Renegade Player (5 page)

“Cynic,” he murmured, but his tone was gentle and he urged her into an easy jog, telling her when she protested that unless she ran off about five hundred calories, she couldn’t have any dessert.

She loped along beside him, keeping up with him easily in spite of his peak condition, for her long, free-swinging limbs were the equal of his more muscular ones; and when he caught at her arm and swung her around to confront him at the edge of the surf opposite their own street, she was scarcely breathing hard.

“And they told me you were bone-lazy,” he teased. “You’re like a kitten who sleeps all day long and still manages to outperform any other animal.”

And you’re like a tiger who sleeps in the sun all day . . . and moves in for the kill when you least expect it, she said silently. Aloud, she asked, “Who told you?”

A cloud passed in front of the moon, obscuring his expression for a moment. “Oh, you’ve quite a reputation around the mushroom patch, didn’t you know?” He was joking. Or, at least, she hoped he was joking.

“That doesn’t sound too promising,” she said doubtfully.

“It sounded awfully promising to me. Let’s see . . . moves like a gazelle, or walks as if she’s treading eggshells barefoot, depending on who’s doing the talking; always a friendly word for everybody, or nobody gets to first base in spite of all her come-hithering, again depending on who’s doing the talking. Shall I continue?”

“I don’t think I want to hear any more,” she said uncomfortably.

“Why not? I did. I admit freely to being avid, once I heard about this paragon of pulchritude who had every man in three office buildings falling over their own feet for a glimpse of her wondrous attributes. I thought I’d better check it out, see what I’d been missing.”

Suppressing an odd shaft of pain, Willy moved away from his side and headed for the saddle-backed dune that gave onto Wimble Court. “And were you satisfied or disappointed?” she asked in a small, tight voice without looking to see if he were behind her.

He caught at her hand and laced his fingers through her own. “Neither,” he told her deeply. “Neither, Willy . . . yet. Now, come on. I promised you dessert.”

“I think I’ve had enough to last me a week. I’ll pass it up if you don’t mind,” she told him in a flat tone, swooping down to collect her shoes, her stole and her bag.

He held her hand firmly while he collected his own things, and then, instead of walking her to her door, he paused outside his garage and opened it, passing his car to lead her over to the stairs in the corner. “We’ll sample it, nevertheless,” he told her, and she hadn’t the heart to argue. She could find no excuse for her own weakness and so she ruthlessly smothered the small warning voice inside her.

On the counter, a board of cheeses sat softening, and after tossing aside his jacket, Kiel took down a bottle of a heavy, sweet Greek wine and handed down two glasses while Willy stared helplessly at the hard muscles of his arms and shoulders, brought into play by the simple action.

“Open the porch door. We’ll have it outside if the dew isn’t too heavy on the furniture,” he suggested, pouring a generous portion into the two glasses and laying a knife on the cheese board. He followed her out, and when she would have taken a chair, he swung her over to the broad redwood lounge with its slightly damp but heavenly soft cushion. She felt the coolness bite into her feverishly hot skin.

Lowering himself beside her where he could easily reach the table, Kiel shaved off a wafer of cheese and dipped it into the sweet wine. “Open wide,” he ordered, “and say, ahhhh.”

“Before or afterward ... the ahhh, I mean,” Willy gurgled. The combination was irresistible and Kiel proceeded to feed her as if she were a baby, interspersing nibbles of cheese with sips of the ambrosial wine, and he ate from her slices and drank from her glass, turning it so that his lips touched the place where hers had touched.

Once more their eyes caught and held, and when she lost the will to break away, feeling deliciously drowsy from the combination of too much wine, rich food, and the soporific salt air, Kiel placed the glass and the cheese down on the table beside them and drew her unresisting body forward until she collapsed on his hard chest.

He kissed her slowly, as if savoring the richness of the wine, and by some sleight of hand that was beyond her capacity to understand, she found herself lying on top of him, her face tucked into the curve of his neck, and she inhaled the herb-scented soap and slightly musky maleness, a smile quivering on her lips. She daringly opened her mouth and tasted the tautness of his skin and felt his immediate reaction beneath her.

