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“Dirk!” Josh said with enthusiasm, rising to his feet and shaking his hand. “I didn’t know you were a jazz lover, or I’d have told you about this place myself. How’d you hear about it?”
“I asked my limo driver,” Dirk explained. “The one you arranged for me, remember? Patrick Chan? He brought me here.” He’d politely kept his attention on the older man during the exchange, but despite himself his gaze soon wandered back to the woman still seated at the small table, watching the interchange between the two men with interest.
“Mei-li,” Josh said, his clipped British accent very obvious, “let me introduce you to one of the best screen actors in the business today—and a true professional—Dirk DeWinter. Dirk, this is my daughter, Mei-li.”
Dirk had already extended his hand, but he shot a sharp glance at Josh at his last words. “Your daughter?” The question slipped out before Dirk could prevent it, and Josh laughed as if this wasn’t the first time someone had misconstrued his relationship with her.
Before Josh could say anything, Mei-li shook Dirk’s hand and said, “Some women might take umbrage at your erroneous assumption, Mr. DeWinter.” Her voice was rich, cultured and bore the same British accent as her father. “I’ll just say if you ever meet my mother you’ll understand why I’m merely amused.” Her dark eyes didn’t hold amusement, however. He wasn’t sure what expression was reflected there. Disdain came swiftly to mind, as if she’d judged him and found him wanting—the same way he’d mistakenly judged her. “My mother is the most beautiful woman in the world in my father’s estimation...and in mine.”
Dirk resisted the urge to raise Mei-li’s hand to his lips. Instead he said, “Then you must take after your mother, Miss Moore.” The compliment rolled glibly off his tongue, but she didn’t react as most women would have.
“M’goy,” she murmured in Cantonese as she withdrew her hand—one of the few Cantonese phrases Dirk knew, which meant “thank you”—but he knew she was only saying it to be polite. She really didn’t appreciate the compliment, and he sensed her inner withdrawal.
Once again Dirk was intrigued. She’s not impressed with her own beauty, and she doesn’t care for men who are, either, he thought. But asking a man not to notice a beautiful and sexy woman was asking the impossible, especially when it came in a classy package. But that didn’t mean a man had to act on it. Circumstances and Bree had turned him into a gentleman, and Dirk wasn’t about to forget those hard-learned lessons. But Mei-li didn’t know it. Didn’t know him.
Despite the signals she was sending out that clearly indicated she wasn’t interested in him and was only being polite to an acquaintance of her father’s, he wanted to know more about her. “Are you in the movie industry, too, Miss Moore?”
She shook her head with vehemence. “One in the business is enough, don’t you think? And who could compete with a talent like his?” she added with a flash of a smile in her father’s direction that indicated nothing but daughterly pride. “No, I’m a pr—”
What she’d been about to say was cut off by a gaggle of young and not-so-young women who came up to their table. “May I have your autograph, Mr. DeWinter?” the first woman gushed, thrusting a pen and a piece of paper at Dirk.
Dirk had an unbreakable rule when it came to autographs. As long as he was standing—which he was now—he would sign. If he was seated at a table, either as someone’s guest or with guests of his own, he would politely decline, feeling it would be rude to the people he was with.
He glanced at Josh and Mei-li. “Excuse me for a moment,” he murmured, stepping a little away from them before scrawling his name on the seemingly endless supply of menus and scraps of paper offered for his autograph. But when one young woman with more gall than sense asked him to sign her bra and began tugging down the neckline of her dress, Dirk shook his head in refusal.
“Sorry,” he told her as gently as he could, even though he was disgusted that any woman would be so lacking in decency as to ask this of him in a public place. “That’s where I draw the line.”
It wasn’t the first time someone had requested something similar from him. Women had even asked him right in front of Bree, as if her feelings at having her husband accosted were unimportant, as if those women held his wife in contempt. As if their blatant sexual advances would be welcomed by a man in love with his wife.
