Pink Satin (3 page)

“John,” Ryan echoed irritably. There had to be a reason why he’d never liked that name. “How long have you been divorced?”

“Four years. I still see him on occasion, though.”

“You were married for a long time?”

His questions would have struck her as prying if he weren’t so obviously investigating her crank calls. For months, Greer had worried in private as to who her caller might be. She’d never discussed the problem with her family because she hadn’t wanted to worry them. Ryan was a stranger, but he was also clearly a rational, objective man. And as long as he was willing to listen…

“John and I were married for two years,” Greer admitted hesitantly, and then started talking in a rush, anxious to hear Ryan’s opinion when he understood the relationship. “The thing was, like most psychology majors fresh out of college, I was very good at taking on the misunderstood, the unwanted, the lost souls. John was one of those. Rotten childhood, parents who didn’t care…” Greer bit her lip absently and gave Ryan a small smile. “I was very sure that an understanding woman was all he needed to turn his life around. Only two years later, I wasn’t quite so fresh out of college. Perhaps he
was
a lost soul, but he was also incurably lazy. And very happy to be taken care of full-time in high style.” She added wearily, “I was still paying off his debts two years after the divorce. It wasn’t the best of times.”

“You think he would call you now—just to harass you?”

“No. But you asked about enemies. I’m trying to give you my best list,” Greer said wryly, then snapped her fingers. “I forgot about Andrew.”

“Who the he—on earth is
Andrew?”

Greer’s eyebrows shot up in amusement at the way Ryan’s fingers were suddenly drumming a tattoo on the couch. “My brother-in-law,” she answered mildly. “My sister died six years ago in a traffic accident. Their daughter, Robin, is ten now and a confirmed runaway. Andrew isn’t a bad father, but he’s busy, and Robin’s a little witch at finding clever ways to get his attention. Her favorite trick is to pack a suitcase and cart it across town to me.”

“To you,” Ryan echoed.

Greer nodded. “Andrew always knows where she is, but he does get upset, and we’ve had a few words now and then. I probably
do
cater to Robin too much, but if he’d give her more of his time…she
needs
his attention.” Greer’s eyes took on a fierce, protective light, then faded. “Anyway, he’s not too fond of me, but still. In terms of the identity of my breather, I really don’t think…”

Neither did Ryan. Strays cats, stray men, stray children, he thought dismally. Quite a hit list. He glanced down to where the cat had leaped on his stomach and was kneading his shirt, staring up at him with limpid eyes. “You work more with men or women?” he questioned abruptly.

“More with men, I suppose. That must sound strange in the lingerie industry, but it isn’t, really. It’s a business like any other business. Anyway, I’ve worked with everyone there for years.”

Ryan fell silent, pensively stroking the cat until the feline raised his chin with a rumbling purr and Ryan realized what he was doing. His hand dropped abruptly, and he shot Greer a deadpan stare. “You’ve got one hell of a list of enemies, Greer. Sounds to me like you need a permanent bodyguard.”

Greer chuckled, feeling immediate and inexplicable relief. She’d never wanted to believe that either Andrew or John was her caller, but they were the closest she had to suspicious characters in her life. “There’s also the man I beat in a chess tournament in college—”

“God. The hate list is
still
going on?”

“And I bumped a guy’s fender when I was sixteen.”

“Finally, someone with cause,” Ryan said dryly, and Greer chuckled again. “How about the other men in your life besides this Daniel?” he asked matter-of-factly.

Greer stretched, weary from sitting still for so long. “I go out with a few others, but no one who would do anything like that.”

Ryan made a small sound.

“What’s wrong?” she asked immediately.

“Nothing. I was just thinking…”

“What?” Greer leaned forward intently.

“I don’t want to offend you by being too personal…”

“You won’t,” she assured him.

“Well. Daniel and your other men friends are probably very nice. I’m
sure
they are, so don’t misunderstand. But if you don’t know them extremely well…” He let his voice trail off. Greer said nothing. Ryan cleared his throat. “You’re sure you know them
 
extremely
 
well?” he asked gravely.

