Ian had been there, riding an experienced jumper, and he had been the first to offer her a hand up. Mortified at having been dumped like a Sunday rider practically at his feet, she had spat a few biting comments on his ancestry and had picked herself up without his help. The sting to her pride had been painful, and it was lucky her young horse wasn’t a timid one who would have been easily ruined by being pushed too hard too soon; when she rode him into the ring later, she was riding fiercely to win.
She had held her mount with iron control, refusing to let him run out at the jumps, driving him over them with sheer determination, riding him harder than ever before. The result had been a spectacular victory, and her horse had become the best jumper she’d ever owned.
All because of embarrassment.
The memory gave her pause. Was it only the ten years between sixteen and twenty-six that made her feel differently about Ian Stuart now? Or did she feel differently? She hadn’t ridden to beat him that day because of family rivalry; the feud between their fathers hadn’t even entered her head. She had done it because the toss had made her feel like a fool, and she’d wanted to show Ian that she was a first-rate rider and could handle any horse.
Childish pride, she decided. That was all. She hadn’t even thought about Ian during the years after that occasion. Oh, she’d seen him from time to time at a distance at social or charity events, and both her father and Jon had offered frequent scathing remarks about the doings of Ian and his father. But she hadn’t thought about him consciously, hadn’t considered his unique and disturbing place in her life. She’d been busy finishing school, going to college, getting a job. She had dated regularly, but hadn’t become deeply involved with any of the men she saw.
The phone on the nightstand rang, and Michele nearly jumped out of her skin. Grimacing, she picked up the receiver. “Hello?”
“They’ve done it to us again,” Jon announced without preamble.
She didn’t have to ask who “they” were, or why her brother had called to tell her about it; Jon tended to keep in touch with her almost daily if she was away from home, and was always quick to report the latest underhanded dealings by the Stuarts.
“What now?” she asked, suppressing the knowledge that her brother would demand her immediate return if she told him that Ian was in Martinique and in the same hotel.
“They’ve bribed half the inspectors, that’s what.” As always, when he spoke of the Stuarts his normally pleasant voice was hard. “Our crews are sitting on their duffs waiting for the final inspections of the electrical and plumbing work, and the inspectors are staring at every piece of wire and pipe in the damned building.”
“Jon, you don’t really believe they’ve bribed city officials?” She made the attempt even though she knew it would be fruitless.
“Payoffs and kickbacks. Hell, you know how it works.”
“I don’t suppose you have any proof?”
“Michele, what’s wrong with you? Since when have the Stuarts been stupid enough to leave fingerprints?” Even that backhanded compliment was grudging.
She leaned back against the headboard of the bed and sighed softly. She loved her brother, but, like their father, he had a wide blind spot when it came to the Stuarts. “Sorry,” she said in a light tone. “I guess it’s just hard to hate in paradise.”
Jon grunted a response that could have meant anything, then asked, “Is Jackie with you?”
“No, she was delayed. She’ll be here in a few days.”
“What’re you going to do?”
Michele could hardly help but laugh. “Brother dear, I believe I can entertain myself for a few days alone. I’ve been pretty good at that since I left the crib.”
“Well, be careful.” He sounded amused by her tart reply, but also a bit restless. “Big girls have more to worry about than little ones, and you’re a long way from home.”
“I’ll be fine, Jon. You just promise me that you and Dad won’t try some harebrained stunt to get even with the Stuarts for what you think they’re doing.”
He laughed. “I’ll probably talk to you tomorrow, Misha.”
His childhood nickname for her reassured her only a little, because he hadn’t promised. “Jon—”
“Don’t fall for some tall, dark stranger. Bye.”
Michele cradled the receiver, troubled. She got up to refill her glass, then settled back on the bed. She didn’t feel guilty at not having told Jon about Ian’s presence. Her brother had always been overly protective of her when it came to men, and he would have reacted violently to the knowledge.
But she was disturbed, both by what could be happening in Atlanta and by her own actions here. Her rational mind told her that having dinner with a man in the hotel was nothing to be worried about, but the fact that the man was Ian Stuart troubled her a great deal.
She glanced at the clock on the nightstand. Five. In two hours, she was supposed to sit down to a civilized meal with the sworn enemy of her father and brother. The very thought seemed melodramatic, but Michele wasn’t tempted to laugh, or even to mock it. She was only too aware that the simple act of having dinner with Ian Stuart was enough to tear violently the fabric of her family.
If they ever found out.
—
He was standing near the desk in the lobby when Michele came out of the elevator, and she walked toward him steadily with the unnerved feeling of having burned her bridges. She had dressed to give herself courage; the midnight-blue linen dress she wore was full-skirted and high-necked, but left her back and arms bare, and she knew the style suited her.
He must have thought so, too, for she could see the appreciation in his striking pale blue eyes as he looked at her. He, too, was dressed informally in a light-brown jacket and dark slacks, with his white shirt open at the throat.
