Her unwilling object of affection was beginning to notice, and be irritated by her, though. It had become a challenge to see how far she could push him before he exploded. The thought was oddly exciting for a woman who almost never took chances. In fact, in all her twenty-four years, he was the first man she’d ever pursued, even in fun. It was unlike her, but he wouldn’t know that. Her flirting seemed to disturb and irritate him.
To complicate matters, he had a son, about twelve or so, and the son spent considerable time staring at Shelly. She was afraid he was developing a crush on her and she worried about trying to head it off while keeping up her facade of being infatuated with his father. Showing up here for dinner every night wasn’t helping her situation, even if it did seem to be doing wonders for Nan’s social life and give Shelly the opportunity to stare longingly at the man she’d singled out for public adoration.
As if she’d conjured him up in her thoughts, a movement caught Shelly’s eye, and she saw him. He was tall and elegant, a striking man somewhere in his middle or late thirties with thick dark hair and pale silvery eyes. He had his son with him. The boy was a younger and much more amiable version of him. Shelly found herself wondering what the man did for a living. He was very handsome, but he didn’t look the male-model type. He was probably someone who carried a gun, she thought. Maybe a secret agent, or a hired assassin. That thought amused her and she smiled mischievously. Before she could erase the smile,
the man turned his head and saw it, and his glare was thunderous.
How could someone that handsome look so vicious and unfriendly? she wondered vaguely. And those silver eyes looked like cold steel in his unsmiling face. An ugly man might have an excuse for that black scowl, but this man looked like every hero she’d ever dreamed of. She put her chin in her hands and stared at him with a wistful smile. She was always so friendly that it was hard to accept that anyone could hate her on sight for no reason.
He looked taken aback by her refusal to be intimidated. But even if the scowl fell away, he didn’t smile back. He turned his attention to a movement of white silk beside the table and abruptly stood up to seat a thin brunette. The boy with him glowered and made some reluctant remark, which prompted an angry look from his father. Undercurrents, Shelly thought, and began to analyze them. She felt a wave of sadness. She’d overheard a tidbit of gossip about him in the restaurant the night before—that he was a widower. She’d known that a man so handsome would have women hanging from both arms, but she had hoped he was unattached. It was her fate to be forever getting interested in the wrong man. She sighed wistfully.
“Stop staring at him,” Nan chided, hitting her forearm with her napkin as she put it into her lap. “He’ll get conceited.”
“Sorry. He fascinates me. Isn’t he dreamy?”
“He’s years too old for you,” Nan said firmly. “And that’s probably his fiancée. They suit each other. He has a half-grown son, and you are a lowly college student, age notwithstanding. In point of fact, you are barely higher on the food chain than a bottom feeder, since you aren’t even a sophomoreyet.”
“I’ll be a sophomore after summer semester.”
“Picky, picky. Eat your salad.”
“Yes, Mama,” she muttered, glaring at the younger woman, who only grinned.
* * *
T
HE NEXT DAY IT SEEMED
to Shelly that providence was determined to throw her into the path of trouble. She always got up early in the mornings, before Nan stirred, and went down to the beach to enjoy the brief solitude at the ocean before the tourists obliterated the beach completely. She threw on her one-piece yellow bathing suit with a patterned chiffon shirt over it and laced up her sandals. For once she left her blond hair loose down her back. She liked the feel of the breeze in it.
This morning, she didn’t find the beach empty. A lone figure stood looking seaward. He was tall, and had thick black hair. He was wearing white shorts that left his powerful, darkly tanned legs bare and a blue-and-white checked shirt, open over a broad, hair-roughened chest. He was watching the ocean with eyes that didn’t seem to see it, a deep scowl carved into his handsome face.
Shelly gave him a wistful glance and took off down the beach in the opposite direction. She didn’t want to infringe on his privacy. Since he was obviously attached, it would do her no good to go on mooning over him, for appearances or not. She was giving him up, she thought nobly, for his own good. That being settled, she strolled aimlessly down the beach, drinking in the sea air.
