Synching Style Sheets across documents

Hi,

I have a series of documents that keeps growing. They use many of the same style sheets, with particular ones showing up here and there. I don't want to add them all to a book, because they need to live separately with separate pagination. Is there a way to link them all to a specific master set of text styles such that if I update/add something to one document, it will appear when I open a sister document?  If I add them to a book would that essentially merge all the stylesheets? If I do that, can I keep each doc with its own pagination starting at 1?

(I guess I could import styles into each doc after I happen to change styles in one, but that seems kind of clunky.)

Thanks,

Stuart