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Read on for an excerpt from
Star-Crossed Lovers
by Kay Hooper
Available from Loveswept
Prologue
“Damn him!” Charles Logan looked at his son with bitter gray eyes. “I don’t suppose we can prove it?”
Jonathan Logan shook his head, the same hard emotion reflected in his blue eyes. “Not a chance, Dad. The inspector was smart enough not to put the money in his own bank account, and my source at city hall won’t go on the record with what he knows.”
“But he’s sure it was Stuart?”
“Who else?” Jonathan laughed shortly. “The inspector was paid to keep us tied up for weeks while he looks at every piece of wire in the building; he’s not about to accept our word that the electrical work is up to code. And you can bet Stuart’s building has already been approved. Unless we do something to slow Stuart down, we don’t have a hope in hell.”
The elder Logan turned to stare out the window of his tenth-floor office. In the distance, between two other buildings, he could see his own latest effort rearing skyward. From the outside it looked complete, but even now his crews were at work doing what they could inside it. Until the inspector passed all the wiring in the massive building, most of the work couldn’t be finished.
Though always fiercely competitive with his nemesis, Charles Logan never permitted slipshod work due to haste. But on this job, he had pushed his crews to do it right and fast, because there was so much at stake.
And now…
“Dad? We aren’t going to take this lying down?” Jonathan’s voice was incredulous. “If Stuart finishes his building first, he’ll get the Techtron contract and it’s worth millions. He’ll crow all over Atlanta that he beat us—”
“He’s not going to beat us.” Charles’s voice was deadly quiet. “No matter what we have to do, he’s not going to beat us.”
—
Frowning, Brandon Stuart gazed out his office window as he listened to one of his foremen. He said nothing until the man finished his report, then turned to stare at the man.
“We’ve dealt with these suppliers for years, Carl. What the hell’s going on?”
The foreman shrugged helplessly. “Beats me, boss. To hear them tell it, half the material we order is out of stock, and the other half turns out to be not what we ordered. I’ve had to send four trucks back just this morning. It feels to me like we’re being stonewalled.”
“Logan,” Brandon Stuart said, making the name a curse.
The foreman blinked. “I don’t see how, boss. Unless—well, I suppose they could be favoring his orders over ours. All the places we’re having trouble with supply him, too.”
“I want it stopped,” Stuart said in a voice that grated. “I don’t care what it takes, or what it costs, I want it stopped. I won’t let that bastard beat me!”
—
“They don’t know about it?”
“No, my love, they don’t. They don’t know how strongly the seeds of hate took root.”
Troubled, she said, “Dangerous.”
Cyrus Fortune smiled at his lady, but though the smile glowed with the love he always showed her, there was little reassurance in it. “The wild card, I’m afraid. I can’t be sure how the others will react to it. But a festering wound must be opened to let the poison out.”
“She’ll be hurt.”
Cyrus sighed heavily, his benign dark eyes fully expressing his sorrow. “I don’t see how it can be avoided. That wasn’t a part of my plan. But I should have anticipated what he would do.”
“Nonsense.” Her tone was bracing, but she softened it with a smile. “At any rate, I feel sure you’ll do what you can to lessen any unanticipated blows.”
“What I can.” Cyrus glanced out the small window at the thick white clouds beneath them and sighed again. “But where there is love—real or manufactured—there must be pain as well. Some blows can’t be softened.”
There was nothing she could say to that, and she knew him too well to pretend answers she didn’t have. Instead, her small hand slipped into his, and she remained silent while the sleek jet cut downward through the clouds toward its landing on the island of Martinique.
Chapter 1
“You need help?”
They faced each other, surprise in both their expressions instantly supplanted by mistrust and wariness. He stopped dead in his tracks as though he’d run into a wall, and she felt a sudden compulsion to pick up something heavy.
Michele Logan recovered first, throwing off impulses that were ridiculous, she told herself. “Damn thing died on me,” she said, waving a hand at the rental compact parked off the side of the road. She looked at her would-be rescuer and swallowed a giggle—surprising herself at the burst of humor and wondering if chivalry was dead, choked to death long ago by the Logans and the Stuarts.
“I’ll look at it,” he offered, proving that Stuarts could overcome destructive impulses just as well as Logans.
At least when the familiar battleground was more than two thousand miles away.
Michele stood back, still conscious of her own wary tension, and watched Ian Stuart bend down to peer beneath the car’s raised hood. She caught herself glancing up and down the deserted road, and felt like laughing aloud to discover she was fearful of even being seen with a Stuart.
Her father, an otherwise reasonable man, would have been tempted to disinherit her after one glance at her companion…or thunder about doing so.
But her father was back in Atlanta, not here on the island paradise of Martinique. In fact, there was no one here who could possibly know or care that representatives from both sides of a very old feud had unexpectedly encountered each other on the road to Fort-de-France.
She studied the enemy, trying to be as objective as possible. He was a big man, with powerful shoulders setting off an obviously athletic body of unusual strength. He was the kind of man who looked sexy in jeans and formal clothing alike, drawing feminine stares wherever he went. At the present, he was wearing jeans and a pullover shirt. He had wheat-gold hair worn thick and just shaggy enough to make a woman want to run her fingers through the shining strands.
