Just Another Pretty Face (HT 459) (13 page)

Or with no encouragement at all.

Which was why he was out in the cabana weight room at three o'clock in the morning, in sweatpants and high-tops, doing his damnedest to work himself into a state of utter exhaustion before going back to bed. "To sleep," he reminded himself as his unruly body began to stir to life at the mere thought of the warm, tousled woman in his bed.

She'd been sleeping deeply when he left her, curled up on her side like an exhausted child with her hands tucked under her chin, the covers pulled over her shoulders and her short feathery hair sticking up in all directions. He could probably slide into bed without even waking her, he thought longingly, just snuggle right up to her warm, lithesome body and hold her while she slept, her back to his front, like spoons. He hadn't made love to her that way, yet.

"Jeez, Kingston," he muttered, disgusted with himself and his rampaging libido. "What the hell's the matter with you? You haven't been this horny since..."

He honestly couldn't remember the last time. When he'd first reached puberty, probably, and constant thoughts of sex and girls had kept him in a perpetual state of arousal. But not since then, certainly. Women were just too available to him, to eager and willing, for him to get into much of a swelter over any one in particular. He'd always been like the proverbial honeybee, flitting from flower to flower, enjoying and being enjoyed, with no thought of anything permanent or lasting.

Until now.

Until now, he hadn't even considered the possibility of anything permanent. Or even semipermanent. He was too much like his father, everyone always said, too much the debonair ladies' man, too much the gallant, lighthearted lover to ever tie himself to just one woman. Except that he didn't feel lighthearted now.

He felt... possessive. Proprietary. Greedy.
Mine,
he'd said as he slipped into the incredible heat and tightness of her.
Mine,
he'd said as her hips rolled beneath him and she made those breathless little panting noises in his ear.
Mine,
he'd said when she gasped out his name and came apart in his arms. And the really scary thing was that, on some basic, primitive, heretofore untapped level of his masculine psyche, he'd meant it. Literally. Like a stallion who'd cut a mare out of the herd, he'd claimed her, marking her as his own with his possession of her body, and now she was
his.

He'd never felt that way about a woman before.

Ever.

And it scared him spitless that he felt that way now.

He tried to tell himself that it had to have something to do with the fact that she'd been a virgin,
A virgin!
he thought, shaking his head with the wonder of it. He'd never made love to a virgin before. His own first experience had been at the hands of an experienced twenty-three-year old starlet who'd played his older sister in one of his early films. But it stood to reason that being the first man to possess a woman's body would affect his feelings for her in some weird way. That it would stir up some ancient, primitive ownership instincts or something. It was the only explanation for the way he was feeling.

Because the way he was feeling was... crazy.

He wasn't equipped for the long-term. Like his father, he lacked whatever it was that was so necessary for permanent bonding with a woman and, unlike his father, he knew it. He wasn't about to risk ruining a woman's life by offering her any sort of permanence in a fit of testosterone-induced ardor that rarely lasted beyond a few heated months. Because, no matter how hot the fire seemed in the beginning, it
always
ended.

Usually he viewed the inevitable termination of an affair with equanimity and the careless sangfroid of a man who knew there would always be another woman. But this wasn't "usually," he thought uneasily. It wasn't anything like "usually."

It was... visceral.

All-consuming.

Intense.

And, for a man whose deepest feelings had never really been engaged before, frightening in a way that he couldn't articulate or explain.

Pierce reacted the way most men do to vague fears, unexplainable emotions and frustrated passion—with aggression. He jumped up from the weight bench, yanked the towel from around his neck and attacked the body bag as if it were a living adversary to be subdued. He leaned in close, hunching his shoulders, aiming his punches at what would have been a human opponent's vulnerable midsection. Two left jabs...a right cross... all delivered with a bouncing step that kept the laces on his high-topped athletic shoes swaying as he moved his feet in a pattern as intricate as any dance steps. He settled into a punishing routine intended to exhaust his superbly conditioned body and empty his mind of everything except what he was doing.

