Trust Me

that the man she was to marry had no intention of giving her his unqualified love and trust.
    As the date of the wedding had neared, Pamela had grown increasingly tense. Desdemona had seen the mounting anxiety in her client each time they had met to go over the reception arrangements, but she had optimistically chosen to ignore it. The future happiness of the bride and groom was not her problem.
    Desdemona had told herself that all she had to do was pull off a wildly successful reception, and that would be the end of her concern with the Stark-Bedford marriage.
    Unfortunately, she had miscalculated. Pamela had panicked at the last minute, leaving not only Stark, but Right Touch, in the lurch.
    “Unromantic? ‘ Unromantic’?” Stark put on his glasses and swung around to confront Desdemona. His riveting green eyes glittered with an unsettling intensity. “What the hell kind of answer is that?”
    “Well, I’m not sure,” Desdemona admitted weakly.
    “Probably because it’s a useless, meaningless, illogical answer.” Stark shrugged out of the black tux jacket and tossed it aside with a gesture of chilling disgust.
    The movement made Desdemona grip the arms of her chair very tightly. The fact that Stark appeared to have his emotions under an ironclad self-control only served to make them seem all the more dangerous.
    She was rapidly learning that Stark did not show his feelings the way the men in her family did. Wainwright men were volatile, exuberant, and flamboyant. So were the women, for that matter. Wainwrights were theater people, after all. They relished emotion.
    But Stark was a different breed. His emotional depths were dark and murky. He was difficult to read.
    For some inexplicable reason, she found him fascinating. She sensed that he was her exact opposite in many ways, and yet there was something oddly compelling about him. Part of her was drawn to him. She wondered rather wistfully what might have happened had they met in another place and another time.
    She had become aware of him as a person only an hour ago when it had finally dawned on everyone that he had been abandoned at the altar. Until that point she had been too frenetically busy behind the scenes to pay any attention to the groom. She had not even caught sight of him until his best man, Dane McCallum, had made the dreadful announcement that had sent the guests home.
    She could say one thing for certain about Stark, Desdemona decided. The man did look good in a tux.
    He had the body of a medieval knight. Not overly tall, a shade under six feet, perhaps, but very hard and very solid. He was sleekly muscled, with no sign of flab anywhere.
    He moved the way that a well-trained actor did, with grace and an instinctive sense of presence. When Stark entered a room, you would know he was there. Desdemona sensed that it was all unconscious on his part, however, not a carefully honed tactic to gain attention. He seemed completely unaware of the intensity that he projected. He simply was what he was, a self-contained force of nature.
    The tails of his black bow tie hung down the front of his crisply pleated shirt. He had undone the tie a few minutes ago when he had stalked into his study. Now, as Desdemona watched apprehensively, he yanked open the collar of his shirt, exposing the strong column of his throat.
    She stared in mute amazement as he impatiently ripped off his gold cuff links and tossed them onto the glass-topped desk. The twin spheres danced and skittered on the slick surface. Stark rolled up his sleeves, revealing sinewy forearms and a large, stainless steel digital watch that was adorned with a lot of miniature keys. It was the sort of watch that looked as though it could provide weather information, stock market reports, and breaking headlines in addition to the time of day. It was a high-tech gadget-lover’s watch.
    From what Desdemona had seen, everything in the fortress was a high-tech-lover’s dream. Lights came on automatically when you walked into a room. The kitchen was state-of-the-art. A household computer regulated everything, from the inside air temperature and the blinds that opened and closed according to the angle of the sun, to the extremely sophisticated security system.
    Even the art on the walls looked as though it had been generated by a computer. The pictures were brilliant explosions of light and color formed into complex, surreal designs.
    Desdemona struggled to change the subject. “A prenuptial agreement