Too Wise To Wed?. PENNY JORDAN

the last time. So rarely...that it had been tricky getting himself to admit that his determined restoration of Abbie and her two little girls to her roving husband’s side had had less to do with supporting her than with satisfying his own need to see if the luscious, long-legged redhead whom Clay was making such determined eye contact with looked as good from the front as she did from the back.

      She had...unfortunately for him.

      He glanced at his watch. It was time he left. He had some paperwork he wanted to get through. He had just about made his way to his car when Brad suddenly materialised at his side.

      ‘Kyle!’ he exclaimed, smiling at him. ‘Did you get to meet Star? I meant to introduce you to one another since you’ll be working closely together once you take over from Tim Burbridge in Britain... I still haven’t formalised the details of her contract with her yet, but from what I’ve seen of her work there’s no doubt in my mind that she’ll do a good job for us.

      ‘Tim Burbridge is taking a month’s leave from the end of next week, as you know, and I’d like the two of you to meet beforehand so that he can hand over things to you; of course, you’ll be staying on to work alongside him once he’s back at work... I think you’ll find him very co-operative and open. He understands how important it is for us to bring our British distribution network up to the same high standards we have over here in the States...

      ‘It won’t be easy, though,’ Brad warned him. ‘One of our biggest problems is recruiting the right calibre of technician. Not so much on the technical side—they all have the necessary skills for the job; no, the problem is more on the motivation side of things, from what I can see...’

      ‘Mmm...I’ve been thinking about that,’ Kyle responded. ‘I think some kind of in-house training scheme coupled with incentive awards might be one way around the problem... But, of course, first I’ll have to discuss things with Tim,’ he added diplomatically.

      ‘Well, that’s something you and Tim and Star can work on together,’ Brad told him. ‘Did you get to meet her?’

      ‘Not exactly... Not officially.’ Kyle was deliberately vague.

      ‘Well, I’ll make sure that the two of you do get a chance to get together before you fly out to Britain,’ Brad promised him.

      ‘You know how much I appreciate what you’re doing for us, don’t you, Kyle?’ Brad asked his friend. ‘So far as I am concerned, the distribution network you’ve set up for us is one of the prime forces underpinning our success. It doesn’t matter how good a product is; if you can’t get it to the customer when and where he wants it and install it and keep it in good working order, it doesn’t matter a damn how good it is.’

      Kyle gave a small shrug. ‘It works both ways,’ he reminded Brad. ‘No matter how good a distribution and servicing network is, it can’t operate efficiently without a reliable product.’

      ‘We make a good team,’ Brad told him, ‘and I can’t pretend that I’m not hoping you’ll be able to help us turn the British side of our business around and bring it into line with our home market success.

      ‘Will you be joining us for dinner this evening?’ Brad asked him as Kyle started to unlock his car.

      Here was his chance to get out of his dinner date with Star, Kyle acknowledged, and he would be all kinds of a fool...asking for all kinds of trouble if he passed up on it.

      Ten minutes later, driving towards his own lake-shore home, contemplating the brief, negative shake of his head and polite words of excuse with which he had responded to Brad’s question, he grimaced to himself.

      OK, so he was all kinds of a fool!

       CHAPTER TWO

      IT TOOK Star an unusually long time to prepare for her dinner date with Kyle. It was not like her to dither over what to wear or to question the effect she was likely to have on her date; she dressed to please herself and not anyone else, and yet, for some reason, she found herself eschewing the loose silky cotton dress she had originally decided to wear in favor of a much more sophisticated and slinky one-shouldered black jersey number that she had added to her packing at the last minute on some odd impulse.

      Like today’s silk and linen dress, she had bought it in Milan where they knew all about the subtle art of emphasising a woman’s sensuality rather than her sexuality.

      It was not a dress that a man would immediately and necessarily see as provocative. It skimmed the curves of her body rather than clung to them, but the way it exposed the smooth, warm curve of her shoulder and bared one arm, the way it highlighted the fact that one needed a well-toned body and precious little underwear to show it off made it the kind of outfit that bemused men with its subtly sensual message and automatically had every other woman in the room narrowing her eyes warily.

      To complement the dress Star had swept her hair up into a smooth chignon and put on heavy, almost baroque dull gold earrings plus a single, matching dull gold bangle.

      She was just about to apply her favourite perfume when something stopped her, and, instead of touching it lavishly to her pulse points, she sprayed a small cloud of it into the air and then walked slowly into it. This way the fragrance would be so elusive and subtle that anyone wanting to know if she was truly wearing it would have to move very close to her—very close indeed.

      Smiling with satisfaction, she picked up her bag and headed for the door, pausing for a second before turning back and quickly spraying the bed with the same delicate perfume.

      So, he liked his roses to be perfumed, did he...? Well, tonight he certainly wouldn’t have any complaints. Still smiling to herself, Star stepped out into the corridor.

      Whoever had been responsible for the interior design of the hotel was obviously a fan of the Gone With the Wind era and had a very romantic streak. Star decided, because the bank of lifts, instead of being situated in the foyer, was actually located on a balconied mezzanine area above it so that one’s entrance into the foyer had to be made via a sweeping, curved staircase.

      There were, of course, amenity lifts situated discreetly to one side of the foyer, but there was no harm in taking advantage of the props which had so usefully been loaned to her, Star reflected as she paused at the top of the flight of stairs for a moment, firmly refusing to glance downwards in the direction of the foyer to see if her dinner date was there to observe her, before moving elegantly down the stairs in a very fair imitation of the arrogantly graceful prowl that she had seen top models adopt at prestige fashion shows.

      Kyle did see her, his brain grimly reinforcing what it had already told him. She looked, he acknowledged as he studied Star’s elegant descent from the shadows of the mezzanine, much as he might have imagined some fabled Greek goddess to have looked—almost slightly inhuman in the perfection of her feminine mystery, her profile sculptured, her gaze remote, her body... Hastily he forced himself not to think about exactly what that sleek, fluid stretch of matt fabric was concealing.

      He was not surprised to see, when he checked the foyer, that virtually every other man there was watching her, mesmerised by the strength of her sensuality and her own indifference to it.

      As she reached the last stair he started to walk towards her. For a second Star almost didn’t recognise him. For some reason she had expected him to look as he had done earlier in the day and for a moment the sight of him wearing not a white T-shirt and jeans but an immaculately cut dinner suit threw her:

      It made him look taller, broader and somehow more remote, more inaccessible...more...formidable.

      Giving herself a small inward shake, Star dismissed. such unproductive and over-imaginative thoughts. He was still the same man, whatever he chose to wear, whatever outward image he might try to present; inwardly he was just like all the rest of his sex and, like them, sooner or later, no matter how much he might try to deny it, he would prove himself to be as faithless, as worthless as the rest.

      ‘Never make the mistakes I’ve made,’ Star’s