“Hush, my dear,” he said gently. The gentleness was really automatic; he no more cared what Sharon Rose had to say than he did what the veal thought about being the main course at dinner. What was important about Sharon Rose was that she was seventeen, and gullible, and easily left behind when that became necessary. Young enough to be piquant, old enough to be excusable. He was forced to save his enthusiasm for younger girls for rare trips out of the country, after the embarrassing contretemps in Dallas, which had only gone to prove that there really was no civilization in the western half of the country.

Of course, there’d been that delicious little Asian girl in Los Angeles—fourteen? Wonderful. A juicy, eager mouth. A very pleasant memory.

Sharon Rose was trying to keep her knees together, remembering too late a strict upbringing. He pried them apart with strong fingers and soft meaningless words. She began to cry, which was tiresome; he stripped the bikini briefs away and probed warm moist flesh, sipped champagne, described for Sharon Rose in detail what he wanted from her. Then he wiped her tears away with characteristic blank gentleness, and aroused himself with memories of the Asian girl—exceptional, that one, really. She’d be fifteen now. Not too old to be exciting.

He stepped out of the Jacuzzi and had Sharon Rose wipe him thoroughly dry. He had to brace himself with one hand on the back of a wrought-iron chair against a new wave of dizziness. He’d been drinking most of the night, of course, but the wine had gone to his head in a very strange way, almost disorienting. The scrape of the towel along his erection distracted him back to his pleasure, and he closed his eyes and remembered the Asian’s mouth, so muscular, the teeth so fragile.

He opened his eyes and looked at Sharon Rose, whose face had blotched unbecomingly from crying, and decided that one night really would be quite enough of her. Draining the last of his champagne, he put the crystal aside.

“I’ll want my robe again,” he told her. She recovered his Neiman Marcus robe—rich fluffed cotton, embroidered with his initials—from the chair where he’d discarded it earlier. The familiar lushness of it along his skin made him instantly harder. He left the front open and motioned Sharon Rose inside, to where the bed waited. She ran ahead, holding her towel over her nude body with appealing modesty-little winks of firm buttocks, the barest glimpse of golden pubic hair—and he decided that it might turn out to be a properly amusing evening, after all.

Annoyingly hot, though. He paused at the thermostat and checked it—set at seventy-five, a perfectly acceptable temperature. He flicked a fingertip against it two or three times, and frowned. Perhaps the Jacuzzi had been hotter than usual, or perhaps it was the wine, but he was really quite overheated—