Most women, Michele reminded herself, surprised that she had to. But not me.
She also reminded herself that she had never been attracted to fair men, but then had to admit silently that blond hair went awfully well with a tanned, handsome face and ice-blue eyes. Still, Ian Stuart was the last man in the world she could ever be drawn to.
In a peculiar way, they knew each other well. Ian Stuart and Michele’s brother, Jonathan, were the same age, and the families both owned houses and businesses in Atlanta, Georgia. As children, Michele and Jon had competed against Ian in horse shows and rodeos, and the boys had brawled on and off their different schools’ football fields.
Michele knew for a fact that Jon had lost at least one high school girlfriend to Ian Stuart, and that Ian had lost two desired horses at auction to Jon’s determined bidding.
Michele was twenty-six, Ian was thirty-one, and this was the first time in their adult lives that they had met face to face and alone.
She didn’t know how to react to the unexpected situation. All her life she had listened to invectives directed at the Stuarts in general and their neighbors in particular; she’d even spat a few curses of her own. She could have listed their treacheries going all the way back to the fifteenth century. Instinct told her she should be raining invectives of her own now, but common sense questioned the need for it.
Ian looked up and saw her watching him, his pale blue eyes as wary as her own probably were. He straightened slowly and looked at her for a moment in silence, then glanced at the compact. “This needs a mechanic, which I’m not,” he said in a neutral tone. “I’m going into Fort-de-France; I can send a tow truck back. Or,” he added after a moment, “I can give you a lift.”
Michele found herself wond
ering if the earth would open up and swallow them both at this heresy, and laughed as she realized her muscles were braced for a thunderclap. It was ridiculous! “Thanks, I’d appreciate a lift,” she said. “I can call the rental company from the hotel and have them deal with it.”
“Where are you staying?”
“The Arcadia.”
“So am I.”
Moments later, sitting comfortably beside Ian in his own rental car, she dismissed the fleeting guilt at her traitorous behavior. Because it wasn’t traitorous, not really. She was a sensible woman and saw no reason why she should prefer to roast in the hot sun rather than accept a brief ride from a man who had never done her an injury.
“Lucky you came along,” she ventured casually. “I might have been stuck out here all day.” There had been a few passing cars, but none had stopped.
“I half expected you to throw the offer of a ride back in my face,” he murmured.
“At home, I might have,” she admitted, turning her head to gaze at the colorful tropical landscape all around them. “But who can fight in paradise?”
Ian sent her a glance, taking the opportunity of her distraction to study her unobtrusively. It had been years since he’d been this close to Michele Logan. On that last memorable occasion, she’d been thrown by her horse during warm-ups for a Grand Prix jumping event, and he had offered her a hand up. Sixteen-year-old Michele had rewarded him for his pains by roundly cursing him, and had regained her feet under her own power.
She had also beaten him in the event.
Ten years had changed her…a lot. Then she’d been thin as a rail and all legs; she was slender now, but no one would ever compare her to a rail. The faded jeans and pale blue T-shirt she wore clung to every curve, and those curves were voluptuous enough to inspire erotic fantasies. Her legs were still long, but they, too, were the stuff of men’s dreams. Her waist-length black hair, wild as a colt’s mane for most of her childhood, was confined neatly in a French braid now, and the severe style emphasized the delicate bone structure of her lovely face. Those bones had seemed awkwardly arranged during her childhood and adolescence, but maturity had smoothed sharp planes and angles into striking beauty.
On the rare occasions in the past when Ian had seen her—at a distance, naturally, and usually across crowded rooms—he had always been conscious of faint surprise. From tall, robust parents of average looks had come this slight, smoke-eyed, raven-haired woman of unusual and distinctive beauty; she was a throwback to the Celtic ancestors she and Ian could both claim, as physically unlike her present-day family as he was unlike his own.
Ian wondered if the differences were only physical; her brother Jon would have chosen a ride with the devil over one with a Stuart.
Feeling her attention shift back to him, he said, “What are you doing in paradise?”
“Vacationing,” she answered in the same pleasant tone she’d been using, her low voice rather husky. “November in Atlanta was unbearable. All that cold rain. I had vacation time coming to me, and the company wasn’t willing to let me take it next year. So, Martinique.”
She had chosen not to enter the family construction business, he knew. He thought it odd but interesting that she was employed by a large insurance company as an investigator.
“I’d planned to come with a friend,” Michele said, “but she got held up by her job and won’t be arriving for a few more days. How about you?”
“Business,” he answered. “I’m supposed to be meeting a potential client here, but he’s been delayed.”
“You’re an architect, aren’t you?”
He nodded, very conscious that she was looking intently at him. His awareness of her surprised him more than a little. “Like your brother,” he said, and from the corner of his eye saw her grimace slightly.
“I wonder if, pardon the pun, that was by design.”
