Fit for a King (12 page)

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Diana
Palmer

Fit for a
King

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gruffly. "With
your mouth swollen and your hair in
a tangle and your skin glowing. I
want her to know
that we've been making love."

"That's cruel," she whispered.

"I
have to be cruel, don't you see? My God, Elissa,
he's my brother,"
he groaned.

"Yes,
I know." She stood in front of him, reaching
up to smooth away his
frown. She smiled gently,
drowning in new fantasies, brimming over
with her new knowledge of him, new memories to put under her pillow and
cherish.

"Too
bad you're such an innocent," he said with
a sigh.

"What
would you do if I weren't?" she teased
gently.

"I'd
take you into my bed and work Bess out of
my system with a
vengeance," he said honestly.
"And I could, with you. I've
never wanted anyone so much in all my life."

"I
wish I could let you," she replied. "I think I'd
like
sleeping with you, King. Lovemaking is more
beautiful than I ever
realized."

"I'm glad you think of it
that way, and not as
something to satisfy a
passing physical urge," he
said.
"Ideally it is an act of love. With you," he
added quietly,
bemusedly, "it feels like it. I don't
understand...."

She drew in
a slow breath and went to turn the
radio off, flushing at the reason it
had been turned on.

She looked across the
room and found him watching
her.

"There's
no need to blush," he said quietly, once
again reading her
mind. "You did my ego a world of
good—believe me. If it hadn't been
for our house-guests, I wouldn't have given a damn if you'd yelled
the place
down."

"It's
embarrassing to feel like this," she whis
pered. "They'll
see...."

"Yes," he agreed tersely. "Thank
God."

She
couldn't answer that. She opened the door and
walked ahead of him.

Bess
wasn't there. Bobby looked up with a sly grin.
"Bess has gone for a walk on the
beach," he mur
mured. He cleared his
throat. "I guess you two settled
your
differences...."

Elissa
blushed to the roots of her hair. King
laughed delightedly
and slid his arm around her. "It
wasn't anything serious," he said,
chuckling. "I'm
sorry if we embarrassed you."

Bobby
shrugged. "Not me. But Bess is unusually
sensitive, I
guess." He put down his pen. "She and
I used to be like
that, but she's grown away from me.
So many parties and teas and girls'
nights out—I
hardly see her when I'm at home."

"You
might try spending more time there, now that
you can afford
to," King suggested pointedly.

"I might. I think I'll stroll out and join her."

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Diana
Palmer

"We'll make some
coffee," King said, and he led
Elissa
toward the kitchen.

"She
was hurt," Elissa said as she filled the cof
feepot.

"I
know." His voice was deep and curt, and he
was staring out the
window at Bess watching the
waves.

She
plugged in the pot and went to him, touching
his chest lightly
where the shirt was unbuttoned.
"And so are you," she said gently.
"I'm sorry. I feel
as if I've failed you."

"How?" he asked, smiling.

"I couldn't give myself."

"The
hell you couldn't." He chuckled wryly, then
linked his arms
around her waist and looked down at
her. "/ stopped us. You didn't.
Not even when I men
tioned pregnancy.''

She lowered
her eyes to his chest. "I'm not so
afraid of it."

"Aren't
you?" He studied her. No, she didn't seem
to be. And he was shocked to learn that he
wasn't, either. That intrigued him. Shouldn't he have been?

He turned to gaze out the window once more.

Chapter
Five
Are you sure Bess doesn't want children?" Elissa
asked
abruptly, disrupting his disturbing thoughts.

He turned
back toward her. "She says not," he
replied. Hands in
his pockets, he leaned against the
counter. "In the beginning, I
think it was because she
didn't want to be tied down. Her mother had
seven children." He smiled sadly, remembering. "Bess was
in the middle, but she did her
share of looking after
the little ones. She
had a rough time of it, and so did the other kids, for that matter," he
murmured, remembering how Bess's father drank and terrified the children.
"Anyway, children don't necessarily guar
antee a good marriage. I've seen happy marriages de
stroyed by them."

That sounded very private. "Have you?"

He frowned. "My mother often said that she and

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Palmer

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King

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my father were happy
enough until I came along and
spoiled things," he said quietly.

"What
a horrid thing to say to your own child,"
Elissa muttered, her
face taut as she arranged cups
and saucers and cream and sugar on a big
silver tray.

"My
mother was a devoted socialite," he said.
"She didn't
much care for children. If my stepfather
hadn't insisted,
Bobby probably would never have
been born. Odd how things turn out. She was
a vi
vacious, beautiful woman with a quick mind. And
now she's a shell of
her former self."

