KATE OPENED THE door to two smiling waiters, one of them in his late twenties, the other in his late forties. “How was your dinner, miss?” the younger waiter asked as he wheeled in a cart.

“Wonderful.” She couldn’t remember what she’d eaten for dinner and she sounded a little breathless.

“The wine was satisfactory?” the older waiter inquired, stepping carefully around the sleeping dog.

“Yes,” Kate said. “Very,” she added with a quick smile, trying to recover her equilibrium. She checked to be sure Max was all right; then she smoothed her hair down and stepped back outside onto the terrace. Mitchell was standing in the garden with his hands shoved in his pockets, staring out across the moonlit water as if lost in thought.

The music had begun again, and as Kate moved around the table, the younger waiter paused in his struggle to force the cork back into the unfinished bottle of red wine. “There’s a private party down there,” he said. “I hope the music has not disturbed you and your husband.”

“We—I’ve enjoyed it very much,” Kate said, but the word husband made her falter momentarily, not because Mitchell wasn’t her husband, but because she realized how awkward this situation would feel tomorrow night, or the night after, if these same waiters served Evan and her a meal. It hit her then that the same possibility might have occurred to Mitchell and that was why he’d moved off into the darkness at the far end of the garden.

Kate forced her worries about the future aside and stepped off the terrace onto the grass. Soon enough, she would have to cope with the ramifications of her decision to be with Mitchell tonight, but for now, that decision was made. She couldn’t turn back. She didn’t want to turn back. Not after their kiss. There had never been a kiss like that—not for her—and she had the thrilling feeling that Mitchell had been almost as surprised and carried away by it as she’d been.

He turned toward her, and Kate searched his features for some sign that the kiss had affected him as much as she thought it had. She wanted to believe it had been no ordinary kiss to him. She needed to believe it, and yet in the pale moonlight, he almost seemed to be frowning at her. However, he was too far away for her to gauge his expression accurately, so Kate smiled tentatively at him and tried to decide what to say to him when she was close enough. He didn’t smile back at her, and she wondered why.

Mitchell wasn’t smiling because he was studying the woman who had just managed to drive him to the brink of uncontrollable, possessive lust with one kiss, and he wasn’t entirely happy with what he saw. With her hands clasped behind her back and the breeze teasing her long hair and ruffling the hem of her long pants, she reminded him of an Irish choir girl, and the beguiling outfit she was wearing—which he’d mentally stripped off her during dinner—now struck him as being virginal white.

Kate Donovan was not at all in his normal style, and neither was his profound physical reaction to a single kiss. Earlier, when she dumped that Bloody Mary on him, his desire to see her again had been an ordinary response to a captivating face framed by a beguiling mass of red hair. Tonight, however, his attraction to her had intensified so fiercely with everything she did and said that a simple kiss—which he’d intended to be nothing more than an expression of languid desire soon to be gratified—became something much different: a kiss of wild urgency.

He watched her as she stopped to pluck a white flower from a bush covered with white blooms. She held the bloom to her nose, inhaling its fragrance as she looked out across the water. Suddenly, Mitchell was catapulted ten years back in time to a party he’d attended at the home of a Greek businessman. Bored with the party, Mitchell had taken his drink outside, where he eventually wandered down a path that ended at the entrance to a small, torch lit garden at the edge of the cliff. In the center of the garden stood a life-size statue of a young woman with flowing hair holding a flower in her hand. Based on the garments she was wearing, the statue was fairly recent, but something about her had captivated him. “Do you mind if I join you?” he’d asked the statue as he studied her features.

That question had been as idiotic, Mitchell realized, as the fact that he was now comparing a redheaded Chicago girl to a Greek statue carved in alabaster. His response to Kate Donovan was not only fanciful, it was unpredictable, and although Mitchell had no idea why she affected him that way—or exactly where all this was heading—he was suddenly a little wary of the general direction it had taken him. He resolved to chart the remainder of the course more carefully and on his terms.

Kate stopped in front of him and glanced over his shoulder toward the beach, where the musicians were starting to play another samba. “We have music again,” she remarked lightly, trying not to feel uneasy about the fact that he was looking at her with a rather cool smile and keeping his hands in his pockets. “The waiter told me there’s a private party down there,” she added.

Mitchell shifted his gaze in the direction she indicated and named the song the musicians were playing. “Corcovado,” he said, but he didn’t make a move to dance with her, and Kate decided the continued presence of the waiters on the terrace was the explanation for his hesitant behavior.