“God . . . Willy, you’re ruining me!” he groaned, and his hands did something at her back and she felt the chill of dew on her flesh as the sides of her dress came unzipped.

Fire raced through her body, rousing her from her dreamy state, and she protested. “Kiel ... no, please.”

He didn’t reply. Instead, his hands moved over the satiny skin of her back and then slipped under her own weight to cup her bare breasts, and she could feel the swollen softness tightening into hard nubs that pushed against his palms in an involuntary invitation that left her stunned and breathless.

He turned his face and she was drawn inexorably into the vortex of a kiss that rendered her open and vulnerable, a kiss that sent wild emergency signals racing to all the most secret areas of her body; and when she felt his hand smoothing her hips, sliding slowly on the bit of nylon that covered her under the fallen sides of her dress, she panicked. His hand was pressing her even closer to his own muscular body and she began to struggle.

“No . . . please, Kiel,” she pleaded, scrambling up to sit trembling on the edge of the chaise. She tugged at her dress, shrugging the straps back up on her suddenly chilled shoulders, but any fastening up was totally beyond her in her present state and she looked around helplessly for her shoes. “I have to go now,” she whispered.

“Spoken like a nice, polite little girl. The party’s over now and I have to go home,” Kiel said bitterly. The moonlight shone down on his dark face, revealing half-closed eyes that seemed to be staring out over her head, and the lines that slashed down his lean cheeks were deeper than ever. Never had moonlight seemed so harsh.

She stood there beside the chaise uncertainly, her stole hanging over one shoulder and her sandals dangling from her hand, and she eyed him cautiously, fascinated in spite of herself. In the stillness of the night, she could hear his breathing and it was far harsher, more ragged than any of the times she had met him when he came from a run along the beach.

“Well? What are you waiting for, absolution?” he ground out at her. Then, tiredly, “Go on home, Willy. You’re safe.”

Her own breath was coming in deep, starved gasps by the time she let herself into her dark apartment. Without turning on the light, she allowed her dress to fall to the floor, and within a few minutes, she was courting sleep, willing it to chase away the confusing emotions that had aroused her from what she now knew was an artificial apathy that had lasted almost a year..

For the first time since she discovered that Luke Styrewall, with whom she had thought herself so deeply in love, had been hired by her father to court her, win her and marry her, Willy felt the protective barrier she had erected around her heart begin to crack and fall away. Her instincts warned her that if she fell in love with a man like Kiel Faulkner she’d be taking her life in her own hands. Kiel had none of Luke’s smooth, well-modulated charm, being a different breed of man altogether.

Luke’s attentions had started soon after she had come home from school in Switzerland. She had been tall, scrawny and unsure of herself in spite of the efforts on the part of her teachers to turn out a finished product. Perhaps the fact that her father had insisted that she call him by his first name had something to do with it, because it was impossible not to notice the way he seemed figuratively to try to sweep her under the carpet whenever he was entertaining any of his glamorous young friends. And the friends seemed to grow younger all the time, to Willy’s embarrassment, until she felt as if she had wandered into a reunion of her own classmates.

Luke had come on the scene so smoothly that at first she had paid him no attention, knowing that he would ignore her as did all the other men at her father’s endless social gatherings. But this time it was different; this time, the best-looking man in the house had eyes only for Willy, and in the months it took to convince her that he really cared for her, that he saw beauty in her graceful young innocence—“coltish charm” was a phrase he used more than once—Willy fell in love.

There was no pressure on her, nothing to indicate that Luke couldn’t restrain his manly impulses, and she thought he was wonderfully forbearing to be so patient. Her own curiosity to sample the delights she had only read about and heard about grew, and when Luke asked her to marry him, she thought she had reached the pinnacle of human happiness. That was the beginning of her blossoming, as if all she had waited for all along was the warmth of his approval and the nourishment of his temperate lovemaking.

