Too Wise To Wed?

That remark about her parents—her father—had been deliberately provocative and he sensed that he had caught her off guard with his response to her taunting comment about his own family background.

Despite the information about herself that she seemed to hand out so freely, he sensed that she was an extremely private person, deeply protective of her innermost self.

‘So,’ Kyle invited, putting down his menu and smiling across the table at her, ‘tell me more about this interesting-sounding family of yours.’

‘Interesting?’ Star raised her eyebrows and gave him a wry look. ‘My mother is currently in the throes of a traumatic love affair with the son of one of her oldest and closest friends. It’s supposed to be a secret but, of course, it isn’t. My mother couldn’t keep a secret if her life depended on it and she certainly can’t seem to see that what she’s doing is bound to lead to disaster. She’s bound to lose her friend, and as for her toy-boy lover...’

‘You don’t approve?’

Star looked at him. He had surprised her with his invitation to talk about her family. Normally, in her experience, the subject most men preferred to discuss was themselves. Star wasn’t used to being asked such unexpectedly intimate questions. One of her strongest character traits was a refusal to deal in any kind of deceit—a fact which put her at a disadvantage now, she recognised, as she found it impossible not to reply honestly to Kyle’s questions.

‘It isn’t a matter of whether or not I approve,’ she told him. ‘It’s more a matter of knowing what’s going to happen, of knowing that someone else is going to have to pick up the pieces of the mayhem that my mother’s emotional overload always causes...’

‘That someone perhaps being you?’ Kyle probed.

This time Star could not answer. The anxiety and sense of guilt she had felt as a child, listening to her mother, watching her go through the turmoil of a series of destructive relationships, was something that even now, as an adult, she found impossible to discuss.

The fear she had experienced then, the sense of being alone with no one to turn to, the panic at knowing that she was her mother’s emotional support rather than the other way round still sometimes surfaced to attack her present-day, adult self-assurance, even if nowadays, outwardly at least, she had learned the trick of transmuting it into angry contempt for her mother’s way of life.

‘Why don’t we talk about you?’ she suggested softly. ‘I’m sure that would be far more...interesting...’

Lifting her glass to her lips, she looked across at him as she took a slow, deliberate sip, letting her lips stay slightly parted whilst she looked at his mouth.

At first she thought that her deliberate sensuality had had no effect on him, and then, to her delight, she saw the small, betraying movement he made, the slight shifting of his body, as though suddenly he wasn’t quite at ease with himself.

‘There isn’t much to tell,’ Kyle responded, and Star smiled to herself as she caught the slightly roughened edge to his voice and knew what had caused it.

No matter what he might be trying to tell her, she suspected that he was far from lacking in sexual experience, and from what she could see of it she could sense that his body had just the kind of sensual appeal she most liked.

Star did not believe in being a passive lover and, whilst not having any specific desire to be dominant or aggressive, she did like to be able to take the initiative to touch and taste the man in bed with her, to reach out and stroke his skin, to discover where and how she could most arouse him, even to tease him a little bit sometimes, testing his self-control. And something told her that Kyle would be very self-controlled.

‘My parents split up before I was born. My mother had never wanted a child. Her ambition was to be an actress.’

Star frowned as she heard not condemnation in his voice, as she had expected, but, instead, compassion. He felt compassion for a mother who had rejected him? A tiny feather-brushing of unease—no more—disturbed the deep waters of her conviction that all men were the same, that all men were, in essence, her father—a feeling so vague that it was easy for her to dismiss and ignore it and tell herself that Kyle was even more devious than she had first suspected and adept at manipulating the vulnerability of the female psyche.

‘Unfortunately she died before she could realise it,’ Kyle continued. ‘An undiagnosed heart defect. Before her death, though, there had been...problems...and ultimately my father agreed to take me in and bring me up alongside his second family... I was very lucky...’

‘How—in being allowed to grow up alongside them?’ Star enquired mockingly.

He couldn’t deceive her. She knew all about how it felt to watch the father who didn’t want you favouring some other child whilst you looked on in impotent grief and rage.

‘In a sense, yes,’ Kyle told her evenly, ignoring her sarcasm. ‘You see, my stepmother had an older sister who... Well, let’s just say she was a very, very special person and she kinda took me under her wing...helped me to understand...to develop a proper sense of myself... taught me what it was like to be loved and valued... and that’s something I guess every child, and every adult too, needs...’

‘Here endeth the first lesson,’ Star taunted softly under her breath, but if Kyle had heard her he wasn’t responding to her taunt. Instead he was looking at the menu.