The stillness was seductive. The only sounds to be heard were the cries of the sea gulls and the watery growl of the ocean. Surf curled in foamy patterns up onto the damp beach, and tiny white sand crabs went scurrying for cover. They amused her and she laughed, a soft, breathy sound that seemed to carry.
“What can you find to laugh about at this hour of the morning?” came a rough, half-irritated deep voice from over her shoulder. “The damned coffee shop isn’t even open
yet. How do they expect people to survive daybreak without a dose of caffeine?”
With the vestiges of her amusement at the crabs still on her face, Shelly turned. And there he was, as handsome as a dark angel, his hands deep in the pockets of his white shorts.
He was devastating enough at long range. Close, like this, he was dynamite. She could hardly get her breath at all. Some sensual aroma exuded from him, like spice. He smelled and looked clean and fastidious, and she had to force herself not to stare at the physical perfection of his body. Hollywood would have loved him.
“I like coffee, too,” she murmured shyly. She smiled at him, pushing back her pale, windblown hair. “But the sea air is almost as good.”
“What were you laughing at?” he persisted.
“Them.” She turned back to the crabs, one of which was busily digging himself a hole. He dived into it like a madman. “Don’t they remind you of people running for trains in the subway?” She glanced at him wickedly. “And people who can’t get their coffee early enough to suit them?”
He smiled unexpectedly, and her heart fell at his feet. She’d never seen anything so appealing as that handsome face with its chiseled mouth tugged up and those gray eyes that took on the sheen of mercury.
“Are your friends still in bed?”
She nodded. “Most of us have eight o’clock classes during the semester, so there isn’t much opportunity to sleep late. Even if it’s just for a week, this is a nice change.”
She started walking again and he fell into step beside her. He was very tall. The top of her head came just to his shoulder.
“What’s your major?” he asked.
“Sociology,” she said. She flushed a little. “Sorry I was staring at you last night. I tend to carry people-watching to extremes,” she said to excuse her blatant flirting.
He glanced at her cynically, and he didn’t smile. “My son finds you fascinating.”
“Yes,” she said. “I’m afraid so.”
“He’s almost thirteen and a late bloomer. He hasn’t paid much attention to girls until now.”
She laughed. “I’m a bit old to be called a girl.”
“You’re still in college, aren’t you?” he mused, obviously mistaking her for someone not much older than his son.
“Well, yes, I suppose I am.” She didn’t add that she’d only started last year, at the age of twenty-three. She’d always looked young for her age, and it was fun to pretend that she was still a teen. She stopped to pick up a seashell and study it. “I love shells. Nan chides me for it, but you should try to walk across tilled soil with her. She’s down on her hands and knees at the first opportunity, wherever she sees disturbed dirt. Once she actually climbed down into a hole where men were digging out a water line! I’m glad they had a sense of humor.”
“She’s an archaeology student?”
“Other people are merely archaeology students—Nan is a
certifiable
archaeology student!”
He laughed. “Well, that’s dedication, I suppose.”
She stared out at the ocean. “They say there are probably Paleo-Indian sites out there.” She nodded. “Buried when ocean levels rose with the melting of the glaciers in the late Pleistocene.”
“I thought your friend was the archaeology student.”
“When you spend a lot of time with them, it rubs off,” she apologized. “I know more than I want to about fluted points and ancient stone tools.”
“I can’t say I’ve ever been exposed to that sort of prehistory. I majored in business and minored in economics.”
She glanced up at him. “You’re in business, then?”
He nodded. “I’m a banker.”
“Does your son want to follow in your footsteps?”
His firm lips tugged down. “He does not. He thinks business
is responsible for all the ecological upheaval on the planet. He wants to be an artist.”
“You must be proud of him.”
“Proud? I graduated from the Harvard school of business,” he said, glaring at her. “What’s good enough for me is good enough for him. He’s being enrolled in a private school with R.O.T.C. When he graduates, he’ll go to Harvard, as I did, and my father did.”
She stopped. Here was someone else trying to live his child’s life. “Shouldn’t that be his decision?” she asked curiously.
He didn’t bat an eyelash. “Aren’t you young to question your elders?” he taunted.
“Listen, just because you’ve got a few years on me…!”