Jasper was planning to take his third wife by then, a divorcée named Breda Coyner, who was only half a dozen or so years older than Willy herself. There had been an instinctive animosity between the two women that built tensions in Jasper’s Hobe Sound villa, where Breda was a more or less permanent guest even before the wedding.

It came to a question of whose wedding would take place first, Breda’s and Jasper’s or hers and Luke’s, and since Luke was beginning to show signs of wanting more than the tepid engagement, Willy rather thought she might be the first to walk down the aisle. But then she overheard a conversation that was not meant for her ears.

She had taken off her engagement ring to practice the violin earlier in the day, because the slightly ostentatious diamond kept slipping on her finger and distracting her, and she remembered it as she was ready to go to bed. She didn’t bother with slippers or a robe, thinking there was no one downstairs at that time of night, but she was wrong; her father and Luke were in the study and the door was partly open so that when she heard her own name mentioned as she passed, it was only natural that she slowed her steps.

“Why don’t we say sometime within the month, Luke, and a settlement of, say . . . fifty thousand on your wedding day?”

“Make it seventy-five, Jas. Willy’s not the only heiress on the market, you know, and there’s—”

“Luke,” her father had interrupted impatiently, “I’ve paid you enough to found an empire already! You’ve got an assured income for as long as the marriage lasts, so don’t try to . . .”

Willy had not stayed around to hear more. The flight of stairs that swept around one end of the foyer seemed as vast and unscalable as the highest mountain, but at last she made it to the doubtful security of her own room. She had curled up into a tight ball, dry-eyed and numb, and allowed the waves of misery and humiliation to wash over her until, sometime before daylight, she had mercifully lost consciousness.

That was on a Wednesday. By the following Wednesday, she was in Edenton, North Carolina, a lovely, historic little town on the Chowan River, gradually thawing out under the gruff, almost impersonal kindness of her mother’s cousin, Fred Harbinger. The showdown at her father’s home had been hard, fast and furious, and Willy had discovered a side to her personality that had surprised her: she was not afraid of her father anymore. She had his backbone and stubbornness along with her mother’s easygoing nature, and she simply told her father that she was leaving and that he could make whatever restitution to Luke he thought fair, considering the broken contract between them. When Jasper had tried to talk her out of it, minimizing the financial settlement, and then had tried to explain that it had all been for her own good, to protect her from fortune-hunters, she had stared at him stonily, still more than a little bit numb, and let him finish.

“I’m twenty, Jasper. I’m going to take enough money from my account to pay for training and then I’m going to support myself, and whether or not we continue to have any relationship at all is strictly up to you. Try to hold me here and I’ll hate you. As it is, I only despise you; but let me go and promise not to try to interfere with my life from now on, and you’ll be free to start your own marriage to Breda without a troublemaking daughter on your doorstep. And I’ll make trouble, I promise you. You have everything to lose; I have nothing at all.”

The delivery had been made in a flat, unemotional tone, for she had no emotions left after a night of wakefulness and a day of weeping, and it had been all the more effective for that. Her father had insisted she take the car she had been using, and because it was practical, she had agreed. It had been on the long drive up the coast that she had come to enjoy the feel of an aggressive engine that responded to her every mood, and by the time she had reached Edenton, she had all but erased Luke and Jasper and the house that had never been a home since the day her father had bought it when he married his second wife.

How could she have fooled herself into thinking she was so secure? Willy Silverthorne, self-sufficient career girl who had made a vow that neither man nor money was ever going to throw her into a tailspin again. She’d manage her own life and play whatever games she chose to play according to her own set of rules.

That she had been successful so far was a measure of her own unexpectedly level head. It had come as a total surprise to find that she was not the undesirable creature she had supposed. Men were interested in her—some of them more than interested—without even suspecting that her father could buy and sell half the small towns in any given state, and she had had to come from behind almost every other girl her age in learning how to deal with the fact of her own attractions. That she had been fortunate so far was due partly to her genuine friendliness, partly to a natural indolence that kept her from becoming involved in too many social activities, and partly, she supposed, to pure luck.