looking her up and down.
Carly met his gaze levelly. ‘What does that mean?’
‘You’re still a conniving little bitch.’
So the battle lines were drawn. It certainly hadn’t taken long. If he’d slapped her face with a glove, he could not have challenged her more clearly. Nor could he have found a better means of making Carly dig her heels in.
For a single instant, before he called her that…that-she couldn’t even let herself think about what he’d called her!—she’d almost felt sorry for Piran St Just. She’d almost regretted that his brother had deserted him, regretted that he’d have to make do with her help, not Des’s.
But when he threw those words at her she thought, Serves him right, damned judgmental jerk.
She supposed she was a bit of a jerk, too, for having thought even for one moment that they could manage this without problems, that he might have changed his opinion of her.
Once—in the very beginning—he’d defended her. It had been the first time they met and she hadn’t even known who he was.
It had happened a month after Carly’s mother had married Piran’s father in Santa Barbara. She’d met Des at the wedding, but she’d never met Arthur’s much heralded elder son. Piran hadn’t come to the ceremony, Arthur had said, because he went to university in the east.
But he was coming for spring vacation. Carly was going to meet him that very night. In fact, if she didn’t hurry, she was going to be late.
She’d waited to leave the beach until the last possible moment, hoping that the small group of inebriated college students standing by the steps up the cliff would disperse. They hadn’t. Instead they’d stood watching her approach, whistling and making lewd suggestions that made her cheeks burn.
She’d tried to ignore them, then she’d tried brushing past them and going up the steps quickly. But she’d stumbled and one of them had grabbed her and hauled her hard against him.
‘Please,’ she babbled. ‘Let me go.’
He rubbed against her. ‘Let’s go together, baby,’ he rasped in her ear.
Carly struggled. ‘Stop it! Leave me alone!’
He shook his head. ‘You want it. You know you do,’ he said as she tried to pull away.
A couple of the other men hooted and whistled. ‘I like ‘em feisty,’ one of them called.
‘Please!’ Carly tried twisting away from him, but he held her fast until all at once, out of nowhere, a savior appeared.
The most handsome young man she’d ever seen jerked the drunken man away from her. ‘Can’t you hear?’ he snarled. ‘The lady said she wants to be left alone.’
‘Lady? Who says she’s a lady?’
Carly’s black-haired savior stepped between her and the drunken student. ‘I say so,’ he said, his voice low and deadly.
The student gave a nervous, half-belligerent laugh. ‘An’ who are you? The Lone Ranger?’ He shoved Piran hard, so hard that he wobbled himself.
The next thing Carly knew the man was flat on his rear in the sand with her savior standing over him, rubbing his right fist.
‘It doesn’t matter who I am,’ he said. ‘Apologize to the lady. Now.’
The man’s jaw worked. He spat blood on to the sand and glanced around at his friends. They fidgeted and muttered, but they apparently didn’t see much point in fighting over Carly. Some of them backed up the steps. A few moved away down the beach. At last it was just Carly and the two of them left.
Finally the student struggled to his feet and glowered at the lean, tanned man still standing there, his fists clenched.
He didn’t move an inch. ‘Say it.’
The drunken student’s gaze flicked briefly to Carly. He scowled. ‘Sorry,’ he muttered in a surly tone. Then he fled.
Carly stared after him, shaking, still feeling the disgusting feel of his sweaty, sandy body pressed against hers.
‘Hey, you OK?’ The young man tilted his head to look into her eyes. He gave her a gentle smile. He had the most beautiful blue eyes and the most wonderful smile she’d ever seen.
‘F-fine,’ she’d mumbled.
‘It’s over,’ he said, and put his arm around her, drawing her close, holding her gently until she’d stopped shaking.
It should have frightened her. He was as much a stranger as the drunken student. But she wasn’t frightened. She felt safe. Cared for.
She remembered looking up into his face right at that moment and thinking she’d found the man she wanted to spend the rest of her life with—the man her mother had always told her was out there waiting.
She stammered, ‘Th—thanks.’
He smiled at her and ran his knuckles lightly down her cheek. ‘My pleasure. Always ready to help out a damsel in distress.’ He gave her a wink, then asked if he could see her home.
And that was when he found out whose daughter she was.
‘You live where?’ he asked her when she pointed out the house on the hillside.
‘The pink house. The great big one. Isn’t it lovely? We just moved in, my mother and I. She married a professor—’
‘Arthur St Just.’ His voice was suddenly clipped and short.
‘Yes. You know him?’
‘I thought I did,’ her savior said gruffly. ‘He’s my father. I’m Piran St Just.’
Her new stepbrother. The one she’d never met. The one, she quickly learned, who hadn’t come to the wedding not simply because he went to school in the east but because he objected so strongly to his father’s remarriage.
He thought Carly’s unsophisticated dancer mother far beneath Arthur St Just’s touch and he made no bones about it. In Piran’s eyes, she was no more than the gold-digging hussy who had trapped his unsuspecting father into matrimony.
While Des accepted his stepmother with equanimity, at the same time acknowledging that she wasn’t quite what one would have expected Arthur St Just to pick for a wife, the same was not true of Piran.
And once he found out that Carly was the gold-digging hussy’s daughter his solicitous behavior and gentle concern vanished at once.
Sue, always optimistic, encouraged her daughter to be patient.
‘He doesn’t understand,’ she said softly to Carly more than once. ‘Piran is young, idealistic, and his parents’ divorce hurt him. He hasn’t known love himself. He doesn’t understand how it can happen. Give him time.’
Over the months to come Carly gave him that—and more. Even though,
