ISTLESSLY,KATE WANDERED to the edge of the garden. Immersed in regret and helpless yearning, she watched the shimmering surf spill onto the sand and then chase itself back into the moonlit sea.

She was so wrapped up in her thoughts that she didn’t notice soft footsteps in the grass behind her until a shadow moved directly across her line of vision. She froze, afraid that if she glanced around, she’d discover it was only a hotel guest going for a late stroll on the beach. A breathless moment later, her dread exploded into a burst of elation when Mitchell put his hands on her waist and moved so close behind her that his shirt brushed her back and arms. For several moments, all Kate heard was the pounding of her heart and the restless rustling of palm fronds overhead. And then he said solemnly, “My brother’s name was William.”

His use of the past tense told Kate that his brother was dead, and she dropped her head in shamed remorse for forcing him to talk about it.

As if to reassure her, he said, “We barely knew each other. We had the same father but different mothers. I grew up in Europe and Bill grew up in the States with his father’s family.”

“I’m so sorry for asking,” Kate whispered, “but thank you for telling me.”

He slid his hands soothingly up and down her arms, and when he spoke again, he hesitated between each sentence as if he found it difficult to articulate what he was trying to tell her. “Neither of us knew the other one existed until a few months ago when he discovered by accident that he had a brother. He traced me to my address in London and sent me a letter explaining who he was. The next week, he telephoned several times. The week after that, he packed up his wife and teenage son, and the three of them arrived, unannounced, on my doorstep.”

Warning flags went up in Kate’s mind about his father’s apparent lack of any role in this reunion, but the last thing she wanted to do was pry further. Instead, she seized on the most uplifting part of his story and smiled as she turned around to face him and made her comment: “Your brother was a good strategist.”

“Why do you say that?”

“Because, by bringing his wife and son, he demonstrated that his family was in complete accord with his desire to know you.”

“Actually, he brought his wife and son in order to make it more difficult for me to throw him out.”

“Why would he have expected you might do something like that?”

“Probably because I hadn’t answered his letter or accepted his phone calls,” he said drily.

“You hadn’t?”

“No,” he said, but his expression had softened enough to make Kate hazard a guess: “When you got to know him, you liked him, didn’t you?”

He looked away from her before he answered and stared over her head at the sea. “Yes,” he said, and after several seconds, he added in a low voice, “I liked him very much.”

Tears stung the back of Kate’s eyes at the wealth of concealed emotion in that last sentence.

He tipped his chin down and looked at her. “What else would you like to know?”

The only thing Kate wanted to know now was how to extricate them both from this painfully serious topic. Despite her earlier belief that she was utterly insignificant to him, the truth was that he’d come back here to tell her whatever she wanted to know. He’d actually come back. That was all that mattered. After a moment’s thought, she came up with a playful way to answer his last question and hopefully transform their mood. Trying to look extremely solemn, she said, “There is only one more question I really need an answer to—it’s very personal, but it’s extremely important to me to know the answer.” His brows lifted inquiringly, but his expression was so wary and unenthusiastic that Kate laughed and asked the “extremely important” question: “How many languages do you speak?”

His startled chuckle transformed into a lazy, sensual smile as he pretended to seriously contemplate his answer. “I’m not certain,” he said, shifting his hand down her spine and drawing her closer. “I’ll name them for you and you can count them.” His gaze fixed on her mouth, and he bent his head. “I’m fluent in Italian—” His warm mouth touched hers and slid languorously from corner to corner and back again in a long, slow exploration of the shape and texture of her lips that twisted Kate into knots.

“And Spanish—” He deepened the kiss, his mouth stroking hers insistently, his arms tightening. His tongue slid across the seam between her lips, and Kate’s pulse rate soared.

“And French—” His hand curved around her nape, his mouth slowly opening on hers. His tongue made a brief foray into her mouth, probing lightly, and Kate returned the intimate kiss, wrapping her arms fiercely around his neck and molding her body to the hardening contours of his. To Kate’s surprise, her response made him abruptly end that kiss. Instead, he brushed a light kiss on her forehead and whispered, “I also speak some German and some Greek...” Touching his lips to her temple, he added, “and a little Russian, and a little Japanese.” He slid his mouth across her cheekbone to her ear, and his warm breath made her shiver and lean into him as he finished playfully, “and almost no Dutch.”

