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‘Jenny doesn’t appear to be accustomed to your bad humour,’ Shay mocked, sinking gracefully down into one of the comfortable armchairs, once again crossing one elegant knee over the other, unconsciously emphasising the slender beauty of her legs as she did so.
‘Meaning you are?’ Lyon rasped, very aware of all of this woman’s beauty, and despising himself for it. She had once made her dislike of him more than obvious, to want her now, especially now, was pure madness on his part.
‘Oh, yes,’ she derided. ‘Don’t you remember?’
‘I remember a lot of things that happened between us in the past—’
‘Strangely, I don’t,’ Shay cut in firmly. ‘You really should have read Scarlet Lover, Lyon; I was sure you would have recognised yourself.’ She smiled briefly, inwardly, not at or with Lyon. ‘Ricky felt sure you would want to sue me!’
‘Could I have done?’ he asked tightly.
‘I doubt it,’ dismissed Shay coolly, her humour gone as quickly as it had arisen. ‘Of course the man’s name was Leon de Coursey, and he did have blond hair and tawny eyes too, was about the same age—’
‘And was he a despoiler of young maidens too?’ Lyon rasped harshly.
‘No.’ Her mouth tightened. ‘But he was married!’
‘Shay—’
‘You never did tell me how Neil is,’ she interrupted his angry outburst.
‘He’s well,’ Lyon dismissed curtly. ‘But we were talking about one of your books—’
‘Amazing, isn’t it,’ she said thoughtfully. ‘At twenty-one I suddenly discovered I had a talent for writing.’ She still found the fact that she was a bestselling author awe-inspiring.
‘And making money,’ Lyon put in derisively.
She looked at him unemotionally. ‘That too, although it isn’t as much as it might seem. But I must admit I like to look on people’s faces when they realise I’m Shay Flanagan, the author of those historical sizzlers. I hope you’re duly grateful about the fact that I didn’t drag the Falconer name into my disreputable career,’ she continued scornfully. ‘Ricky assured me Grandfather Jonas would have turned in his grave!’
‘Considering the fact that my father, his only child, was born illegitimately, I don’t think Grandfather Jonas would have any right to criticise,’ Lyon drawled. ‘What happened on page one hundred and twenty-three in the book, Shay?’
She had known he wouldn’t be diverted by the deviations in the conversation. ‘I’ll get you a copy,’ she promised casually.
‘I’d rather you told me now,’ he insisted roughly.
Shay shook her head firmly. ‘I never discuss my work with anyone.’
‘But if I feature in one of your books—’
‘I didn’t say that you did,’ she contradicted coldly. ‘Page one hundred and twenty-three is a very explicit sex scene—and we once had a lot of those,’ she added hardly.
‘You were married to Ricky, couldn’t you have used your—times, with him?’ Lyon grated forbiddingly.
‘I said it was a sex scene, Lyon, not a love scene,’ Shay said crushingly. ‘Now, if you wouldn’t mind,’ she stood up, ‘I think I should like to go into the bedroom and rest for a while.’
‘Shay …!’ His hand snaked out and captured her wrist as she would have walked past him.
She looked at him unemotionally. ‘Please, don’t cause a scene, Lyon.’
‘And if I do?’ he challenged.
‘You remember my Irish temper?’ she said calmly.
The hand that wasn’t holding her wrist moved up to the scar on his right temple. ‘Vividly,’ he drawled dryly.
Shay’s gaze moved to the small white scar, remembering how she had once thrown a cup at him, a fine china missile that had smashed when it made contact with his head, blood dripping down his face from the gash it made. ‘I can see that you do,’ she said with satisfaction. ‘Well, I may appear calm and collected to you,’ she spoke pleasantly, ‘but if you don’t release me there are one or two glasses in here that I could use instead of the cup.’
Lyon looked at her sceptically, and then with grudging admiration as he saw she was in earnest, slowly released her arm. ‘You little hell-cat,’ he murmured in fascination.
She didn’t show any emotion for the name he had once called her at more intimate moments in their past relationship. ‘Ricky preferred to think of me as fiery.’ She felt an inner satisfaction as Lyon’s mouth tightened at the mention of her intimacy with his brother. ‘I prefer to think of it as an aversion to being pushed around.’ Shay stepped back from him. ‘I won’t be requiring any dinner,’ she informed him coolly. ‘Perhaps you could have Jenny wake me when we get to England?’
Tawny eyes narrowed. ‘You intend sleeping for the next eight hours?’
Shay shrugged narrow shoulders. ‘Why not?’
