Renegade Player

he asked softly, “that you had to run away? Or shall I tell you?”

“No . . . no, I don’t want to hear it!” she blurted, her voice thickening with emotion.

Struggling against his superior strength only seemed to excite him, and the low laugh that feathered along her cheek did serious damage to her resistance. She moaned his name, and his answering kiss seemed to go on and on.

“By this time, I know how to handle you, Willy Silverthorne,” he murmured. His arms held her captive—not that she would have had the strength to try and escape ... as he well knew.

grew up on Hatteras Island off the coast of North Carolina. She is an accomplished and well-known artist of watercolors but thoroughly enjoys her second career, writing.

Renegade Player

Dixie Browning

SILHOUETTE BOOKS, a Simon & Schuster Division of

GULF & WESTERN CORPORATION

1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, N.Y. 10020

Copyright © 1982 by Dixie Browning

Distributed by Pocket Books

All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever.

For information address Silhouette Books, 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, N.Y. 10020

ISBN: 0-671-57142-7

First Silhouette Books printing April, 1982

10 987654321

All of the characters in this book are fictitious. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

SILHOUETTE, SILHOUETTE ROMANCE and colophon are registered trademarks of Simon & Schuster.

America’s Publisher of Contemporary Romance

Printed in the U.S.A.

On the last day of May, as on every day since the first week Willy Silverthorne had come to work for Rumark Realty, the low growl of her persimmon-colored 450SL, as it turned off Highway 158 onto Bittern Drive, signaled an exodus from office chairs so that by the time Willy tooled the little sports car into the parking lot behind the office complex familiarly known as the mushroom patch, every window was filled—every window, that is, except one: the last and largest in the Collier Consulting Engineers Building.

As she whipped the polished thoroughbred into the employees lot, passing all the more plebeian vehicles parked in what was already sweltering sunshine, and took her place in one of the only three shaded spots, there came a collective sigh from the three surrounding octagonal buildings.

“Power glide,” murmured an agent in the office of MacNulty Insurance. He watched reverently while Willy collected her purse and crossed the softening asphalt to the building that housed Rumark Realty.

“That one’s built for speed and handling,” sighed a design engineer in CCE.

It was perfectly natural to refer to Willy Silverthorne in automotive terms; her greatest enthusiasms at the present time were cars and food, not necessarily in that order. By the time Willy had worked in the mushroom patch for three days, every man in all three office buildings, whether married or not, had latched on to every bit of information available about her. The few women, if only as a matter of self-defense, were not far behind.

By the time she had finished her first month as a newly licensed real-estate saleswoman, Willy had tactfully refused dates with all but three of the men who had asked her, and had made fast friends with the only other woman at Rumark Realty, Dotty Sealy, a bouncy brunette who worked as general secretary while she studied for her own license as a realtor.

On the morning of June first, it was nine-fourteen when the rush to the windows commenced. Willy was seldom, if ever, on time, a fact that did not seem to bother her boss, who was one of the three men she dated. Today each window held at least one viewer and this time Willy might have sensed a new element of expectancy in the air, had she even been aware of her audience.

As usual, she down-shifted and slowed her 450SL up the slight grade into the lot, then gunned the motor for the final maneuver that would position her in the space marked MR. COLLIER, between Ed MacNulty’s Cadillac and the late-model station wagon bearing the logo of her own firm.

The sound of rubber screeching on asphalt could be heard clearly above the drone of the central air-conditioner and it brought several masculine looks of commiseration, plus a few of smug satisfaction—these from the men who had never broken through Willy’s friendly but impregnable barrier—and from the office that had stood empty since Randy Collier’s leaving; both sets of expressions would have given Willy more than a moment’s misgivings had she been able to see them.

There was a car in her place! A superb piece of machinery she recognized as a Porsche, although the exact model was unfamiliar to her ... as was the owner. Dumbfounded, Willy sat in her car and stared for several minutes before reversing thoughtfully and backing into a place in the sun.

She had used that particular parking spot ever since her second date with Randy Collier. He had volunteered to park his own car somewhere else, claiming the white top was less vulnerable to the heat than was the black top of her dusky-orange Mercedes, and then, after Randy had left Nags Head under conditions she preferred to forget, it had seemed silly to stop parking there. After all, no one had come to take his place as head of CCE, and while his office went unoccupied, she continued to park there with all the aplomb of a girl who had been materially, if not emotionally, spoiled by an indulgent parent for the first nineteen of her twenty-one years.

Her aplomb might have suffered a bit had she been able to see behind the tall, tinted window of the largest office of CCE. The man who stood there observing her leisurely and belated arrival wore no admiring expression. His obsidian eyes were narrowed in a face that was lean to the point of tautness, the muscles of his broad shoulders bunched slightly as he stroked an aggressive jaw thoughtfully with one well-kept hand. The morning sun, rendered impotent by the gray thermal glass, cast shadows under his well-defined cheekbones and the high forehead that was tanned to the color of raw teak. Not a strand of his black hair was out of place, although a lock in the front seemed inclined to rebel, and there was nothing about his summer-weight, custom-tailored business suit to indicate other than a sophisticated man with the wealth to indulge his cultivated tastes.

And yet there was an element about him that was alien to an office setting, that had nothing to do with the dictating of letters or the drafting of company policies. There was a quality of danger about the man, of raw, sensual power that could quell with the lift of a brow and inflame, in the case of a woman, with the same gesture, for few women would be immune to such blatant masculinity.

