Just Another Pretty Face (HT 459) (6 page)

Pierce sighed against her temple. "You're not going to keep on pretending you don't want to kiss me as much as I want to kiss you, are you?" he whispered, nuzzling her ear as he spoke.

"Some of us don't feel it's necessary to get everything we want, whenever we happen to want it," she said stiffly, trying very hard not to be affected by the tenderness of the caress—or the feel of his hard, muscular body all along the length of hers.

"See?" he crowed at her inadvertent admission. "I was right. You
do
want to kiss me."

"I do not!"

He drew his head back to look down at her. "Prove it," he challenged.

Nikki just looked at him.

"Prove it," he said again. "Lie still and let me kiss you, and if you don't feel irresistibly compelled to kiss me back in, oh, say—" he slanted a teasing glance at her "—twenty minutes, I'll let you up and never bother you again."

Nikki sputtered on surprised, unwilling laughter. "That's ridiculous."

"But you're tempted, aren't you?"

Nikki tried to look stern. "I am not," she said, trying to believe it. Trying to make him believe it. "Not in the least."

"Oh, yes, you are," he said cajolingly. Knowingly. "I can tell these things about a woman. You're dying to kiss me but you don't want to admit it. Come on, Nikki." He nuzzled her cheek, brushing soft baby kisses over her tender skin. "Just one kiss. One—" he touched his lips to the corner of her mouth, urging her to turn her head just a bit more "—tiny.. .little—" his lips hovered over hers, as if waiting for permission"—kiss," he groaned as she turned her mouth up to his.

The kiss was deep and hot and sweet and—

"Ahem!" said a voice from the doorway.

Nikki stiffened and jerked her mouth from his, her muscles tensing, poised to scramble to her feet at the first opportunity. Pierce merely tightened his arms, holding her still, and lifted his head.

"Yes, Mrs. Gilmore?" he asked as calmly as if having his housekeeper catch him rolling around on the floor with a woman he'd just met was a daily occurrence. "What is it?"

"The reporters from
People
magazine are here," she said.

A bulb flashed over her left shoulder, confirming her statement.

Pierce shifted his gaze to the man with the camera. "I'd appreciate it if you wouldn't do that again," he said in a voice Nikki had never heard him use before.

Without a word, the photographer lowered his camera.

"Thank you," Pierce said, icily polite, and levered himself to his feet. He held out his hand and helped Nikki to hers. One look at her flushed, furious face told him she most definitely wouldn't care to stay and be introduced to his guests. "Why don't you meet with Kathy while I'm busy here?" he said, bending his head to hers so that his words couldn't be overheard. "She can give you my schedule for the next couple of days, go over the routine around here, that sort of thing. This interview won't take very long, and then we'll see about getting you settled in." He looked up at his housekeeper with a smile. "Mrs. Gilmore will show you where Kathy's office is."

"That's all right," Nikki said quickly. "I remember the way." Then, with a quick embarrassed nod, she did what every smart soldier does when faced with overwhelming odds. She retreated to regroup.

She hurried past the housekeeper and out the door of the garden room, following her nose down a short hallway with a sharp right angle and into Kathy Frye's pleasant office with its view of the pool and cabana area.

Kathy Frye wasn't in it. The hold button on the telephone was blinking madly, though, and a large leather-bound appointment book lay open on the desk's polished surface with a gold Cross pen laid carelessly across the lined page as if she'd been called away in the middle of some task. Presumably she would be back any minute.

Nikki sighed, thankful for even a few minutes alone to gather herself together. Her pulse was still beating wildly against the tender skin at the base of her throat, hard, as if she'd run a mile with a fifty-pound pack on her back. Her breasts were still tight and aching. Her lips still tingled. And all from just one kiss. She crossed her arms over her waist and turned toward the open glass doors, willing the unfamiliar feelings to go away.

She stared blindly for a second or two, her thoughts focused inward, and then, gradually, her gaze was drawn by the motionless figure of the gardener at the narrow end of the pool. She was kneeling in one of the flower beds that separated the pool from the terrazzo tiles of the patio area in front of the garden room. Her face was in profile to Nikki, her left hand up to shade her eyes, her right hand clutched around the handle of a small trowel. Intrigued by the woman's utter stillness, Nikki uncrossed her arms and stepped closer to the long, multipaned doors, her gaze following the direction of the gardener's focused stare.

