and smiled. “If you haven’t cooked anything, suppose we go out for a nice steak supper?”

Her eyebrows arched. “Steak?”

“Steak. I feel like chewing something.”

“Ouch. Bad day?” she murmured.

“Vicious!” He shrugged. “By the way, Ahmed said that he’d like to join us, if you don’t mind.”

“Certainly not!” she said, smiling. “I like him.”

“So do I. But don’t get too attached to him,” he cautioned. “There are some things going on that you don’t know about, that you’re safer not knowing about. But Ahmed isn’t quite what he seems.”

“Really?” She was intrigued. “Tell me more.”

“You’ll have to take my word for it,” he said. “I’m not risking any more scathing comments from the boss. He was out for blood today. One of the secretaries threw a desk lamp at him and walked out of the building without severance pay!”

Meg’s eyebrows arched. “Steven’s secretary?”

“As a matter of fact, yes.” He chuckled. “Everybody else ran for cover. Not Daphne. I suppose she’d known him for so long that she can handle him.”

Meg’s heart stopped beating. “Daphne—the Daphne he was sleeping with when he and I got engaged?”

David’s eyes narrowed. “I don’t think they were that intimate, and certainly not after he asked you to marry him. But, yes, they’ve known each other for years.”

“I see.”

“She was the reason you argued with him. The reason you left, as I remember.”

She took a deep breath. “Part of it,” she replied, correcting him. She forced a smile. “Actually she did a good turn. I’d never have had the opportunity to continue my training in New York if I’d married Steven, would I?”

“You haven’t let a man near you since you left Wichita,” David said sagely. “And don’t tell me it’s due to lack of time for a social life.”

She lifted her chin. “Maybe Steve’s an impossible act to follow,” she said with an enigmatic smile. “Or maybe he taught me a bitter lesson about male loyalty.”

“Steven’s not what he seems,” he said suddenly. “He’s got a soft center, despite all that turmoil he creates. He was deeply hurt when you left. I don’t think he ever got over you, Meg.”

“His pride didn’t, he even admitted it,” she agreed. “But he never loved me. If he had, how could he have gone to Daphne?”

“Men do strange things when they feel threatened.”

“I never threatened him,” she muttered.

“No?” He stuck his hands into his pockets and studied her averted face. “Meg, in all the years we’ve known the Rykers, Steve never took a woman around for more than two weeks. He avoided any talk of involvement or marriage. Then he took you out one time and started talking about engagement rings.”

“I was a novelty.” She bit off the words.

“You were, indeed. You melted right through that wall of ice around him and made him laugh, made him young. Meg, if you’d ever really looked at him, you’d have seen how much he changed when he was with you. Steven Ryker would have thrown himself under a bus if you’d asked him to. He would have done anything for you. Anything,” he added quietly. “His father didn’t want Steven to marry you because he thought Steve was besotted enough to side with you in a proxy fight.” He smiled at her shocked expression. “Don’t you see that everyone was manipulating you for their own gain? You and Steven never had a chance, Meg. You fell right into line and did exactly what you were meant to do. And the one who really paid the price was poor old Steven, in love for the first time in his life.”

“He didn’t love me,” she choked.

“That’s true. He worshiped you. He couldn’t take his eyes off you. Everything he did for that one long month you were engaged was designed solely to please you, every thought he had was for your comfort, your happiness.” He shook his head. “You were too young to realize it, weren’t you?”

She felt as if her legs wouldn’t hold her. She sat down, heavily. “He never said a word.”

“What could he have said? He isn’t the type to beg. You left. He assumed you considered him expendable. He got drunk. Roaring drunk. He stayed that way for three days. Then he went back to work with a vengeance and started making money hand over fist. That’s when the women started showing up, one after another. They numbed the ache, but he was still hurting. There was nothing anyone could do for him, except watch him suffer and pretend not to notice that he flinched whenever your name was mentioned.”

She covered her face with her hands.

He laid a comforting hand on her shoulder. “Don’t torture yourself. He did, finally, get over you, Meg. It took him a year and when he got through it, he was a better man. But he’s not the same man. He’s lost and gained something in the process. It’s hardened him to emotion.”

“I was an idiot,” she said heavily, pushing back her loosened hair. “I loved him so much, but I was afraid of him. He seemed so distant sometimes, as if he couldn’t bear to talk to me about anything personal.”

