Диана Палмер – Man of the Hour: Night Of Love (страница 2)

Meg had been devastated. She’d cried herself to sleep. Rather than face Steven and fight for a relationship with him, she’d opted to leave and go to New York to study ballet.

Like a coward, Meg had run. But what she’d seen spoke for itself and her heart was broken. If Steven could go to another woman that quickly, he certainly wasn’t the type to stay faithful after he was married. Steven had been so ardent that it was miraculous she was still a virgin, anyway.

All of those facts raised doubts, the biggest one being that Steven had probably only wanted to marry her to keep all the stock from the partnership in the family. It had seemed quite logical at the time. Everyone knew how ambitious Steven was, and he and his father hadn’t been too happy at some of the changes Meg’s father had wanted to make at the time of the engagement.

Meg had gone to New York on the first plane out of Wichita, to be met by one of her mother’s friends and set up in a small apartment near the retired prima ballerina with whom she would begin her studies.

Nicole, meanwhile, met Steve for coffee and explained that Meg had left town. Afterward, Meg heard later, Steven had gotten roaring drunk for the first, last and only time in his life. An odd reaction for a man who only wanted to marry her for her shares of stock, and who’d thrown her out of his life. But Steven hadn’t called or written, and he never alluded to the brief time they’d spent as a couple. His behavior these days was as cold as he’d become himself.

Steve hadn’t touched her since their engagement. But his eyes had, in a way that made her knees weak. It was a good thing that she spent most of her time in New York. Otherwise, if she’d been around Steven very much, she might have fallen headlong into an affair with him. She wouldn’t have been able to resist him, and he was experienced enough to know that. He’d made sure that she kept her distance and he kept his. But the lingering passion she felt for him hadn’t dimmed over the years. It was simply buried, so that it wouldn’t interfere with her dreams of becoming a prima ballerina. She’d forced herself to settle; she’d chosen not to fight for his love. Her life since had hardly been a happy one, but she told herself that she was content.

Steve still came to the Shannon house to see David, and the families got together at the annual company picnics and benefits. These days, the family meant Steven and his mother and Meg and her brother David, because the older Shannons were dead now.

Mason Ryker, Steven’s father, and John and Nicole Shannon had died in the years since Meg went to New York; Mason of a heart attack, and John and Nicole in a private-plane crash the very year Meg had left Wichita. Amy Ryker was as protective of Meg as if she’d been her mother instead of Steve’s, but she lived in West Palm Beach now and only came home when she had to. She and Steven had never really been able to bear each other’s company.

Steven had women hanging from the chandeliers, from what Amy told Meg on the occasions when she came to New York to watch Meg dance. He was serious about none of them, and there had never been a whisper of a serious commitment since his brief engagement to Meg.

Meg herself had become buried in her work. All she lived and breathed was the dance. The hours every day of grueling practice, the dieting and rigid life-style she lived made relationships difficult if not impossible. She often thought she was a little cold as a woman. Since Steven, she’d never felt her innocence threatened. Men had dated her, of course, but she was too conscious of the dangers to risk the easy life-styles some of the older dancers had once indulged in. These days, a one-night stand could be life-threatening. Besides, Meg thought sadly, only Steven had ever made her want intimacy. Her memories of him were devastating sometimes, despite the violent passion he’d shown her the last time they’d been together.

She stretched her aching muscles, and her mind wandered back to the mysterious Jane who’d telephoned. Who the hell was Jane? she wondered, and what did Steven want with someone who could speak that haughtily over the phone? She pictured a milky little blonde with a voluptuous figure and stretched even harder.

It was time to take off the lean roast and cottage potatoes she was cooking for supper by the time David walked in the door, still in his tennis outfit, looking as pleasant and jovial as ever. He had the same coloring his sister had, but he was shorter and a little broader than she.

He grinned at her. “Just thought I might mention that you’re in it up to your neck. Steve got a call while we were at his house, and your goose is about to be cooked.”

