The Best Way to Lose (12 page)

“You knew you could count on me to come through, didn’t you?” His tone remained harshly cynical and slowly came closer. “After all, I’m completely unscrupulous—without any morals. If you tried this with anyone else, there was always the risk they might be slow on the uptake and not recognize the subtle signals you were flashing. It could have forced you to be blatant. This way you can always allow yourself the excuse that you’d been drinking more than you realized and Trace Santee, the corrupt bastard that he is, took advantage of you in a vulnerable moment.”

“Stop it.” Pilar clenched her hands into fists and pressed them to her ears, trying to block out the burrowing words that stripped her bare.

His circling fingers caught her wrists and pulled them down. Her arms remained rigidly bent, straining in mute protest of his action.
Haunted by the way she had tried to use him so she wouldn’t have to feel any guilt or remorse, her dark eyes tentatively lifted their glance to his face.

There was a relentless quality to the chiseled bones in it, a lack of expression that seemed to make her heart beat faster. His hooded eyes never wavered from their inspection of her. In the shadows of the house interior, his hair seemed almost devil-black.

“You wanted to be made love to and you picked me. Didn’t you?” Again he sought her confirmation.

“Yes.” Almost impatiently she pushed it out with a hissing breath.

His fingers loosened their hold on her wrists, and there seemed no place for her hands to go except onto the front of his shirt. His own hands glided to the sides of her back, the warmth of them flowing across her ribs. The vein in her throat began to throb heavily.

“Pilar.” The low, raw urging expressed a reluctant want that she understood.

It broke through her restraint. “Yes.” Her hands went around his corded neck and pressed at the back of his head to bring his mouth down onto hers.

His arms gathered her inside their circle while his lips rolled onto hers in a fevered rush of moisture and heat. Pilar dug her fingers into the springing thickness of his hair to increase the crushing pressure of his driving kiss. She couldn’t breathe, but it didn’t
matter. Her body strained to mold itself to the hard male contours, her flesh absorbing their exciting imprint.

There was a wild and hungry mating of lips and tongues, a restlessness in the press of bodies that couldn’t get close enough. It was the intimacy of a man and a woman that Pilar needed. There was a feminine fierceness about the way she responded to him, her lips traveling over a smoothly shaven cheek and jaw and tasting the salty perspiration that beaded on his upper lip.

Her breath came in quick, hot rushes as she nibbled at the corded muscle standing out so tautly in his neck. Her fingers tugged at the buttons of his shirt. A little thrill shot through when she heard the half-muffled groan that shuddered him as her fingers crept inside his shirt and onto his bare flesh. Her hands sensually explored his chest and the virile mat of curly hair scattered across sinewed breastbones.

Something pulled at the waistline of her wraparound dress and its tightness suddenly loosened when the bow securing it was untied. The front of the strawberry-pink dress was pushed open, and Pilar breathed in sharply at the stabbing pleasure that quivered through her when the rough texture of a man’s hand glided onto her naked skin. The devastation wrought on her senses by his cupping hands was virtually total.

Her lungs welled with air and expanded her
rib cage to push her breasts more fully into his stimulating hands while his thumbs rubbed and teased her nipples into hard, erect nubs. She felt tensely weak, all heady and taut with wanting more, but lacking the strength to do more than savor the raw sensations. His mouth came back to devour her lips in a kiss that seemed to rock her all the way to her toes.

Impatient hands pushed the sleeveless dress off her shoulders and Pilar lowered her arms to let it slide to the floor, glad to be rid of the hampering garment. His shirt was already pulled loose from the waistband of his pants. When she came against him again, she knew the searing intoxication of flesh touching flesh.

There was a movement, a turning, a step when he took all of her weight. Then she was being lowered, and there were cushions beneath her and the force of his body bearing down. His mouth was all over her, nibbling at her neck and nipping at her shoulders until her skin danced with raw quivers, then shifting to nuzzle at her breasts and erotically suckle at them until the ache in the pit of her stomach seemed unbearable.

But his hands seemed to know that, caressing and massaging with wicked deftness. Pilar writhed and twisted, half crazy with the sweet torment of his touch. Her fingernails dug into the muscled flesh of his back, urgent in their attempt to force the hard weight of him onto her.