Since she couldn’t restore the mood to what it had been just before the waiters arrived, she decided to try for the friendly banter she’d shared with him at dinner and, hopefully, an opportunity to learn a little more about the man she was about to go to bed with. “I know you like music,” she said lightly. “I can tell that from the way you dance. What’s your favorite kind of music?”

“Jazz.”

Kate sighed in exaggerated despair. “Men prefer jazz because you don’t bother listening to lyrics. With jazz, you don’t even have to pretend you’re listening to them. What’s your second favorite kind of music?”

“Classical,” Mitchell replied.

“Which has no lyrics to listen to,” she said so smugly that Mitchell grinned in spite of himself. “What’s your third favorite?” she asked.

“Opera,” Mitchell replied.

“Which has lyrics you don’t understand, ” Kate pointed out drily, lifting her palms as if his answers had completely proven her point, but a hesitant flicker in his expression made her drop her hands and study him more closely. “Do you understand Italian?”

Italian was Mitchell’s first language, not English, but rather than tell her that and provoke more questions, he nodded and said a dismissive, “Yes.”

“Do you speak it as well? I mean, are you fluent in Italian as well as English and Dutch?”

“I’m not fluent in Dutch,” he reminded her.

From that reply, Kate deduced he was, however, fluent in Italian, and she looked as impressed and fascinated as she felt. “How many languages do you speak?”

“I’ve never counted them.”

“Let’s do it now,” Kate joked, and started to hold up her fingers.

“Let’s not,” Mitchell replied curtly, dousing her smile and her enthusiasm with a swift efficiency that made him dislike himself so thoroughly that he made a quick, clumsy effort to atone for his rudeness and ended up giving her an ill-advised explanation that confused her and required clarification. “Most Europeans are multilingual,” he said.

“You sound so much like an American that I never imagined you’re a European.”

“I’m not.”

“Then what are you?” she asked, her green eyes searching his.

“I’m neither,” Mitchell replied bluntly. “I’m a hybrid,” he added, because that’s exactly how he thought of himself, but when he realized that he’d just been lulled by a soft voice and shining eyes into saying something he’d never admitted aloud, he didn’t like the feeling it gave him. Impatiently, he glanced toward the terrace, and then he put his hand under Kate’s elbow, turning her in that direction. “The waiters have left. Let’s go inside,” he said, intending to take her to bed without further conversation.

When she nodded and walked obediently beside him, Mitchell assumed she was willing to go along with that plan, but when they stepped onto the terrace, she foiled him either purposely or inadvertently by backing up and sitting on the stone balustrade. “Mitchell—” She said his name for the first time in a low, sweet voice; then she glanced down and paused as if saying his name had given her the same twinge of surprised pleasure that he’d felt hearing it.

Mitchell perched his hip on the opposite balustrade and folded his arms over his chest. “Yes?” he said, resigned to naming a few foreign languages he spoke before he could get her to go inside with him.

She lifted her face to his, her smile quizzical. “Why did you call yourself a ‘hybrid’?”

“Because I’m an American by birth and a European by upbringing.”

She nodded as if satisfied. “Do you have brothers or sisters?”

Startled and annoyed by her unexpected line of questioning, Mitchell said shortly, “No, not really.”

“Not really,” she repeated, and then half jokingly she said, “What about a mother or a father?”

“No.”

“You have no family anywhere, is that it?”

“What the hell difference does it make?”

“None, really, I suppose,” she said, but a hint of sadness and resignation had crept into her voice, giving Mitchell the distinct impression that for some reason, any further refusal to answer her questions was going to weigh heavily against him in whatever decision she was struggling with.

“I have a sister-in-law, a nephew, and a great-aunt,” he conceded in a clipped voice, refusing to acknowledge the existence of his grandfather.

“How can you have a sister-in-law or a nephew if you have no brothers and no sisters?”

“Where is this conversation going?” he said shortly.

“Are you in the CIA or MIA or something?”

If he hadn’t been so annoyed, he would have laughed. “Neither one.”

“No, of course not,” she said lightly, standing up. “If you were, you’d have a much better cover story, wouldn’t you?”

Mitchell stood up and answered with a curt, impatient question of his own. “Are you always so inquisitive?”

It was a thinly veiled reprimand and a warning to back off. And Kate backed off—literally as well as figuratively. Turning away from him, she faced the cold reality of the situation and not the dreamy idyll she’d cherished a short while ago. The only thing he wanted to share was an hour or so in bed, and his only interest in her was as a convenient sex partner. For a moment she actually considered settling for that, but she already had all the sorrow and uncertainty she could shoulder waiting for her when she returned to Chicago. She didn’t need to add humiliation and guilt to her burdens.

