Her Leading Man (24 page)

But that wasn’t the point here. He decided to say
so. “That doesn’t
have anything to do with this situation.”

Her icy control snapped, and she leaned into
hi
m
as if a strong wind blew at her back. Her
cheeks
blossomed with color, her nostrils flared, and her
eyes
s
parked fire. “Oh, yes, it does, damn you,
Martin
Tafft!”

Shocked by her sudden vehemence, Martin stepped
back a pace. “It
does?”

“
Yes, blast you! Men think it’s their exclusive
right
to pursue and manipulate women into doing what
they want! They’re
the ones who set out to seduce!
They’re the ones who do the courting. They
think it’s
their right to set the rules and boundaries of
sexual
conduct among the masses—as long as they get to
play around on the
side and pretend to keep the so
-
called
ladies pure. In the meantime, their women are
supposed to sit home
and knit and not pay any attention
to their husbands’ affairs on the
side!”

Martin was so startled by this outburst, he couldn’t
form a coherent
thought, much less speak one. He
could only stand there, receive
Christina’s complaints,
and blink at her. He’d never heard anything like
it.
What made
it worse was that she was saying aloud
what he’d been thinking for
years
. Only
hearing his
thoughts spoken—and by a woman, yet—made
him
uncomfortable.

Besides all
that, this line was totally irrelevant.

“
Now,
see here—”

But she wasn’t through with him
.
“Oh,
no you
don’t!
It’s the truth, blast you! Men have it all their
own way, and when a
woman dares to horn in on
their territory—in this case, proposing a sexual
liaison—they get all fussy and scared and run away!”

Now that,
Martin thought, was extremely unfair.

“
I
didn’t run away! You did!”

“
You rejected me!” Christina all but shouted
at
him
“Do you think I’m going to sit around with a
man who doesn’t want me and
wallow in his rejection?
If you think that, Martin Tafft, you have
another
think
coming! I’m not the wallowing kind!”

She had pointed her forefinger at him during this
speech, and by the
end of it
she
was poking him in
the chest with it. Martin grabbed her finger. “Stop
that! It hurts! And
dammit, quit yelling, will you?”

“
No!”
she yelled. “I will not quit yelling!”

Doors had started to open, and people had begun
to peek out from
behind
them.
Martin saw a couple
of Peerless folks standing in a clump near the door
to the lobby,
looking frightened and uncertain. Great.
This was just
great
.
Exactly what he wanted to do:
m
ake a
scene.

“
Darn it all, this is ridiculous, ‘ he muttered at
last.
“Come with me.”

Again, he had to use force, but he eventually
managed
to
drag and push
Christina
up the stairs to his
hotel
room.

Christina really didn’t know why she was being
such a pill.
Probably she was only feeling humiliated
because Martin hadn’t leaped at the
chance to have
an affair with her. It truly was mortifying, though.
He was the first man
she’d ever met with whom she’d
even consider having an affair, and he didn’t
want
her.

It was embarrassing and humiliating and infuriating,
and she didn’t want
to talk about it, especially
with him. What she wanted to do was heave
bricks
at
stone walls and have the satisfaction of seeing
something burst into pieces.
Something other than
herself, that is to say.

She felt shattered. Ashamed, embarrassed, rejected,
and humiliated. Not
very comfortable emotional companions
for a woman who was normally on top
of
the world
and everything in it. She also could
scarcely believe that Martin Tafft, of all
men, was
actually using brute force to bend her to his
will.

He opened the door to his room, shoved her inside,
and after stumbling
and barely catching, herself before
she could fall flat on her face, Christina
jerked
away
from him, swirled around, and would have slapped
h
im in the face if he
hadn’t caught her wrist and
held on to it. His grip was
quite strong. She was
secretly
impressed, although,
since she now hated him
every bit as much as she’d
wanted to get him naked
only minutes
earlier, she’d never say so.

“
Will you stop that?” he said angrily. “I don’t
want
to fight with you! I want to figure out what’s going
on here!”

What she wanted to do was scream abuse at his
face, but Christina
knew she would only embarrass
herself further if she did so. Therefore, she
sucked
in
several deep, soothing breaths and decided to wait
until she’d calmed
down a bit before she
tried to
speak again.

Thank the good Lord he released her wrist almost
as soon as he’d
grabbed it. Free to move again, she
spun around and stalked to the window,
where she
ripped the curtain aside and glared outside. The
only
green in
sight was that of the palm trees, their fronds
gently swaying in the desert
breeze. Merciful heavens,
this desert was ugly.

