Too Wise To Wed?

by Penny Jordan

  ‘And then, of course, if I did go, there’d be the usual comments that I’m not fulfilling my traditional female role, that I’m not decorating the arm of some suitably impressive man—but not as impressive as my father, of course.’

  Star suddenly realised that not only had she raised her voice above its normal level, cool pitch, but also that, shamingly, it was filled with angry emotion. What on earth was wrong with her? What had possessed her to reveal so much about herself—to betray so much about herself?

  As Kyle watched the emotions chase one another across her face—anger, confusion, dismay, disbelief and, most telling of all, pain—he wanted to reach out to her, to take hold of her and make her whole again, heal all her hurts, show her that she was wrong, that she was perfect and fully worthy of being loved just as she was. Just as she was. And he also knew exactly how she would react if he tried, if he let her see how vulnerable he knew she was beneath that shield of prickly pride and acid cynicism that she used to protect herself.

  He could see her so clearly as the child she must have been—an outsider...different...sensitive, and far too intelligent not to be aware of the prejudices and flaws in the adults around her.

  ‘I could come with you to the wedding if you like,’ he said.

  The offer stopped Star dead in her tracks. She was already furiously angry with herself and thoroughly bewildered by her uncharacteristic behaviour, and Kyle’s words had left her totally nonplussed and bereft of her normal ability to make a quick, defensive comeback—unable to do anything other than simply demand huskily, ‘Why?’

  Kyle had no intention of telling her why; instead he simply shrugged and answered, ‘Why not?’

  ‘I’m not going; there isn’t any point,’ Star said fiercely.

  ‘Yes, there is,’ Kyle contradicted her. ‘He is your father; they are all your family—’

  ‘I don’t have a father,’ Star told him flatly. ‘Nor a family; and I don’t want one either. I’m not going.’

  ‘Just like you didn’t go to Sally’s barbecue tonight. Funny,’ Kyle told her with deceptive gentleness, ‘I hadn’t thought of you as the type to run away from a situation that made you feel vulnerable. It just goes to show—’

  ‘I did not run away,’ Star interrupted him angrily. ‘And nothing, no one makes me feel vulnerable.’

  Her eyes warned him against continuing but Kyle ignored the fiercely challenging look she was giving him, telling her, ‘If you really believe that, then you are lying, Star, and not just to me but, more importantly, to yourself, pretending—’

  ‘Pretending!’ Star had had enough. ‘I’m not the one who’s pretending,’ she stormed at him. ‘You’re...’

  To her horror Star suddenly found that she couldn’t go on—that her throat was closing up, her eyes filling with tears. Tears... She never cried. Ever.

  As Kyle saw first the disbelief and then the panic crossing her face as her eyes filled with tears and her throat muscles constricted, he decided that there was a time in every man’s life when he could allow himself to stop listening to his inner voice of caution and act on his instincts instead.

  Through the blur of her tears, Star saw him stand up and come towards her but didn’t realise what he was going to do until she felt his arms come round her, holding her, drawing her firmly against his body, one hand securing her against him whilst the other rubbed her back in the same comforting way that she had seen parents comforting small children.

  For some reason what he was doing, instead of restoring her to sanity, seemed to have the perverse effect of making her cry harder, in deep, gulping sobs accompanied by ridiculously childish hiccups, whilst his voice murmured soft words of comfort in her ear.

  Men did not treat her like this, cuddling her and comforting her as though she were a small child; she did not behave like this—crying, clinging, wanting to be held, to feel secure... comforted...understood.

  Understood. She stopped crying, her body tensing in rejection of Kyle’s hold on it as she started to pull away.

  Kyle, who until that moment had managed to make his body understand that on this occasion she was not a highly desirable and sensual woman but a very unhappy and needy child, was very quickly reminded by that same body that those deliciously warm and feminine breasts that he could feel and virtually see beneath her thin covering did not belong to any child. He warned himself of all the reasons there were for not allowing himself to feel what he was feeling right now and then promptly ignored them as Star lifted her face up to his, her lips parting, ready to deliver what he knew would be some scathing and furious criticism of his behaviour.

