Sweet virginal Katydid, with her painfully innocent eyes and desperate eagerness to please. He’d loved her like a second sister for most of her life, and yet he’d used her.
The memory of the sex itself was blurred by the booze he’d drunk that night. The morning after, when he woke up in the pool house behind his parents’ home, cradled in her arms, the scent of sex mingling with the chlorine from the pool in the foggy air, he’d all but strangled on shame.
It was that shame that had made him cruel, compounding his sins. He’d lost count of the nights he’d drunk himself into oblivion after that. Dozens, hundreds, it hadn’t much mattered. Everywhere he’d looked, he’d run into a memory.
Finally he’d taken a leave of absence from medical school and hit the road, ending up in Alaska, where he’d worked on a shrimp boat to earn his keep. It had been brutally hard work, taxing his strength and straining his muscles. By the end of three months, he’d regained the weight he’d lost, most of it muscle layered over his chest and arms.
At the end of shrimping season, he’d gone back to medical school, because that’s what his wife would have wanted. He’d told himself he was healed, but he knew better. He was little more than a shell, with a hollow space where his heart was supposed to be.
Katie was right to want nothing to do with him now, he thought as he morosely wiped the last of the lather from his face. He would only hurt her again if he got the chance. He wouldn’t want to. He would try his damnedest not to, but sooner or later it would happen. Candy and Lauren had trusted him to keep them safe from hurt, and they’d died. Katie had trusted him with her heart, and he’d stripped her of her virginity and her pride.
It didn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out Elliot Hunter was poison to those he cared about—and he did care about Katie, as much as a man with most of his heart cut away could.
Whatever she wanted, that’s what he would give her. He owed her that, at least.
After stalking away from Elliot moments earlier, Katherine realized she was holding her breath, and let it out as she turned toward the elevator lobby. It was only when she was safely in the limousine that she allowed her shoulders to slump.
As the limo carried her through the narrow streets of Montebello, a sense of unreality came over her. She couldn’t believe the chain of events that had brought her and Elliot to this majestic island in the eastern Mediterranean. She had no idea what part of the world Elliot had been holed up in before he received the call from his father, but one week ago she’d been in dusty, hot Baja California, hyperventilating her way through a serious makeover she’d known without question would be a miserable failure. Her only worry then had been how fast her hair would grow back after Señor Jose Miguel had finished whacking off several inches….
Chapter 2
Rodeo Drive, Beverly Hills, California;
two days earlier
The shiny gilt letters on the door spelled out the name of the boutique in the same ornate script gracing the bottle of the obscenely expensive perfume sold at the desk and wafting through the ventilation system. Salsa pulsed through the small, but opulent fitting room, as hot and steamy as its Latin origin.
Alone in the fitting room, Kate stared at her reflection in the mirror. The woman staring back at her was a perfect stranger.
A goddess.
A siren.
Or dare she even think it, a slinky, sleepy-eyed sex object?
She drew a shaky breath and wetted lips the color of ripe plums. Secrets shimmered like summer heat in wide-set eyes of dark clear amber. Beneath sweeping, honey-toned brows, feathery lashes of the same hue fluttered in a provocative invitation. Slender hips longed to sway beneath thin silk the color of fuchsia, while her blood heated and her skin glowed.
“Oh my,” she whispered in awe. This woman would never be invisible in a roomful of people. Her face was a perfect oval, her features delicate. Her unblemished skin had been sun-kissed to a golden hue, with a subtle hint of rose-petal pink brushed over exotic cheekbones.
Still reluctant to believe her own eyes, Kate lifted a tentative hand to the softly curling tips of her glossy auburn hair, now layered and blow-dried into a breezy, asymmetrical, shoulder-length shag that did terrific things for her cheekbones.
When she walked into the clinic on Monday morning her staff would stare. Her pint-size patients would giggle. When she joined her parents for their traditional Sunday brunch next week, both would express their disapproval with their customary multisyllabic eloquence. Father, in particular, would be outraged that she’d cut off her crowning glory. Hadn’t Mother worn her hair in the same sophisticated—and boring—French twist for the past thirty-odd years? The same French twist Kate had adopted as her own sometime around her fifteenth year.
It had been a brain warp or some kind of temporary insanity, of course, combined with the two margaritas she’d gulped down to give her the courage to bare her head to a stylist’s scissors.
Muy magnifico, Doctor Remson. Que linda!
Magnificent? Beautiful?
Her? The nerd who’d been two and then three years younger than everyone else in her class, even in medical school? The pathetic geek who’d had only one date in high school—and that arranged by the brother of her best friend, Sarah?
The same Sarah who had talked her into spending the last six days at El Puerto d’Oro, the outrageously expensive health and beauty spa located fifty miles south of San Diego on the Baja California peninsula.
“Give her the works,” Sarah had ordered. A major makeover.
If Sarah hadn’t been standing right there next to her, urging her on, Kate was pretty sure she would have leaped out of the fancy salon and run all the way back to the Bay Area.
So what if she wasn’t attractive to members of the opposite sex? She had a life, didn’t she? A boring one, sure, but it was richly rewarding, which was what she’d been raised to value above all things. Service to others had been a Remson tradition for generations. Teachers, doctors, scholars and philanthropists dotted her family tree. As her parents’ only child, she’d always known she had an obligation to carry on the tradition. Founding the Children’s Free Clinic in San Francisco’s Mission District three years ago had been both a joy and an obligation.
Unmarried, and rarely been kissed, she had a cozy, turn-of-the-century flat on Nob Hill, the same VW bug her father had driven as a graduate student at Stanford and a small, but beloved, group of women friends. Perhaps there were moments in the darkest hours of night when her heart wept for her lost dreams, but by the light of dawn she had banished her haunted memories to the back of her well-disciplined mind. Maybe she wasn’t always over-the-moon happy, but she was productive and valued.
“What’s taking you so long in there, Kates?”
Before she could answer, Sarah slipped through the yellow-and-white-striped curtain, her green eyes glittering with expectation. A brunette who was also highly intelligent and remarkably kind, Sarah had been Kate’s rock during the worst period of her life, and she loved the outrageously unpredictable woman like a sister.
“Wow!” Sarah murmured, her hand still clutching the curtain, her large, heavily fringed eyes going wide. “You look…dangerous.”
Kate snorted a self-conscious laugh. “It’s the dress, what there is of it.” Which was no more than a couple of yards of flowing silk, cut on the bias to fall from thin, rhinestone-covered straps. The bodice dipped into a V so deep it would be considered a misdemeanor in more conservative states. Below a slinky stretch of shimmering fuchsia, the ruffly hem hit her in midthigh, shorter even than her favorite man-tailored nightshirt.
Her father, the biblical scholar, and her mother, the primary-school principal, would be appalled to see their properly reared daughter parading around in a couple of flimsy scarves sewn together—and