“Well. Hardly their deepest secrets, if that’s what you mean,” Greer answered thoughtfully. “Even so, I’m a long way from a naive high school girl as far as judging character goes. Really, I can’t picture any of them making those calls.”

Fine. He still didn’t know whether she was sleeping with anyone on a regular basis, but Ryan had no right to pursue that subject.

They talked a little longer before he restlessly stood up, apologizing for taking up so much of her evening.

Greer just shook her head, trailing him to the door. “You were awfully kind, listening to me for an entire evening. As a little kid, I wasn’t afraid of the goblins in the night, but I have to admit that lately I’ve been nervous staying alone.”

The thought grew as they reached the door. It was because Ryan had been there that she hadn’t felt nervous. He was a very comforting, understanding, strong kind of man to have as a neighbor. He’d made her feel safer than she’d felt in months. Impulsively, she touched his hand as he pulled open the door. He turned, a question in his eyes.

She stood on tiptoe and swung her arms around his neck in a quick hug. Affection came as naturally to her as breathing, and there was no question that Ryan was a huggable man. She clung to the warmth of his body, more grateful than she could tell him for laying her ghosts to rest that evening. “Thank you again,” she said simply. “And I promise I won’t talk your ear off the next time I see you. I’m hardly in the habit of laying problems on a stranger’s doorstep, honest.”

She smiled, expecting to see his own easy smile in return.

He didn’t smile back. She wasn’t exactly sure what happened. One minute she was smiling affectionately up at him and her arms were slipping down from his shoulders. In the next, he’d captured her arms and his smooth, warm mouth descended on hers with a pressure that was starkly, boldly sexual. All heat, all fire, all such a startling surprise of warm-blooded male… She didn’t pull back; she was too shocked.

Not angry, not distressed. Just shocked. In seconds, he’d realize that she wasn’t responding. This was no teenage boy but a man. And Greer was no longer a frightened girl but a woman who never responded until time and gentleness and trust had won her over. Blunt sexuality no longer frightened her; it simply turned her off.

Only this time something strange was happening. Ryan’s tongue was playing on the seam of her lips, forcing them to part. That smooth, warm tongue slipped inside, touching hers. She could feel the strength of his arms holding her, the warmth of him, an alien rush of…foolish sensations. He wasn’t waiting for a response. He was expecting it, demanding it. And that something strange kept happening, because that sensual rush kept coming, and like a candle, she wanted to burn and melt.

Ryan’s lips rose from hers abruptly. Brusquely, with a trace of roughness, he changed from lover to brother. He tugged the lapels of her robe together and ran a quick hand through her hair as if he were suddenly determined to obliterate the sensual toss of her hair. The kiss might never have been, except that the look in his eyes was fierce, bright and stark with wanting. “You
do
need a bodyguard,” he said gruffly.

“I… Pardon?”

“Lock your door and keep it locked.
Now,
Greer.”

He was gone.

Greer was left bewildered and mildly irritated. Exactly what had
happened?
Surely he hadn’t changed from Jekyll to Hyde simply because she’d demonstrated a little basic human affection?

She glanced at the gold-framed mirror in the hall and saw a woman with tousled hair and no makeup, wearing a threadbare robe. Ryan didn’t strike her as a man who would ever be
that
desperate.

Men just didn’t jump her, not anymore. A long time ago, Greer had had enough of being wanted for her body, and she knew better than to send out any “available” signals until she knew a man well. She
knew
she hadn’t sent them out to Ryan, not because she didn’t immediately like him, but because she simply didn’t know him well enough.

For whatever reasons that kiss had happened, it left her unsettled the rest of the night.

Wearing a pastel green suit and matching sandals, Greer was perched on the conference table, her legs swinging as she waited for the discussion to die down.

The conference room, like the offices at Love Lace, was thickly carpeted in pale pink. Flocked ivory wallpaper added an elegant touch; the paperweights were mother-of-pearl; and the ambience from the sewing room to the customer entrance was supposed to reflect luxurious serenity—an atmosphere conducive to the selling of lingerie.