She could see Pierce easily from where she stood, seated on one of the red chintz sofas in the garden room next to the reporter from
People
magazine. He was turned toward her slightly, his head tilted in what Nikki already recognized as a characteristic indication of at-tentiveness as the reporter spoke to him. He shook his head when she finished, obviously laughing at whatever she had said. The woman laughed with him, reaching out to touch his arm, lingeringly, as she did so.

And the gardener knelt there in the flower bed, as still as a statue, silently watching.

Nikki wondered if the woman had also been witness to
her
little tete-a-tete with Pierce. It was a discomforting thought. Even more discomforting was the thought of who else might have witnessed her near surrender to the charms of her employer. Because of the way the house was built—in a modified U-shape with the pool roughly in the middle—all of the rooms at the back were more-or-less visible to all the other rooms.

"It's a good idea to keep your bedroom drapes closed at night," said a voice behind her.

Nikki jumped and turned around.

"Sorry," Kathy said. "I didn't mean to startle you." She smiled as she went around behind her desk. "Just let me finish with this call and then I'm all yours," she said, stabbing the hold button with the eraser end of a pencil as she picked up the receiver.

Nikki turned back toward the open door to give the secretary some privacy for her call, feeling, unaccountably, as if she were violating the privacy of the woman in the flower bed by watching her watch Pierce. She reached out and pulled the doors closed.

"Poor Janice has it really bad," Kathy said a moment later as she came up beside Nikki at the glass. The faint scent of her perfume came with her.

"Janice?"

Kathy nodded her head toward the gardener, who had finally gone back to digging in the flower bed. "She's been mooning over Pierce ever since she started working here." Her smile just a bit derisive, as if she felt sympathy for the woman but found her ridiculous, too. "She's almost worse than Lisbeth sometimes."

"What do you mean, worse than Lisbeth?"

"Oh, she doesn't
do
anything, any more than Lisbeth does, if that's what you're getting at. She just follows him around with her eyes. Stares at him when he's not looking, like some hormone-ridden little teeny-bopper." She laughed softly. "But, hey, who can blame her, huh?" Kathy said, giving Nikki a conspiratorial little woman-to-woman look out of the corner of her eye. "That damned charm of his affects most of us that way, at least at first."

"Damned charm?" Nikki said, instantly picking up on the woman's word choice.

"Damned. Roguish. Rascally. Take your pick," Kathy said with a careless shrug. "The tabloids call him all that, and worse." She horned back to her desk, then, suddenly all business. "Mrs. Gilmore said Pierce wanted me to fill you in on the routine around here." She flipped the leather-bound appointment book back a few pages. "You're going to be real busy keeping track of him."

An hour later, the last of the clotted cream and scones were gone, Pierce had told several amusing anecdotes about the making of
The Devil's Game
and dropped a couple of hints about his next project, and several pictures had been taken of the movie star at his leisure. Finally the reporter from
People
put down her empty teacup and asked the question she'd been dying to ask since she'd walked into the garden room.

"So, the woman you were, ah... entertaining when we arrived—who is she?"

Pierce smiled wickedly. "Just a friend," he said, knowing the reporter would draw the correct incorrect conclusion. "A very good friend."

* * *

NIKKI CROSSED her arms over her chest like a stubborn child and pressed back into the soft leather seat of the Lamborghini. "I'm not getting out," she said, as Pierce maneuvered the car into a parking space.

He glanced over at her, his eyebrow raised inquiringly.

"I mean it. I have absolutely no desire to go shopping."

"Well, I do," Pierce said, and set the parking break with a gesture of finality. Without another word, he pushed open the door and stepped out of the flashy low-slung red car onto the hallowed ground of some of the most expensive and profitable real estate in the world with every expectation that Nikki would follow him.