Despite Mitchell’s lighthearted tone, her shivering response made him yearn to make her shiver again, only harder, and longer, and he had to force himself to lift his head. He could not fathom why kissing her had such a powerful physical effect on him, and he was genuinely relieved that he’d managed to name all the languages he spoke while keeping things from getting out of hand.

Kate stirred in his arms and tipped her chin up. “You forgot to mention English,” she said with a smile.

In the interest of conformity, Mitchell suddenly felt that the English language needed to be mentioned in the context of a kiss, just as the others had been. “Did I?” he asked, slowly rubbing his thumb over her soft bottom lip; then he looked at what his thumb was doing. His restraint snapped. He pressed his thumb down hard, forcing her lips apart, and abruptly seized her mouth in a hungry, devouring kiss. His tongue plunged into her mouth, and the kiss went wild. She kissed him back, her fingers flexing against the muscles in his back, clasping him to her while his hands slid restlessly over the sides of her breasts, then swept behind her, cupping her hips and pulling her tightly against his rigid erection.

When Mitchell finally pulled his mouth from hers, lust was raging through his entire nerve stream, and the idea of walking toward her villa in the condition his body was in struck him as being too humorous to consider. Instead, he held her in his arms, her face pressed to his chest, her titian hair spilling over his arm in a rumpled cascade. Lifting his gaze from the top of her head, he looked out at the shifting sea, his emotions caught somewhere between excitement, amusement, and disbelief. She was leaning against him for support, her hand splayed over his pounding heart, her fingers moving slightly in a feathery caress. He liked the way she was touching him. He knew she was in much the same emotional and physical state he was in, and he liked that, too.

In fact, he liked everything about her.

He liked her humor, her warmth, and her sensuality. He liked her courage and her candor and her pride. He liked her smile and the musical sound of her laughter. He liked her face, and her hair, and the way she’d laid her hand on his jaw earlier, when she said, “I have a feeling you’re a whole lot more than just another pretty face.”

He liked the way her body fit itself to his, and the way her breasts felt in his hands. Mitchell checked the direction of his thoughts and tipped his chin down, ready to relinquish his hold on her and walk back to the suite. “How many languages was that?” he asked with a grin.

She lifted her head from his chest, leaned back in his arms, and looked at him blankly for a moment; then she gave him a smile filled with charming chagrin. “I don’t know. I lost count after you said French.”

“Then we’ll have to start over.”

“Oh, God—” she said on a choked laugh, and dropped her forehead weakly against his chest.

“But not here,” Mitchell said, amused and flattered by her reaction; then he curved his arm around her waist and directed her toward the villa. As they walked across the grass, he tried to remember the last time a woman had made him experience such strong, frequent, and repeated transitions from laughter to lust, and frustration to fascination. He couldn’t remember that ever happening to him before. The experience was surprising, challenging, and exhilarating. He didn’t want to do anything to diminish it, or the woman who affected him that way, and as he glanced at the open terrace doors, he wondered if it was a mistake to take her to bed in her boyfriend’s hotel room. Then he wondered exactly who he thought that would bother—her? Or him? Or both of them?

The possibility that he might not like the idea of going to bed with her in another man’s hotel room seemed ludicrous, since he’d done similar things in the past and without the slightest qualm. In view of that, Mitchell decided that his concern was strictly for her sake—until they walked into the suite and they both saw his navy sport jacket hanging on the back of a chair in the living room.

Kate reacted with a surprised statement of the obvious. “When you left earlier, you forgot your jacket.”

“That might have been difficult to explain to the lawyer,” Mitchell replied without intending to say any such thing. The lawyer was an off-limits subject under the circumstances, and he couldn’t believe he’d just been foolish enough—or crass enough—to bring him up at such a time as this.

“I would have noticed it and...”

“And what?” Mitchell inquired, even though that completely compounded his last transgression and made him even more annoyed with himself.

