Free Bachelor On The Prowl by Kasey Michaels Page A

the days of at least three secretaries, and gladdened the heart of one octogenarian who still had a very good memory of her younger, more flirtatious days.
    It was like that for Colin. Sometimes he knew when he was causing a stir. It was rather hard not to know. But, mercifully, for the most part he was unaware of stares, covert looks, hands lifted to feminine mouths to cover girlish giggles.
    Because he was Colin Rafferty. He knew he had this certain appeal to the feminine mind or heart or whatever, but he had learned to never let it go to his head. He couldn’t. He was much too busy living his life, enjoying his career.
    Okay, so he wasn’t beneath using a well-aimed look, a perfectly timed smile, when it got him what he wanted, where he wanted to go. Only a jerk would look a gift horse—or a handsome face—in the mouth.
    And he hadn’t always been so unaware of the power of his physical looks.
    From the time he’d been handed over to his third or fourth nanny—at about the age of five—he’d figured out that women liked him. They catered to him, liked to feed him milk and cookies, liked to help him with his homework.
    For a while, during his teenage years, he’d become more than a bit of a jerk. Females flocked to him, and he wasn’t yet mature enough to resist the urge to take advantage of them, injure their tender hearts.
    Until Max had gotten wind of what was going on, that is, and just about taken Colin apart. And he’d learned. He learned that an almost perfect “outside” meant nothing, less than nothing, if the “inside” didn’t live up to its “cover.”
    So Colin had stopped posing, and started to crack open the books. He still played on his high school baseball and football teams, but he also joined the debate club. He painted scenery for the class play, took guitar lessons with more of an eye to the classical than the quick chording that wowed the girls as he played and sang vocals with a local rock band.
    The high school girls still chased him. And then the college girls chased him. And then women, all sorts of women, from Texas to New York, to Paris, and everywhere in between. Except he didn’t let so many of them “catch” him anymore. He was careful not to take everything that was offered to him, learned to judge others as he wished to be judged.
    In short, Colin grew up.
    Just to have a major relapse yesterday, with a woman who, he had to admit to himself, just might be the one woman in the world who would actually dislike him because his face didn’t scare small children.
    No wonder he was intrigued. For all the good it would do him.
    He crossed the street and saw the Frick in front of him, a large, imposing building he was amazed he’d never noticed on his earlier trips to Manhattan.
    So this was where a Holly Hollis would go when she wanted to be alone? Interesting.
    He stepped inside, felt the coolness of being surrounded by very thick walls, aware of entering a sort of haven far removed from the hustle and bus tl e of the New York City streets. Paying his entrance fee, he was handed a brochure that included a map of the museum as well as a short history.
    Stalling, playing for time, he opened the brochure, and learned that a man by the name of Henry Clay Frick, a Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania coke and steel industrialist, had ordered the construction of this huge mansion around 1913, for use as a private home. Some private home. A guy could fly a kite right here in the foyer.
    Henry had willed the building and his art collection to a trust, and that trust had added considerably to Henry’s already impressive collection, so that now over one thousand, one hundred works of art were on display. A Rembrandt. An El Greco. Some Whistler.
    Colin was always impressed to learn that private citizens actually owned great masterpieces, and only loaned them to museums from time to time.
    He could imagine—just barely—what it would be like to eat dinner in a dining room overlooked by El