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As she reached the last stair he started to walk towards her. For a second Star almost didn’t recognise him. For some reason she had expected him to look as he had done earlier in the day and for a moment the sight of him wearing not a white T-shirt and jeans but an immaculately cut dinner suit threw her:
It made him look taller, broader and somehow more remote, more inaccessible...more...formidable.
Giving herself a small inward shake, Star dismissed. such unproductive and over-imaginative thoughts. He was still the same man, whatever he chose to wear, whatever outward image he might try to present; inwardly he was just like all the rest of his sex and, like them, sooner or later, no matter how much he might try to deny it, he would prove himself to be as faithless, as worthless as the rest.
‘Never make the mistakes I’ve made,’ Star’s mother had told her emotionally in the first throes of her grief and anger after Star’s father had left. ‘Never trust a man, Star...any man... They’ll only hurt you in the end.’
Star, six years old at the time, had taken her mother’s words to heart and learned from them—unlike her mother, who had gone on allowing her emotions to rule her life and then regretting it.
He was only a few feet away from her now—more than close enough for her to be able to look right up into those astonishingly dense dark blue eyes.
Gravely he returned her gaze—without allowing his to slide downwards to her body. Star allowed her eyebrows to rise a little as she mentally awarded him a point for his subtlety.
‘We still haven’t introduced ourselves,’ he announced as he stepped towards her. ‘Kyle...Kyle Henson,’ he told her, extending his hand.
‘Star...Flower,’ she told him wryly, adding with a small, dismissive shrug, ‘A small folly of my mother’s and not, unfortunately, her only one.’
‘I’m sorry, I don’t quite follow you,’ Kyle said.
‘It was a joke.’ Star shrugged. ‘But obviously not a very good one. I was trying to say that my mother’s larger folly was not so much in the choice of my name as in the choice of my father...’
‘Ah... You don’t get on well with him.’
‘Well enough,’ Star countered. ‘Or at least as well as any of the other half a dozen or so offspring he has fathered...and perhaps rather better than most. You see, I have the distinction of having known him the longest and therefore having had the greatest time in which to grow accustomed to his...foibles...’
‘You don’t like him,’ Kyle suggested.
‘No, I don’t like him,’ Star agreed. ‘So go on,’ she mocked as they walked towards the restaurant bar. ‘Tell me how shocked you are by my undaughterly emotions and how devoted you are to your own wonderful parents... They are wonderful, of course,’ she added, giving him a thin smile.
A man like him would have wonderful parents: a mother who adored and cosseted him, had brought him up to think he was the most wonderful human being that ever lived. And his father would have been stern and silently proud of the boy-child he had produced, reinforcing with everything he did the growing child’s belief in himself and his invincibility, his right to live exactly how he chose.
‘No, as a matter of fact they weren’t,’ Kyle told her evenly, and then, before she could cover her shock, asked her, ‘Are you always this open and frank with strangers?’
‘No,’ Star told him, giving him a deliberately seductive half-smile. What she had been intending to do was to shock him a little bit, needle him slightly, but his quiet denial of her comment about his parents, coupled with his obvious lack of any intention of expanding on what he had said, had caused her to change tack. If she couldn’t shock him into taking notice of her, then she would have to seduce him into doing so.
In the bar they both ordered spritzers before sitting down to study the menus they were handed.
Although Star was well aware of the interest she was exciting amongst the other diners, she gave no sign of it, and Kyle, who was watching her, wondered wryly how long it had taken her to grow the outer skin of cool self-confidence that she armoured herself in.
That remark about her parents—her father—had been deliberately provocative and he sensed that he had caught her off guard with his response to her taunting comment about his own family background.
Despite the information about herself that she seemed to hand out so freely, he sensed that she was an extremely private person, deeply protective of her innermost self.
‘So,’ Kyle invited, putting down his menu and smiling across the table at her, ‘tell me more about this interesting-sounding family of yours.’
‘Interesting?’ Star raised her eyebrows and gave him a wry look. ‘My mother is currently in the throes of a traumatic love affair with the son of one of her oldest and closest friends. It’s supposed to be a secret but, of course, it isn’t. My mother couldn’t keep a secret if her life depended on it and she certainly can’t seem to see that what she’s doing is bound to lead to disaster. She’s bound to lose her friend, and as for her toy-boy lover...’
‘You don’t approve?’
Star looked at him. He had surprised her with his invitation to talk about her family. Normally, in her experience, the subject most men preferred to discuss was themselves. Star wasn’t used to being asked such unexpectedly intimate questions. One of her strongest character traits was a refusal to deal in any kind of deceit—a fact which put her at a disadvantage now, she recognised, as she found it impossible not to reply honestly to Kyle’s questions.
‘It isn’t a matter of whether or not I approve,’ she told him. ‘It’s more a matter of knowing what’s going to happen, of knowing that someone else is going to have to pick up the pieces of the mayhem that my mother’s emotional overload always causes...’
‘That someone perhaps being you?’ Kyle probed.
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This time Star could not answer. The anxiety and sense of guilt she had felt as a child, listening to her mother, watching her go through the turmoil of a series of destructive relationships, was something that even now, as an adult, she found impossible to discuss.
The fear she had experienced then, the sense of being alone with no one to turn to, the panic at knowing that she was her mother’s emotional support rather than the other way round still sometimes surfaced to attack her present-day, adult self-assurance, even if nowadays, outwardly at least, she had learned the trick of transmuting it into angry contempt for her mother’s way of life.
‘Why don’t we talk about you?’ she suggested softly. ‘I’m sure that would be far more...interesting...’
Lifting her glass to her lips, she looked across at him as she took a slow, deliberate sip, letting her lips stay slightly parted whilst she looked at his mouth.
At first she thought that her deliberate sensuality had had no effect on him, and then, to her delight, she saw the small, betraying movement he made, the slight shifting of his body, as though suddenly he wasn’t quite at ease with himself.
‘There isn’t much to tell,’ Kyle responded, and Star smiled to herself as she caught the slightly roughened edge to his voice and knew what had caused it.
No matter what he might be trying to tell her, she suspected that he was far from lacking in sexual experience, and from what she could see of it she could sense that his body had just the kind of sensual appeal she most liked.
Star did not believe in being a passive lover and, whilst not having any specific desire to be dominant or aggressive, she did like to be able to take the initiative to touch and taste the man in bed with her, to reach out and stroke his skin, to discover where and how she could most arouse him, even to tease him a little bit sometimes, testing his self-control. And something told her that Kyle would be very self-controlled.
