Jade Star (Star Quartet 4)

“Is Jane your mistress?”

He said sharply, “I told you I don’t have a mistress.”

“I don’t know any other word for it. You make love to her, don’t you? You care for her.”

“Yes and yes, but it’s not the same thing.”

“Does she live in San Francisco?” Is she there now, waiting for you to come back?

She was speaking so calmly, with far less enthusiasm than she used discussing the dolphins they’d seen yesterday.

“Yes,” he said, frustrated, “she does. She is a very nice person, Jules.”

“Why didn’t you marry her?”

“Because I don’t love her, dammit!”

You don’t love me either. “I see,” she said aloud. “A pity you didn’t rescue her. Then perhaps you would have—married her, that is.”

“I did rescue her, but not in the same way.”

She arched a questioning brow, saying nothing.

He eased down beside her on the coil of rope. The mailsail flapped overhead and the wind whipped through his hair. The smell of salt permeated everything. He wanted to tell Jules to get into the shade, for her fair complexion was turning a distinct red, but he didn’t. “Her name is Jane Branigan, and she’s a widow with two boys. Her husband died in one of the gold camps and I simply helped her to get started on her own. She owns a seamstress shop and is doing well now.”

“Does she know about me?”

r /> “She knows that I was taking you back to Maui.”

Jules closed her eyes, fighting against the burdensome pain. He’d more than likely made love to Jane Branigan while she, Jules, was staying in his house.

“She will be . . . upset?”

“I don’t know. We are good friends, Jules.”

Will you still go to her when we arrive in San Francisco? Will you make love to her? . . . Where’s your pride, you stupid twit! She raised her chin. “Perhaps I shall have some good friends who are men.”

“Perhaps you will,” he said in a light voice.

“Perhaps I shall even dream about them and call out their names and not yours.”

He sucked in his breath. You are twenty-nine years old, you stupid bastard. Have a little sense and wit. She’s lashing out because you frightened her, then called out another woman’s name.

“Jules,” he said slowly, “I am truly sorry for what happened. It is difficult for a man to be very close to a woman and not . . . well, respond to her. It is also very common for a man to dream about sexual things so vividly that they almost become real. Women do it too.”

“I don’t.”

You haven’t because you don’t know what to dream about! “Perhaps someday you will understand what I mean. In any case, it won’t happen again, I swear it to you.”

Jules wished at that moment that he hadn’t awakened, that she hadn’t cried out. It would have been over with, and she felt now that she could deal with any fear better than this. She said, “When we are home, you will continue to see this Jane?”

He hadn’t thought about it. It was the kind of thing that shouldn’t happen. A man married, his wife a virgin, and he so damned randy . . . She was so beautiful, his Jules, so bright and vivid, and so very vulnerable. He would simply have to become a monk. He had no choice in the matter. A saint who was also a monk. He supposed it fit.

“No,” he said finally. “I will see her, of course, as a friend, but I won’t have sexual relations with her again. Marriage, for me, means fidelity.”

“Fidelity seems to have no bearing on anything,” Jules said, and quickly rose, beating down her skirts as the ocean breeze swirled around her.

“Just what is that supposed to mean?”