  What was it about the combination of vulnerability and strength in a woman’s face when it was wet with tears at the same time as her eyes were full of fury that evoked such an instant and age old male response? he wondered helplessly as he looked from her angry eyes to her softly parted mouth and gave up the struggle to resist the temptation in front of him.

  Kyle kissed her, the unexpectedness of the warm pressure of his mouth on hers causing her eyes to widen in shock as she stared up at him in disbelief, her body motionless in his arms, as caught off guard as a young, untried girl.

  She tasted wonderful, Kyle acknowledged, her mouth as sharply sweet as a delicious piece of fruit, tormenting his taste buds, making him want to take more and more.

  Star blinked dizzily as he lifted his mouth from hers, touching her lips with the tip of his tongue. She looked at Kyle’s mouth and then raised her gaze to his eyes, her own cloudy and confused. An involuntary shudder went through her body; she looked back at Kyle’s mouth.

  That look wasn’t faked or contrived, Kyle knew; he doubted that she even knew what she was doing or the effect it was having on him, he didn’t have to hear her whisper huskily, ‘Kiss me,’ to know what she wanted and she didn’t have to ask him for it either. He was covering her mouth with his own even before she had finished saying it, kissing the way he’d wanted to kiss her right from the very start.

  Star had ceased to exist on her normal plane from the moment she had discovered that she was going to cry. Now she was vaguely aware of somehow, somewhere along the line, stepping out of her normal persona, her normal behaviour, but it hardly seemed worth concerning herself about when the movement of Kyle’s mouth on her own was filling her with the kind of physical sensation that would have made the explosion that led to the creation of the universe a mere nothing.

  When her head fell back against Kyle’s supporting arm to allow his mouth easy access to the taut line of her throat, she whimpered in fierce, excited pleasure, digging her nails into the strong muscles of his back and raking it passionately as she shivered beneath his caress, her breasts lifting, their nipples taut and dark and clearly visible beneath their thin covering.

  She was kissing him too, hungry, biting kisses interspersed with the shallow, frantic sound of her breathing, making Kyle want to wrench the thin covering off her body and slide his hand between those long, slender legs to find out if her womanhood had that same delicious. succulent moistness as her mouth.

  He wanted to touch her with his fingers and to carry the scent and taste of her to his lips, to lick the flavour of her from them and then kiss her whilst he still had the taste of her in his mouth, to make her know that once the immediacy of their shared desire to come together was sated he wanted to repeat that intimacy by replacing his fingers with his mouth—and if there was any possibility that she might share his desire and similarly want to explore and know him, then...

  Star whimpered deep in her throat as she felt the pulsing ache inside her body grow to a heated throb. She couldn’t wait much longer. She had never wanted a man with such...such intensity, such overwhelming insistence.

  Her hands moved down over Kyle’s body, his mouth silencing her small purr of satisfaction with a kiss of fierce male hunger as she felt the hard surge of his erection. She didn’t want him like this, quickly and frantically, the pleasure gone almost before she could enj
oy it. She wanted...she wanted...

  Dragging her mouth from his, she told him huskily, ‘Not here... In bed... I want...I want you in bed, Kyle... All of you, not just...’

  He seemed to understand without her having to say any more because he was already turning towards the door, letting her guide him to where she wanted him to be, taking control only when she opened the bedroom door, pulling her back into his arms and kissing her deeply, using his tongue to show her the pleasure his body would soon be giving her, giving them both, as he pushed her robe off her shoulders and explored her body blindly with a delicate fingertip touch that left her shuddering and clinging achingly to him.

  However, when she reached towards him and tried to undress him, he pushed her gently away and told her softly, ‘No, not yet... I want to look at you...see you...know you first, Star.’

