Beauty and the Brain (28 page)

Stop it!
In that direction lay ruin,
and Brenda knew it, even if her emotions and nerve endings had
decided to ignore the bitter truth for the nonce.

“Please let me go, Colin,” she said softly.
She hadn’t intended the command to be soft. She’d wanted it to come
out loud and steely.

“I don’t want to.”

Oh, great. So what was she supposed to do
now?

She knew what she wanted to do, and it was
scandalous. Recalling all the injustices perpetrated against women
in this land of the free and home of the brave, Brenda straightened
as much as she was able, with her limbs turned to jelly and her
bones to water.

But she knew what was what. This sort of
underhanded seduction wasn’t fair. It was as old a practice as it
was an unfair one. Beastly, lust-crazed men had been perpetrating
such methods on love-starved women for as long as the world had
been turning. Both genders might appreciate and enjoy the act of
love, but women appreciated it as an expression of that love. Men
used love to get what they wanted, and that had very little to do
with commitment and permanence. Brenda resented it almost much as
she longed to succumb.

“Stop doing that, Colin.”

“Don’t you like it?”

Fiddlesticks! If that wasn’t an unethical
question, she didn’t know what was. “Liking it has nothing to do
with it.”

“It has everything to do with it. I need
you, Brenda. I need you more than anything else on earth.”

Right. Sure he did. Even in her fuddled
state, Brenda knew that was untrue.

Well, perhaps it was true right this minute,
but if wouldn’t be true as soon as he’d had what he wanted. She’d
seen too much misery engendered by just such belief in men’s soft
lies to fall for that old line. Many’s the time she’d comforted a
woman who’d been led astray by sugary words murmured by a
scoundrel.

“Nonsense.” Blast, her voice was quivering
again.

His hands covered her breasts, and she
nearly lost control completely. She couldn’t afford to do that. As
surely as she gave herself to Colin—and she dearly wanted to—he’d
just as surely begin looking upon her as a wanton hussy, sort of
like a piece of candy to be tasted and discarded. If she succumbed
to him now, she’d be proving what he assumed about her was true:
that she was just like any other actress in the world and was,
therefore, no better than a prostitute. She’d never be able to hold
her bead up again.

Not only that, but she’d be betraying her
family. Her mother had told her over and over again that she’d
rather starve in a ditch than to learn Brenda had sold herself to
some man for her family’s sake.

Thinking of her family strengthened her.
Although Colin’s fingertips were at present setting fire to her
body, through the agency of her breasts, which he was caressing,
she slapped her own hands over his, grabbed his fingers, and yanked
them away from her.

She felt bereft. She also felt justified,
and she wasn’t about to lose the momentum she’d gained thanks to
her mother’s wisdom. “Stop that this instant!” she snapped—and she
even sounded moderately irate, if a little shaky.

“But—but—”

“No buts!” She jerked away from him. A cold
breeze hit her back where his warm body had been, and she shivered.
“If you can’t behave yourself, Colin Peters, I’m going to have to
ask you to leave my room.” She considered pointing at the door, but
that might have made her dressing gown gape, and she was having a
hard enough time rejecting him as it was.

He looked as if she’d hit him with a
baseball bat instead of merely refused his advances. His
befuddlement rankled and allowed her to gather her wits together
more quickly than she might otherwise have done. She’d have slammed
her hand on her hips except for the dressing gown problem.

“But—” He looked utterly helpless.

Brenda didn’t buy it for a second. He was
about as helpless as a wasp. Wasps looked pretty
enough—sometimes—but they packed a wallop that could fell a
sensitive person. While Brenda didn’t claim to be the most
sensitive female on earth—she’d had to learn how to parry the
slings and arrows of outrageous fortune when she was quite
young—she retained enough sensitivity to be offended by his evident
bewilderment.

So the knave had believed she’d fall for
that old you’re-the-most-beautiful-woman-in-the-world routine, had
he? He’d thought she’d be flattered by his scandalous attentions,
had he? He’d believed her to be so lost to virtue that she’d climb
into bed with him as soon as he gave the signal, had he?