Which, with an exasperated sigh, she did. It was, after all, what she'd been hired to do. "Oh, all right. All right. Hold on a minute," she said irritably, pushing open her own door without waiting for him to come around and do it for her. "I'm coming."

She glanced up and down the street as she stepped onto the curb, automatically checking for any suspicious-looking characters while he locked the car up tight. There were lots of characters hurrying up and down the crowded sidewalk, but not one of them looked as if they were poised to launch an attack on her famous charge's gorgeous person. A few of them— more than a few, actually, and most of those female—glanced covertly at the man beside her but no more than that. It would have, she suspected, been considered less than cool for these hipper-than-hip Southern Californians to take any notice of something so commonplace as a mere movie star on Rodeo Drive. Nikki wished
something
would happen, though, that even just one overeager fan—an uncool tourist, maybe—would run screaming toward him. It would be as good an excuse as any to call a halt to this proposed shopping spree of his.

"Okay?" Pierce said as he turned from the car. He gave her a sardonic look, one that said he knew what she'd been doing—and thinking, probably. "Can we go now?"

"We can go," she answered. "But I'm only coming along on this little jaunt to protect you," she warned him. "I'm not going to buy anything."

"Fine," Pierce retorted. "Nobody asked you to." He reached out to take her hand in his.

She drew back instinctively, without thinking, putting her hand behind her, out of temptation's way.

Pierce gave her a knowing, faintly amused look. "You're supposed to be my new girlfriend, remember?" he said, reaching around her to take her hand in his. The movement brought him very close and he leaned even closer, putting his lips to her ear. Nikki was sure it must look as if he were nibbling on her. "We're supposed to be hot for each other," he murmured huskily, giving in to the temptation to nuzzle the soft, silky black hair at her temple.

She took a step back, tilting her head away and scowling fiercely in an effort to deny she'd felt anything at all, silently warning him to behave himself. "All right," she said, steeling herself to endure the little sparks that sizzled up and down her spine every time he touched her. "I'll try to pretend you make me weak in the knees."
Which won't,
she thought,
involve much pretense at all.
"But take my other hand, will you?" She pulled her right hand out of his grasp, reluctantly offering him her left as she stepped around to his other side. "That one's my gun hand."

"Jeez."
He stopped on the sidewalk to look at her. "Don't tell me you're wearing your gun under that jacket."

"Well, of course I am. How do you expect me to protect you without it?"

He snorted inelegantly. "The only thing I'm going to need protection from on Rodeo Drive is salesclerks on commission," he said, and pushed open the door to a very small, very exclusive boutique.

It was decorated in burnished silver and soft grayed blue with lots of subdued lighting so as not to detract from the hideously expensive merchandise. There were no racks of clothing like in a normal boutique or department store, just several long-waisted, long-legged, arrogant-looking mannequins, tastefully dressed and posed to display the latest au courant styles and make the shopper think that she, too, could look like a rich, well-dressed anorexic if she just bought the right outfit.

It was the kind of place that had always intimidated Nikki in a way that no barking staff sergeant or smart-mouthed enlisted man on a weekend spree ever could, making her feel hopelessly unhip, badly dressed and as awkward as Gulliver in Lilliput. The beautifully dressed, professionally coifed salesclerks—each one as dainty and elegant as a porcelain doll—added immeasurably to Nikki's discomfort level, putting her in a worse mood than she'd been in to start with.

One of them glanced up at their entrance, the expression on her exquisite, expertly made-up face as bored and distant as those of the mannequins. It changed dramatically when she saw who'd come in to the store.

"Mr. Kingston," she said, hurrying forward to greet him as if he were a cross between visiting royalty and a naked Chippendale dancer. "What a pleasure to see you." Her smile glistened, beaming goodwill and helpfulness. Her eyes glowed, reflecting the expectation of a fat commission. "What can I do for you today?"

"Hello, Maria," Pierce said warmly, effortlessly calling up the salesclerk's name from what Nikki was sure must be the vast store of feminine names warehoused in his libidinous synapses.

The young woman's face brightened even more at this sign of recognition, the gleam in her eyes becoming a little less monetary as obvious fantasies of romance—implied by the fact of his remembering her name—began to flicker through her mind.