“You were the same way,” he prompted.

She smiled wistfully. “Of course I was. I was hopelessly repressed and introverted, and I couldn’t believe that a man who was such a man wanted to marry me. I stood in awe of him then. I still do, a little. But now I understand him so much better…now that it’s too late.”

“Are you sure that it is?”

She thought about the night before, about his exquisite ardor and then the pain and grief of hearing him proposition her. She nodded slowly. “Yes, David,” she said, lifting pain-filled blue eyes to his. “I’m afraid so.”

“I’m sorry.”

She got to her feet. “Don’t they say that things always work out for the best?” She smoothed her skirt. “Where are we going to eat?”

“Castello’s. And I’m sorry to have to tell you that so is Steve.”

She hated the thought of facing him, but she was no coward. She only shrugged fatalistically. “I’ll get dressed, then.”

He told her what time they needed to leave and went off to make a last-minute phone call.

Meg went upstairs. “I think I’ll wear something red,” she murmured angrily to herself. “With a V-neck, cut to the ankles in front, and with slits up both sides…”

She didn’t have anything quite that revealing, but the red dress she pulled out of its neat wrapper had spaghetti straps and fringe. It was close-fitting, seductive. She left her blond hair down around her shoulders and used much more makeup than she normally did. She had some jewelry left over from the old days, with diamonds. She got it out of the safe and wore it, too. The song about going out in a blaze of glory revolved in her mind. She was going to give Steven Ryker hell.

As David had said, he was, indeed, in the restaurant. But he wasn’t alone. And Meg’s poor heart took a dive when she saw who was with him: a slinky, sultry platinum blonde with a smooth tan, wearing a black dress that probably cost twice what Meg’s had. It was Daphne, of course, draped against Steve’s arm as if she were an expensive piece of lint. Meg forced a brilliant smile as Ahmed rose from the table, in a distinguished dark suit, and smiled with pure appreciation as she and David approached.

“Mademoiselle prompts me to indiscretion,” he said, taking her hand and bowing over it before he kissed the knuckles in a very continental way. “I will bite my tongue and subdue the words that tease my mouth.”

Meg laughed with delight. “If you intend asking me to join your harem,” she returned impishly, “you’ll have to wait until I’m too old to dance, I’m afraid.”

“I am devastated,” he said heavily.

Steven was staring at her, his silver eyes dangerous. “What an interesting choice of color, Meg,” he murmured.

She curtsied, grimacing as she made her injured ankle throb with the action. “It’s my favorite. Don’t you think it suits me?” she asked with a challenge in her eyes.

He averted his gaze as if the words had shamed him. “No, I don’t,” he said stiffly. “Sit down, David.”

David helped Meg into the chair next to Ahmed and greeted Daphne.

“How did you manage this?” David asked the other woman.

“He likes having things thrown at him, don’t you, Steven, darling?” Daphne laughed. “I got rehired at a higher salary. You should try it yourself.”

“No, thanks.” David sighed. “I’d be frog-marched to the elevator shaft for my pains.”

“I don’t suppose Meg is the type to throw things, are you, dear?” Daphne asked.

“Shall we find out?” Meg replied, lifting her water glass with a meaningful glance in Daphne’s direction.

David put a hand on her wrist, shocked by her reaction.

“Forgive me if I’ve offended you,” Daphne said quickly. She looked more than a little surprised herself. “Heavens, I just open my mouth and words fall out, I suppose,” she added with a nervous, apologetic glance toward Steven.

Steven was frowning and his eyes never left Meg’s.

“No need to apologize,” Meg said stiffly. “I rarely take offense, even when people blatantly insult me.”

Steven looked uncomfortable and the atmosphere at the table grew tense.

Ahmed stood up, holding his hand out to Meg. “I would be honored to have you dance with me,” he offered.

“I would be honored to accept.” Meg avoided Steven’s eyes as she stood up and let Ahmed lead her onto the dance floor.

He held her very correctly. She liked the clean scent of him and the handsome face with liquid black eyes that smiled down at her. But there was no spark when he touched her, no throbbing ache to possess and be possessed.

“Thank you,” she said quietly. “I think you saved the evening.”