“I thought you might stand me up,” he murmured as she reached him.
“I almost did,” she admitted honestly.
“What made you change your mind?”
Michele drew a short breath. “Sheer cussedness, I guess. I like to make up my own mind about things.”
“And people?”
“And people.” She managed a smile.
Ian smiled slightly as well, but his eyes were very intent. “Of course, the fact that no one’s going to know about this didn’t influence you at all.”
“Of course not. Besides, you could have hired a photographer to take pictures to send to my father.” She blinked, conscious of shock at her own words.
Ian took her arm lightly and began leading her across the lobby toward the dining room. “I didn’t.”
“I’m sorry. I don’t know why I said that.”
“Because you’ve been taught to suspect the motives of anyone named Stuart.”
“Do you suspect my motives?”
“No.”
Michele looked up at him as they walked, a little surprised to find that her head barely topped his shoulder even though she was wearing heels. “Why not?” She was honestly curious, wondering if their upbringings had been so different or if Ian had simply risen above his.
Ian didn’t answer until they’d been shown to their table in the quiet restaurant. When they were supplied with menus and left alone again, he looked across the table at her. “Because I think you’re honest, Michele. If you wanted to fight me, you’d do it openly.”
“With all my motives flying like flags?”
“Yes. I wish you could believe the same about me.”
She hesitated, but couldn’t lie. “I want to. The rational part of me does.”
“But,” he murmured.
Michele nodded. “But. I was thinking about it up in my room. Do you suppose that after five hundred years it’s become embedded in the genes?”
“I’d hate to believe that.”
“So would I.” She bent her head and began studying the menu, adding lightly, “I’m starved. I skipped lunch so I could explore the island.”
The soft lighting in the dining room
combined with her black hair and gleaming blue dress to lend her a curiously insubstantial air. And her manner toward him intensified the impression, because she was troubled and wary. Ian couldn’t stop looking at her, even as he told himself this was worse than reckless, it was insane.
He wasn’t worried about sitting across a dinner table from Michele Logan; that was certainly harmless and even his father—after an initial explosion—would be able to make little of it. What bothered him was his reaction to her. Every fleeting expression in her smoke-gray eyes fascinated him, and her delicate face held his gaze as if she were his lodestar.
When he had taken her arm and walked beside her through the lobby, he had been vividly aware of her warmth, of the faintly spicy scent of her perfume. He had wanted to put his hand on her bare back, to touch the pale gold skin that looked so soft and silky. Then she had glanced up at him with those haunting eyes, and he’d felt a jolt to some part of him. He didn’t know what it meant, but he knew instinctively that something had been forever changed by it.
“I think I’ll have the chicken.” She looked at him, faint color rising in her cheeks. “How about you?”
He realized that she had felt him staring at her, that she was disturbed by the steady gaze. “The same,” he said, without the faintest idea of what he was agreeing to.
Michele folded her hands over the menu and fixed her eyes on them. In a conversational tone, she said, “What we were talking about before is something neither of us can forget, you know. Suspicions. Whether they’re embedded in the genes or the mind, they’re still there.”
“I don’t have any reason to hate you, Michele. And you have no reason to hate me.”
She nodded. “I know. But not hating is one thing; becoming friends is something else. Even if we could, I mean. Even if we wanted to. Because it isn’t just us.”
“Why?” He leaned toward her unconsciously, wanting her to look at him so he could see what she was thinking and feeling. He didn’t think about what he was saying, he simply felt compelled to make her understand something that was very clear to him. “It’s just us here, Michele. No fathers or brothers looking over our shoulders. Nobody around who gives a damn if we’re enemies, friends…or lovers.”
She felt a strange flare of heat at the last word and didn’t know if it was the word itself or the husky way he said it that caused her reaction. She didn’t dare meet his eyes because she was half afraid of what she might find in his gaze. Tension wound tightly inside her, like a spring coiling, and she couldn’t seem to hold her breathing steady.
“Michele?”
Softly, still without looking at him, she said, “When I was a little girl, I didn’t know that Stuart was a name. I’d heard my father say it many times, but all I knew from his tone of voice was that a ‘Stuart’ was something bad.”
Very deliberately, he reached across the table and covered her folded hands with one of his own. “I thought Logan was a curse until I was seven. But I’m not seven anymore. And you’re not a little girl. We have to start with just us, Michele. Or else blindly follow twenty generations of tradition in our families.”
She stared at the big hand covering hers, feeling the warmth and heavy strength of it. Finally, she raised her eyes to his, seeing in them some of the intensity that she had felt earlier. “I don’t think I’d be a very good trailblazer,” she said unsteadily. “There’s so much I’d be risking. So much I could lose. Would lose.” Her father’s love. Her brother’s.
