Beauty and the Brain (27 page)

“Have a seat,” she said, gesturing at the
room. She had a very expensive suite, with a small parlor, a
bedroom, and a bathroom. “There are lots of magazines and books and
stuff. They’ll keep you amused while I bathe.”

He turned that hot, hot gaze upon her, and
Brenda Fitzpatrick, who was about as worldly as a person could be,
felt herself blush. Darn. This was awful.

“Thanks,” he said. “I’ll wait in here if you
want me to.”

She felt her eyes pop open as his
insinuation struck her. Had he expected her to invite him into the
bathroom while she bathed? The unmitigated cad. She wished the idea
didn’t appeal to her so much.

“Yes,” she said coolly. “Please wait in
here.”

He sat with a sigh on the big brocaded sofa
stretched in front of the fireplace

Brenda retreated into the bathroom. She even
locked the door. Inside herself she felt a tumble of emotions. She
was accustomed to men lusting after her, and she’d learned
innumerable ways of dissuading them without earning their
enmity.

She’d thought Colin was different. She
didn’t want him to turn out to be just another sex-crazed man
hoping for a brief fling with her. She didn’t know why the notion
made her want to burst into tears, but it did.

“Golly, girl, you have it bad,” she muttered
angrily as she dipped her toe into the warm bathwater. She’d dumped
in a lot of her favorite orange-blossom scent because she felt so
sweaty and dirty.

It was insane of her to want Colin Peters to
fall madly in love with her. Why should he? Most men, when
confronted by a woman they believed could be easily conquered,
thrust notions of love, marriage, and decorum out of their minds
and concentrated on sexual conquest alone. The shameless beasts.
Brenda soaped her soft-bristled bath brush savagely with her
specially made orange-blossom scented soap and scrubbed her
back.

By the time she’d finished washing the crud
from her body and scrubbing the dirt from under her fingernails,
she was feeling both depressed and furious. She wanted to scratch
Colin Peters’s eyes out with her newly cleaned nails. She also
wanted to cry.

In short, she was a mess.

Something occurred to her, and she sat bolt
upright in the tub, all thought of tears vanishing in a flash.
She’d forgotten to bring her clothes into the bathroom with her.
She groaned. Now she’d have to parade in front of Colin, who’d been
eyeing her like a wolf after a sheep all day long, in only her
dressing gown and nothing else. What would he think of her now? She
had a pretty darned good idea.

Slapping the water with her bath brush and
sending up a wave that dribbled over the side of the tub, Brenda
swore softly “To heck with him. If he tries anything, he’ll find
out what kind of woman I am.”

She only hoped she wasn’t wrong about
herself.

It was all Colin could do to keep from
breaking down the bathroom door and charging inside where he
would—

What? Rape her?

“Don’t be an ass,” he advised himself
gloomily.

But he was beginning to doubt his
animal-mating-ritual scenario. It didn’t look to him as if she’d be
all that eager to tumble into bed with him any time soon. He didn’t
understand her reluctance to follow the call of nature. This was
the way the ritual went, wasn’t it? The male signaled his
intentions and the female, after protesting for a little while,
fell into his snare. Procreational activities ensued, and
everyone’s needs were satisfied. Colin acknowledged that the human
species was somewhat more complicated than most mammals, but surely
not that much.

Brenda, however, was proving difficult. She
wasn’t playing by the rules. Colin disapproved of her resistance.
She probably didn’t even know the rules.

But that shouldn’t matter, dash it. These
mating customs were as old as life on earth itself. They were
performed by instinct. She shouldn’t be able to help herself.

Moodily, he considered himself and Brenda in
as unemotional a manner as he was capable. Perhaps there was
something about the natural aspects of the ritual he’d failed to
grasp.

The female of the species always attempted
to select the most worthy object, if there was a choice. There was
no obstacle there, surely. He was handsome enough, wasn’t he? He
was no insipidly preening Leroy Carruthers, perhaps, but he was
good-looking. Even manly, which is more than could be said for
Carruthers. If what Colin suspected was true, Carruthers was some
kind of oddity in the natural world: a member of the species who
preferred his own gender.