There was a moment of withdrawal when he pulled away from her. A tortured sound of protest came from her throat at the cessation of all contact with him.

It took a second for her passion-thick senses to locate him. He was standing alongside the sofa where she lay, his hands at the buttoned closing of his trousers while he stared down at her. There was something in his eyes that she didn’t understand—almost indecision.

Her hungry glance skimmed the dark hairs on his bronze chest, traveling down his flatly muscled stomach. “Trace,” she urged him in a voice that throbbed on an aching note.

A muscle leaped convulsively along his jaw, and he swung away from the sofa, one step striding into another. Stunned, Pilar turned onto her side and watched as he began to shove his shirttail inside his pants.

“Trace.” This time it was confusion and bewildered questioning that dominated her thready voice.

Her dress was scooped off the floor and tossed sideways to her, landing softly on her shoulder and sliding down before Pilar could react and catch it. Unconsciously she clutched it in front of her, compelled by some unbidden instinct to cover her nakedness even though Trace wasn’t looking at her. His dark head was bent as he buttoned his shirt with jerky impatience, his body angled away from her.

“You aren’t leaving now?” The shameless protest was wrenched from her by all the
strident needs he’d aroused, then failed to satisfy.

His head half-turned in her direction, giving her a glimpse of his profile and all the tautly checked emotions that gave it a hard look. “I guess you’ll just have to face the fact that I can’t be the animal you’d like me to be.” The tersely worded statement was pushed through clenched teeth.

“No.” She choked on the muffled cry as Trace headed for the porch doors, his stride lengthening.

Only seconds later, it seemed, his car roared out of the driveway. Pilar sat huddled on the sofa with the cotton dress clutched to her, twice as empty and hurting twice as much. Sickened and ashamed, she was caught halfway between frustration and pain as hot tears rolled down her lashes.

The knot of his tie was loosened and the top button of his shirt was unfastened. Trace conformed to the practice of wearing a business suit and tie to the office in the morning, but the jacket usually came off when he walked in the door. After lunch the tie was loosened. If it was late in the day, the tie was off and the cuffs of his shirt were turned back.

A small staff meeting was in progress, but it wasn’t going well. Trace was at the core of the crackling in the air, his ill temper managing to make all three department heads uncomfortable in his presence, never sure which of them would bear the brunt of it next. In other
years that bad mood would have been unleashed in some physical form, but trapped in an office, it had no outlet.

“What the hell do you mean, Connors, that you couldn’t finish your report because you didn’t get all the numbers back from our accounting firm?” Trace pushed out of his chair, despising this endless paperwork yet aware that it was a necessary evil. “Weren’t they supposed to have that information for you last week?”

“Yes, but Tom … Mr. Lowe … got sick and—” The man attempted an explanation.

“I don’t give a damn who got sick!” Trace flared. “That firm is being paid to do a job for us. It isn’t
our
problem how they accomplish it! And if they are so understaffed they can’t do it, maybe it’s time we changed accountants.”

“I don’t think that’s necessary.” A flustered Connors protested the rashness of that statement.

“You don’t,” Trace challenged grimly and walked to the water pitcher on the credenza to fill a glass with ice water. “I didn’t have to make the trip up from New Orleans. There were some loose ends I could have cleared up if I had stayed a couple more days instead of arranging to return here to Natchez last night—so we could hold this meeting. And it’s only half a meeting because you don’t have your report ready.”

The thing that kept tearing at him was the knowledge that if he’d stayed in New Orleans
that extra day, he would have spared himself last night’s agony. It damn near ripped him apart. Trace bolted down a swallow of ice water like he was downing a shot of whiskey. The cold, bracing liquid seemed to have a similar effect, its iciness shocking his throat.

“I know I’ll have the report ready for you by Wednesday, Trace,” Connors offered hesitantly.

“Wednesday.” Trace pivoted, still too irritated and on edge to be mollified by that promise.

A knock preceded the opening of the door to his private office. The peremptory intrusion was another irritant to an already growing list. Trace threw a cold look at the middle-aged woman opening his door.

“What the hell is it now, Maude? I told you—” The sight of Pilar standing in the background behind his secretary cut off the rest of the complaint he was about to make.