“Daphne has no malice in her, despite what you may think,” he said gently. “It is quite obvious what Steven feels for you.”

Meg flushed, letting her eyes fall to his white shirt. “Is it?”

“This dancing…it hurts you?” he asked suddenly when she was less than graceful and fell heavily against him.

She swallowed. “My ankle is still painful,” she said honestly. “And not mending as I had hoped.” Her eyes lifted with panic in their depths. “It was a bad sprain…”

“And dancing is your life.”

She gnawed on her lower lip, wincing as she moved again with him to the bluesy music. “It has had to be,” she said oddly.

“May I cut in?”

The voice was deep and cutting and not the kind to ignore unless a brawl was desirable.

“But of course,” Ahmed said, smiling at Steven. “Merci, mademoiselle,” he added softly and moved back.

Steven drew Meg to him, much too closely, and riveted her in place with one long, powerful arm as he moved her to the music.

“My ankle hurts,” she said icily, “and I don’t want to dance with you.”

“I know.” He tilted her face up to his and studied the dark circles under her eyes, the wan complexion. “I know why you wore the red dress, too. It was to rub my nose in what I said to you last night, wasn’t it?”

“Bingo,” she said with a cold smile.

He drew in a long breath. His silver eyes slid over the length of her waving hair, down to her bare shoulders. They fell to her breasts where the soft V at the neckline revealed their exquisite swell, and his jaw clenched. The arm at her back went rigid.

“You have the softest skin I’ve ever touched,” he said gruffly. “Silky and warm and fragrant. I don’t need this dress to remind me that I can’t think sanely when you’re within reach.”

“Then stay out of reach,” she shot back. “Why don’t you take Daphne home with you and seduce her? If you didn’t on the way here,” she added with hauteur.

She missed a step and he caught her, easily, holding her upright.

“That ankle is hurting you. You shouldn’t be dancing,” he said firmly.

“The therapist said to exercise it,” she said through her teeth. “And she said that it would hurt.”

He didn’t say what he was thinking. If the ankle was painful after five long weeks, how would she be able to dance on it? Would it hold her weight? It certainly didn’t seem as if it would.

She saw the expression on his face. “I’ll dance again,” she told him. “I will!”

He touched her face with lean, careful fingers, traced her cheek and her chin and around her full, bow mouth. “For yourself, Meg, or because it was what your mother always wanted?”

“It was the only thing I ever did in my life that pleased her,” she said without thinking.

“Yes. I think perhaps it was.” His finger traced her lower lip. Odd how tremulous that finger seemed, especially when it teased between her lips and felt them part, felt her breath catch. “Are you still afraid of making a baby?” he whispered unsteadily.

“Steven!” she exclaimed. She jerked her face back and it flushed red.

“You made me think about what happened that last night we were together before we fought,” he said, as if she hadn’t reacted to the question at all. “I remember when you started fighting me. I remember what I said to you.”

“This isn’t necessary…!” she broke in frantically.

“I said that if we went all the way, it wouldn’t really matter,” he whispered deeply, holding her eyes. “Because I’d love making you pregnant.”

She actually shivered and her body trembled as it sought the strength and comfort of his.

He cradled her in his arms, barely moving to the music, his mouth at her ear. “You didn’t think I was going to stop. And you were afraid of a baby.”

“Yes.”

His fingers threaded into her soft, silky hair and he drew her even closer. His legs trembled against her own as the incredible chemistry they shared made him weak. And all at once, instantly, he was fully capable and she could feel it.

“Don’t pull away from me,” he said roughly. “I know it repulses you, but, my God, it isn’t as if I can help it…!”

She stilled instantly. “Oh, no, it isn’t that,” she whispered, lifting her eyes. “I don’t want to hurt you! You used to tell me not to move when it happened, remember?”

He stopped dancing and his eyes searched hers so hungrily that she could hardly bear the intensity of the look they were sharing.

His lips parted as he tried to breathe, enmeshed by his hunger for her, by the beauty of her uplifted face, the temptation of her perfect, innocent body against his. “I remember everything,” he said tautly. “You haunt me, Meg. Night after empty night.”

She saw the strain in his dark face and felt guilty that she should be the cause of it. Her hand pressed flat against his shirtfront, feeling the strength and heat and under it the feverish throb of his pulse.