Well, she’d show him Now that she was no
longer encircled by those maddeningly deceptive arms—deceptive
because, while they felt as though they belonged on an athlete,
they were on the body of a total scholar—she was beginning to
gather herself together. She marched up to him, stopping far enough
away so that if he made a swoop, she’d be out of his reach. She
didn’t trust herself
that
far.

“Get out of this room, Colin. I had believed
you to be a gentleman, but I can see now how deceived in you I
was.”

“Deceived? Deceived?” He both sounded and
looked as if he’d never heard the word before.

“Deceived,” she said firmly. “I shall go
downstairs and join the others as soon as—in a moment.” She’d been
going to say as soon as she was dressed but didn’t want to point
out her relative nudity in case he’d forgotten about it. She made
the mistake of letting her gaze drop to his trousers and
gasped.

He hadn’t forgotten. Good God, he was huge.
She knew stage actors who liked to parade around in their drawers
in order to show off their assets, but she’d never seen anything
like this before.

Swallowing, she allowed as to how she might
be the slightest bit naive about this man-woman thing, even though
she’d been an actress for half her life. She’d heard tales enough,
but she’d never actually seen a hard male member before.

What was worse was that she had a compelling
and completely illogical, not to mention wicked, desire to see one
now. On Colin.

Merciful heavens, this was just awful. She
stamped her foot to get her own attention. “I’ll be back in a
moment. If you can behave yourself, you may remain in my room and
escort me downstairs.”

She saw him swallow. “I’ll behave. I mean—I
mean, I’ll stay here and wait for you.”

“Very well.” She grabbed her clothes, rushed
to the bureau and snatched out some underwear—she didn’t even look
to see what she’d chosen—and hurried back to the bathroom. As soon
as the door closed behind her, she locked it with a hand that shook
as if with palsy, threw her clothes on a dressing table covered
with bottles of scent, bowls of dusting powder, and her tooth
powder, sank onto the pretty wicker chair with the flowered seat
cushion, pressed a hand to her pounding heart, and tried to catch
her breath. It took a long time

Colin was still trying to figure out what
had gone wrong with his carefully constructed plan of action when
Brenda emerged from the bathroom again, this time covered from head
to toe with clothing. Dash it.

She looked as if she’d been born fully
clothed, as if she didn’t even possess breasts, but only those two
slight protuberances on the bodice of her gown. Colin knew better.
Not only did she possess breasts, but they weren’t slight. They
were large and succulent and he wanted to feel them again. And
again and again and again. And the rest of her, too.

This was awful.

She stood as straight and stiff as his sex
had been only moments earlier, but she appeared much less happy. In
fact, she scowled at him in a manner that might have been described
as frightful if it had been on the face of another woman when she
said, “I’m ready.”

So was he, although he meant something
different by the words than she. He sighed. “Allow me, please.” He
opened the door and stood aside. She sailed out of her room on a
cloud of indignation and dignity. Colin saw several damp curls
caressing the nape of her neck that must have escaped her brush and
hairpins. They made his heart lurch. Not to mention his sex.
Grinding his teeth and telling himself to calm down, he followed
her.

But the Peerless crowd in the bar was
cheerful, Brenda visibly relaxed as soon as she saw them, and Colin
decided he might as well join in the fun. Unfortunately, there
wasn’t anything else more pleasurable to do at the moment.

He’d been sitting with Leroy Carruthers and
a member of the Peerless crew when he heard his brother’s
voice.

“H’lo, Colin.”

Colin glanced up and saw George smiling at
him shyly. Feeling guilty that he should inspire guilt in his own
brother, he gestured at an empty chair at his table. “Have a seat,
George.”

“Thanks.” George nodded at Carruthers and
the other man and sat. He looked as if he’d as soon the two
non-Peters fellows would take themselves off.

Colin wasn’t sure he wanted them to go; he
feared George wanted to bring up unpleasant subjects and preferred
to study the Brenda problem for a while. Since was accustomed to
thinking his own thoughts while in the company of others, he hadn’t
been having any trouble considering Brenda until George showed up.
He sighed and paid attention to his brother, who seemed to be
winding up to speak some more.