‘I thought we could talk, become reacquainted,’ he grated.
‘Reacquainted, Lyon?’ Her smile was one of genuine amusement. ‘Were we ever acquainted?’
His mouth tightened at her mockery. ‘We were lovers, damn it!’
‘Is that what you would call it?’ she scorned. ‘After being married to, and in love with, Ricky, I have a much different name for what we once were. Now if you’ll excuse me, I don’t wish to be disturbed.’ She walked past him into the bedroom, closing the door on his rage at being dismissed so autocratically, knowing he wouldn’t disturb her, that he was too angry to follow her.
Now that she was alone, away from those all-seeing tawny eyes, she didn’t have to keep up the pretense any more, sitting down heavily on the bed, wrapping her arms about herself as she shuddered with reaction.
Oh Ricky, she silently cried, why aren’t you here to take care of me, to love me! Twenty-eight was too young to die, especially when he had so much to live for.
She knew her husband would have enjoyed this verbal sparring with Lyon, that he had reveled in their animosity, the clash of characters between the two brothers only becoming so heatedly intense after she and Ricky were married. They were all aware of that, the relationship between herself and Lyon no secret from the rest of the family. Ricky had never been angry about her and Lyon, only angry for her. Especially after reading Scarlet Lover.
She had written the manuscript during the days once Ricky had gone to work, hadn’t told him about it, embarrassed at her own imagination, only allowing him to read it after it was completed. She had known the exact moment he reached page one hundred and twenty-three, had watched him anxiously, her breathing becoming constricted at how still he had suddenly become.
He was sitting cross-legged on their bed, the manuscript spread out in front of him, looking up at her with pained eyes. ‘Leon de Coursey—’
‘I’ll change it.’ She ran to him, stricken. ‘I won’t send it to a publisher. It’s only rubbish, anyway,’ she dismissed. ‘It was just something for me to do while you were—’
‘It isn’t rubbish, you will send it to a publisher, and you won’t change a thing,’ Ricky told her intensely, his laughing blue eyes unusually serious. He cupped her face in his hands. ‘That was what it was like between you and Lyon?’
‘Lyon?’ she hedged unconvincingly. ‘I don’t—’
‘Darling, we’ve never lied to each other,’ he encouraged gently. ‘What we have together is—fantastic. What you had with Lyon, if de Coursey is him— and I believe he is—was something else entirely. It was primitive, savage—’
‘Yes, it was both of those things,’ she acknowledged bitterly. ‘We seemed to bring out those qualities in each other. But it was also destructive.’
‘It’s all right, darling,’ Ricky took her in his arms, holding her trembling body close against his arms, beginning to kiss her, the manuscript, and Leon de Coursey, or Lyon—the two had become confused in her mind by this time!—were forgotten in the heat of their passionate exchange.
But the next day Ricky had parcelled up the manuscript and sent it to a reputable publisher, and now the heated historical romances of Shay Flanagan were almost history themselves.
Just as her relationship with Lyon was also history, a painful part of her history she had tried to put behind her.
DAMN IT, what was she doing in there! Lyon shook with the rage of being instructed what to do as if he were one of the help. No one had ever, ever, spoken to him that way before! And all it had achieved was to make him want Shay more than ever.
More than anything he was curious about page one hundred and twenty-three of her book. Was Leon de Coursey the hero of her book or the villain? Knowing how Shay felt about him, de Coursey was the blackest villain there had ever been!
God, she had grown incredibly beautiful the last three years, he could feel his thighs tightening just at the thought of her. Had she undressed now that she was alone in the bedroom, was she naked even now, lying between those brown silk sheets, moving sensuously in her sleep as she always used to?
He had been haunted by those sounds she used to make as she slept, had woken up in a sweat more than once after imagining her there beside him, only to know the agonising disappointment of pent up desire when he found he was once again alone, that Shay now shared his brother Ricky’s bed, giving him all the passion she had once so freely given him.
He had never forgotten the look on Ricky’s face when he had first been introduced to Shay; his younger brother had looked as if it were Christmas and New Year all rolled into one, with Shay the glittering angel on top of the tree. To her credit Shay hadn’t looked at him the same way for several months, but finally it had come. Lyon could still feel the pain in his gut at knowing she was no longer his.
‘Lyon?’
He turned sharply, scowling. ‘What is it, Jenny?’ he asked tersely.
She smiled engagingly. ‘I wondered if there were anything I could do for you?’