“Mrs. Santee is here. I thought you’d want to see her.” There was an imperious lift of Maude Hanks’ dye-darkened head. She had ruled the office for too many years to bow to any higher authority. And in her book protocol dictated that an owner of the company be admitted at any time, regardless of the interruption of normal schedules.

“If I’m interrupting a meeting, I can come back later,” Pilar suggested at Trace’s long hesitation.

A pair of glasses, half shaded with a smoky-blue color on the top of the lenses, obscured
the darkness of her eyes. He could see them, yet he couldn’t read their expression. Her shiny onyx hair was loosely swept back from her face and coiled in a chic bun, not flowing freely as it had been when she had lain on the couch, all creamy white skin and silky black hair, for the feasting of his hungry eyes. And this dress was a gauzy thing in a deep shade of turquoise blue that covered her from neck to wrists, a dark underslip hiding the ripe and full breasts that had been his to fondle and kiss.

“No. Come in,” he said abruptly and rudely turned away from the door before other vivid details came back to him. “We were just finishing up.” The nod of his head was curt and dismissive to the three men. “You can leave now.”

“Thank you, Maude,” Pilar murmured to the woman who had been her husband’s secretary and passed by her into the office.

She nodded briefly to the men filing past her to leave, all the while conscious of Trace as he donned the mustard-colored blazer that had been hooked over the corner of a chair and adjusted the tie. Her legs felt weak, and she still wasn’t sure she had the courage to go through with this.

He seemed so distant, hard and uncaring. When he walked behind the desk, putting it between them, she didn’t think he could have been further away from her.

“What is it you wanted to see me about?” He
took a cigarette from the pack on his desk and lit it, not looking at her as he asked the question.

The door was shut behind her, the sound briefly distracting her. When she glanced back, Trace was still standing behind the desk, the smoke from the cigarette throwing up a screen.

“I came”—she took a step toward his desk and unsnapped her clutch purse to remove a small, narrow packet—“because I’m out selling tickets for a charity dinner to raise money for—” The falseness of her claim rang blatantly in her ears, and Pilar didn’t finish the lie. “That’s not why I’m here,” she admitted and stared at the charity tickets that were her excuse.

“Oh?” It was an almost disinterested challenge.

“I came to thank you for not—” Somehow she couldn’t put it into words when she looked at him. All the heat and embarrassment came rushing back.

His mouth quirked at a mocking angle. “For not allowing myself to be seduced by my father’s wife?” Trace suggested.

“Yes.” Pilar bent her head, breathing tightly. “I wanted you to know that I’m grateful you stopped when you did. It was very—”

“Noble?” Trace interrupted to suggest a descriptive adjective.

“Yes, noble,” she agreed, a little wary as she eyed him again.

“It wasn’t a damned bit noble,” he declared,
making a scoffing sound in his throat. Trace walked from behind the desk to sit sideways on the edge of it. “It was purely selfish.”

“Selfish,” Pilar murmured, confused by his answer.

“In the morning I knew you’d hate yourself—but not nearly as much as you’d hate me,” Trace explained calmly while he continued to watch her. “Once I would have taken what you offered and let the devil handle tomorrow.”

“I’m glad you didn’t.” She breathed a little easier. “Because you’re right. I would have hated myself this morning. And I doubt if I could have faced you. As it is, I feel like a fool.”

“It’s forgotten.” He half turned away from her to flick the ash from his cigarette into a ceramic ashtray on his desktop. “We all get lonely at times and need to be loved. Sometimes we aren’t careful about whom we choose. It’s part of what makes the world go around.”

“I … don’t know what to say.” She was hesitant, wondering more than a little if he wasn’t making a personal observation about himself.

“Tell me how much those tickets are for that charity dinner,” he suggested with a dry gleam.

“You don’t have to buy any.” Pilar shook her head, aware that he was merely turning the
conversation away from an unpleasant subject.

“I might as well.” He reached into the side pocket of his suit pants and removed some folded bills, peeling off two of the larger bills. “Since I seem to be turning respectable, I might as well go all the way.” When she reluctantly started to separate several tickets from the packet, he shook his head. “Just give me one ticket. You can consider the rest a donation.”