  She had no inhibitions about her body and felt no shame about her sexuality or her needs, and yet for the first time in her life, as he took a step back from her and silently, lingeringly let his gaze rove over her body, she knew what it was to experience uncertainty and insecurity—so much so that she actually found that she was holding her breath, wondering, worrying that... And then she looked into his eyes and her pent-up fear leaked away on an unsteady lurch of sharp emotion.

  ‘Star...’ She could hear in the husky, shaken timbre of his voice all that she wanted to know—his awe, his desire, his adoration of the perfect femaleness of her.

  Her confidence returning, she waited for him to come to her, to take her in his arms, and he kissed her slowly and lingeringly as he picked her up and carried her towards the bed. By the time he reached it his mouth had travelled as far as the tiny hollow at the base of her throat. By the time he lowered her onto it he was caressing the smooth slope of her breast. By the time she was actually lying on it his mouth had reached the rigid peak of her nipple, and she expelled a long, slow moan of satisfaction as his gentle caress became firmer, stronger, his kiss turning to a rhythmic suckle. Blindly Star reached for him, her hands tugging at his shirt, and then she smelt it...that unmistakable scent of another woman’s perfume.

  It was like free falling without the security of a parachute, knowing that only pain lay ahead, that there was no escape from it. No hope of any safety. And with her knowledge of that pain came shock, anger and panic.

  There was no need for her to do any more. She had all the proof she needed. She had been so right to mistrust him. These and a hundred other thoughts she didn’t want to acknowledge raced through her brain, her body awash now with confused emotions and sensations.

  Valiantly she tried to recover her lost ground, to convince herself that what had happened had all been part of her grand plan, that she had known what she was doing all the time, that she had simply pretended to want him, that she had never really been in any danger of losing control.

  As he felt her body stiffen in rejection of his touch, Kyle lifted his head to look at her.

  ‘Thank you,’ Star told him, ‘but there’s no need for you to go any further. You’ve already proved my point for me...proved that I was right about you...’

  ‘Right about me?’ Kyle could see the antipathy glittering in her eyes and hear the contempt in her voice but he had no idea what it was he was supposed to have done.

  ‘You’re a fake, Kyle,’ Star told him triumphantly. ‘A liar...a cheat...no different from the rest of your sex... You didn’t want just sex—sex without emotion—remember?’

  Kyle closed his eyes and held onto his self-control—just. Now he understood. He knew what was happening, what she was trying to do. Self-preservation, self-protection was all very well and his compassion helped him to accept her need to deny what was happening between them, to reject the emotions that he was pretty damn sure she felt as strongly as he did in favour of the safer alternative of mere physical need, but he was still a man, after all, and right now...

  ‘Star,’ he told her firmly, ‘there’s no way that what we’re experiencing...sharing...could ever remotely be described as “just sex”. I understand that it’s difficult for you—’

  ‘No?’ Star cut across him bitingly. ‘So it wasn’t sex; what was it, then? Love?’ she challenged him mockingly. The harsh tone of her voice jarred but Kyle refused to allow her to force him into a fight.

  ‘I don’t know,’ he told her softly. ‘But what I do know is that there was a hell of a lot more going on between us just then than the mere physical arousal of two bodies—’

  ‘Really? Well, you should know. I suppose you said the same thing to Lindsay, did you?’

  ‘Lindsay?’

  He was an actor, Star acknowledged, she had to give him that, but then of course he would have to be able to carry off the kind of act he liked to put on.

  ‘Yes, Lindsay,’ she repeated tauntingly. ‘Remember her...? She’s the one you were with before me...the one whose lipstick you were still wearing when you came in...the one whose perfume you are still wearing right now. Right here.’

  She let her fingertips touch his throat and the open neck of his shirt—the open neck she had further unfastened in her desire to touch him and hold him, to—

  The savage, raking pain that tore at her was surely far too intense to be put down to mere anger against men and their perfidy, their deceit... But determinedly she ignored that knowledge and instead tried to find release from it by digging her fingernails into his skin purposefully, painfully before releasing him, her mouth curling in disdain as she told him, ‘You smell of her perfume... Of her...’

