The Tycoon's Virgin Bride (6 page)

“I think you do.” For the first time there was some
thing approaching compassion in his gray eyes. “In fact, I know you do.”

That he should know her better than she knew herself infuriated Jenessa. “Bryce, you didn't haul me up here to talk about art.”

“I didn't haul you up here just to talk about your mother, either. Why did you lie to me all those years ago?”

“Which lie are you referring to?” she said with conscious provocation.

“Your name. Your age. Your sexual experience. Your relationship to Travis, who happens to be my best friend. Any or all of the above.”

“If you'd known I was seventeen, you wouldn't have gone near me. The same goes for my virginity.”

“Why did you want me, Jenessa?”

“Julie's thirty-one years old and madly in love with my brother and she thinks you're a hunk. Why wouldn't I, at seventeen and not madly in love with anyone, think the same?” Jenessa gave an offhand shrug. “You're a very attractive man—I'd bet my little Quaker house I'm not the first woman to tell you that.”

“Let's skip the flattery,” Bryce said in a deadly quiet voice. “You knew about my friendship with Travis, yet you went to my hotel room knowing damn well what was going to happen. What were you doing, settling some kind of score with him?”

“No!” she cried, stung.

“No? How do you think he's going to feel if he ever finds out about that night? That I had his seventeen-year-old sister in bed with me?”

His voice had risen. Jenessa said furiously, “Why don't you just stand on the nearest turret and yell it to the four winds? I was homesick and you were a connection to my older brother, whom I adored. Okay, so I wasn't thinking very straight, I give you that. But you did your best to seduce me. Aren't you in danger of forgetting that?”

“You used me,” he said flatly.

Not for anything was she going to divulge that he was the first—and only—man ever to arouse such passion in her. That, too, was her secret, and so it would remain. “You weren't in love with me,” she answered coldly. “So you were using me, too.”

“And how many men have you used since then? If I was the first, I'm sure I wasn't the last.”

“I'm not interested in your sexual history,” she lied, “so why should you be in mine?”

“I don't like being deceived. Made a fool of.”

“I was seventeen!” she cried. “On my own for the first time in my life, in one of the biggest and most exciting cities in the world. So I made a mistake. So what?”

“We could go to bed right now,” he said, his gray eyes like gimlets. “That kiss showed me the chemistry's still there. You don't have to get the launch for another hour, and one advantage of this ill-begotten heap of stone is that we can hide without any trouble at all. What's to stop us, Jenessa?”

She took a step backward, wondering if she'd forever afterward hate the scent of lilac. “You don't make love with someone just because you've got a spare hour.”

“I didn't say we'd make love,” he replied mockingly. “There are one-syllable Anglosaxon words for what we'd do.”

“You hate me, don't you?” she whispered.

“You exaggerate your own importance.”

Through a haze of misery, Jenessa heard the sound of voices and laughter. She turned around. The whole family was leaving the pool and wandering toward the castle; Travis hailed her, calling out something she couldn't hear. Light-headed with relief, she said, “I wouldn't go to bed with you if you were the last man in Massachusetts. And I'll do my level best to make sure we never meet again.”

Knowing Bryce couldn't very well restrain her in full view of her brother, father and mother, she marched away
from him, blinking back tears that she was too proud to shed.

When would she ever learn to listen to her instincts? Hadn't they told her, loud and clear, to stay away from the christening? But she'd allowed herself to be persuaded by a tall man with sun-streaked hair and eyes gray as clouds; and all it had accomplished was to open old wounds.

Open old wounds and inflict new ones. Jenessa wasn't sure which was worse. She did know she'd meant every word she'd said: she was going to stay away from Bryce Laribee. For the rest of her days.

B
RYCE
had done enough traveling in the Far East that a Boston afternoon late in June shouldn't have posed a problem. But the humidity was cloying, the sun blazed unrelentingly from a sky that was a merciless blue, and the streets and sidewalks were reflecting the heat so that buildings shimmered like mirages. Exhaust fumes stung his throat.

These were the streets he'd escaped from when he was twelve. Turned his back on. Only in the last year or two had he ventured into them once again.

He had an appointment with the director of a newly built women's shelter. He was fact-finding: another step in the process he'd embarked on a couple of months ago.

Occasionally he found himself wondering if he'd been way off base when he'd decided to build and fund a special school for the kids who roamed these streets. Give them, through education, the chance he'd been given, to leave the streets behind and try for a different life.

There were no guarantees it would work. He knew that.

Wiping the sweat from his forehead, he checked the number on an undistinguished brick building squeezed between a pool hall and a bar; and an hour later, head stuffed with information about possible locations and security precautions, started down the four flights of wooden stairs that led to the street. There were no elevators here. No luxuries at all. But a haven, nevertheless.

He was on the second floor landing when a freshly varnished door swung open. A woman's voice said clearly, “Thanks, Marlene. See you next week, and I'll remember to bring the shampoo.”

Bryce stopped dead, glued to the tiled floor. He'd have known that voice anywhere. But it couldn't be. Not here.

Then the owner of the voice came through the door, closing it carefully behind her. Her blond curls were confined in a thick braid, her jeans and shirt undistinguished. Bryce croaked, “Jenessa?”