"Do you visit her very often?"

"As
often as I can," he said. "She doesn't know me, of course."

She
studied his hard face while the coffee finished
perking, thinking how difficult his
childhood must
have been. She felt a burst
of sympathy for the boy
he had been.

"It
wasn't that rough," he said after a minute,
clearly reading her
expression. "Besides, it was an
incentive to show them all what I could do. Hasn't
anyone ever told you that revenge has produced a
hell
of a lot of successful
men?"

"I suppose so. Is that why
you've never married?
Because of your own
childhood?" she persisted
gently.

He
sighed. "Oh, Elissa," he murmured, smiling.
"You're one of a
kind, honey."

"I just wondered," she said.

He
watched her pour coffee into the elegant floral
china cups, thinking
how sweetly domestic she
seemed at that moment. She could cook like
an angel,
she
looked exquisite in anything she put on, she had
a gentle and loving nature, and physically she made
the top of his head fly off with the
uninhibitedness of
her response to him.

"If
I ever married, I suppose it would be you," he
said unexpectedly.

Her hand
trembled, spilling coffee. She put the pot
down with shaky
fingers and reached for a dish towel
to mop up the mess.

"That was unkind," she told him.

"I
meant it, in fact," he said lazily, moving closer. "There's not much
hope of marriage in my life, with
things the way they are. But I think I
could enjoy
living with you. You're quiet and amusing, and I
covet your
body."

He was openly leering at it, in
fact, and she burst
out laughing. It was a
joke, of course. After all the
time
she'd known him, occasionally it was still dif
ficult to tell when he
was joking.

"I covet yours, too, but
I'm not that kind of girl,"
she
reminded him primly.

"That doesn't stop you
from looking out windows
at nude men at
night, I notice," he said, tongue in
cheek.

She threw
up her hands. “Well, if that's the attitude

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Palmer

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King

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you're going to take,
I'll find some other nude man
to ogle!"

"What
was that?" Bobby asked from the doorway, laughing. Behind him, Bess was
glaring at them both.

Elissa
flushed. "Now see what you've done? Your
brother will think I'm
a voyeur."

"Well, aren't you?" King grinned.

She handed
him the tray. "I hope you drop it on your foot," she said sweetly.

"Vicious
woman," he muttered. "Open the door,
honey," he told
Bess.

Bess
flushed, and the two of them exchanged a look
that made Elissa
want to throw herself off a building.
Fortunately, Bobby had gone ahead and
didn't see it. Elissa wished
she
hadn't. King might want her body, but
what she saw in his eyes when he looked at Bess
was something she'd
have died for. It was a sweeping
kind of hunger, mingled with tenderness.

Bess
curled up on the sofa to drink her coffee,
pausing now and
again to glance at Elissa, who knew
that everything she and King had done
probably
showed in
her lack of makeup and tangled hair.

"I hope we're not
intruding by staying here to
night,"
Bess said quietly. "But the hotel was so
crowded, and you're much closer to the airport than
we were, way up in Ocho Rios."

"You're
not intruding at all," King replied. He glanced at Elissa. "Elissa
will need tonight to pack
and get the cottage squared away, won't you,
baby?"

"That's
right," she said. It was hard to talk when
he called her
"baby." "And I'd better get to it if
we're leaving in the morning. What time is
it?" she
added, rising.

"You'll
need to be ready by eight," he said. He
got lazily to his
feet. "I'll walk you home," he said
with a meaningful
smile. "Don't wait up," he told
the other two.

"I
need an early night myself," Bess said coolly.
"I expect I'll be
out like a light in no time."

"I
wish I could say the same," Bobby muttered
over his paperwork. "I won't finish
before dawn, at
this rate. I guess you
wouldn't care to help?" he
asked
Bess.

Her eyes
widened. "Me? Heavens, I can't add one
and one."

"Too bad," Bobby
said. He seemed about to say something else, but he shrugged and bent his head
again. "See you in the morning, Elissa."

"Sleep
well," she told them, clinging to King's
hand as he led her out
into the darkness.

He lit a
cigarette and smoked it during the short
walk to her cottage,
not saying a word. It was a warm,
pleasant night, even with the misting
rain around
them.

At the
back step of her cottage, he ground out the
cigarette. "I'm
sorry about this trip, but I couldn't
think of another way to do it that
didn't involve you."

"It's all right. I'm not doing so well with the new