Certainly not the woman who stood at his side, a slightly smug look of superiority on her flawlessly groomed face. “Well, now you’ve seen what all the men in the mushroom patch are drooling over. Whatever signals she’s sending out with that . . . that come-hither walk of hers remain a mystery to me, I can assure you, but she has every man in all three buildings panting after her and you can’t tell me it’s all for nothing.”

“I suspect the walk you find questionable is merely a natural result of her construction. Wide hips, long legs,” Kiel Faulkner murmured absently, not sparing his secretary a glance. Instead, he continued to stare thoughtfully after the tall, slender figure disappearing up the ramp that led to the Rumark Building. There was nothing in particular visible from his present vantage point that would explain the general masculine reaction to the girl whose parking place he had just commandeered, nothing except for a walk that, if she could bottle and sell it, would net her a cool fortune.

“What was it
this
time, a freighter come ashore and you had to call the Coast Guard?” Dotty Sealy gibed with exaggerated patience.

Willy grinned. “Hang gliders. There were three all set to go off the top of Jockey’s Ridge and I just had to stop and watch. One of these days I’m going to—”

“No you’re not,” Dotty finished for her. “Not until they install elevators on Jockey’s Ridge, you’re not.”

Willy’s natural laziness was well known. It was not really a disinclination to work, for she did her share and then some, often taking over for one of the other two agents when they had to go out unexpectedly, or staying on without demur to finish up a report that had to go out. She did everything at her own relaxed rate of speed, but that was not to say she didn’t accomplish more in the long run than Frank, who came early and stayed late, or Pete, who rushed madly wherever he went. As in the case of the hare and the tortoise, the tortoise in the form of Willy Silverthorne often ambled across the finish line well ahead of the others. As even now she was ambling across the thick sand-colored carpet toward the office marked Matthew Rumark, Pres.

“ ’Morning, Matt,” she drawled melodiously.

“Seventeen minutes late, Wilhelmina. You’re seventeen minutes late and yesterday it was twenty-three. How is it that you can break every rule of office behavior I put on the books and still outsell the others?” he demanded with resignation.

Willy shrugged her shoulders under the yellow T-shirt she wore with her denim skirt. “I dunno . . . just lucky, I guess.” The lids that half-hid her dark green eyes seemed weighted down with their burden of luxuriant blond lashes.

Matt Rumark shook his head slowly, not even attempting to hide his admiration of the exquisitely modeled face before him. The fact that that face was covered with a fine layer of freckles that its owner did little or nothing to try to disguise did nothing to mar its loveliness, nor did the heavy weight of sun-streaked blond hair suffer for its casual treatment, being pulled ruthlessly back and tied haphazardly with a cotton handkerchief. Willy Silverthorne’s beauty was structural rather than superficial, but her true loveliness stemmed more from a genuine friendliness than from any deliberate charm, a fact that, considering her background, was little less than startling. Somehow, her indolent good humor had a way of disarming female competitors and would-be suitors alike, with few exceptions.

“All right, all right, I know when I’m licked,” Matt admitted, shuffling through the litter on his desk and coming up with two new folders. “As boss around here, I owe it to the others to rack you up for getting away with what they wouldn’t dare, so consider it done. Now, here are a couple of new listings at Hatteras. Want ’em?”

“Sure,” Willy answered slowly, slipping off a sandal to scratch a mosquito bite. “If no one else wants them, I’ll take them, but what about Pete? He and Connie are expecting again in September and he could probably use the extra.”

Matt shook his head exasperatedly. “Willy, love, did it ever occur to you that a competitive staff means more business for everybody? With every agent out hustling to outsell the others, more gets sold, which means more profit for all of us. Profits . . . remember? The old filthy lucre? It’s the name of the game, honey . . . it’s what keeps the old capitalistic system ticking over. We make more profit, we expand and hire more people, who in turn make more money, and we all pay our taxes and Uncle Sam is fat and happy, and then we make even more so that we can throw it around a little—that way we spread the joy; in my case, to the purveyors of fishing tackle and bonded whiskey; in yours, to the fancy car dealers and top-drawer restaurants. Then, they in turn grow filthy rich and hire more people and pay more taxes and—”

“Hey, I get the message,” Willy laughed.

He shook his head sadly. “I don’t think you really do, but in case you’re worried, no, Pete doesn’t want it. Connie doesn’t want him to be that far away when she might have to call him to boil water any minute, and before you drag in Frank, let me remind you of one thing: I’m boss around here, and if I say you sell ’em, you sell ’em!”

Willy laughed, a sound not unlike water rushing over small pebbles, and she stood up. “I sell ’em, Mr. Rumark, sir,” she surrendered. She was completely unaware of the eyes that watched her almost wistfully as she crossed to the door, eyes that gazed longingly after her five feet, eight inches of convex and concave curves. Nor did she hear the sigh of pure frustration that followed her out because she was already asking Dotty if she knew who the silver Porsche was.

“The who?” Dotty repeated, sliding her glasses back up on her short nose.

“That’s what I wanted to know,” Willy explained patiently. “I came barreling into the parking lot this morning and just about creamed it. Somebody parked it in my spot, and if I hadn’t stood on my brakes, I’d have ended up in the back seat.”

“Search me. Must be somebody at MacNulty’s or CCE. My wheels came out of Detroit so long ago they’ve lost their northern accent, and as far as I know, you’re the only one around here who runs anything that even approaches a Porsche.”

“Mmmm, I’d like to approach it, right up under the steering wheel,” Willy murmured, her husky drawl unconsciously seductive as she put away her purse and opened the folders Matt had handed her.