Smiling faintly, he said, “Jon and I both being architects? I don’t know about your father, but mine wasn’t happy with my career choice. He felt growing up around the construction business provided all the knowledge I’d need to take over the company one day. I was born to follow plans, he said, not draw them.”
She laughed softly, and he was astonished to realize how focused his senses were on her. It was just like the first instant he’d recognized her there by the car, when he had felt the shocked wariness of encountering not an enemy, but something totally unexpected.
“Not by design, then,” she said dryly. “Dad hit the roof when Jon announced his career plans. He complained that all those summers working for the firm had been wasted. He’s come around in the last few years, though, especially after Jon convinced him that an architect would be an asset to the family business.”
“Mine still has reservations,” Ian said. “We argue about once a month, regular as clockwork.”
“Who wins?” she asked, amused.
“Me. Dad says he takes consolation in the knowledge that strong-minded men breed strong-minded sons.”
“And daughters,” Michele commented somewhat dryly.
“Your father didn’t like your being an investigator?”
If she was surprised by his knowledge, it didn’t show on her face. “Are you kidding? Whenever he catches my eye, Dad looks wistfully at some of the old paintings hanging on the walls of our house. All done by our ancestral Southern belles, of course. He didn’t mind my showing horses or running barrels in the rodeo, but he winces whenever he has to face the fact that his gently nurtured daughter is a licensed investigator.”
“Were you never tempted to get into the family business?”
Michele was silent for a moment, her gaze directed at the windshield but unfocused. Then she looked at Ian. “The business end of it interested me, but some of Dad’s goals weren’t mine. I couldn’t see expending so much energy in a rivalry that was so…bitter.”
It was the first time either of them had mentioned the feud. Ian wanted to probe her feelings on the matter, especially since her statements indicated she was far less rabid about it than her father and brother. But they reached the hotel just then, and as he pulled the car into the circular entrance drive, he felt a definite reluctance to part company with Michele Logan.
A parking valet came out to take the car, and they walked into the cool lobby together, both silent. Neither spoke until they were in the elevator. Michele pushed the button for her floor, watched him follow suit, and realized absently that his room was three floors above hers. Then Ian broke the silence in a mild tone.
“We’re both alone here for the time being. Have dinner with me tonight.”
Michele was conscious of shock, but it took her several seconds to realize why.
Because he was a Stuart.
All her life, she had been told repeatedly and with passionate insistence that there was nothing on earth worse than a Stuart—except two of them. Told, moreover, by the father she had always adored. And no matter what logical protests her rational mind could counter with, it was impossible for her to discount what had been drummed into her since childhood.
As the elevator doors opened onto her floor, Ian pressed a button on the control panel to hold them open. He looked at her steadily. “Here at the hotel, of course. The food’s great.”
She drew a short breath, freed at last from a cold place she was horrified to find inside her. A place that had been sown with dark seeds. She felt shaken and was aware of an almost overpowering relief; the seeds might have been sown, but there was nothing dark and twisted growing there. Only an echo of what might have been.
Or what might yet be.
That flashing insight reminded her that she was far more than a mere continuation of a story that had been written in stone five hundred years ago. She was an individual with her own thoughts and beliefs, and it was entirely up to her whether she chose to hate another person—with or without sufficient cause.
And neither this man nor his family had given her any cause to hate.
“Michele?”
Had he ever said her name? She didn’t think so. It felt unfamiliar coming from him, a roughly beautiful sound like nothing she’d ever heard before. She looked up at him, uncertain and more than a little wary, but the cool hint of challenge in his eyes made her decide. “Sure.” Her voice was unsteady, and she concentrated on firming it up. “I’d be glad of the company.”
Ian smiled. “Good. I’ll meet you in the lobby, then. Around seven?”
Michele nodded. “I’ll be there. And thanks for the rescue, Ian.”
“Anytime.”
She got off the elevator, almost immediately turning right to head down the hallway to her room. It wasn’t until she was inside that a shaken laugh escaped her. She felt strange, as if all her emotions had been tumbled about and left in a heap.
She dropped her purse on the big bed and kicked off her sandals, then went to adjust the temperature of the air conditioning. It was unsettling to discover the room was actually cool according to the thermostat; it seemed hot to her. Deciding firmly that the time spent in the sun after her car broke down had given her a very mild case of heat exhaustion, she called room service for a pitcher of iced tea. She spent the next few minutes on the phone with the car rental company, then changed into shorts and went to let the waiter in with her order.
After he’d gone, she banked the pillows on her bed and curled up with a glass of cold tea. She’d turned the television on to a news channel, but didn’t pay much attention even though she stared at the screen.
Ian Stuart. A peripheral part of her life for nearly as long as she could remember, he had suddenly appeared center stage with no warning. And she didn’t know how she felt about that.
A scene from ten years before sprang vividly into her mind, surprising her with its clarity. A show ring during warm-ups for a Grand Prix event. She’d been riding a young horse, expecting nothing from him and intending only to school him over moderate jumps so he could become accustomed to shows. He had balked at the third jump and shied violently, throwing her.