Colin had no quibbles with nature, however
it played itself out. His concern centered around whether or not
Brenda should select some other male over himself. He couldn’t see
why she should, given the number and general caliber of the present
group of candidates. It’s true that he might be a little on the
intellectual side, but that shouldn’t be a barrier, since she
claimed to seek knowledge.

Maybe he didn’t look as if he had enough
money to tempt her. He was really quite well-off. All right, he was
no Getty or Rockefeller—or Morgan, who had single handedly bailed
the country out of bankruptcy a few years back.

Still, he could provide her with—with what?
She was as rich as God Almighty Himself. What a pity. If she’d been
on the needy side, he might have had better luck, but she wasn’t
needy. And he couldn’t buy the diamonds and rubies and other
ostentatious rocks he’d heard actresses craved. Slumping on the
sofa, he thought about her possible need for money for a minute.
Maybe she gave all of her money to her family and didn’t keep much
for herself. Maybe she’d really like a fellow who could shower her
with diamonds and emeralds and so forth.

On the other hand, she didn’t wear much
jewelry. He’d seen her once in a necklace of pearls that he’d
assumed to be genuine. That was the only jewelry he’d seen her
wear. Probably some old married goat of a millionaire had given her
the pearls. His stomach twisted painfully.

Unless that was his heart.

“Dash it, man, don’t be an ass,” he advised
himself again.

He thought hard for a long time as Brenda,
he presumed, was soaking in her bath. He wished he could watch her
soak. Maybe help her. His rigid sex gave a tremendous throb, and he
groaned.

Dash it, his plan would work. It
had
to work, unless he wanted to die from unfulfilled sexual desire. He
only had to give it time. After all, it often took the male duck
days to claim his mate. Humans males ought to be able to ply their
wiles and wait for at least that long. Humans were the superior
species, after all.

The fantasy of a naked Brenda in his bed
made Colin’s sex throb again alarmingly, and he wasn’t sure about
that waiting-for-her-to-fall scenario. Waiting was very difficult
when the provocation was so great. Brenda was a most alluring
female human being. Actually, she was the most alluring female
human being he’d yet come across.

She was also bright and charming and
interested in things and a darned good sport. He recollected her
slide into home base with a grin. The girl had grit, all right. Yet
he couldn’t allow her good qualities to fog his intentions. If he
began thinking of her as an individual personality instead of an
object of his sexual mating preference, his designs upon her person
might become muddied. If he allowed himself to, for instance, fall
in love with her—whatever that idiotic phrase meant—he’d be
doomed.

The bathroom door opened, and he sat upright
on the sofa. His eyes went round and his mouth fell open. Good God,
she was standing there in nothing at all but her gorgeous flesh,
pink now from the warm bath, her hair knotted on top of her head,
her bare feet sporting ten perfect pink little toes.

Very well, she wore that blue silk wrapper,
but it only accentuated the flush of her skin and the incredible
blue of her eyes. He knew she was naked under the wrapper, and he
knew without knowing how that her body would be spectacular. He
gaped at her, speechless.

Brenda didn’t notice Colin’s state of
arousal or his stupefaction. She was too mortified by her idiotic
lapse in common sense. Why hadn’t she thought to bring clothes into
the bathroom with her? It was humiliating to have to parade around
in front of him practically naked as she rushed to the closet to
fetch clothes to wear down to the bar. She hoped he didn’t take her
relative nudity in the wrong way.

Whatever could the right way be?

Lord, she had to control herself or she’d be
ruined. He provoked the most unnerving yearnings inside her. Every
time she’d so much as looked at Colin these past several hours,
visions of white picket fences and hordes of charming children
swarmed into her head. Not to mention those other, darker visions,
of herself and Colin tangled in the sheets of her hotel room,
clinging to each other in passionate and embarrassingly intimate
embraces.

Mercy, she hoped he’d chalk up the high
color in her cheeks to her recent bath and not embarrassment
brought about by her own salacious thoughts.

