Star Dust (14 page)

“That’s because Reynolds is married,” Carruthers said. And then under his breath, “Which means his dick is dead, for all intents and purposes.”

Parsons snorted and resumed his pacing.

Carruthers was wrong. Joe Reynolds looked at his wife with an expression of wonder—almost as if he was looking at the stars. No, there was nothing dead in how Reynolds felt about his wife.

Kit had meant it when he’d told Anne-Marie he wanted to date her. Between looking at the stars with her, dancing with her, kissing her… something had shifted. He didn’t want to make half-hearted passes at her. Or date for a few weeks before parting, like all the rest. He wanted to court her. Wanted to see if things led to marriage. Wanted the whole world to know they were together. And that was the problem—literally the entire world would know.

Kit worked his jaw. “Hey, Carruthers?”

Carruthers grunted in reply.

“That last girl you dated?” He took a deep breath. “Where did she find that photographer again?”

Carruthers rubbed a thumb across his chin. “The bushes outside her bedroom window. Why?”

Because I’m about to have an affair with the divorcee next door.

The divorcee next door
. Carruthers probably had that on a bingo card somewhere, right next to the square labeled “ménage a trois.”

Carruthers hadn’t minded when that girl had left him after the photographer incident. There were always more women waiting in the wings. That was part of being an astronaut.

A few weeks ago, Kit would have said that all the women were one of the perks. Not publicly, though.

Because all of America was watching him. They wanted to know everything about him, even down to the brand of underwear he wore.

Kit hated it, but he accepted it as part of the deal. He’d chosen to be an astronaut. That was the price he paid for the chance to see the stars.

Anne-Marie didn’t even like the stars.

If he and Anne-Marie dated, she and the kids wouldn’t choose such attention for themselves—it would be forced on them. Look at what had happened to Carruthers’s girl. Or Margie Dunsford. Margie handled all the attention well, but she had to be on all the time, her and the kids. Privacy was a distant country they could no longer even visit.

Did he want even half of what he and the rest of them went through on a daily basis visited on Anne-Marie and the kids?

No. No, that would hurt them. And he never wanted to hurt them.

Anne-Marie was right—an affair was best, with no one exposed, no one hurt. No deeper feelings engaged.

He rubbed between his eyebrows. “No reason,” he answered Carruthers. “No reason at all.”

Anne-Marie knocked on the Dunsfords’ door.

“No trump, spades, hearts, diamonds, clubs,” she muttered. She’d located an old copy of Hoyle—a wedding present from a fraternity brother of Doug’s—and crammed bridge rules for ten minutes after the kids left with her mom. Maybe repetition would make some of it stick? If not, she was going to pass all night and hope it didn’t infuriate her partner too much. Well, she could always throw her cards down and yell
gin rummy,
and they could eject her.

She repeated, “Spades, hearts, diamonds, clubs” several times.

“You’re right on time,” Margie said as she flung the door open. “Come in.”

As she entered the Dunsfords’ living room, Anne-Marie nearly gasped. Unless more people were coming, it was going to be an intimate affair.

“I think you met them the other night,” Margie was saying, “but if not, Betty Henkins and Frances Reynolds, this is Anne-Marie Smith. The one Kit danced with.”

“Twice, wasn’t it?” Betty said with a wink. “How do you feel about gimlets?” She was wearing a sapphire-toned sheath that set off her small, delicate features and dark, perfectly coifed hair. She could have stepped off the cover of
Redbook
, but she wielded the cocktail shaker like a weapon and her eyes snapped with verve. Anne-Marie’s mom would have tagged her a firecracker.

Anne-Marie liked Betty immediately. “Fine. They’re fine.”

Actually, a drink or three sounded great—and not only for bridge. Anne-Marie shoved the thought away. If she thought about Kit she’d turn the same color as Betty’s lipstick—not a good look on her.

“And she brought a Bundt,” Frances said. “How lovely.” She was pretty in an entirely different way: stately and patrician, like a blonde Jackie Kennedy. Her black silk Eisenhower jacket was understated in a way that spoke to complete sartorial confidence. At the barbeque, she hadn’t even seemed to raise her voice at her children, which couldn’t be human.

Anne-Marie handed the cake to the hostess and fumbled with her jacket. No, one minute later, it still didn’t make any sense. Margie, Betty, and Frances were famous. And she was playing bridge with them.

She walked over to an empty chair. Dear Lord. There’d been a picture in
Life
from precisely this spot. These women had all been profiled next to their husbands. If ASD ever reached the moon, the implication was that these three would be equally responsible.

Twenty minutes, a gimlet, and thankfully no cards later, Anne-Marie had no doubt this was true. At the very least, if the Soviets did beat us there, these women would know who had failed.

“And then he said that Parsons exploded!” Betty was recounting a story about a recent debriefing meeting. The details were sketchy—though it involved whatever had gone wrong on the recent training exercise and a persnickety engineer named Parsons whom Betty did a spirited imitation of.

Betty was a sketch. Anne-Marie and Margie were ruddy-cheeked from laughter and alcohol. Only Frances was still poised.

“Well,” Frances said as the hilarity died down, “Stan Jensen is working them too much, with too much pressure. That’s all there is to it.”

“We knew it was going to be like this. This push to the moon is hard,” Margie said. She was so energetic, so competent—she should be running things.