“I’m sorry,” she said tenderly. “I’m so sorry…”

He fought for control, his eyes lifting finally to stare over her head.

Meg moved away a little, and began talking quite calmly about the state of the world, the weather, dancing lazily while he recovered.

“I have to stop now, Steven,” she said finally. “My ankle really hurts.”

He stopped dancing. His eyes searched over her face. “I’m sorry about what I said to you last night, when I asked you,” he said curtly. “I wanted you to the point of madness.” He laughed bitterly. “That, at least, has never changed.”

Her eyes adored him. She couldn’t help it. He was more perfect to her than anything in the world, and when he was close to her, she had everything. But what he wanted would destroy her.

“I can’t sleep with you and just…just go on with my life,” she said softly. “It would be another night, another body, to you. But it would be devastating to me. Not only my first time, but with someone whom I…” She averted her eyes. “Someone for whom I once cared very much.”

“Look at me.”

She forced her eyes up to his, curious about their sudden intent scrutiny.

“Meg,” he said, as the music began again, “it wouldn’t be just another night and another body.”

“It would be for revenge,” she argued. “And you know it, Steven. It isn’t about lovemaking, it’s about getting even. I walked out of your life and hurt you. Now you want to pay me back, and what better way than to sleep with me and walk away yourself?”

“Do you think I could?” he asked with a bitter laugh.

“Neither of us would really know until it happened.” She stared at his chest. “I know you’d try to protect me, but you aren’t quite in control when we make love. You certainly weren’t last night.” She raised her face. “Then what would we do if I really did get pregnant?”

His lips parted. He studied her slowly. “You could marry me,” he said softly. “We could raise our child together.”

The thought thrilled, uplifted, frightened. “And my career?”

The pleasure washed out of him. His face lost its softness and his eyes grew cold. “That, of course, would be history. And you couldn’t stand that. After all, you’ve worked all your life for it, haven’t you?” He let her go. “We’d better go back to the table. We don’t want to put that ankle at risk.”

They did go back to the table. He took Daphne’s hand and kept it in his for the rest of the evening. And every time he looked at Meg, his eyes were hostile and full of bitterness and contempt.

5

David and Meg, who’d taken a cab to the restaurant, rode back to their house with Ahmed in his chauffeured limousine. Steven, Meg noticed, hadn’t even offered them a ride; he probably had other plans, ones that included Daphne.

“It’s been a great evening,” David remarked. “How much longer are you going to stay in Wichita, Ahmed?”

“Until the last of the authorizations are signed,” the other man replied. He glanced at Meg with slow, bold appraisal in his liquid black eyes. “Alas, then duty forces me back to my own land. Are you certain that you would not consider coming with me, ma chou?” he teased. “You could wear that dress and enchant me as you dance.”

Meg forced a smile, but she was having some misgivings about her future. Her ankle was no stronger than when it was first damaged. Her concern grew by the day.

“I’m very flattered,” she began.

“We are allowing our women more freedom,” he mused. “At least they are no longer required to wear veiling from head to toe and cover their faces in public.”

“Are you married?” she asked curiously. “Aren’t Moslems allowed four wives?”

The laughter went out of his eyes. “No, I am not married. It is true that a Moslem may have up to four wives, but while I accept many of the teachings of the Prophet, I am not Moslem, mademoiselle. I was raised a Christian, which precludes me from polygamy.”

“That’s the road, just up ahead,” David said quickly, gesturing toward their street. “You haven’t seen our home, have you, Ahmed?” he added, smiling at the other man.

“No.”

“Do come in,” Meg asked. “We can offer you coffee. Your chauffeur as well.”

“Another time, perhaps,” Ahmed said gently, glancing behind them at a dark car in the near distance. “I have an appointment this evening at my hotel.”

“Certainly,” Meg replied.

“Thanks for the ride. I’ll see you tomorrow, then,” David said as they pulled up in the driveway.

Ahmed nodded. “Friday will see the conclusion of our business,” he remarked. “I should enjoy escorting the two of you and our friend Steven to a performance at the theater. I have obtained tickets in anticipation of your acceptance.”

Meg was thrilled. “I’d love to! David…?”

“Certainly,” her brother said readily. He smiled. “Thank you.”