She pivoted. Her jaw dropped.
“Bryce!”

“What are you doing here?”

“I—I could ask the same of you.”

“Are you leaving?”

“Yes,” she said, “yes, I am.”

“Good. Let's go down together.”

Side by side they emerged into the blazing heat. “My car's six blocks over,” Bryce said. “I never park it around here, it's asking for trouble. Let me drive you wherever you're going.”

“I get the subway a couple of blocks from here, and then the bus—I'm going home, Bryce. But thanks for the offer.”

He hated the thought of her walking these streets unprotected, even more of her taking the subway. He said with more honesty that tact, “You look tired out.”

“Gee, thanks.”

“I'll drive you to the bus station.”

Jenessa was tired. Tired, hot and discouraged from listening to the same stories from different women week after week. “Is your car air-conditioned?” she said. “That might persuade me.”

“Yep. So come along.”

He took her by the elbow, steering her across the street. “Come clean, Jenessa—what were you doing at the shelter?”

“I volunteer there. Once a week.”

Her sleeves were rolled up; her bare skin felt wonderful to his touch. Even so, his mind made an instant leap. “That canvas I saw in your studio—now I understand how you painted these streets so vividly.”

“I don't tell people I come here. That's why I didn't tell you.”

“It's a long way from Wellspring,” he said, accepting her tacit apology. “And I don't just mean the bus trip.”

“It is, yes.”

“Why do you do it?” He could see the reluctance in her face, and added impulsively, “You can trust me to be discreet.”

She bit her lip. “The whole time I was growing up, Charles didn't want me. Not as I was. Corinne wasn't ever unkind but wasn't overly warm, either; and my mother was never mentioned, as if she hadn't existed. So now I volunteer at a shelter for homeless women. Who are truly homeless. I know it doesn't make much sense.”

He stopped, gazing right into her blue eyes. “It makes a lot of sense,” he said gently. “You're doing a fine thing, Jenessa.”

“It's not much.”

“No one can save the whole world,” he said. “But if each of us does our bit, it all helps.”

“So what were you doing there?”

He should have anticipated that question. As briefly as he could, he filled her in on his plans for the school. “Kim, the shelter director, has a lot of experience of the neighborhood. So I was picking her brains.”

“A special school's a wonderful idea,” Jenessa said warmly, adding naively, “You must have a lot of money.”

“Enough.”

“All of it from computers?”

“Didn't Travis ever tell you the story?” As she shook her head, Bryce said, “The school I went to when I was eleven had a brilliant and eccentric math teacher, and for the first time in my life I saw the point of being in a classroom. He got me a computer, paying for it out of his own pocket—he's the one who arranged for the scholarship to Travis's school, because they had an innovative
computer department. By the time I was nineteen I'd come up with some programming concepts when the timing had happened to be right, and in the next five years I made a mint.” Bryce shrugged. “Technically, I don't need to work. But I get a kick out of problem-solving, and I like the travel.”

“You want your school to do the same thing for the kids here,” Jenessa said slowly. “Offer them a way out.”

“Yeah…the math teacher and I became good friends. He died three years ago.”

“Not in poverty, I'm sure, if you had anything to do with it.”

Bryce looked uncomfortable. “Don't make me into some kind of saint.”

She chuckled. “If I am, it probably won't last long.” Glancing at a boarded window spattered with graffiti, she added, “You went from rags to riches…is this the area where you grew up?”

He dropped her arm, walking a little faster along the garbage-strewn sidewalk. “Near here. What time's your bus?”

“In a couple of hours. If you don't like to talk about your childhood, Bryce, you can just say so.”

“All right. I don't.”

From her weekly visits, she'd seen and heard enough to understand why. She said humbly, “You must think I'm a real wimp, complaining about my upbringing.”

Bryce stopped in the middle of the sidewalk. “Your mother vanished, your father tried his best to make you into someone you weren't, and Corinne spends more time on her goddamn roses than she does on real human beings—no, I don't think you're a wimp. And I'm sorry I came on to you so hard about Leonora at the christening. I shouldn't have.”

Jenessa said roundly, “Just when I think I have you figured out, you say something that takes me completely by surprise.”

“It's not your job to figure me out,” he said, and strode on.

Panting in the heat, Jenessa followed him. He moved like a hungry tiger, she thought. So what did that make her? A tigress, padding along behind him? Or a rather small animal without many defences who could well turn into prey?

She'd seen a whole new side to Bryce today. A man who cared enough to put money and time on the line for boys and girls he'd never met, who might not even give a damn. Intuitively, she sensed that if his school gave only one or two kids a better life, he'd think it was worthwhile.

She didn't want to start liking Bryce. Bad enough that she still lusted after him with the lack of subtlety of a seventeen-year-old, without adding liking and respect to the mixture.

How could she lust after him when her shirt was sticking to her back and she was so thirsty she could drink out of a puddle?