  Those last two words weren’t true, but Star didn’t care. She wanted him to know how completely he had betrayed himself, how utterly contemptible she found him.

  ‘And just for the record,’ she added, determined now to settle every single score, ‘I never really wanted you, Kyle...not even just for sex. You’re not my type. All I wanted was to show you how pathetic you are and how easy it is to see through your lies.’

  Kyle had had enough. Compassion was one thing; allowing her crazy paranoia to go unchallenged and unchecked was something else again.

  ‘I do not lie,’ he told her grimly. ‘I don’t have the need. Neither do I have the need to create some fantasy world for myself filled with fantasy villains because it’s the only way I have of trying to pretend that I haven’t been hurt and that I’m not afraid and vulnerable. I don’t need to cling to the belief that all women are like my mother and that because she didn’t want me and she walked out on me that means that I was to blame, that her inability to mother me lies with me. Your father walked out on his marriage and you because—’

  ‘It wasn’t my fault... It’s not true... I tried to be good, to be what he wanted.’

  White-faced, Star almost screamed the words at him as the angry tears flooded her eyes.

  ‘No, Star,’ Kyle agreed gently, ‘that’s right—it wasn’t your fault—but deep down inside you don’t really believe that, do you? Just as you refuse to believe that you might just possibly be wrong...that I might just possibly have genuinely wanted you, physically and emotionally... that I haven’t lied at all, that—’

  ‘Go to hell,’ Star screamed at him. ‘How can you want me when you’ve come to me from Lindsay’s bed? I don’t believe you.’

  ‘No?’ Kyle queried thickly, his patience finally snapping. ‘Then try believing this...’

  Star couldn’t believe how quickly he overpowered her, taking hold of her and imprisoning her flailing arms whilst he silenced her furious protests with his mouth, kissing her with an angry passion that excited a response inside her that blasted apart her self-control and had her clinging to him, fighting fire with fire, kissing him back with just as much furious sexual urgency as he was showing her, knowing that it wasn’t just the hard pressure of his hold on her that was welding her body to his, knowing that his visible physical arousal only mirrored the inner secret ache of her own.

  ‘I have not been making love to Lindsay... I have never, would never go from one woma
n’s bed, one woman’s body,’ he emphasised, ‘to another’s.

  ‘I could take things to their natural conclusion between us now—take you now,’ he told her rawly, ‘and prove to you just how wrong you are, not just about me but about yourself. God knows I want to. But if I did I would be breaking one of the rules I’ve made for myself, which is never to touch a woman in anger. But then you aren’t a woman really, are you, Star? You’re just a hurt, angry child, wildly hitting out at every man who comes near her because the one man she needs to love her doesn’t.’

  His mouth smiled as he caught the warning hiss of her indrawn breath but his eyes didn’t. His eyes, Star registered painfully, were completely blank of any emotion, and as he released her and got off the bed she started to shiver with reaction.

  Her pride wouldn’t allow her to conceal her body; instead, she stood up and held her head up proudly, following him to the door. When he reached it, he paused and turned to face her. Was it her imagination or did a tiny muscle beat frantically in his jaw as he looked at her?

  ‘And, for your information, the only woman that I...my skin...my body...could possibly smell of tonight is you. I wanted to fall asleep with the scent of you all around me. The taste of you in my mouth. Did you know that?’ he asked her quietly.

  To her shock he suddenly came up to her and bent his head to kiss her naked breast before telling her thickly, ‘I wanted to taste you not just here but here as well.’ And then, before she could stop him, he touched her briefly but deliberately, intimately, just where her body was still achingly moist and ready for him.

  Star couldn’t stop herself from betraying her shocked reaction. It burned two bright red spots of colour high on her cheekbones and tightened her already over-taut muscles.

  ‘Yes, I know,’ Kyle said heavily to her. ‘You want me to go!’