Calamity Mum. Diana Palmer

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СКАЧАТЬ a little. “Sorry I was staring at you last night. I tend to carry people-watching to extremes,” she said to excuse her blatant flirting.

      He glanced at her cynically, and he didn’t smile. “My son finds you fascinating.”

      “Yes,” she said. “I’m afraid so.”

      “He’s almost thirteen and a late bloomer. He hasn’t paid much attention to girls until now.”

      She laughed. “I’m a bit old to be called a girl.”

      “You’re still in college, aren’t you?” he mused, obviously mistaking her for someone not much older than his son.

      “Well, yes, I suppose I am.” She didn’t add that she’d only started last year, at the age of twenty-three. She’d always looked young for her age, and it was fun to pretend that she was still a teen. She stopped to pick up a seashell and study it. “I love shells. Nan chides me for it, but you should try to walk across tilled soil with her. She’s down on her hands and knees at the first opportunity, wherever she sees disturbed dirt. Once she actually climbed down into a hole where men were digging out a water line! I’m glad they had a sense of humor.”

      “She’s an archaeology student?”

      “Other people are merely archaeology students—Nan is a certifiable archaeology student!”

      He laughed. “Well, that’s dedication, I suppose.”

      She stared out at the ocean. “They say there are probably Paleo-Indian sites out there.” She nodded. “Buried when ocean levels rose with the melting of the glaciers in the late Pleistocene.”

      “I thought your friend was the archaeology student.”

      “When you spend a lot of time with them, it rubs off,” she apologized. “I know more than I want to about fluted points and ancient stone tools.”

      “I can’t say I’ve ever been exposed to that sort of prehistory. I majored in business and minored in economics.”

      She glanced up at him. “You’re in business, then?”

      He nodded. “I’m a banker.”

      “Does your son want to follow in your footsteps?”

      His firm lips tugged down. “He does not. He thinks business is responsible for all the ecological upheaval on the planet. He wants to be an artist.”

      “You must be proud of him.”

      “Proud? I graduated from the Harvard school of business,” he said, glaring at her. “What’s good enough for me is good enough for him. He’s being enrolled in a private school with R.O.T.C. When he graduates, he’ll go to Harvard, as I did, and my father did.”

      She stopped. Here was someone else trying to live his child’s life. “Shouldn’t that be his decision?” she asked curiously.

      He didn’t bat an eyelash. “Aren’t you young to question your elders?” he taunted.

      “Listen, just because you’ve got a few years on me…!”

      “More than fifteen, by the look of you.”

      She studied his face closely. It had some deep lines, and not many of them were around the corners of his eyes. He wasn’t a smiling man. But perhaps he wasn’t quite as young as she’d suspected, either. Then she realized that he was counting from what he thought her age was.

      “I’m thirty-four. But that still makes me an old man compared to you,” he murmured. “You don’t look much older than Ben.”

      Her heart leaped. He was closer to her age than she’d realized, and much closer than he knew. “You seem very mature.”

      “Do I?” His eyes glittered as he studied her. “You’re a beauty,” he said unexpectedly, his silver gaze lingering on her flawless complexion and big pale blue eyes and wavy, long blond hair. “I was attracted to you the first time I saw you. But,” he added with world-weary cynicism, “I was tired of buying sex with expensive gifts.”

      She felt her face go hot. He had entirely the wrong idea. “I’m…” she began, wanting to explain.

      He held up a lean hand. “I’m still tired of it,” he said. He studied her without smiling, and the look he gave her made her knees go weak, despite its faint arrogance. “Do your parents know that you’re making blatant passes at total strangers? Do you really think they’d approve of your behavior?”

      She almost gasped. “What my parents think is none of your business!”

      “It certainly is, when I’m the man you’re trying to seduce.” He glared at her. “So let me set you straight. I don’t take college girls to bed, and I don’t appreciate being stalked by one. Play with children your own age from now on.”

      His statement left her blustering. “My goodness, just because I smiled at you a time or two…!”

      “You did more than smile. You positively leered,” he corrected.

      “Will you stop saying that?” she cried. “For heaven’s sake, I was only looking at you! And even if I was after that kind of…of thing, why would I pick a man with a son? Some father you are! Does he know that his father wanders all over the beach accusing people of propositioning him? And you must be attached—”

      He was oddly watchful, not at all angry. He was studying her face with keen, faintly amused interest. “My, my, and you’re not even redheaded,” he murmured, watching the color come and go on that exquisite complexion. “My son is too smitten with you to consider my place in your thoughts, and I don’t have a wife. She died some years ago. I do have a fiancée—almost,” he added half under his breath.

      “The poor woman!”

      “She’s quite well-to-do, in fact,” he said, deliberately misunderstanding her. “So am I. Another reason to avoid college students, who are notoriously without means.”

      She wanted to tell him what her means were, but she was too angry to get the words out. She flushed furiously at being misjudged and insulted. She decided then and there not to tell him about her background. He’d have to get to know her for herself, not her “means.”

      “Thinking up appropriate replies?” he asked helpfully. “Something along the lines of feeding me to the sharks?”

      “They’d have to draw straws so the loser could eat you!” she blurted out.

      She turned and set off back down the beach, hot all over from her surge of fury.

      She ran along the beach in her haste to get away from him. She’d been playing mind games with herself. She hadn’t realized that he mistook her rapt regard for serious flirting. She’d certainly be more careful in future to keep her fantasies to herself! Never again would she so much as glance at that man!

      It was a pity she didn’t look back. He was standing where she left him with a peculiarly predatory look in his pale eyes, and he was laughing.

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