Out of breath, probably from fury, she still
listened
with
all of her senses on the alert to detect
what
Martin
was doing behind her She didn’t suspect him
of malicious intent—if
anythin
g
, Martin Tafft was too
good for this world, damn
hi
m
—but she didn’t want
him to take her by surprise.

He, too, breathed heavily. As well he might. She
was a slim woman,
but still a grown-up on
e.
And
he’d had to force
her upstairs, down the hall, and
into his room.
Good. Christina felt slightly
better,
knowing it had been she who’d worn him
out
.

After several tense moments, he spoke. “Listen,
Christina, I’m sorry
I manhandled you. I-
I
really
don’t do things like
that.”

She
said, “Ha!” and felt even better.

“
I know, I know. I must do things like
that,
be
cause I just did.”

Although she’d be hanged before she’d turn and
look, Christina
imagined him either running his
fingers
through his hair or tugging on that lock of hair
he loved so much.
Her heart executed a sharp spasm
of sympathy, and she told it to stop doing
stupid
things. She didn’t speak.

“
But I don’t usually do things like that,” he
continued.
It sounded to Christina as if he were floundering
in the dark, unsure
what to say now
.

And well he
might flounder, the brute.

Even as the epithet crossed her mind, she knew it
was unfair. Martin
wasn’t a
brute
. He was a fine man.
A
gentleman—whatever that was—and he thought
he
was doing
a noble thing by refusing to have an affair
with her. Heck, he thought he was
doing her a good
turn. Saving her virtue and all that rot. As if her
virtue had ever done
her any good.

She wanted to strangle him
.

“
Anyhow,” he went on, reminding her of a
blind
man groping toward light, “I didn’t mean to hurt
you.”

“
You didn’t.” There. Let him come up with
another
cliché and see if it would fit any better.

“
Good.
I’m glad.”

She
huffed to let him know she wasn’t mollified.

“
And I
didn’t mean to hurt your feelings.”

Christina whirled around, incensed. “Damn you,
Martin Tafft! You
didn’t hurt my feelings!”

He had hurt her feelings. Dreadfully. She’d die a
painful death before
she’d admit it to a soul.

Martin looked confused for a second or three, then
said, “But
. . .
but then I don’t understand.”

“
Oh!” So furious, she almost saw red
again,
Christina turned around once more and slammed her
palm against the
wall. At once, she spared a second
to be grateful she hadn’t hit the window
glass.

The truth of the matter was that she didn’t
understand
,
either. Not
really. In an effort to hide her
own
puzzlement
at her shocking behavior, she raged
on.
“Men!
You’re all alike. Think you’re the only people
in the universe able to make
decisions.”

“
That’s not true, Christina. The only person I
can
make decisions for is myself. And I try to make
decisions
I
can live with.”

Oh.

For some reason, Martin’s calm rationality didn’t
make her feel any
better at all. This time, she, turned
slowly to gaze at him. So. If he honestly
believed
what
he’d just said, then he had refused her offer to
have an affair with
him because he
honestly didn’t
want to
bed
her
.

When the silence thickened and became oppressive,
she forced herself
to say, “I see. Well, then, I
guess there’s no further need to chat, is
there?
”

Had she truly used the word
chat
to describe the
past several intense minutes? She’d have
rolled her
eyes in disgust with herself if she didn’t feel so
ghastly.

Christina didn’t cry easily, and she seldom lost her
temper, although she
certainly had one
.
At the moment
tears pressed against her eyelids,
her temper
was in shreds, and she wanted to hit Martin Tafft
with a blunt
instrument, then bang her own head
against a rock wall, then stab Pablo
Orozco to death
with a dull butter knife, then jump off a high
cliff,
and
then line up all the people she didn’t like and
run them down with her
motorcar—not necessarily
in that order.

She’d never felt more pathetic, powerless, and
unhappy
in
her life. Even when she’d understood, finally
and completely, that she’d never
be able to earn a
scholarship to attend medical school, in spite of
the
fact that
she was smarter, better qualified, and better
educated than ninety-nine
percent of her male competitors,
she hadn’t felt this awful. Heck, when
that
had
happened, she’d been prepared for it,
having lived
twenty-one years in this wretchedly unfair
world.
That
lineup of black crows who called themselves
regents of the university had only
confirmed what
she already knew about the world as it related to
women.

This was different. This was an intensely personal
rejection. She
couldn’t offhand think of anything
more personal, actually.

Martin held out a hand to her. The gesture was
tentative, as if he
feared she might slap it away. She
felt like it. She also felt like grabbing
his hand and
pressing it to her cheek. The state of her emotions
boded ill for the
rest of her sojourn on the set of
Egyptian Idyll
. But she’d persevere. She was
nothing
if
not persistent.