Her body language was unmistakable, and Mitchell suddenly decided the evening was better off ending exactly this way. Much better off. In fact, he was relieved it was ending like this. Tomorrow, when they were in St. Maarten, he could enjoy her at arm’s length—mentally and physically. “It’s getting late,” he said in a calm matter-of-fact tone. “I’ll pick you up at ten tomorrow.”

Instead of agreeing to that as he expected, she shook her head; then she cleared her throat and said, “No. I’ll manage on my own tomorrow, but thank you.”

She was sulking, Mitchell decided, and because he couldn’t stand women who sulked, he was perversely pleased to discover she was one of them. Except that when she turned around and looked at him, he realized she wasn’t sulking at all. Smiling softly, she said, “Good-bye, Mitchell. Thank you for a lovely, memorable evening. I wouldn’t have missed it for anything in the world.”

Mitchell was so disarmed by her expression and what she said that he reversed his earlier decision about the best way to end the evening. “It doesn’t necessarily have to end now,” he pointed out.

“Yes, it does.”

Although Mitchell was willing to change his mind, he was not willing to be backed into a corner or forced into a compromise. “Because I don’t want to tell you the story of my life?” he speculated impassively.

“No, because you pried the story of my life out of me, but you’re offering nothing in return.”

“Nothing?” he mocked, lifting his brows.

He was reminding her that he’d offered her his body in bed, in lieu of his biography, and as Kate fought down a fresh surge of temptation, she suddenly rediscovered that strange feeling of preordained friendship that had come over her earlier. Without realizing what she was doing, she laid her hand against his hard cheek and smiled winsomely into his shuttered eyes. “What you’re offering would be enough for any woman, I know,” she teased, “but the problem is that I have a feeling you’re a whole lot more than just another pretty face—”

At that remark, reluctant laughter flickered in his eyes and a muscle twitched at the corner of his mouth, and the warm connection Kate felt with him grew stronger, along with her aching sense of loss. “The truth is, I think you have a lot of layers, and if we were together again tomorrow, I would keep trying to peel off one layer at a time to peek beneath it and see what’s hiding there.” When he didn’t reply, she did it for him: “But you won’t let me, and you won’t like it if I try, will you?”

Caught between shock at her candor and admiration for her courage, Mitchell gave her the tribute of an honest answer. “No.”

“I knew that,” she whispered with another smile, and pulled her hand slowly from his cheek, sliding it down over his shoulder until she finally forced herself to lift it away from him entirely. “Now go away before I change my mind.”

Mitchell noticed the way her hand lingered, he heard the slight shake in her voice, and he knew beyond any doubt that he could pull her into his arms and change her mind. He even sensed that on some level, she wanted him to do precisely that almost as much as he was tempted to do it. Instead he decided to do exactly what she said she wanted him to do, partly because he knew that was probably the wisest course. However, rather than end their brief acquaintance on a grim note, he deliberately joked with her about her decision as he prepared to leave. “You’ll regret it,” he predicted with sham gravity.

She nodded in complete agreement and matched his tone perfectly. “Without a doubt,” she assured him, but her eyes were suspiciously bright.

Attuned to each nuance of her expression now, Mitchell assumed tears were responsible for that sheen in her eyes. “If you change your mind about tomorrow—”

“I won’t,” she interrupted quietly. “Good-bye,” she added, and held out her hand to shake his, just as she’d done twelve hours before when she introduced herself after spilling a drink on him.

He looked down at her hand, and without warning or reason, he felt a sharp compulsion to change her mind for her and spend the night with her after all. Ignoring her outstretched hand, he took her chin between his thumb and forefinger, tilted her face up to his, and smiled into her eyes. “In Europe, when a man and woman have spent an evening together, they kiss each other good-bye.”

If she’d looked away or tried to free her chin from his grasp, Mitchell would have forced her to kiss him and subdued the rest of her objections with his mouth and hands. Instead she gave him a confused, innocent look. “What part of Europe would that be? Would it be France? Or Sweden? Or Belgium?”

Mitchell’s brows snapped into a scowl. “You’re stubborn as hell, aren’t you?”

“Or Spain? Or Transylvania?” she persisted. Mitchell dropped his hand in irritation. She stepped back. “I’ll show you out,” she said politely, and turned to walk into the suite with him.