‘Would you recommend the sea-bass?’ Star queried with mock-feminine deference.

But Kyle refused to be drawn, commenting only, ‘I certainly like it.’

‘Well, then, I’ll just have to try a taste of yours, won’t I?’ Star flirted, refusing to give up.

It was only a matter of time, Star told herself confidently. With time and persistence she would be able to prove to her own satisfaction that underneath the disguise of chivalrous knighthood that he chose to wear he was just as untrustworthy, as selfish and careless of other people’s feelings as the rest of his sex.

Not that it was going to be all hard work getting him to back down from his claim that, for him, sex meant nothing without emotion. Unlike men, she did not need the crutch of self-deceit for her ego. It wasn’t simply to prove a point that she intended to challenge him—and to win. She had already acknowledged the heightened buzz of sexual awareness that being with him was giving her.

The maître d’ was hovering, waiting to take their order. Star’s mouth curled in a small feline smile as she chose one of the vegetarian options, her smile deepening as Kyle ordered the sea-bass. Before handing the menu back to the maître d’ he murmured something to him that Star couldn’t hear.

Several minutes later, as a waiter escorted them to their table, Star was amused to see the way the other diners watched them whilst trying to pretend that they were not doing so.

‘We seem to be causing something of a stir.’ she murmured dulcetly to Kyle as they sat down. ‘I wonder why...?’

‘Oh, no, you don’t,’ Kyle countered evenly, smiling at her. ‘You know perfectly well that there isn’t a single man in the place who has been able to take his eyes off you since you came down those stairs.’

Kyle wasn’t quite sure how he expected her to react to his comment, but the sudden warm peal of totally genuine laughter she gave as she acknowledged the truth of his comment made him realise that she was not as predictable and true to type as he had originally assumed, and that whilst with a little conscious effort he should be able to withstand the sensual heat of her deliberate come-ons to him, resisting the effect of that wholly natural laughter and the rueful intelligence in her eyes was going to be much, much harder.

So it was with relief that he observed her revert to type, and he was thrown as she asked him softly, ‘Not a single man... Does that include you?’

‘I’m as visually attracted to a beautiful, sensually dressed woman as the next man,’ Kyle replied drily.

It was not exactly the reaction she had hoped for but it would do—for a start, Star told herself as the waiter brought their starters.

Star had ordered mussels, which she picked up with her fingers and ate with a deliberate, almost greedy relish, triumphantly conscious of the fact that although Kyle affected not to be he was acutely aware, as he ate his way stoically through his seafood platter, of the sensuality in the way she was eating.

When she had had enough she licked the juice from the tips of her fingers with deliberate enjoyment, enthusing, ‘Mmm...that was delicious.’

. There were several mussels still left on her plate and as she made eye contact with him she picked one up and held it out to him, offering, ‘Here, why don’t you try one?’

His calm, ‘I already have, thank you,’ as he indicated the empty shells on his own plate, would have caused a lesser woman to retreat in a self-conscious fluster of embarrassment, Star acknowledged, but she was not so easily discomposed. Why should she be? She knew already that he wanted her. Now it was simply a matter of making him admit it.

As she smiled into the bemused eyes of the young waiter who had come to take their plates, she mentally congratulated herself on her inevitable victory and settled back to enjoy the rest of the game.

Their main courses arrived and were served—her own very appetising vegetarian dish and Kyle’s sea-bass.

Star waited until they had been served before recommencing her attack, pouting slightly as she eyed her own plate and then Kyle’s.

‘The bass does look good...’ she began.

There was something in the dark blue steadiness of his gaze as he returned her eye contact that wasn’t, somehow, quite in line with his predictable, ‘Would you like some?’

‘I thought you’d never ask,’ Star responded softly, already leaning towards him, reaching out with one hand to hold his wrist as he lifted his fork towards her mouth, when out of the corner of her eye she saw him make a small gesture towards the maître d’ and then saw, to her chagrin, their waiter hurrying towards their table, carrying a small portion of the sea-bass.

She could see Kyle watching her urbanely as the waiter served her with the fish, all her earlier good humour and sense of triumph evaporating in the smouldering fury of knowing that he had not only anticipated her move but very skilfully sidestepped it as well.

Star wasn’t used to men rejecting her sexual advances; she wasn’t used, in fact, to having to make them. It wasn’t normally necessary and for a moment the sheer shock of having the tables so neatly and unexpectedly turned on her held her completely silent.

‘So you’re a PR consultant,’ Kyle commented as he calmly ate his own fish.

‘Yes,’ Star agreed coolly. ‘I trained with one of the large London agencies and then decided to set up on my own...’