Sadly, at the party Anne-Marie had recognized Mitch Dunsford’s jovial tone and wandering eye. They bore significant resemblance to a colleague of Doug’s who couldn’t keep his hands off the secretaries, and maybe that explained why Margie had taken to managing other people—and ASD—from afar.

Margie turned those keen eyes to Anne-Marie. “Did Kit say anything? About the exercise?”

“Oh, no. That is, I think you have things wrong. We’re just neighbors. He wouldn’t take me into his confidence.” She shifted a bit. He’d said some things to her that felt like confessions, but it had been the darkness. The stars. Or maybe exhaustion. Nothing to do with her.

Betty regarded Anne-Marie over the rim of her gold-flecked, gold-rimmed glass. “He seemed smitten the other night.”

Suddenly the prospect of bids and trumps didn’t seem so bad.

Anne-Marie quaffed her second drink and went for stupid. “Did he?”

“Oh yes,” Frances said. “Joe even commented on it when we got home.
Down for the count
was his phrase.”

The entire astronaut corps was no better than cheerleaders.

“He’s a lovely neighbor. He’s been very… welcoming.” Her cheeks were smoldering now.
Welcoming
was certainly one way to put what Kit had been. Obnoxious, beautiful, seductive, infuriating: all those applied too. She tried not to think about his hands on her body, his mouth on her neck, his thigh between hers.

She failed. Utterly. Incineration did not follow.

The other women watched her—expectant and unconvinced. Several beats passed.

“The kids love him,” she finished. Which was half the problem—he could break their hearts more easily than he might hers.

“He enjoys kids,” Margie agreed. “And unlike some of his colleagues, I can imagine him as a father.”

“What would Carruthers do with a baby? I’d give you even odds he’d put gin in the bottle and call it a White Russian.” Betty threw back her head and positively cackled.

Margie didn’t join in the mirth. She kept her steady gaze focused on Anne-Marie. “So there’s nothing going on with you and Kit?”

“Not a thing.” Not a thing except all the things she was going to do with him tonight, and maybe another time too, because having an affair—if it were half as fun as the fantasies she’d been having—might just suit her.

But those things hadn’t happened yet, and so it wasn’t a lie. Feeling a bit better, Anne-Marie smiled. “Aren’t we going to play bridge?”

“Maybe when you come next week… and we ask you about Kit again.”

Anne-Marie smiled weakly. Well, at least there would be a next week.

Thankfully Anne-Marie had walked to Margie’s, so she didn’t have to worry about driving home. Except she wasn’t going home. She swallowed a giggle. It seemed so surreal—that she was going to Kit’s for the night. That she’d kissed him. That she was going to kiss him again.

That this was her life.

To top it off, it was balmy for February and clear. The moon was nearly full, and it looked so close. Like she could reach up and press her fingertips into the craters.

She didn’t meet anyone on the way. If she had, they’d probably be able to smell the scandal wafting off her. Margie, Betty, and Frances had certainly suspected—though no, they didn’t suspect anything close to the truth. They thought what was between her and her famous neighbor was infatuation, not lust.

Despite the other women’s trust, Anne-Marie truly was scandalous. Maybe Roberta and the rest of the gossips could sense the truth about her the way you could tell which cantaloupes were ripe: instinct or smell or luck or something. At the very least, if everyone was going to keep treating her like a pariah, she was going to enjoy some of the benefits, specifically the ones that brought Kit’s mouth into contact with hers. Preferably over and over again.

When she rounded on to Harbor View, she glanced at her house. Everything seemed fine. She picked her way across the side yard and back onto Kit’s patio. When she knocked on the door, he quickly slid it open and waited.

This was the part where she should kiss him. Just pop up onto her toes and take the lead. She’d done it before. He’d seemed to know what to do after that. Of course he’d been sweaty and shirtless and irresistible then, but he was pretty much always irresistible.

Right. Absolutely. That was what she was going to do.

Or maybe not.

She brushed past him and into his house. Once there, she wrapped her arms around herself and chafed them a bit.

She wanted this. She did. She was going to take it. Soon.

He leaned against the wall and watched her intently. “Do you want something to drink?”

“No. I had something at Margie’s.” She’d had several somethings, but the walk had sobered her up—perhaps a bit too much.

“Can I take your coat?” He closed the door. The lock clicked as he engaged it. She swallowed.

She took a deep breath. First things first: clothes. She needed to get those off. She started on the buttons of her coat. Her fingers were clumsy, but at last she’d undone the final one. She loosened it from her shoulders. As she removed the coat, she tried to let go of the nerves coursing through her body along with it. It was a scandalous thing. A selfish thing. And it was okay to want it.

She extended her coat to him, but found she couldn’t meet his eye. He was too good-looking. Too manly. Too famous. She looked around him, at his house, lovely as a magazine spread.

“Kit, I…”

Before she could get the words out—whatever words she’d been trying to form—he was across the room and kissing her.

Better. This was so much better.

She wrapped her arms around his neck and leaned into the warm certainty of his mouth, the spicy scent of his aftershave, and the muscular expanse of his chest. She burrowed into him and he brought his hands down, anchoring her against him.

“We have,” he whispered, his mouth leaving hers to trail along her jaw, “all night.”

She made a breathy affirmative noise and tried to block out all thought. Except for his fingers, digging into her hips so hard it almost hurt. Except for the noises she was making in the back of her throat, which would have sounded needy if Kit hadn’t been responding so enthusiastically. Except for her pulse, which was echoing in every part of her body. She hadn’t known she could feel her heartbeat in her core.