“I, um, asked the long-distance operator to
place a call to Mother and. Father, Colin,” George said after
taking a swig of his drink.

Colin frowned at the mug in George’s hand
which, he presumed, contained beer. He didn’t think George should
be drinking an alcoholic beverage at his tender age, although he
opted not to mention it. No sense in humiliating his brother again.
He’d already made George feel bad enough—and he was sorry for it,
too.

George apparently caught Colin’s severe
glance, because he colored slightly and lifted the mug. “Root
beer,” he said, embarrassed about it. “I’m not old enough to
drink.”

Dash it, Colin wished he’d stop making
mistakes with people. He hadn’t meant to appear so disapproving of
his brother. He really wanted to help George, but he kept
embarrassing him instead. That was no help. And he was failing
completely in his campaign to lure Brenda into a sexual liaison, as
well.

This was ridiculous. The laws of nature
dictated sexual behavior in various species. Surely he couldn’t
have strayed so far from the path set out by nature that his
instincts no longer worked properly. Could he? It seemed unlikely,
although something had definitely gone wrong with his plan of
attack.

George said, “Well?” and Colin realized his
brother had asked him a question.

It was his turn to flush. “I’m sorry,
George. I was thinking over a—a problem—and didn’t hear what you
asked.”

George didn’t seem much surprised by Colin’s
lack of attention. He looked resigned, actually. Colin was ashamed
of himself. “I just asked if you wanted to talk to them when the
call goes through,” George said, fiddling with his glass. “Our
parents, I mean.”

“Oh. Well—sure. Why not? I don’t have any
news to report or anything, but I’ll talk to them.”

“I’m sure they don’t care if you have news.
They’ll be pleased to hear from you. I know they miss you.”

“They do?” This was news to Colin, who never
communicated with his parents unless he had something of an
uplifting or, educational quality to report. He didn’t communicate
with anyone at all merely to blather on about nothing, and he never
placed calls over the telephone. He’d been operating under the
assumption that, while he enjoyed hearing from his parents, they
didn’t much care to hear anything but newsworthy incident from
him

Perhaps he’d been wrong about them, too.
Perhaps parents enjoyed hearing from their children simply because
they loved them.

Bother. Life could be very complicated
sometimes. All of his carefully constructed theories seemed to be
going up in smoke before his eyes.

He shot a glance at Brenda, who was playing
some sort of lively card game that entailed a lot of slapping of
hands on the table and laughing, and he frowned. Up in smoke, hell.
His theory about her had been blown sky high. Shaking his head, he
decided she was worth constructing another strategy for, although
what it might be he had no idea.

“Of course they miss you.” George sounded
incredulous. “They talk about you all the time. They’re awfully
proud of you, Colin.”

Wrenching his gaze from Brenda, Colin
blinked at his brother. “They are?”

George laughed. “Oh, I get it. You’re
pulling my leg.”

Colin had glanced at his brother’s long legs
before he realized George had used a figure of speech. “Er, no,
George. I’m not pulling your legs.”

“Leg,” George corrected. “Just one of them.”
He shook his head, as if in amazement. “I swear, Colin, you really
do have your head in the clouds, don’t you? I’m surprised you ever
come down to commune with us lesser beings here on earth.”

“I beg your pardon?” Now it was Colin who
was incredulous.

As if he hadn’t heard his brother, George
went on musingly. “I must admit I was surprised when you agreed to
play ball with us today, but you’re pretty good at it. Now, if
you’d only learn to talk to the rest of us in a language we can
understand, you might even turn human one of these days.”

Colin didn’t know whether to be offended or
not, but he had his suspicions. He said crisply, “I am human, for
heaven’s sake.”

“You don’t act like it,” George muttered.
“At least not very often.”

“Some people never have any trouble
understanding me.”

“Brenda.” George nodded wisely, which looked
kind of silly for a boy his age, even though he was right. “That’s
only because she’s as smart as you are.”

What? Again Colin glanced at Brenda. His
lips compressed as he studied her. She? Smart? As in intelligent? H
e turned his head and frowned at his brother some more.