Shelby stood on the balcony, looking out over the gardens, looking out over the night. She and Parker had been there for over ten minutes, standing under a romantic full moon, and all Parker had talked about was the stock market and the rumor that Merilee Throgmorton had just had her second nose job.
When Parker finally paused in his monologue, she spoke up, hoping to change the subject. “It’s beautiful out here, in a stodgy, up-tight sort of way, isn’t it, Parker? Everything so neat, so orderly. Too neat and orderly. Don’t you just wish there were a dandelion or two?”
“Hardly, darling.” Parker Westbrook III leaned a hip against the wrought iron railing, folded his hands across his chest. Tall, thin, but sleekly muscular, Shelby’s fiancé had blue eyes to her brown, his hair an even lighter, sun-bleached blond. Dressed in his custom-tailored tuxedo, he could have been posing for a liquor ad, one of those with the hidden phallic symbol somewhere in the background. Sleek, handsome, subtly sexy. Shelby used to be impressed. Lately, she wasn’t quite so sure, and actually wished Parker could sprout a dandelion or two himself, just to make him look more human.
“Do you really think we should be out here, darling?” he said at last, barely able to keep the boredom out of his voice. “I mean, those diamonds are shining like beacons. Insured or not, they’re around your neck, and I don’t like feeling as if I am now in charge of protecting both.”
Shelby ran a finger along the heavy choker. “What, these old things?” she teased, referring to her grandmother’s diamonds. “You really think someone would go to the trouble of climbing through all of this considerable security for the chance of stealing these few pieces, when it would be so much easier to break into our house and scoop up the entire Taite collection? I know the combination to the safe, Parker,” she told him, leaning close, wishing the man would relax, be spontaneous, just this once. “Do you want to know it? Twenty-three right, sixteen left—”
“Oh, for God’s sake, Shelby,” Parker interrupted, looking around as if he expected to see half a dozen masked thieves standing there, pens and scratch pads at the ready. “Is that why you insisted on coming out here? To be ridiculous?”
Shelby could have cheerfully strangled this man she was marrying. Not that she’d say so, because that would cause a scene, and Taites never caused scenes. Except for Uncle Alfred, but that was rather expected of the man.
Still, she decided maybe it was time to be at least a little bit daring.
“Actually, no,” she told Parker, twining her arms around his shoulders, “I came out here so we could neck. Don’t you want to neck, Parker? I want to neck.”
“Now, Shelby. The night has eyes, remember?” Parker smiled, and Shelby thought, not for the first time, that when he smiled he was really quite handsome, in a sterile sort of way. She liked that he was tall, at least four inches taller than her own five feet, nine inches. His hair was getting just a little bit thin on top, but he used one of those hair-restoring formulas now, and she knew better than to try to run her fingers through his hair, mussing up the careful arrangement meant to cover the more sparsely populated areas. He played enough squash to keep himself in trim, and he was quite intelligent, having taken over his father’s investment firm three years earlier when the old man had died.
In short, he was perfect. Perfect Parker.
Shelby grimaced, still hearing the echo of that “the night has eyes” ridiculousness.
Perfect Parker picked a peck of picayune platitudes.
But he was perfect, at least as far as prospective mates went. Good family, solid financially, handsome enough to sire handsome children. Socially accepted. He was her perfect match, as Somerton had pointed out to her, as Parker had pointed out to her the night he had proposed.
It hadn’t exactly been a whirlwind courtship, as they’d known each other for years. In fact, Parker had paid very little attention to her over those years, until a few months ago, when he seemed to have “discovered” her much in the way Columbus discovered America. Everything was suddenly “Hello, Shelby, how are you, Shelby, I would be honored to have this dance, Shelby.”
Somerton had thought all of this wonderful. Somewhere in the back of her brain, Shelby thought all this new attention had a bit of a smell to it, but Parker was handsome. She’d always give him that. He showered her with flowers and poems and treated her as if she were made of glass.
When he proposed their “merger,” she tried to see that proposal wrapped up in pink ribbons. She’d been trying hard to keep seeing it that way, and their marriage as well.
Then he went and comes out with “the night has eyes.”
This trying to be wrapped up in the romance of the thing was getting more difficult to pull off every day.
“Come on, Parker, be a little naughty,” she pursued now doggedly, rubbing up against him, hoping to feel some sort of spark, see some flash of fire in his eyes. She had to know, needed to know—was something wrong with Parker, or with her? Was he a passionless stick, or was she still the Ice Maiden?
She touched his cheek with her hand, stroked its smoothness. “We’re engaged to be married, remember? Forget where we are. Forget everything. Kiss me. Don’t you want to kiss me, need to kiss me? Don’t you ever think you’ll just die if you can’t kiss me, hold me? Don’t you want to go a little mad—right here, right now?”
Parker reached up and disengaged her arms from his neck, placed kisses on the back of each hand as he lowered them to her sides. “How much have you had to drink, Shelby?” he asked, smiling indulgently.
“Not enough, apparently,” she shot back at him, pushing past him as she all but ran down the length of the balcony, intent on returning to the ballroom. And bumped into a tall wall of well-tailored muscle.
“ ’Evenin’, ma’am. I was just coming out to check up on you, doing the bodyguard thing and all of that.”
“Yes, yes. Whatever.” She kept her head down, refusing to look at him, concentrating instead on the shine on the tops of his shoes. How dare the man have been here to witness her embarrassment! Didn’t the fool know the meaning of the word discretion? She sailed past him, mortified, hating to hear the man’s soft chuckle as she stepped inside the ballroom once more, then immediately forgot him.