She stopped dead in the hall as Steven Ryker walked in behind her brother. Steve was a little over six feet tall, very dark and intimidating. He reminded her of actors who played mobsters, because he had the same threatening look about him, and even a deep scar down one cheek. It had probably been put there by some jealous woman in his checkered past, she thought venomously, but it gave him a rakish look. Even his eyes were unusual. They were a cross between ice blue and watered gray, and they could almost cut the skin when they looked as they did at the moment. The white shorts he was wearing left the muscular length of his tanned, powerful legs bare. A white knit shirt did the same for his arms. He was incredibly fit for a man on the wrong side of thirty who sat at a desk all day.

Right now he looked very casual, dressed in his tennis outfit, and that was the most deceptive thing about him. He was never casual. He always played to win, even at sports. He was also the most sensuous, sexy man she’d ever known. Or ever would. Just looking at him made her weak-kneed. She hid her reaction to him as she always had, in humor.

“Ah, Steven.” Meg sighed, batting her long eyelashes at him. “How lovely to see you. Did one of your women die, or is there some simpler reason that we’re being honored by your presence?”

“Pardon me while I go out back and skin a rock,” David mumbled with a grin, diving quickly past his sister in a most ungentlemanly way to get out of the line of fire.

“Coward!” she yelled after him as the door slammed.

“You wouldn’t need protection if you could learn to keep your mouth shut, Mary Margaret,” Steven said with a cool smile. “I’d had my calls forwarded here while I was playing tennis. Jane couldn’t believe what she’d heard, so she telephoned my home again and got me. It so happened David and I had stopped back by the house to look at a new painting I’d bought. I canceled the call forwarding just in time—or I might have been left in blissful ignorance.”

She glared at him. “It was your own fault. You don’t have to have your women telephone you here!”

The glitter in his eyes got worse. “Jealous, Meg?” he taunted.

“Of you? God forbid,” she said as casually as she could, and with a forced smile. “Of course I do remember vividly the wonderful things you can do with your hands and those hard lips, darling, but I’m quite urbane these days and less easily impressed.”

“Careful,” he warned softly. “You may be more vulnerable than you realize.”

She backed down. “Anyway,” she muttered, “why don’t you just take Jane Thingamabob out for a steak and warm her back up again?”

“Jane Dray is my mother’s maiden aunt,” he said after a minute, watching her reaction with amusement. “You might remember her from the last company picnic?”

Meg did, with horror. The old dowager was a people-eater of the first order, who probably still wore corsets and cursed modern transportation. “Oh, dear,” she began.

“She is now horrified that her favorite great-nephew is sleeping with little Meggie Shannon, who used to be such a sweet, innocent child.”

“Oh, my God,” Meg groaned, leaning against the wall.

“Yes. And she’ll more than likely rush to tell your great-aunt Henrietta, who will feel obliged to write to my mother in West Palm Beach and tell her the scandalous news that you are now a scarlet woman. And my mother, who always has preferred you to me, will naturally assume that I seduced you, not the reverse.”

“Damn!” she moaned. “This is all your fault!”

He folded his arms over his broad chest. “You brought it on yourself. Don’t blame me. I’m sure my mother will be utterly shocked at your behavior, nevertheless, especially since she’s taken great pains to try to make up for the loss of your own mother years ago.”

“I’ll kill myself!” she said dramatically.

“Could you fix supper first?” David asked, sticking his head around the kitchen door. “I’m starved. So is Steve.”

“Then why don’t the two of you go out to a restaurant?” she asked, still reeling from her horrid mistake.

“Heartless woman.” David sighed. “And I was so looking forward to the potatoes and roast I can smell cooking on the stove.”

He managed to look pitiful and thin, all at the same time. She glared at him. “Well, I suppose I can manage supper. As if you need feeding up! Look at you!”

“I’m a walking monument of your culinary skills,” David argued. “If I could cook, I’d look healthy between your vacations.”