Pink Satin

other reason, of course.

Except that he’d come on like a freight train when they were dancing. He’d packed kisses like explosives, and in more subtle ways showed a very definite interest. For three days after that, they hadn’t seen each other, and when they did she was naked.

But then, he hadn’t even blinked twice when he saw her naked.

Half her life, Greer would have given gold for men who didn’t look at her figure.

She plumped up the pillow for the fourth time, pushed Truce off the bed for the third time, and stared at a night-black ceiling with her eyes wide open. Don’t you fall in love with him, lady. Stick to the kind of men you can handle.

Her conscience was always good for a pep talk. Greer was too honest to kid herself. Ryan…she couldn’t handle him. And her feelings around him…she wasn’t very good at handling those, either. Moorings shifted; landmarks disappeared; mental fogs rolled in when he was around.

Greer was safe just as she was. In time, perhaps, she’d want marriage again, but to a man she felt comfortable with. Ryan didn’t make her feel comfortable; she felt perfectly miserable around him. Those blue eyes of his invited wanton, deliciously decadent behavior, but Greer wasn’t playmate material. She’d never played, not where her sexual feelings were concerned. Sex was a serious business. And if she hadn’t taken it seriously, she would have been used more than once in her life.

Only Ryan made her feel as if it were…fun. As if touch had to do with laughter. As if kisses had to do with mischief. As if fooling an entire crowded restaurant had been…exciting. As if she were a different kind of woman, a woman who enjoyed enticing, and low-voiced laughter, and private, intimate teasing…

Goose. If you ever tried to play that role, they’d laugh you off the stage, Greer. Go to sleep.

She did.

Chapter Six

“Stop,” Greer whispered into the telephone. “Would you just stop? Leave me alone!”

She put down the phone and promptly burst into tears. Her breather had called incessantly this week. Dragging a hand through her hair, she paced the living room in her bare feet, her eyes blinded by tears. She was still dressed for work, in a tan-and-white skirt and tan blouse. She had kicked off her shoes and tossed her white jacket on the couch hours before. She’d worked like a slave ever since she’d come home.

She didn’t normally work on Friday nights, much less schedule a follow-up meeting with Ray for a Saturday morning. Only because it was Ray had she agreed. The man had been so damned impossible to work with this past week. She’d snatched at the chance to establish some kind of decent professional relationship with him.

After fifteen straight hours of work, her nerves were on the tensile edge of exhaustion. Her breather calling at this late hour had been the last straw after an impossibly long day. The tears kept dripping, and fear filled the weary corners of her mind. Most Friday nights she went out. How could he have known she was home on this one?

Unless he was watching. Heart pounding, Greer whirled around to face the living-room windows, but the draperies were closed. Or nearly. There was a thin strip of darkness where they didn’t quite meet, and she rushed over to pull those ends together.

Fresh moisture brimmed in her eyes. Grabbing Truce and a bag of knitting, she let herself out of the apartment, leaned against the bare white wall in the hall and took one calming breath after another. Why do you persist in believing you’re safer out here?

Because safety wasn’t the issue. This was a matter of putting distance between herself and that white wall phone, that man. And the caller was a man. She knew the sound of a man’s deep breathing.

With a loud, emphatic sigh, she sat on the hall carpet with her legs tucked under her and grabbed her knitting needles and a long strand of pale green yarn from her tapestry bag. Click, click. She sniffed. More click-clicks, until an entire row of Robin’s sweater was finished, that row a little tear-blotched but basically straight.

When the hall door opened at the bottom of the steps, she jumped three feet, still sniffing.

“Greer?”

Before she could blink, Ryan’s work boots had bounded up the steps and settled in front of her. She did not want to see him. The man had run her through an emotional maze all week, darting in and out of her life as if he belonged there. Depending on him was asking for trouble. And that was half the darn problem anyway. He was incredibly easy to depend on.

“Hey.”

He was also difficult to ignore. “Hi,” she said brightly.

His long legs bent at the knees, jeans straining to accommodate the muscles in his thighs. Apart from jeans and work boots and a blue work shirt, he was wearing impatience like an outer garment. She couldn’t see his face, since she was busy click-clicking with her knitting needles, but she could smell his mood, the way a fawn could sniff a hunter’s closeness. “You wear jeans more often than any engineer I ever heard of,” she remarked casually, and refrained from sniffing one last time. Furiously, she blinked away the last hint of tears. “And don’t you ever keep regular hours? You realize it’s nearly midnight?”

He didn’t move toward her. He didn’t touch her, but he didn’t move so much as an inch away, either. “You’re all right?”

“You told me one time that mechanical engineers are high-class grease monkeys. How did you put it? ‘A mechanical engineer plays with a drawing board half the time. The other half he has to figure out why,’ I quote, ‘his half-assed designs didn’t work.’” Knit-purl, knit-purl. “Is that why you’re so late?”

“Because of a half-assed design? In a way.” He paused, and then his voice continued, as soothing as butter, calming, reassuring. For a moment. “They can teach you a great deal in school about mathematical precision. Nothing about the human factor of blending man and machine. Efficiency, safety, timing-those problems can’t be solved on the most brilliant man’s drawing board. Exactly why I opted for the mechanical end of engineering. And you’re excellent at doing that,” he added abruptly.

“Doing what?”

“Getting a man to talk about his favorite subjects. But you can stow it with me, Greer; I’m no Daniel. Now what the hell are you doing out here? As if I didn’t know.”

“It was hot in the apartment. Something’s wrong with that air conditioner again.”

“You’ve been crying.”

“You’d cry, too, if you’d just dropped four stitches.”

“How many times has he called today?”

“No one has called,” Greer assured him, salvaging another straggly length of yarn that Truce was trying to paw.

“Would you stop that?” he said irritably. “Look at me.”

“Nope.”

He almost smiled at the stubborn tilt to her chin. He’d seen her when she left for work that morning, all crisp efficiency in her white blazer and white pumps, her hips swinging briskly in the tan-and-white A-line skirt on the way to her car. Her outfit hadn’t changed so drastically since then, only her expression. Now, she looked crisp, efficient, and stubborn.

He’d seen that look a lot this week. In terms of attire, he’d seen her in her bag-lady gear, dressed alluringly for a date, in the pastel business suits that showed off her legs, and that once he wasn’t likely to forget, naked. Greer was a lot of women in one, but the image that was undoubtedly going to drive him over the edge was the slightly irrational woman with the big brown eyes and the stubborn streak.