A few minutes later, minutes in which Jenessa couldn't come up with anything to say, she and Bryce reached his car, a sleek dark blue Jaguar which did indeed have air-conditioning. Once they'd left the area, they were soon cruising streets with leafy trees and unsmashed windows. Bryce said, “I'll buy you dinner. I know a little place a few blocks from here. Then I'll drive you to the station.”

“Bryce, I'm a mess—no restaurant would let me in.”

“Yes, they will. They know me. Anyway, I'm no ad for the well-dressed man.”

The restaurant, at the bottom of a flight of wrought-iron steps, had the most wonderful calamari and Greek salad Jenessa had ever tasted. They were seated in a corner; as she took a sip of a flinty red wine, Bryce said, “I'd fully made up my mind when I left Manatuck never to see you again.”

Her lips curved in a smile. “Join the club.”

“And here we are. Do you believe in fate?”

She looked at him warily. “Is that a trick question?”

He reached over and took her fingers in his, playing with them until she was weak with a hunger that had nothing to do with calamari. “What are we going to do about this? I want you and you want me and you're no longer a virginal seventeen.”

“We're not going to do anything,” she said forcefully.

“We're twelve years older than we were then, Jenessa. Older and—on my part—possibly wiser,” he added with a crooked grin. “I'm not into marriage. But I promise I'd be faithful to you for the duration of whatever relationship we'd have, and I'd do my best to please you. To make you happy.”

For some reason that wasn't clear to her, Jenessa felt like crying. Gazing into the jeweled heart of her wine-glass, she sought for words that would match his honesty without revealing more than she was prepared to. “I've met lots of men in the last twelve years,” she said carefully. “You don't fit the mold, Bryce. You're forceful and charismatic and so sexy you make me weak at the knees. I don't want to have an affair with you. I'd get in deeper than I'm prepared for, and in the long run you'd only do me harm.”

“You're not saying you're in love with me?” he rapped.

“No, of course not! But what happens every time you and I are in the same room doesn't feel casual. You make me lose my bearings. My understanding of who I am.” She took a gulp of wine. “That may not make any sense to you. But it's the way I feel. So it's no dice as far as an affair's concerned.”

He said flatly, “The way I desire you—it's sure not casual. In a very real way, I resent it.”

“I'd noticed,” she said dryly.

“You're afraid of me.”

“I'm afraid of my own body—of what it does to me when I'm in your vicinity,” she said with suppressed vi
olence. “Right now I'd like to drag you behind that palm tree and make love to you on the carpet. That's all very well. But then what?”

He suddenly gave her a smile so full of sheer male energy that she found herself smiling back. “I like you,” Bryce said. “I like the way you operate.”

“Do you? Do you really? Because I'm saying no, Bryce. And I mean it.”

“You're telling me the truth.”

She wasn't telling him the whole truth, though. Her lashes dropping to hide her eyes, she tackled her roast lamb and herbed potatoes as though she had nothing else on her mind.

After a short pause Bryce said, “How's your work going?”

So he'd accepted her refusal. Somehow she'd expected him to put up more of a fight. “Pretty well. I finished the final painting for the show three days ago, so today I brought it with me and dropped it off at the gallery.”

For a few minutes they talked technicalities, Bryce surprising her by the depth and extent of his knowledge of the contemporary art scene. Then he said, “I called up your gallery, by the way, and sweet-talked an invitation to your show. I hope you don't mind.”

Her fork stopped in midair. “What happens if I do?”

“I go anyway.”

Her temper rising, she demanded, “Why do you want to go to my show?”

“To see your work. Of course.”

“Nothing to do with me,” she snapped.

“Well, no. You've turned me down, remember?”

So angry she didn't know where to look, and simultaneously decrying her anger as totally inappropriate, Jenessa said, “Both of us had decided never to see the other again. Why don't we just stick with that?”

“We could try. After the show.”

“Oh! You're impossible.”

“Everything's possible, Jenessa.”

“Not with me, it's not,” she announced, her cheeks burning with color.

“I get the message. This restaurant makes fabulous baklava, want some?”

“I want to be on the bus by myself, going home to my own place!”

“Where Charles, Corinne and Leonora won't bother you,” he said shrewdly.

“Add your name to the list.”

Bryce signaled the waiter, ordering two servings of baklava to go. Then he said very casually, “Are you sure you aren't dismissing me too quickly? Aren't you the slightest bit interested in my money?”

Fighting the urge to tip the entire table and its contents into his lap, Jenessa announced, “Bryce, right now I live pretty close to the bone. But next year, when I turn thirty, I inherit my share of my grandfather's trust fund. No, I'm not interested in your money.”

“I'm worth a lot more than your trust fund.”

“How much money can one person spend?” she flailed. “I'm too busy painting to be out shopping. And owning stuff for the sake of owning it has never appealed to me.”

“Something else we have in common,” he said. “I got rid of all kinds of stuff a few years ago. For a while, around the time you and I first met, I owned houses in as many countries as you could name, cars in all the garages, and a private jet so I could commute from one to the other. But then it all palled. Overkill, I guess.”

It was his honesty that got to her every time, Jenessa thought painfully. “Why wouldn't you buy houses and cars, with your background? And now you're going to build a school instead.” She hesitated. “Who did you live with when you were nine and ten? What were you like?”