Greer had known for a long time that the atmosphere was a scam. Marketing panties was as cutthroat as any other business, if not more so. Greer’s glasses were perched on her nose as she surveyed the three pairs of male eyes glaring stubbornly at her.

“You all appear to be deaf this morning,” she said cheerfully. “I agree that the nightgown is a unique design—one of the sexiest we’ve ever had. It just won’t do at all for the catalog cover.”

“The hell it won’t,” growled the tall blond in front. Barney tossed copies of designs on the table in front of him. “The others don’t hold a candle to it, Greer. And since you’re the only holdout—”

“And Marie’s vote would be on our side. You know that,” Tim interrupted.

Greer nodded patiently. The two potential choices for their fall catalog cover design were lying next to her. One was a pastel yellow lounging outfit, an infinitely soft design that draped loosely over the model’s figure. The look was sensual, comfortable and subtly alluring.

That was the one the men didn’t like. Their favorite was Marie’s coup de grâce, a negligee in pearl-pink satin and cream lace. The model wearing it had a
Penthouse
figure—which the gown required. Satin, however luxurious, was not an easy fabric for most women to wear. It had a sheen and, like a mirror, reflected a woman’s worst faults. The gown flowed over a body that had to be perfect, from flat stomach to smooth hips and long legs. The cobweb-lace bodice cupped breasts that had to be sizable and tilted up just so. The low, heart-shaped neckline, the cutouts showing the sides of the breasts—only a certain kind of woman could wear the style, a sexually uninhibited woman who had the courage to flaunt her assets.

“If our customers were men, I would agree with you,” Greer continued patiently. “But they’re women. Women we want as return customers.”

“Women who are increasingly buying sexy lingerie, or we wouldn’t all be here now,” Ray drawled from the chair closest to her. “Sex is in this decade, sweetheart. We’re asking you to catch up and become part of the times…”

Greer tossed a wad of paper in his general direction. Grant, from the back of the room, didn’t so much as raise an eyelid. “You can sell the nightgown on that basis,” Greer said evenly. “And it
will
sell, even if the price is much higher than for our usual lingerie. You’re still missing the point. The nightgown doesn’t enhance the image we want Love Lace to project, and in the long run, we’d lose money because of it.”

The argument raged on. Greer’s eyes darted back and forth between the men in front of her, her tone calm and her stance never wavering. This morning the men were generally behaving like turkeys. Normally, she was pretty fond of them.

In front of her sat Barney. In his mid-thirties, Barney was tall and blond and divorced. His specialty was fabric and tech care; he was great at his job, but she’d had a few problems with his roving hands when she first started working at Love Lace. There’d been no passes, however, after he’d had the flu and she’d taken chicken soup to his home…and listened for six hours to his divorce woes.

Tim, on the other side of the table, was the firm’s accountant. He looked harmless enough with his fluff of gray hair and myopic brown eyes, but he was one of the most confirmed misogynists Greer had ever met…until she’d discovered he was a sucker for doughnuts in the morning. The way to
some
men’s hearts was still through their stomachs.

In the back of the room sat Grant, the boss, a small, spare man with thinning hair, a wisp of a mustache, a gentle voice and the business instincts of a shark. Throughout the meeting, his face remained expressionless, except for the faintest of smiles as he watched his ad psychologist in action.

One of Grant’s favorite management strategies was never to conduct a staff meeting himself. Actually, few of his business methods followed a standard set of rules—they just worked, and woe to any competitor who misjudged his gentle look as weakness. Greer thought affectionately that the man had only one major flaw: He couldn’t stand arguing with his French wife.

Today he didn’t have to, because Marie had stayed home with a cold. Volatile and brilliantly creative, Marie was their chief designer. On the rare occasions when Grant didn’t feel that one of his wife’s designs would sell, he expected Greer to be his hatchet woman. And the cream lace on pink satin was Marie’s choice for their fall catalog cover, or someone’s life was going to be miserable.