He declined her offer in a bored, impatient voice. “Don’t bother; I’ll take the path around the building instead.”

Fighting back tears, Kate watched him walk off the terrace and turn left, striding along the back of her villa, but as he reached into his pants pocket and withdrew his keys, he stopped for a moment, his dark head bent in thought, then he turned toward her. Kate’s hope soared at the sight of his brief smile, but the words he spoke yanked her back to painful reality. “You made the right choice.”

Inwardly, Kate flinched at the additional damage he inflicted on her with his perfunctory smile and indifferent words, but she forced her aching facial muscles into an answering smile. “I know,” she lied.

He nodded, as if completely satisfied with matters between them now; then he strode down the path and disappeared around the corner of the villa. And out of her life.

In the trees at the border of the garden behind her, something made a rustling noise, but this time Kate didn’t feel any alarm or bother to look around. Since she knew it wasn’t Mitchell, she didn’t care what else was back there. Squeezing her eyes closed, she dropped her head in a losing battle with doubt and shame.

The reasons she’d given Mitchell for putting an abrupt end to their time together were nothing but half-truths. When she originally decided to go to bed with him, she hadn’t needed to know how many languages he spoke or how many siblings he had before she could make that decision. The reasons she’d given herself for backing away were logical, but lame and dishonest. She’d realized all along that she might feel guilty or mortified later if she slept with him tonight, and she’d been prepared to risk that, and accept it if it happened. What she had not been prepared to do was go back to Chicago and torture herself with more unanswerable questions. The reason for her father’s death was a mystery; the future of the restaurant he’d devoted his life to was an uncertain mystery with Kate in charge. When Mitchell refused to talk about himself, she’d panicked at the realization that yet another frustrating mystery was presenting itself to her—standing right in front of her, in fact, looking at her with sexy, heavy-lidded eyes and a deceptively lazy smile while he practically dared her to try to unravel what was going on inside him.

And what made Kate so furious with herself now, and so ashamed, was that she could have done it, at least partway. She had a master’s degree in psychology and several years of experience dealing almost exclusively with the living results of dysfunctional families. At dinner tonight, she’d realized within minutes that there were carefully erected emotional barricades around Mitchell, and she’d presumed that they’d been there a very, very long time—probably since childhood.

Instead of granting him the right to have boundaries and admiring the amazing amount of warmth and strength he obviously possessed—instead of letting him put all that irresistible, confident sexuality of his to use, which he’d intended to do with her, Kate had focused on the probable foundation of his barricades and started digging there with probing questions about his family members.

Finally, he’d asked her the one-million-dollar question: “What the hell difference does it make?”

And the answer to that question was, Kate admitted miserably—no difference. Every adult male had some sort of useful emotional barricades. Sometimes, they let them down for a woman they cared deeply for, but never did they let them down simply because a woman they scarcely knew wanted to make them do it—and do it immediately!

Swallowing back tears, Kate stepped off the terrace where she’d laughed and joked and danced with him... and been melted by one unforgettable kiss. Lifting her hand, she rubbed the aching muscles at her nape, then dropped her hand to her side. Less than half an hour ago, she remembered poignantly, his long fingers had been at her nape, shoved into her hair, his mouth hungrily on hers.

The music had ended when he left, she realized as she wandered aimlessly toward the beach. The night had died when he left.

She thought about the way he’d turned back when he was walking away, as if the act of taking his keys out of his pocket had suddenly reminded him of another act he needed to perform...“You made the right choice,” he’d told her with a brief smile; and for the first time, Kate finally understood his seemingly odd behavior: He was politely assuming all the blame for the failure of the evening—like a perfect gentleman. His manners weren’t merely excellent, Kate realized, they were impeccable. Whether he was being doused with an ice-cold drink or sent away with unfulfilled sexual expectations, he lost neither his temper nor his composure.

She paused, trying to link that vaguely familiar behavior with something she knew, and then she remembered what it was: Supposedly, the British upper class behaved as if they were impervious to chaos. Any outward display of temperamental frustration was regarded as a sign of bad breeding. Evidently, Mitchell had somehow acquired the manners of the British upper class.

She would never be sure if she was right about that. Because of her own cowardice and her infatuated eagerness to know everything about him, she’d spoiled her chance to discover anything about him at all.

Knowing that made her feel so miserable that it was almost a consolation to think he hadn’t really given a damn about her. At least she couldn’t blame herself for spoiling chances she’d never have had with him.