“More than fifteen, by the look of you.”
She studied his face closely. It had some deep lines, and not many of them were around the corners of his eyes. He wasn’t a smiling man. But perhaps he wasn’t quite as young as she’d suspected, either. Then she realized that he was counting from what he thought her age was.
“I’m thirty-four. But that still makes me an old man compared to you,” he murmured. “You don’t look much older than Ben.”
Her heart leaped. He was closer to her age than she’d realized, and much closer than he knew. “You seem very mature.”
“Do I?” His eyes glittered as he studied her. “You’re a beauty,” he said unexpectedly, his silver gaze lingering on her flawless complexion and big pale blue eyes and wavy, long blond hair. “I was attracted to you the first time I saw you. But,” he added with world-weary cynicism, “I was tired of buying sex with expensive gifts.”
She felt her face go hot. He had entirely the wrong idea. “I’m…” she began, wanting to explain.
He held up a lean hand. “I’m still tired of it,” he said. He
studied her without smiling, and the look he gave her made her knees go weak, despite its faint arrogance. “Do your parents know that you’re making blatant passes at total strangers? Do you really think they’d approve of your behavior?”
She almost gasped. “What my parents think is none of your business!”
“It certainly is, when I’m the man you’re trying to seduce.” He glared at her. “So let me set you straight. I don’t take college girls to bed, and I don’t appreciate being stalked by one. Play with children your own age from now on.”
His statement left her blustering. “My goodness, just because I smiled at you a time or two…!”
“You did more than smile. You positively leered,” he corrected.
“Will you stop saying that?” she cried. “For heaven’s sake, I was only looking at you! And even if I was after that kind of…of thing, why would I pick a man with a son? Some father you are! Does he know that his father wanders all over the beach accusing people of propositioning him? And you must be attached—”
He was oddly watchful, not at all angry. He was studying her face with keen, faintly amused interest. “My, my, and you’re not even redheaded,” he murmured, watching the color come and go on that exquisite complexion. “My son is too smitten with you to consider my place in your thoughts, and I don’t have a wife. She died some years ago. I do have a fiancée—almost,” he added half under his breath.
“The poor woman!”
“She’s quite well-to-do, in fact,” he said, deliberately misunderstanding her. “So am I. Another reason to avoid college students, who are notoriously without means.”
She wanted to tell him what her means were, but she was too angry to get the words out. She flushed furiously at being misjudged and insulted. She decided then and there
not to tell him about her background. He’d have to get to know her for herself, not her “means.”
“Thinking up appropriate replies?” he asked helpfully. “Something along the lines of feeding me to the sharks?”
“They’d have to draw straws so the loser could eat you!” she blurted out.
She turned and set off back down the beach, hot all over from her surge of fury.
She ran along the beach in her haste to get away from him. She’d been playing mind games with herself. She hadn’t realized that he mistook her rapt regard for serious flirting. She’d certainly be more careful in future to keep her fantasies to herself! Never again would she so much as glance at that man!
It was a pity she didn’t look back. He was standing where she left him with a peculiarly predatory look in his pale eyes, and he was laughing.
* * *
S
HELLY AND
N
AN STUCK
to the beach and the shops for the rest of the day, and that evening she persuaded Nan to go to a fast-food joint with some of the other students instead of the restaurant. She didn’t dare tell anyone why, or confess the result of her stupid behavior. If Nan suspected, she was kind enough not to say anything.
Two good things had come out of the experience, Shelly thought as she now walked by herself along the beach. It had been two days since she’d run into the man. She’d managed to avoid the worshipful glances of Mr. Sexy’s son, and she’d learned a painful lesson about obvious flirting. He was a banker. Wasn’t he supposed to be dignified and faintly reticent and withdrawn? Her father was an investment counselor, and he was like that. Of course, he had inherited wealth, too, and that made him faintly arrogant. Mr. Sexy almost cornered the market on arrogance, of course, and conceit. She had to add conceit to
the list, since he thought she couldn’t wait to jump into bed with him!
I might have known,
she told herself,
that no man could be that perfect to look at without having a few buried ugly flaws. Conceit, stupidity, arrogance…