For a brief moment, Ian’s hand tightened over hers, then he leaned back and withdrew from her. “All right,” he said quietly. “I suppose that not hating is something.”
Ian signaled the waiter, going on in the same mild tone. “We can at least have dinner in peace; the families don’t have to know we’re even on the same island.”
Michele gave her order and listened as he gave his. She felt a strong sense of loss and also a bitter feeling of failure. She had never really failed in her life, not at anything that mattered to her—and somehow Ian mattered to her very much. She wasn’t sure why, perhaps simply because it was her nature to make up her own mind about things. Sometimes, there was no choice to make. If she could have believed that the feud could be stopped because she and Ian made peace between them, she would have risked it, she told herself fiercely. But she knew both her father and brother too well to think that was possible.
“Don’t look so troubled,” Ian said softly. “Maybe when it’s our turn to carry the torch, we can do a better job with it.”
“No,” she said. “Maybe you don’t want to hate, but Jon does. Dad’s poisoned him. He’s heard so much more than I have. I don’t know, maybe he got the brunt of it because he was older. Or maybe because he’d always keep the Logan name. Dad isn’t rational where you’re concerned. And no matter how good your intentions are, Ian, if somebody hates you long enough and tries to hurt you often enough, you’ll hate, too.”
Ian frowned slightly. “It sounds as if your father is more bitter than mine. Do you know why?”
She shook her head. “No. But Jon knows something. When we were younger he said that your father had done something terrible to ours a long time ago. He wouldn’t tell me what it was.”
“It must have had something to do with a woman.”
She was surprised. “Why do you say that?”
“Otherwise, Jon would have told you.”
Michele thought about that, and somewhere deep inside she felt a little chill. Had some unknown woman intensified an already bitter rivalry? What had happened? Women were vulnerable when men feuded; they could be hurt in so many ways. They could be used as weapon or as victim. As soon as that thought occurred to her, she felt another chill and then anger hard on the heels of it. These damned suspicions! Ian had merely suggested that the two of them make peace, not crawl into bed together.
Into bed…together…
Her breathing seemed to stop for an instant, and a wave of dizziness swept over her. Images flashed in her mind, images that were raw and powerful—and undeniably exciting. For the first time in her life, she felt the shocked awareness of her own sexuality, and the images were so strong they were almost overpowering. The thought of being in bed with Ian Stuart triggered a surge of emotions as confused as they were complex.
“What are you thinking?” he asked suddenly.
Michele felt heat rise in her face. She wasn’t about to confess the erotic images still playing through her mind, not the least because they shocked her to her bones. “I was…wishing that it was simple. Wishing it was just us.” She heard the husky words emerge, and felt another jolt because she knew it was true.
“Would you trust me then?”
“I don’t know. But I’d only be risking myself if I took the chance.”
The waiter arrived and began to serve their food just then, and Ian didn’t respond to what she’d said. Michele was grateful for the reprieve, using it to try desperately to cope with these stunning, unexpected, and wholly unfamiliar feelings. She ate food she didn’t taste, bewildered by what had happened to her—and why it had happened.
Why had it happened? Why had her chance encounter with Ian and the reckless act of having dinner with him sparked these wild surges of desire? How could she possibly feel such things for this man of all men? She had never felt desire until now, not at all; her strongest interest in a man had been mild and detached compared to this.
But now…
Tension coiled in her as her emotions churned chaotically. Make peace with Ian? No, that would never be possible now. Even if it were just the two of them, she knew that what she wanted of him had little to do with peace. It was as if some barrier inside her had collapsed into rubble at the slightest touch, and what she saw beyond that shattered wall terrified her.
“Michele?”
She looked up at him, seeing a lean, handsome face that was all too dreadfully familiar now, because something, some deeply buried instinct, told her it had always been behind that wall
. Waiting.
It was too much to accept, to think about; she had to get away from it. She set her fork aside automatically and pushed her chair back. “Excuse me,” she murmured, rising jerkily to her feet.
“Michele, what’s wrong?” He was on his feet as well, staring at her with concern and something else in his eyes.
She couldn’t answer him, because all the answers were so terribly dangerous. Without another word, she hurried away from their table. She heard him call after her, but the sound of her name only made her move faster. She was almost running by the time she reached the lobby, and barely noticed a few startled faces as she raced across and fled out into the night.
The hotel boasted a strip of private beach, deserted this late, and it was there Michele ran. She kicked off her heels almost as soon as she left the hotel, leaving them where they fell. She passed the blue-lit pool and blindly followed the path through the lush garden until she felt sand under her feet and saw the moonlit darkness of the ocean.
When she reached the water she turned, racing on the wet sand. For years she’d made a habit of morning runs to keep in shape. She ran fast now, the wind tearing her hair free of its braid and whipping her skirt out behind her. She ran because she had to escape.
Love stories you’ll never forget
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Kay Hooper, The Lady and the Lion
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