And then, suddenly, a shrill sound, as grating as fingernails on a blackboard, ripped through early-morning darkness with a pulsating whine that demanded immediate attention. Pierce checked himself in midpunch, his head jerking toward the sound, his feet already carrying him toward the open door of the cabana to investigate. He was moving at a slow lope as he rounded the pool and flower beds, his eyes searching the massive stone structure for any indication of what—or who—had caused the alarm to go off. He saw lights come on. Heard women's voices raised in fear and confusion. And realized, suddenly, exactly what the shrieking alarm was warning them of.

"Nikki," he mouthed frantically, breaking into a run as he reached the terrace steps. Black smoke was billowing out of his open bedroom doors.
"Nikki!"

* * *

THE SCREAMING ALARM jerked Nikki from a deep, dreamless sleep, catapulting her into a waking nightmare of noise and heat and confusion. Her eyes stung fiercely as she struggled to open them, and every breath she dragged into her heaving lungs burned all the way down. Flames flickered through the smoke, as deadly and threatening as living monsters as they crawled across the carpet. She stared at them in confusion for a moment, her mind disoriented by smoke and sleep. And then, realizing what was happening, she scrambled up, coughing and choking, and flung an arm to the side to rouse her lover and warn him of the danger.

"Pierce," she croaked hoarsely, blindly searching for him among the tumbled covers. Smoke-induced tears streamed down her face as she scrambled, naked, on all fours over the bed, trying to find him.
"Pierce!"
she screamed frantically, the word no more than a rasp of sound in her smoke-clogged throat.

She grabbed a pillow and rolled off the bed, intending to beat a path through the smoldering carpet and free him from the flames. It was her duty to watch over him, she thought frantically. Her duty to see that no harm came to him while he was in her charge. He was her responsibility. Hers to protect and care for.
Hers.
And she had failed him.

"Pierce! Where are you?"

Something clamped around her bare waist, lifting her off her feet and yanking her back away from the danger of the flames licking around her ankles. She kicked backward, instinctively using the side of her foot in a determined effort to free herself. There was a grunt of pain as it connected with something solid. The clamp around her waist faltered and then tightened painfully, lifting her even further off of her feet.

"Nikki." The word was low and intense and spoken right next to her ear. "Nikki, it's me. Pierce. We've got to get out of here."

"The fire-"

"The hell with the fire," he said, awkwardly dragging her backward. "The fire is nothing. It's the smoke we've got to worry about. We've got to get out of here.
Now."

The sense of what he was saying got through to her then. She dropped the pillow and stopped struggling to get away, struggling instead to get to her feet and drag
him
to safety.

"... get you out of here," she muttered purposefully, wrapping an arm around his waist to assist him from the room.

They stumbled out of the bedroom and onto the terrace together, weaving like a pair of drunks on a binge, tears streaming down their faces from the sharp sting of the smoke. Other hands reached for them as they started down the stone stairway to the ground below, offering support as they took the last few tottering steps toward safety.

"Oh, my God, Oh, my God, are you all right?"

"Mr. Kingston, what happened?"

"Are either of you hurt? Is anyone burned?"

Pierce ignored the questions. "Someone call the fire department," he bellowed, raising his voice over the sound of the fire alarm that still screamed inside the house. His arms tightened around Nikki, shielding and supporting her against his chest as she took deep, heaving gulps of sweet, clean air into her lungs. "And get Nikki something to put on."

"I've already called 911," Kathy said, stripping off her blue silk peignoir as she spoke. Pierce grabbed it from her without a word. "You can hear the sirens already," she said, watching as he tenderly wrapped it around his bodyguard's naked, trembling form.

"I thought you were caught in the fire," Nikki said, her voice barely more than a hoarse whisper. She clung to him, resisting his efforts to guide her arms into the borrowed robe. "I thought you were hurt." Her hands skimmed frantically over his shoulders and chest, as if checking for damage. "Or dying. When I couldn't find you I thought—"

"I'm all right," he said, abandoning his efforts at dressing her to pull her tight against his chest. Nikki gasped, coughing, and wrapped her arms around his waist, burying her face in the warm curve of his neck. He cupped the back of her head in his hand and held her there, pressing his cheek against her hair.
"We're
all right," he said, soothing them both with the close contact of their bodies and the faint rocking motion one uses to calm a baby.