Probably Greer’s, though she doubted Grant would escape the flying shrapnel when his wife returned to work.

Regardless, Grant had warned her when she started with Love Lace that there were areas in which she’d have to sink or swim. Because of her looks, she was better prepared than some to deal with sexism. She’d managed Barney and Tim, but Ray was her last holdout, and it was Ray who followed her to her office once the staff meeting was over.

He paused in the doorway while she tossed her glasses on her desk and unloaded the mound of paperwork in her arms. “You won again,” he remarked idly.

“Hmm.” Greer scanned the messages next to the phone before glancing up. Ray was their resident feudal baron, she thought whimsically. Black hair, black eyes, a subtle smile, broad shoulders in meticulous dress. He only needed a castle with moat to complete the picture. And an estate populated by women who bowed to him.

Ray could market oceanfront property in Kansas successfully, and Greer respected him for that. But at times his salesmanship didn’t make him any easier to work with. Ray generally backed down just before a clash, but he and Greer inevitably circled each other in conversation like wary combatants.

Leaning against her office door, he lazily crossed his ankles. “Marie will have your hide.”

“You’re telling me something I don’t know?”

Ray chuckled and moved in to slouch comfortably in the pale gray chair next to her desk. “It
would
have made a good cover.”

“For Frederick’s of Hollywood.” Greer sat down and slipped off her shoes. The others were used to her padding around in stocking feet; she wasn’t about to change her habits for Ray. As she waited for him to speak, she was aware that his eyes were roving over her mint-green suit, slowly removing that suit, and just as slowly continuing to talk with her stark naked—in his imagination. Used to his mode of operation, she paid little attention.

“You’re one of the few women who could wear that nightgown to absolute perfection,” Ray drawled.

“Yup,” Greer agreed smoothly. “Unfortunately, pink makes my face break out in spots.”

Annoyance flamed in his dark eyes, but only for an instant before he let out a low chuckle. “I still think I caught just a glint of lust in your eyes when you looked at that nightgown. Don’t tell me we’ve found a rare weakness in you, Greer?”

Something sharp pricked her finger, and she glanced down in surprise. The paper clip in her hand was completely bent out of shape, unusable now. Had she really just done that? Tossing the thing in the wastebasket, she let her eyes return to Ray. “I know you’re ticked because you were backing Marie on this one, but rationally you know better. Cost margins were part of it—the nightgown is too much higher than our regular lines. And style is part of it—the style simply has limited appeal; too few women would look good in it.”

“You want me to listen to your whole lecture again?” he asked dryly.

Greer leaned forward, resting her chin in her cupped hands, wondering why some men remained uneducable. “We’re selling fantasies,” she said patiently. “The whole business of lingerie is based on people’s fondness for make-believe. We sell sinfully delicious fantasies—daydreams that don’t threaten. A woman is going to buy what makes her feel good about herself. What feels good next to her skin. Clothes that give her confidence because she
does
feel sexy in them. And that’s entirely different from a nightgown that shouts—”

“Sex object. ‘Promoting sexuality is inherent to the field, but it doesn’t have to be on a sex-object basis,’” Ray quoted with another of his subtle smiles, mimicking her earlier words in the staff meeting. “One of the staff can be very, very picky on that infinitesimal difference between sexy and sex object.”

“A
huge
difference,” Greer corrected.

“You’re full of peanuts, darling.”

Control your temper, Greer.
“You voted with me in the end,” she reminded him.

“That was business. Business is a different game from life.” He stood up and stretched lazily, his opaque, hypnotic eyes fastened on her. “I really only came in to say I was shocked you didn’t have a little feminine temper tantrum over going with me to the trade show.”

“Why on earth should I?”

He shrugged. “You’ve backed out of attending every other trade show before this.”

It was true—she
had.
Because lingerie conventions were just like other conventions. A lone woman was a prize lamb in a meat market, something Greer would never willingly let herself in for. And the minute she’d yielded to Grant’s suggestion at the end of the staff meeting that she go, she knew Ray would offer a suggestive comment. “Love Lace always sends two representatives,” she said smoothly, “and since Marie can’t go with you this time, I don’t mind.”