“I’ll be just another little minute, Colin,”
she tittered, her voice gone high because her throat was tight.

He didn’t answer her. Oh, dear, was that
because he was shocked by her outrageous boldness? He’d
unquestionably heard all the lurid tales concerning actresses being
fallen creatures and so forth. Would he believe her to be one of
those poor women who threw themselves into the arms of any willing
man who was rich enough to buy her favors?

Brenda knew full well that most of the women
who allowed themselves to be supported by wealthy men were only
suffering from the memory of poverty or its current influence in
their lives, and that most of them were only determined never to
experience want and deprivation again. The means open to women for
achieving security were minuscule, and if a woman chose to sell
herself to a rich man in order to lift herself from the gutter, so
be it. Brenda was too wise to cast stones. She was only fortunate
that she hadn’t had to make a decision of that nature. Chance had
played an enormous part in her life, and she knew it.

Before she’d left the bathroom, she’d
determined exactly what she planned to wear. She didn’t want to
have to putter around in front of Colin in her dressing gown that
sort of delay might give him doubts about her virtue. She had
enough doubts of her own without adding his to the mix.

Therefore, she aimed herself directly at the
closet and turned to a powder-blue, scoop-necked pinafore dress and
a frilly white lawn blouse, suitable for casual afternoon wear.
She’d grab fresh pantaloons and a suitable set of undergarments
from the bureau drawer on her way back to the bathroom. She’d
plotted her course with intricate care so as to spend as little
time as possible alone Colin in the parlor of her suite.

She’d just taken the blouse and pinafore
from their padded hangers when she felt his arms go around her. She
uttered a small shriek that withered into a moan of pleasure when
she felt his warm breath on her neck.

Colin’s hands were big and broad and hard.
They closed across her midsection and drew her back against his
chest, which was also big and broad and hard. The hardest thing she
could discern on his body, however, was his masculine member, which
was at present pressing against her hips like an iron rod.

Brenda’s brain screamed,
No!

Her heart whispered,
Yes. Oh,
yes.

It was as she’d always feared. She was no
better than she should be, and this was the telling moment.
Everything in her cried out for her to turn into Colin’s arms and
succumb to the lure of his magnificent manliness.

The tattered vestige of sanity still alive
in her head told her to slap the cad’s face and run.

Lord, what a dilemma.

“You’re beautiful, Brenda. You’re the most
beautiful woman in the world.”

Fortunately for her, she’d learned long ago
that beauty meant next to nothing in the overall scheme of things
except when it came to making a living, and that was only because
men were too stupid to value women as they ought. Her sanity made a
tentative step toward mending its rips.

She said, “What are you doing, Colin?” She’d
aimed for a stern, icy quality in her tone, but that had been
asking too much of her willpower. Her voice merely shook, which
wasn’t nearly as effective.

“I’m kissing you,” Colin answered
unnecessarily.

There was nothing whatever wrong with
Brenda’s nervous system. She could discern without being told that
he was kissing her. Which meant her question had been silly.
Through the mush in her brain, she tried to compose a sentence that
would more nearly get her meaning across.

He took that moment to move his hands only
slightly, but the movement was enough so that his thumbs barely
pressed the bottoms of her breasts. Brenda feared her bones were
melting. Her knees most definitely had lost their steel and were
beginning to buckle. With an enormous effort, she stiffened
them.

This was terrible. It was awful. It was
despicable of Colin to do this to her. It was—it was—

Oh, God, it was wonderful.

No, no, no! She couldn’t begin to think that
way or she’d be lost for sure. “Colin,” she said—she was astonished
that her voice held such firmness. “This isn’t right.”

“Yes, it is.”

His voice was a mere rumble, more nearly
felt than heard, as it brushed across the skin of her neck. She
felt gooseflesh rise all over her body. It took all the power she
could command not to let her head drop back and give him better
access to the tender flesh of her throat. She wanted to guide him
to that little hollow between her ears and her neck that was so
sensitive.