The Best Way to Lose by Janet Dailey Page A

head. After that earlier rawness in his presence, she felt pleasantly loose and able to deal with him It showed in the artificially bold glint in her dark eyes.
    Her shoulders were hunched to allow her forearms to rest on her crossed legs. The action allowed the crossing front of her wraparound dress to gape slightly. Trace’s angle from the chair permitted him to view the exposed slope of a breast. There was a hardness in the steel-gray of his eyes as he tried not to look, but his gaze kept slipping to it. Pilar appeared totally oblivious to the exposure—and to him.
    “Were you able to load all the boxes in your car?” she asked while she ran a pencil down a list of items on a paper.
    “Yes, I did.”
    Outside of a nod, she didn’t appear interested in his answer as she flipped pages in an appointment calendar, then thoughtfully rubbed the soft eraser end of the pencil along her lower lip. Its slow movement was an unwanted diversion that had his mouth pressed tightly shut.
    Everything about her—from the way she sat to the way she was dressed to her gestures—seemed to be deliberately provocative, designed to arouse and stimulate. Yet she showed about as much interest in him as she did a piece of furniture. They were conflictingsignals, her body flashing him one set, and her attitude slapping him away.
    If he thought for one minute that she knew what she was doing to him, he’d … Trace cut off the thought because there was no answer to it. He had to move out of that chair while he still had a grip on himself.

Chapter Six
    R ising, Trace took a quick swig of his drink and walked to the tall wicker table to replenish it. Silently he blamed Cassie and her talk for all his wild imaginings. For purely selfish reasons he wanted to believe that Pilar was attempting to be alluring for him.
    When he finally turned back to face her, she had shifted her hands to the seat cushion and stiffened her arms in a bracing posture that emphasized the jutting roundness of her breasts. Yet she continued to look at the papers on the table with thoughtful concentration.
    “What’s so interesting?” A hint of gruffness put an edge on his question.
    “What?” Her dark glance hardly touchedhim, but she did shift out of that pose to a less disturbing one. “I’m trying to decide how I could rearrange my schedule so I could attend this auction. They have a silver service by Reed and Barton listed that I’d like to see, as well as some Meissen porcelain.”
    “Where is it?” Trace wandered over to look at the flyer.
    “Just outside of Vicksburg.” She scratched out the appointment listed on the day of the sale, changed it to another date, and wrote in the auction. Something was marked on nearly every day, and Trace noticed, when she had turned pages, that many of them were auctions.
    “You go to a lot of them, don’t you?” He swirled the liquid in his glass to hasten the cooling by the ice cubes.
    “Yes. They’re fun, especially those rare times when you find some treasure that the people didn’t even know they had. And there’s always that competitive edge when you’re bidding against another dealer on some piece you’d kill for,” Pilar declared with a faint laugh that derided the seriousness of her statement. Her head was tilted back to look up at him, her features all womanly soft and impishly gay.
    “All you’d have to do is bat those long, black lashes at him and he’d forget all about the item on the auction block,” Trace informed her in a thickening voice and took a fiery swallow of his drink to burn out the fire that had suddenly blazed.
    “The problem is when it’s another woman,”she retorted and took a sip of her drink. “It needs freshening,” she murmured and glided to her feet in a graceful motion.
    Her path to the table brought her close to him, close enough for the fragrance of her hair to stir up his senses. But as she passed he noticed that she was weaving slightly.
    “Maybe it’s time I