“I will send the car for you at six, then. We will enjoy a leisurely meal before the curtain rises.” He didn’t offer to get out of the car, but he smiled and waved at Meg as David closed the door behind her. The limousine sped off, with the dark car close behind it.

“Is he being followed?” she asked David carefully.

“Yes, he is,” David said, but he avoided looking at her. “He has his own security people.”

“I like him,” she said as they walked toward the front door.

David glanced at her. “You’ve been very quiet since you danced with Steve,” he observed. “More trouble?”

She sighed wistfully. “Not really. Steven’s only shoving Daphne down my throat. Why should that bother me?”

“Maybe he’s trying to make you jealous.”

“That will be the day, when Steven Ryker stoops to that sort of tactic.”

David started to speak and decided against it. He only smiled as he unlocked the door and let her in.

“Ahmed is very mysterious,” she said abruptly. “It’s as if he’s not really what he seems at all. He’s a very gentle man, isn’t he?” she added thoughtfully.

He gave her a blank stare. “Ahmed? Uh, well, yes. Certainly. I mean, of course he is.” He looked as if he had to bite his tongue. “But, despite the fact that Ahmed is Christian, he’s still very much an Arab in his customs and beliefs. And his country is a hotbed of intrigue and danger right now.” He studied her closely. “You don’t watch much television, do you, Meg? Not the national news programs, I mean.”

“They’re much too upsetting for me,” she confessed. “No, I don’t watch the news or read newspapers unless I can’t avoid them. I know,” she said before he could taunt her about it, “I’m hiding my head in the sand. But honestly, David, what could I do to change any of that? We elect politicians and trust them to have our best interests at heart. It isn’t the best system going, but I can hardly rush overseas and tell people to do what I think they should, now can I?”

“It doesn’t hurt to stay informed,” he said. “Although right now, maybe it’s just as well that you aren’t,” he added under his breath. “See you in the morning.”

“Yes.” She stared after him, frowning. David could be pretty mysterious himself at times.

David didn’t invite Steve to the house that week, because he could see how any mention of the man cut Meg. But although Wichita was a big city, it was still possible to run into people when you traveled in the same social circles.

Meg found it out the hard way when she went to a men’s department store that her family had always frequented to buy a birthday present for David. She ran almost literally into Steve there.

If she was shocked and displeased to meet him, the reverse was also true. He looked instantly hostile.

Her eyes slid away from his tall, fit body in the pale tan suit he was wearing. It hurt to look at him too much.

“Shopping for a suit?” he asked sarcastically. “You’ll have a hard time finding anything to fit you here.”

“I’m shopping for David’s birthday next week,” she said tightly.

“By an odd coincidence, so am I.”

“Doesn’t your secretary,” she stressed the word, “perform that sort of menial chore for you?”

“I pick out gifts for my friends myself,” he said with cold hauteur. “Besides,” he added, watching her face, “I have other uses for Daphne. I wouldn’t want to tire her too much in the daytime.”

Insinuating that he wanted her rested at night. Meg had to fight down anger and distaste. She kept her eyes on the ties. “Certainly not,” she said with forced humor.

“My father was right in the first place,” he said shortly, angered at her lack of reaction. “She would have made the perfect wife. I don’t know why it took me four years to realize it.”

Her heart died. Died! She swallowed. “Sometimes we don’t realize the value of things until it’s too late.”

His breath caught, not quite audibly. “Don’t we?”

She looked up, her eyes full of blue malice. “I didn’t realize how much ballet meant to me until I got engaged to you,” she said with a cold smile.

His fists clenched. He fought for control and smiled. “As we said once before, we had a lucky escape.” He cocked his head and studied her. “How’s the financing going for the ballet company?” he added pointedly.

She drew in a sharp breath. “Just fine, thanks,” she said venomously. “I won’t need any…help.”

“Pity,” he said, letting his eyes punctuate the word.

“Is it? I’m sure Daphne wouldn’t agree!”

“Oh, she doesn’t expect me to be faithful at this stage of the game,” he replied lazily. “Not until the engagement’s official, at least.”

Meg felt faint. She knew the color was draining slowly out of her face, but she stood firm and didn’t grab for support. “I see.”

“I still have your ring,” he said conversationally. “Locked up tight in my safe.”

She remembered giving it to her mother to hand back to him. The memory was vivid, violent. Daphne. Daphne!

