Unable to bear another word, Kate snapped her cell phone closed without listening to the next message. She stole a sidelong glance at Mitchell, relieved that he seemed to be engrossed in reading the tourist pamphlet he was holding, but he was frowning and his jaw looked tense. After a moment of uneasy silence, Kate said brightly, is fine.”
In response to that he stuffed the pamphlet back into the seat pocket and directed a challenging brow at her. boyfriend seems to think otherwise.”
heard?”
couldn’t help hearing it. Is he married?”
, of course not! Why would you think such a thing?”
one thing, you said you’ve been together for years, but from what I heard him say just now, you apparently don’t live together. How old is he?”
’s thirty-three. Why do you—” A realization hit Kate and she twisted toward him in the seat. you under the impression I’m some sort of”—she hesitated and then settled for the least awful of the descriptions that came to mind— kept woman?”
haven’t dwelled on the possibilities, but that was the most likely one, based on what I know of similar situations.”
you have a lot of experience with ‘similar’ situations?”
He leaned back, stretched his legs out, and hesitated; then he looked at her and said bluntly, .”
Before Kate could recover from that statement, he changed the subject: did the vet call you ‘Mary’?”
I filled out his questionnaire with my legal name, which is Mary Katherine. Until I was a teenager and could make them stop, everyone called me Mary Kate. My father never stopped calling me that.”
Kate,” he repeated a little grimly. cute. Perfect, in fact, for an Irish choir girl.”
Startled by his tone, Kate said, was never a choir girl in the way I think you mean. In fact, I was a wild child.”
,” he said tightly.
Kate turned her head and gazed at the foothills of the mountains on her right while she tried to come up with an explanation for his attitude. Something he’d heard in the last few minutes was bothering him, but she couldn’t figure out exactly what it was.
Chapter Seventeen
AFTER SEVERAL MINUTES,Kate glanced sideways and caught him looking at her, his forehead furrowed into a thoughtful frown. Suppressing a self-conscious impulse to smooth her hair, she broke the silence with the first inane subject that came to mind. “The weather here is certainly beautiful this time of year.”
, it is.”
thought it might rain today, but there isn’t a cloud in the sky.”
it rained without a cloud in the sky, it would be surprising,” he agreed solemnly, but he was on the verge of smiling, and Kate was so relieved that she gave him a rueful grin.
Mitchell’s gaze dropped from her bright green eyes to her soft lips, and the impulse to kiss her was so strong that he had to turn his head and look in a different direction. His conscience had suddenly developed a voice after decades of silence on the subject of sexual ethics, and it was in an uproar over the true picture he’d just formed of Mary Kate Donovan. In the taxi, on the way to the veterinarian, she’d told him about her father and their lives together. As she spoke, it had been obvious even to Mitchell—who had little personal knowledge of loving family relationships—that Kate had loved her father deeply and she was grieving over his death. She was also, by her own admission, terrified of the responsibility she now had of trying to run his restaurant in Chicago. The absentee boyfriend, who Mitchell had originally assumed was a wealthy, aging playboy using Kate for a toy, was actually a year younger than Mitchell, and he not only cared about Kate, he wanted to marry her. He’d taken her to a wonderful hotel on a lush, tropical island, undoubtedly to help her recuperate. When he needed to return to Chicago, he’d left behind in that seductive setting a beautiful, grieving, worried Kate who had probably never cheated on him before, but who was so weakened by loneliness and sorrow that she was ready to fall into Mitchell’s arms.
Next week, or next month, she’d start regretting going to bed with him, and then she’d have guilt to deal with on top of all her other burdens. She was so tenderhearted that in the midst of her own misery over her father’s death, she was determined to take a stray dog home with her to keep him safe. She’d end up torturing herself for doing anything as ” as betraying her boyfriend.
Mitchell’s conscience pointed out that if he truly liked Kate as much as he felt he did, he’d spare her the ramifications of sleeping with him by telling the cabdriver to turn around and take them back to Philipsburg. He himself wasn’t boyfriend material. Among other things, he had no intention of staying in Chicago longer than a week after he returned. His appearance at Cecil’s birthday party had been noted by theTribune ’s social columnist, and if he continued to be seen in Chicago, someone was going to start digging around, and sooner or later his personal history would become tantalizing gossip among people he wouldn’t voluntarily share an evening with, let alone the sordid story of his life. Furthermore, he felt an inexplicable, intense aversion to acknowledging his relationship to the illustrious Wyatts, but in the city where Kate Donovan lived, he no longer had a choice.
Mitchell’s logic went to battle with his conscience and argued that Kate was old enough to decide for herself what she wanted to do and what was best for her. Moreover, prolonged passionate lovemaking would provide her with an excellent, temporary diversion from her woes. That last part wasn’t logic, it was lust, Mitchell’s irate conscience pointed out.
The cabdriver chose that moment to look over his shoulder and ask Mitchell for instructions. much farther ahead is the turn?”
Lost in his thoughts, Mitchell hesitated, and then said, flatly, miles.” Lust and logic had fewer arguments, but louder voices, than his conscience.
Kate expected him to turn to her now and explain where they were going, but he looked out his own window again and said nothing. Baffled by his silence, she reached across him for the tourist pamphlet he’d been looking at earlier. She’d already gotten a similar pamphlet in the lobby of the Island Club, and this pamphlet reiterated much of the same information: St. Maarten was a small island occupying only thirty-seven square miles; it was divided between two governments—the northern section being French, the southern section Dutch.
A map of the island was attached to the back of the pamphlet, and Kate unfolded it, hoping to gauge where she was. They’d been traveling on a main highway, and according to the map, there was only one of those, and it made a full circle of the island. She remembered passing exit signs to Simpson Bay and Princess Juliana Airport soon after they left Philipsburg, which meant they’d been going east. Based on the landmarks she’d seen since then, they were now traveling north along the coastline of the French section, with the Caribbean Sea on the left and the foothills of the mountains on the right.