like my parents and I’m not about to apologize for it,” Slade said, a matching edge to his voice.
“It’s none of my business how you feel about them.”
He reached over and wiped a drop of purple from her mouth with his fingertip. “Why don’t you believe in marital harmony?”
As she bit her lip, it was as much as he could do to keep his hands at his sides. “I told you—I’m a realist. Oh look, what gorgeous earrings.”
She dragged him over to a kiosk selling abalone earrings that shimmered turquoise and pink. Lifting one to her ear, she said, “What do you think?”
“They clash with your sweater. But you could wear anything, and you’d still look devastatingly beautiful.” Anything, he thought. Or nothing.
She laughed. “Oh, you Americans—so direct. The earrings, Slade, the earrings.”
“They match your eyes. Let me buy them for you.”
“So I’ll be indebted?”
“So I’ll have the pleasure of knowing that perhaps, occasionally, you’ll think of me.”
“I promise that perhaps, occasionally, I will,” she said, removing the gold hoops she was wearing and tucking them in her purse. Increasingly, she was finding it difficult not to like Slade. Didn’t that make him all the more of a threat?
“Let me,” Slade said, and with exquisite care inserted the silver hooks into her lobes. Her skin was as smooth as he’d imagined it. Deep within him, desire shuddered into life.
Her irises had darkened, as though a cloud had covered the sea. He stepped back, reaching for his wallet and paying for the earrings. “They look great on you.”
She struggled to find her voice. “Thank you.”
“My pleasure,” he said formally.
Between them, unspoken, crackled the electric awareness of sexual attraction. Slade said abruptly, “You know I want you. You’ve probably known it from the first moment we met.”
“Yes, of course I know—which doesn’t mean we do anything about it…other than enjoy each other’s company on a sunny morning in October.” She fluttered her lashes at him in deliberate parody. “Are you enjoying my company?”
“Very much. Don’t fish, Clea.”
“Where better than on Fisherman’s Wharf?” As he chuckled, she went on calmly, “We’re talking about sex between two total strangers here. Possibility is so often more interesting than actuality, wouldn’t you agree?”
“Not when one of the strangers is you.”
“You have a pretty way with a compliment.”
He said, fixing her with his gaze, “Possibility’s on a par with fantasy. Nothing wrong with fantasy—last night I had a few about you I’d be embarrassed to describe. But actuality is real. Real and risky. That’s the catch, isn’t it?”
She said through gritted teeth, “I don’t sleep with someone I don’t know.”
“That’s easily fixable. We can get to know each other.”
“Slade, I’ve been told I’m beautiful, and I know I’m rich. Consequently I’ve learned to choose my partners carefully. I already told you that you scare me—you’re the last man I’d have an affair with.”
He shouldn’t have been so direct. But he had a horrible sense of time running out, along with the even worse sense that nothing he was saying to her was making any real or lasting impression. Welcome to a new experience, Slade thought wryly. He’d never before had to work at getting a woman interested in him; fighting them off was his area of expertise.
“There’s a bakery a couple of blocks from here that sells crusty sourdough bread,” he said. “I always take some home with me.”
He heard the tiny puff as she let out her breath. “Let’s go,” she said agreeably. “Do you like to cook?”
“I do. Sheer self-defense. I eat out a lot, and it’s relaxing to stay home and cook for myself. My specialties are bouillabaisse and pumpkin pie. I’ll make them for you sometime.”
“Perhaps. Occasionally,” she said, her eyes full of mockery.
“For sure. At least once.”
“You don’t like opposition.”
“Neither, dear Clea, do you.”
She laughed. “Who does? Tell me about sourdough bread—it doesn’t sound very appetizing.”
Impatient of small talk, suddenly desperate for details beyond the superficial, Slade said, “How old are you, Clea?”
“Old enough to enjoy flirtation without—how do you say it?—strings attached.” She stepped off the boardwalk onto the sidewalk at the end of the wharf. “As for—”
Shouting and swearing, a gang of teenagers surged around the nearest building. Three of them collided head-on with Slade. Automatically he threw his arms around Clea, pulling her close to his body for protection, his feet planted hard on the tarmac.
“Sorry!” one of the kids yelled. Another gave a loud whoop. None of them stopped.
Slade stood very still. Clea’s body was crushed to his, her breasts jammed against his chest. One of his arms encircled her hips, the other her waist; for a heart-stopping moment he felt her yield to him.
Her floppy hat had been shoved to the back of her head. He bent his own head and found her lips in a kiss that he wanted to last forever.
And again she yielded to him, a surrender all the more potent for being unexpected. He brought one hand up, tangling it in her hair, so silky and sweet-scented, and deepened the kiss, his lips edging hers apart. Her fingers were digging into his nape; her tongue was laced with his, teasing him, tasting him, driving him out of his mind.
As animal hunger surged through him, he forgot he was on a city sidewalk; forgot all Belle’s warnings and his own advice. Robbed of any vestige of caution, he muttered, “I feel as though I’ve been waiting for you my whole life…God, how I want you!”
His words sliced through the frantic pulsing of Clea’s blood, and brought in their wake an ice-cold dash of reality. She stiffened, then pushed hard against Slade’s chest. “Stop!” she gasped. “What are we thinking of?”
“We’re not thinking at all, which is just the way it should be,” he said thickly, lifting her chin with his fingers and bending to kiss her again.
“Slade, stop—you mustn’t, I don’t want you to.”
His gaze bored into hers. “Yes, you do.”
She sagged in his embrace, her forehead resting on his chest. He was right. She had wanted him, in the most basic of ways, her body betraying her into a response that, in retrospect, appalled