“I kept it to remind me what a fool I was to think I could make a wife of you,” he continued. “I won’t make the same mistake again. Daphne doesn’t want just a career. She wants my babies,” he added flatly, cruelly.

She dropped her eyes, exhausted, almost ill with the pain of what he was saying. Her hand trembled as she fingered a silk tie. “Ahmed invited us to dinner and the theater Friday night.” Her voice only wobbled a little, thank God.

“I know,” he said, and sounded unhappy about it.

She forced her eyes up. “You don’t have to be deliberately insulting, do you, Steven?” she asked quietly. “I know you hate me. There’s no need for all this—” She stopped, almost choking on the word that almost escaped.

“Isn’t there? But, then, you don’t know how I feel, do you, Meg? You never did. You never gave a damn, either.” He shoved his hands deep into his pockets and glowered at her. She looked fragile somehow in the pale green knit suit she was wearing. “Ahmed is leaving soon,” he told her. “Don’t get attached to him.”

“He’s a friend. That’s all.”

His silver eyes slid over her bowed head with faint hunger and then moved away quickly. “How are the exercises coming?”

“Fine, thanks.”

He hesitated, bristling with bad temper. “When do you leave?” he asked bluntly.

She didn’t react. “At the end of the month.”

He let out a breath. “Well, thank God for that!”

Her eyes closed briefly. She’d had enough. She pulled the tie she’d been examining off the rack and moved away, refusing to look at him, to speak to him. Her throat felt swollen, raw.

“I’ll have this one, please,” she told the smiling clerk and produced her credit card. Her voice sounded odd.

Steven was standing just behind her, trying desperately to work up to an apology. It was becoming a habit to savage her. All he could think about was how much he’d loved her, and how easily she’d discarded him. He didn’t trust her, but, God, he still wanted her. She colored his dreams. Without her, everything was flat. Even now, looking at her fed his heart, uplifted him. She was so lovely. Fair and sweet and gentle, and all she wanted was a pair of toe shoes and a stage.

He groaned inwardly. How was he going to survive when she left again? He never should have touched her. Now it was going to be just as bad as before. He was going to watch her walk away a second time and part of him was going to die.

Daphne was coming with him tonight or he didn’t think he could survive Meg’s company. Thank God for Daphne. She was a friend, and quite content to be that, but she was his coconspirator as well now, part of this dangerous business that revolved around Ahmed. She was privileged to know things that no one else in his organization knew. But meanwhile she was also his camouflage. Daphne had a man of her own, one of the two government agents who were helping keep a careful eye on Ahmed. But fortunately, Meg didn’t know that.

Steven was in some danger. Almost as much as Ahmed. He couldn’t tell Meg that without having to give some top-secret answers. Daphne knew, of course. She was as protected as he was, as Ahmed was. But despite his bitterness toward Meg, he didn’t want her in the line of fire. Loving her was a disease, he sometimes thought, and there was no cure, not even a temporary respite. She was the very blood in his veins. And to her, he was expendable. He was of no importance to her, because all she needed from life was to dance. The knowledge cut deep into his heart. It made him cruel. But hurting her gave him no pleasure. He watched her with possessive eyes, aching to hold her and apologize for his latest cruelty.

Her purchase completed, Meg left the counter and turned away without looking up. Steven, impelled by forces too strong to control, gently took her arm and pulled her with him to a secluded spot behind some suits.

He looked down into her surprised, wounded eyes until his body began to throb. “I keep hurting you, don’t I?” he said roughly. “I don’t mean to. Honest to God, I don’t mean to, Meg!”

“Don’t you?” she asked with a sad, weary smile. “It’s all right, Steve,” she said quietly, averting her eyes. “Heaven knows, you’re entitled, after what I did to you!”

She pulled away from him and walked quickly out of the store, the cars and people blurring in front of her eyes.

Steve cursed himself while he watched her until she was completely out of view. He’d never felt quite so bad in his whole life.

Meg spent the rest of the week trying to practice her exercises and not think about Steve and Daphne. David didn’t say much, but he spoke to Steve one evening just after she’d met him in the store, and Meg overheard enough to realize that Steve was taking Daphne out for the evening. It made her heart ache.

She telephoned the manager of her ballet company, Tolbert Morse, on Thursday.

