Sultry Nights. Annie West
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One month later. Four Seasons Hotel, downtown San Francisco
KATE felt even more like a piece of meat than usual, yet she clamped down on her churlish thoughts and pasted on her best professional smile as the bidding continued. The smack of the gavel beside her made her flinch minutely. The fact that the gavel was being wielded by a well-known A-list Hollywood actor was not making the experience any easier. Despite her years of experience as a top model, she was still acutely uncomfortable under scrutiny, but she had learnt to disguise it well.
‘Twenty-five thousand. Twenty-five thousand dollars to the gentleman here in the front. Am I bid any higher?’
Kate held her breath. The man under the spotlight with the unctuous grin was a well-known Greek shipping magnate. He was old, short, fat and bald, and his beady obsidian eyes were devouring Kate as he practically licked his lips. For a second she felt intensely vulnerable and alone, standing here under the lights. A shudder went through her. If someone else didn’t—
‘Ah! We’ve a bidder in the back—thirty thousand dollars from the new arrival.’
A rush of relief flooded Kate and she tried to strain to see past the glaring spotlights to identify who the new bidder was. It appeared as if the ballroom lighting technicians were trying to find him too, with the spotlight lurching from coiffed person to coiffed person, all of whom laughed and waved it away. The bidder seemed determined to remain anonymous. Well, Kate comforted herself, whoever it was couldn’t be any worse a prospect to kiss in front of all these people than Stavros Stephanides.
‘And now Mr Stephanides here in the front is bidding forty thousand dollars … things are getting interesting! Come on, folks, let’s see how deep your pockets are. How can you turn down a chance to kiss this lovely lady and donate generously to charity?’
Kate’s stomach fell again at Stephanides’ obvious determination—but then the actor spied movement in the shadows at the back. ‘Fifty thousand dollars to the mysterious new bidder. Sir, won’t you come forward and reveal yourself?’
No one came forward, though, and inexplicably the hairs rose on the back of Kate’s neck. Then she saw the look of almost comic indignation on Stephanides’ face as he swivelled around to see who his competitor was. The Greek’s expression visibly darkened when someone leant low to speak in his ear. He’d obviously just been informed as to the identity of the mysterious fellow bidder. With an audible splutter Stephanides upped the ante by raising the bidding in a leap to one hundred thousand dollars. Kate held in her gasp at the extortionate amount, but her smile was faltering.
She became aware of the ripple of hushed whispers and a distinct frisson of excitement coming from the back; whoever this person was, he was creating quite a buzz. And then whoever it was also calmly raised their bid—to a cool two hundred thousand dollars. It didn’t look as if her ordeal was going to end anytime soon.
Tiarnan Quinn wasn’t used to grand, showy gestures. His very name was the epitome of discretion. Discretion in everything: his wealth; his work; his life, and most definitely in his affairs. He had a ten-year-old daughter. He didn’t live like a monk, but neither did he parade his carefully selected lovers through the tabloids in the manner so beloved of other men in his position: a divorced heterosexual multi-billionaire male in the prime of his life.
None of his lovers had ever kissed and told. He made sure that any ex-partner was so well compensated she would never feel the need to break his trust. He always got out before any messy confrontations, and he always kept his private life very private. None of his lovers ever met his daughter because he had no intention of marrying ever again, and to introduce them to Rosalie would be to invite a level of intimacy that was reserved solely for his family: his daughter, sister and mother.
His lovers provided him with relief. Nothing more, nothing less.
And yet here he was now, bidding publicly, albeit discreetly for the moment, in the name of charity, for a kiss with Kate Lancaster—one of the most photographed women in the world. Because something in his mind and body was chafing, and for the first time in a long time he was thinking discretion be damned. He wanted this woman with a hunger he’d denied for too long. A hunger he’d only recently given himself permission fully to acknowledge and to believe it could be sated.
And it had been a long time building—years. He could see now that it had been building with a stealthy insidiousness into a subconscious need that was now very conscious—a burning necessity. His mouth twisted; those years hadn’t exactly been uneventful or allowed much time for contemplation. A short-lived marriage and an acrimonious divorce, not to mention becoming a single parent, had taken up a large part of that time. If he’d had the luxury of time on his hands he might have realised a lot sooner—He halted his thoughts. No matter. He was here now.
His attention came back to Kate, focused on Kate, and he had the uncanny sensation of being in the right place at the right time. It was a sensation he usually associated with business, not something more emotional. He corrected himself; this wasn’t about emotion. It was desire. Unfulfilled desire.
Perhaps it was because he’d finally allowed himself to think of it again—that moment ten years ago—but it was as if the floodgates had opened on a dam. It had been little more than a kiss, and yet it was engraved more hotly onto his memory than anything he’d experienced before or after. It had taken all of his will-power and restraint to pull away from her that night. Since then Kate had been strictly off-limits to him for myriad reasons: because that incendiary moment had shaken him up a lot more than he cared to admit; because she’d been so young and his little sister’s best friend.
He remembered the way her startlingly blue eyes had stared directly into his, as if she’d been able to see all the way into his soul. As if she’d wanted him to see all the way into hers. She’d looked at him like that again only a few weeks ago. And it had taken huge restraint for him to allow Kate to retreat back into her shell, to ignore his intense desire. Until now, when he knew he could get her on her own, could explore for himself if what he’d seen meant what he thought it did.
His sister’s wedding had sparked off this burgeoning need, this awareness. He hadn’t been thrown into such close proximity to Kate for years. But all through the ceremony and subsequent reception she’d held him back with that cool, frosty distance of hers. It was like being subjected to a chilly wind whistling over a deserted moor. He’d always been aware of it—yet that day, for the first time in years, it had rankled. His interest had been piqued. Why was she always so cool, distant?
Admittedly they had a history that up until now he’d been quite happy not to unearth. He knew on some level that that night ten years ago had marked a turning point for him, and perhaps it was one of the reasons he’d found it so easy to relegate Kate to a place he had no desire to re-explore. Her studied indifference over the years had served to keep a lid on those disturbing memories.
And yet he knew he couldn’t deny the fact that he’d always been aware of her—aware of how she’d blossomed from a slightly gauche teenager into a stunningly assured and beautiful woman.
He’d thought he had that awareness and desire under control, but one night some years ago a girl had bumped into him in the street: blonde, caked in make-up, and wearing an outfit that was only a hair’s breadth away from a stripper’s. The feel of her body slamming into him, her huge blue eyes looking straight up into his, had scrambled his brain and fired his libido so badly that he’d sent his date home that night with some pathetic excuse and hadn’t been able to look at another woman for weeks—turned on by a girl in a tarty French maid’s outfit because she’d borne some resemblance to—
Tiarnan halted his wayward thoughts right there. He chafed at the resurgence of something so minor he’d thought long forgotten—and at the implication that Kate had occupied a bigger place in his mind than he’d admitted to himself. He reassured himself that he’d had his own concerns keeping him more than occupied—and lovers who’d been only too warm and willing, making it easy to shut out the frosty indifference of one woman. Seeing Kate just once or twice a year had hardly been conducive to stoking