They stood like that for a long moment, holding on tight, each physically affirming that the other was alive and breathing and safe, until, finally, the sound of screaming sirens became louder than the din of the fire alarm, announcing the arrival of the Beverly Hills fire department.

"Lisbeth, run around front and tell them the fire's back here so they don't tear down the front door and tromp all through the house looking for it," Pierce ordered over Nikki's head.

The girl just stood there in her yellow Snoopy nightshirt, staring at Pierce and Nikki with a flabbergasted look on her face, as if she couldn't believe her eyes.

"Go," he said sternly, and Lisbeth fled to do his bidding.

Nikki drew back out of Pierce's embrace and slipped her arms into the wide kimono sleeves of the borrowed robe, suddenly embarrassed at her nakedness and the reason for it and the way she'd exposed her feelings to everyone watching.

"You look like a chimney sweep," Pierce said, his smile tender and teasing as he helped her pull the edges of the silky robe together. His fingers drifted upward to touch her cheek. "You have soot all over your face." He smoothed the hair at her temple. "And your hair's sticking up all over your head."

"Me?" The soft look in Nikki's eyes belied the brisk, enough-of-this-nonsense tone of her voice. "You look like you just crawled out of a coal mine." Then, unable to deny herself, she reached up to touch the back of the hand that was smoothing her hair. "Are you sure you're all right?" she asked softly, her voice still unnaturally husky from the smoke. Her gaze searched his face. "You're not burned anywhere?"

"I'm fine," he assured her just as the firemen came racing around the back of the house with the nightshirt-clad Lisbeth in the lead. He lifted his hand to hail them. "We could use some oxygen over here," he said as two of the firemen veered off toward him while the rest of them rushed past, up the terrace steps to the smoke-filled bedroom.

"I
don't need any oxygen," Nikki said as she crisscrossed the robe over her torso and pulled the belt tight around her narrow waist. "I'm fine."

"You need oxygen," Pierce said, motioning to one of the firemen to administer it to her whether she wanted it or not.

She sighed and slipped out from under Pierce's sheltering arm as one of the firemen held the oxygen mask to her face.

Pierce stumbled against her as she moved away from him.

Nikki's eyes widened in alarm, vivid green in her soot-smeared face. "I thought you said you weren't hurt," she accused, rudely pushing the oxygen mask out of the way as she reached to steady him. She slipped her arm around his waist before either of the firemen could move to assist him, wedging her shoulder into his armpit to support him.

"Not from the fire," Pierce said, leaning heavily on her as he wrapped his arm around her shoulders again and let her take most of his weight.

"Then what?" Nikki demanded, ignoring the firemen as she steered Pierce to a lounge chair by the pool.

He gave her a lopsided grin, one mingling wry self-deprecation with the sort of pride a fond father feels when his little girl has accomplished a feat he'd thought was beyond her capabilities. "I think you broke my leg when you kicked me."

* * *

PlERCE'S LEG WASN'T actually broken. There was a nasty-looking bruise on his shin and X rays revealed a small hairline fracture of the tibia that would need a bit of coddling until it healed. Pierce agreed to having a removable walking cast strapped onto his lower leg by the emergency-room personnel but refused to submit to the indignity of a wheelchair until Nikki grudgingly agreed to lung X rays and an examination for possible injuries caused by smoke inhalation. As this involved the taking of a blood sample to check for possible toxins that may have been present in the smoke, it was awhile before she was finally allowed to return to Pierce's side.

Both Claire and Gage were with him when she entered the examining room that had been set aside for their use. And neither of them, Nikki thought, looked anywhere near as frazzled as they should have at being called out of bed to come to the emergency room in the middle of the night. Even Pierce, still in his soot-smeared sweatpants with a hastily donned black T-shirt and the flexible cast on his leg, looked more as if he were sitting on a movie set discussing the next scene than as if he'd really been injured. It must, Nikki thought, disgruntled, be something in the Kingston genes. No frumpiness allowed.