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Her hair, wet from her shower, was wrapped in a towel turban-style on top of her head, and with her face free from make-up she looked, although she didn’t know it, more like the solemn child she had been than the woman she now was.
As she opened the door the last person she was expecting to see was Kyle. He at least, so far as her imagination was concerned, was very cosily ensconced in Lindsay’s home, no doubt offering her solace and comfort of a kind that made Star’s upper lip curl in disdain just to think about it.
Only he wasn’t. He was standing outside her front door. In her hall now, in fact, she recognised as he closed the door firmly and demanded tersely, ‘Are you all right?’
‘Yes, of course I’m all right. Why shouldn’t I be?’ she challenged him.
‘Sally said you were going to spend the weekend with your mother. When I drove up and saw your lights on and the balcony door open, I thought you might have had burglars—’
‘And so you knocked on my door, hoping that they would let you in,’ she scoffed. ‘Is that what you are trying to tell me?’
‘No. I knew you must be here because I saw your car, but I thought...’ He paused, raking his fingers through his hair, all too aware of how she was likely to react if he told her what had been running through his mind. A woman on her own...vulnerable...beautiful...and with the kind of temperament all too likely to push a couple of thugs into...
‘What are you doing here, anyway?’ he demanded instead. ‘Sally told me that your mother lives down on the south coast.’
‘Yes, she does,’ Star agreed uncommunicatively. It was unfortunate that he knew that she hadn’t been away but she would just explain to Sally what had happened, only changing the timing so that she could pretend that she hadn’t realised her mother would be away until it was too late to change her mind about the barbecue, and, after all, so far as Kyle went she owed him no explanations. None at all.
‘I was just about to go to bed—’ she began, and then stopped as she saw it—the tell-tale mark of another woman’s lipstick on his jaw... Lipstick on his jaw and... Her nostrils quivered fastidiously as she moved slightly closer to him and caught the scent of perfume on his clothes—Lindsay’s perfume; she would have recognised it anywhere.
A sudden sense of fate having played into her hands, having dealt her all the cards she needed to win, made her feel almost dizzily reckless. Now was her chance to prove what she already knew. He had come here to her flat straight from another woman...from her friend with whom he had been sharing—if she was any judge, and she was—an intimate goodnight... A very intimate goodnight, she decided bitterly as she saw another lipstick stain, this time close to his ear.
Much as it went against the grain, the time had come for her to use a little subtle subterfuge. This was, after all, war, she reminded herself as she lowered both her voice and her eyes and murmured mock-dulcetly, ‘It was kind of you to come and check that I was all right.’ A contrite smile curled her mouth. ‘I was just about to have some supper; would you like to join me or did you have enough at the barbecue?’
For a moment Star thought that he might have cottoned onto the secret meaning underlying her words. He certainly looked rather sharply at her but as she held her breath and waited he simply said, ‘A cup of coffee would be very welcome.’
‘A cup of coffee... Well, I think I can manage that.’
The balcony windows were still open and as she went to close them Star deliberately shook her damp hair free of its constraining towel; her cotton robe was only thin and with any luck the light from behind her ought to give him a pretty clear impression of exactly what it was concealing.
Star knew without vanity that she had a very sensual body—strong-boned and yet at the same time alluringly, femininely curved and delicate, her waist narrow, her hips softly curved, whilst her breasts were taut and firm, her nipples, now that she was standing in the cooling night air, suddenly stiff. A little too much so, she decided as she turned away from the window and made her way to the kitchen... It never did to overgild the lily, and in her experience men preferred to believe that only they could have that particular effect on a woman.
Male egos—how much damage they caused... how much pain and misery. If he responded to her sexual overtures now, it would prove beyond any shadow of a doubt—not that she had any doubts—that she was right about him, that beneath that assumed demeanour of caring sensitivity he was just as self-centred and untrustworthy as the rest of his sex, and that his claim to want to make an emotional commitment to a woman was just another male ploy designed to trick a woman into trusting him.
If he was genuinely even one tenth of the man he claimed to be, there was no way he would be able to respond to her overtures having just, quite obviously, made love with Lindsay. But of course he wasn’t what he claimed to be at all; she knew that.
She walked into the kitchen, her body movements deliberately subtle and sensually enticing, and Star knew that he was watching her as he followed her into the small, confined space. As she filled the kettle she smiled at him and purred, ‘Why don’t you make yourself comfortable?’
He didn’t look at her as he sat down but Star knew that he had to be conscious of the firm yet seductively soft curves of her breasts, which were now virtually on a level with his eyes. There wasn’t an awful lot of room in her small kitchen, but there was no real need for him to move his outstretched legs so betrayingly, turning away from her slightly as he removed his jacket and placed it over his thighs.
The invitation from her father was still on the table and as she carried his coffee over to him she picked it up quickly.
‘A duty invitation from my father—a way of underlining the fact that Emily is so much more the kind of daughter he prefers, all pliable sweetness and wanting to please...’
‘Emily?’ Kyle was frowning, Star saw, and she wished that she had not made any reference to the letter and wondered why on earth she had.
‘Your half-sister?’ he quizzed in that open, interested way that Americans seemed to have.
‘No,’ Star snapped grittily. ‘She’s my stepsister. Louise, her mother, was my father’s second wife; they’re divorced now but Emily has always stayed in contact with my father. She claims she looks on him as her real father. God knows why, since he and Louise were only together for four years before he ditched her for a new, younger model—just long enough for her to produce the twins and for him to get bored.
‘After Louise came Harriet—no previous convictions—sorry, children. That lasted five years and produce
d Anne and Sam and then...let me think...Gemma or Jemima. I can’t quite remember.
‘You see, by then the visits had trickled down to one or two a year. There wasn’t any room, you see... not with all those children who needed a father so much more than I did... And, of course, I was such a difficult child, so disruptive with the little ones, not like Emily who was always so sweet and loving with them. They all adored her...all the wives...but they were all so alike...and all the best of friends... Tragic, really, in a black-comedy sort of fashion.
‘And now it’s Lucinda’s turn. She and Emily are close friends. In fact I seem to remember being told that they were at school together, although I suspect that Emily might have been in a higher class. She’s only three years older than me, you see, and Dad’s taste runs to sweet, innocent young things.
‘He must be getting rather tired now, I imagine, because they’ve been together three years, but then, of course, the triplets are very energetic—not easy for a man in his late fifties, although he does try not to show it.
‘No doubt he’ll fully enjoy the role of father of the bride, although Emily will have to make sure that he always believes that he’s the most important man in her life, and he won’t like it when she makes him a grandfather—’
‘So you’re not going to the wedding, then?’ Kyle interrupted her quietly.
‘Weddings aren’t my style,’ Star told him curtly, and added vehemently, ‘No, I won’t be going—not that I’ll be missed. It’s only a duty invite. No doubt someone, probably Emily, has even had to remind him that I exist.
‘The truth is that my father would like to believe that I don’t exist. I’m not his kind of daughter, you see... I’m not the kind he can show off to his friends as his pretty, adoring little girl. Emily’s much more suited to fulfilling that role than me.