Kate shot him an uneasy smile and bent down to check on the sleeping dog. Max’s nose was cool and moist, and he opened his eyes when she touched him; then he gave his tail a feeble wag and drifted back to sleep. Satisfied, she stood up and rubbed her palms on the sides of her pants. She was trying to think what she would have done with Mitchell’s jacket, and she wished the subject hadn’t come up, because it was making her feel sneaky and guilty about going to bed with him here in Evan’s suite, when moments before she’d been happy and excited. “I guess I could have left it at the front desk in a bag with your name on it.”

Mitchell knew that was a perfectly logical solution, but for some reason he suddenly found the notion extremely distasteful—almost as if it were he, rather than merely his jacket, that she would be pulling a bag over and hustling out to the front desk.

“Or I guess I could have put it in the closet and waited for you to phone and tell me what to do with it.”

Mitchell restrained the idiotic urge to ask her if she thought the lawyer and he wore the same size jacket; then he glanced at the telephone and imagined the lawyer standing there, answering Mitchell’s phone call about the jacket or playing back Mitchell’s voice mail about it. As he looked at the telephone, it occurred to him that the red message light was no longer flashing, as it had been earlier. That meant Kate had already retrieved her voice mail message sometime during the evening.

He glanced at her, half expecting her to be looking at the telephone, too, but she was looking at the bed with a decidedly guilty expression, rather than the soft, yielding expression she’d had a few minutes ago. Although the lawyer wasn’t present in the room, he’d become a pronounced obstacle to their unrestrained enjoyment of each other, Mitchell realized with disgust. “Is he still planning to arrive tomorrow?”

Kate shook her head. “The day after tomorrow,” she said, but their conversation about Evan had made her feel so uneasy that she couldn’t look at the bed in the alcove without feeling despicable about being there with Mitchell. Ethically speaking, this wasn’t her hotel room or her bed. Evan was paying for them. Decide now, her brain prompted. Decide. Decide. Engaged in her personal struggle with ethics and logistics, Kate turned in shock when, from the corner of her eye, she saw Mitchell shrugging into his jacket. “Are you leaving?” she asked, sounding as stricken as she felt.

He nodded; then he partially dispelled her fears over his reasons by capturing her wrist and pulling her firmly into his arms.

He looked amused, not annoyed, she noted. “But, why?”

“Because,” he said drily, “something tells me that nice Irish choir girls think it’s naughty to sleep with a man in another man’s room.”

Kate’s eyes widened at his acuity, but the term choir girl seemed so inappropriate under the circumstances that she couldn’t hide behind the falsity of it. “I am hardly behaving like a choir girl.”

“Did I guess wrong about the room?” he countered with a knowing smile.

“Not exactly, but—”

“And I also think that if we sleep together ‘on the first date,’ one of us will decide tomorrow that our behavior tonight reeked of tacky, indiscriminate sex.”

“Do you mean you?” Kate said dazedly, and he gave a short bark of laughter.

“Not me. You.”

Kate thought about what he was saying, and she made no effort to hide the yearning or confusion she felt. “I never realized what a prude I must be.”

In reply, he slid his fingers through the sides of her hair and turned her face up to his for a demanding kiss that ended on a gruff command. “Get over it by tomorrow.”

Kate tried to think of a clever rejoinder and instead said softly, “I will.” Satisfied that the matter was settled, he dropped his hands and turned toward the terrace doors, apparently intending to walk outside and around the building. “There’s a front door in here, you know,” Kate pointed out.

“If I walk past that bed with you, I’ll have you in it in thirty seconds.”

“You’re awfully sure of yourself,” she teased.

He tipped his head back, closed his eyes, and said, “Please, just dare me to prove it. Just give me one excuse. That’s all I need right now—just one infinitesimal excuse and my fragile new scruples won’t matter.”

Kate wisely decided not to do that, and he opened his eyes. “I’ll pick you and Max up at ten o’clock. We’ll take him to a vet in St. Maarten and spend the day on the island. And the night,” he added meaningfully. When she didn’t object to that, he said, “Do you like to gamble?”

Kate looked at the man she’d agreed to spend the night with after knowing him only a few hours and said with a winsome smile, “Obviously.”

He caught her meaning and grinned. “Then bring a change of clothes for the evening—something nice.”

He turned and disappeared through the doorway.