“Somehow I thought you would.”

“Why?”

“You and I rather rub each other the wrong way, don’t we? On the other hand, we could probably solve that rather quickly if we took a double room at the convention.”

Greer frowned innocently, as if considering. “Sex does solve
everything,
”
 
she said cheerfully, “but I doubt it would work in this instance. I snore—loudly, I’m told. You’d get crabby from lack of sleep, and then we’d never stop bickering.”

“I didn’t have in mind getting all that much sleep, anyway.”

“Would you kindly get your bedroom eyes out of here so I can get some work done?”

Ray chuckled, pausing only for another second at the door. “Are you that sassy with the men in your life, Greer?”

“Worse,” she said absently, and deliberately opened a folder on her desk. He was gone a few seconds later. Her pulse slowed down a few moments afterward. Ray inevitably ruffled the figurative fur on the back of her neck. She didn’t know why she let him do it. There was a psychological label for men who didn’t feel sexually secure about themselves unless they were aggressive with the females of the species. Whatever the term, it was her own problem that she let him continue to bother her.

She worked for an hour and accomplished precisely nothing. When the clock struck twelve, she put on her shoes, grabbed her purse and sauntered to the front door.

On the street, a soft breeze fluttered through the leaves in restless surges. The day was warm, bright with the North Carolina sun. Settling her sunglasses on her nose, she slid her hands into the pockets of her suit and simply strolled, taking in the springtime mood and relaxing.

The offices near Love Lace were well landscaped; gay rows of colorful flowers danced in the faint breeze, neat and confined within their borders and as new as the season. The smell of freshly mown grass filled her nostrils, and birds were rocking on the branches overhead, most of them in pairs. Another sign of spring.

The sun’s touch on her face felt as sensual as a caress. Her mood half lazy, half oddly wistful, Greer strolled through the business district and window-shopped. She paused before a display showing a rose-colored evening gown, and thought helplessly of the pink satin negligee. The damn thing, she was well aware, was starting to haunt her, but
not
because she hadn’t been right about the catalog cover.

Cream lace on pink satin…maybe every woman had a secret fantasy about color and texture and whatever it was that made her feel sultry and sexy and exotic. That negligee was Greer’s. She wasn’t the type to wear it; even the thought of wearing it raised a fleeting feeling of nameless anxiety, but she couldn’t get the thing out of her mind.

She hadn’t been able to get her new neighbor out of her mind, either. She’d woken up thinking about Ryan, and at most inconvenient times all morning she hadn’t been able to get him out of her head.

His kiss bothered her. The men who knew her would never have misunderstood a simple gesture of affection; he obviously thought she’d invited that kiss with her own behavior. Because they were going to be neighbors, she obviously had to find some way to correct a misleading impression if she’d given one.

Glancing at her watch, Greer turned around and ambled back toward work, suddenly feeling restless, unsettled. Something about her new neighbor seemed to bring on a bad case of spring fever.

She’d known and worked with a lot of men in the past five years. As a girl, she’d hid her figure in oversized clothes, but that nonsense was all past. These days she had no reason to hide, and dressed to reflect the woman she was. Gentle colors and subtle styles suited her; sexy fashions didn’t. She happened to be a naturally affectionate, caring woman, but
not
the type to lure out the sexual predator in a man.

Ryan—she couldn’t fathom why—felt like danger.

Greer was too sensible to let a dangerous case of spring fever get her down.

***

“
Off
the counter if you value your life,” Greer warned Truce. For once, the feline seemed to realize she meant business. He immediately leaped down and paced in wounded silence toward the living room.

Blowing a wisp of hair from her eyes, Greer turned the steaming bread out of the loaf pan and set it on a plate. Next to it was a luscious chocolate cake covered with two inches of seven-minute frosting. Licking her fingers, Greer stood back to survey her masterpieces with a critical eye.