“Glad you called,” he said. “I think I may be on the way to meeting our bills. Can you be back in New York for rehearsals next week?”

She went rigid. In that length of time, only a miracle would mend her ankle. But she hesitated. She didn’t want to admit the slow progress she was making. Deep inside she knew she’d never be able to dance that soon. She couldn’t force the words out. Dance was all she had. Steve had made his rejection of Meg very blatant. Any hope in that area was gone forever.

Her dream of a school of ballet for little girls was slowly growing, but it would have to be opened in Wichita. Could she really bear having to see Steven all the time? His friendship with David would mean having him at the house constantly. No. She had to get her ankle well. She had to dance. It was the only escape she had now! Steven’s latest cruelty only punctuated the fact that she had no place in his life anymore.

Fighting down panic, she forced herself to laugh. “Can I ever be ready in a week!” she exclaimed. “I’ll be there with my toe shoes on!”

“Good girl! I’ll tell Henrietta you’ll want your old room back. Ankle doing okay?”

“Just fine,” she lied.

“Then I’ll see you next week.”

He hung up. So did Meg. Then she stood looking down at the receiver for a long time before she could bring herself to move. One lie led to another, but how could she lie when she was up on toe shoes trying to interpret ballet?

She pushed the pessimistic thought out of her mind and went back to the practice bar. If she concentrated, there was every hope that she could accomplish what she had to.

David paused in the doorway to watch her Friday afternoon when he came home from work. He was frowning, and when she stopped to rest, she couldn’t help but notice the concern in his eyes, quickly concealed.

“How’s it going?” he asked.

She grinned at him, determined not to show her own misgivings. “Slow but steady,” she told him.

He pursed his lips. “What does the physical therapist say?”

Her eyes became shuttered and she avoided looking directly at him. “Oh, that it will take time.”

“You’re supposed to start rehearsing in a month,” he persisted. “Will you actually be ready by then?”

“It’s in a week, actually,” she said tautly, and told him about the telephone call. He protested violently. “David, for heaven’s sake, I’ll be fine!” she burst out, exasperated to hear her own fears coming from his lips.

He stuck his hands into his pockets with a long sigh. “Okay. I’ll stop. Ahmed’s going to be here at six.”

“Yes, I remember. And you don’t have to look so worried. I know that he invited Steve and Daphne, too.”

His shoulders rose and fell heavily. He knew what was going on, but he couldn’t tell Meg. She looked haunted and he felt terrible. “I’m sorry.”

She forced down the memories of her last meeting with Steven, the painful things he’d said. “Why?” she asked with studied nonchalance. She dabbed at her face with the towel around her neck. “I don’t mind.”

“Right.”

She lifted her eyes to his. “What if I did mind, David, what good would it do? I ran, four years ago,” she said quietly. “I could have stayed here and faced him, faced her. I let myself be manipulated and I threw it all away, don’t you understand? I never realized how much it would hurt him….” She turned, trying to control her tears. “Anyway, he’s made his choice now, and I wish him well. I’m sure Daphne will do her best to make him happy. She’s cared about him for a long time.”

“She’s cared about him, yes,” he agreed. “But he doesn’t love her. He never did. If he had, he’d have married her like a shot.”

“Maybe so. But he might have changed his feelings toward her.”

He gave her a wry glance. “If you could see the way he treats her at the office, you wouldn’t believe that. It’s strictly business. Not even a flirtatious glance between them.”

“Yes, but you said that it all came to a head when she quit.”

He grimaced. “So it did.”

Her heart felt as heavy as lead. She turned away toward the staircase. “Anyway, I’m going back to New York soon.”

“Sis,” he said softly. She paused with her back to him. “Can I help?”

She shook her head. “But, thanks.” She choked. “Thanks a lot, David.”

“I thought you might get over him, in time.”

She studied her hand on the banister. “I’ve tried, you know,” she said a little unsteadily. She drew in a small breath. “I do have my dancing, David. It will compensate.”

He watched her go up the staircase with a terrible certainty that ballet wouldn’t compensate for a life without Steve. Her very posture was pained. Her ankle wasn’t getting any better. She had to know it. But she must know, too, that Steve wasn’t going to give in to whatever he felt for her; not when he’d been hurt so badly before. David shook his head and went upstairs to his own room to dress.

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