He remembered other times he had received completely different offers from this beautiful woman, occasions when he hadn’t been averse to her providing him with the physical relief he needed, even on the bed in the adjoining room once. ‘A whisky,’ he requested harshly, ignoring how hurt she looked at his coldness. ‘And just keep them coming until we land.’ He was going to need to be numb from the feet up to cope with knowing Shay was only feet away from him after imagining every woman in his bed was her for the last five years.
‘And Mrs Falconer, can I get her anything?’ Jenny recovered quickly from his snub.
‘Nothing,’ he bit out, staring broodingly at the closed door to the bedroom.
He was still staring broodingly at the door, Shay on the other side of it, when they touched down at Heathrow Airport hours later.
HE HAD been drinking. She had known it the moment she came out of the bedroom to join him to leave the plane. Lyon wasn’t offensive, didn’t look or act drunk, but she knew he was one of those people who became more controlled after consuming alcohol, the tawny eyes narrowed, his mouth a compressed line of tension.
She spared him only a brief glance before turning to the mirror to put the hat back on her recently brushed hair, several tendrils having escaped as she lay sleepless on the bed. She had known she wouldn’t really be able to sleep, hadn’t slept without medical help since Ricky disappeared, but the thought of spending all that time alone with Lyon was abhorrent to her. But as she lay on the bed she had almost been able to feel his eyes burning her flesh through the closed door, and she clung to the sanctuary of the bedroom, preferring to save her energy—and emotional strength—for the ordeal of returning to Falconer House.
‘We can leave now, if you’re ready.’ Lyon watched her gloweringly.
She pulled the black lace of her hat down over her face before turning to look at him, knowing by the scowl on his face that he disliked this partial shield to her emotions. The time when she gave a damn what Lyon liked or disliked was long gone!
She gave a haughty inclination of her head, as coolly composed as when they had faced each other in Los Angeles all those hours ago, ignoring the hand he put out to guide her down the steps to the waiting airport cars, one for them, the other for the coffin containing Ricky’s lifeless body, the law deeming the funeral director with the car should take over now.
She bore the tedium of Lyon’s dealing with the passport officials with a bored look on her face, secretly wondering how much longer she could keep up this cool façade as the man seemed to linger over clearing them. It was true that the shock of losing Ricky had numbed her, that her independent career from the Falconer empire had given her a confidence she had hitherto lacked, but this act of cool emotionalism was causing more of a strain than she felt able to cope with. But not for anything would she admit to Lyon how all this was affecting her.
‘Could we hurry this up, please?’ Lyon suddenly pressed as the man continued to linger over checking their passports. ‘As I’m sure you can imagine, my sister-in-law is under severe strain.’
The man glanced sympathetically at Shay, receiving a wan smile in return, miraculously seeming to find no further delay with their documents.
Once out in the general flow of people at the airport, Shay felt her panic rising, flinching from the cameras as they clicked practically in her face as each newspaper representative tried to get the best picture of Richard Falconer’s widow, questions coming at them from all directions, the hand that grasped her arm making her pull away.
‘It’s me, you little fool,’ Lyon rasped, pushing his way through the reporters, pulling her along with him. ‘Where the hell is the damned car?’ he swore roughly as they emerged out into the English summer sunshine.
‘Mr Falconer—’
‘Thank God.’ He turned to the chauffeur gratefully, guiding Shay to the waiting limousine, the windows discreetly darkened for privacy.
‘I’m sorry about this, Mr Falconer.’ The man preceded them. ‘But there’s been a bomb scare, and the police are—’
‘Yes, yes,’ Lyon dismissed tersely, still running the gauntlet of the press. ‘Let’s just get out of here.’
‘Thank you, Jeffrey.’ Shay smiled at the man as he opened the back door for her, sliding inside and across the seat as Lyon climbed in next to her, cameras still clicking, the questions still coming until Jeffrey firmly closed the door, enclosing them in cool, silent peace.
‘I’d like to know how they found out when we were arriving,’ Lyon scowled heavily.
Shay had a more resigned view, knew that the press were always able to find out what they wanted to know. She had been badgered by the worldwide media as soon as Ricky’s plane went down, the last weeks a nightmare of trying to escape them, finally having to move from the apartment she had shared with Ricky the last three years and move into a hotel, security guards placed outside her room to protect her privacy and grief.
‘Does it matter?’ she sighed, the incident just another horror in the nightmare her life had become since Ricky’s crash.
‘Yes, it—No,’ Lyon amended with controlled violence as he saw the unconscious vulnerability in deep purple eyes, the pale skin beneath those fathomless depths looking bruised and translucent. ‘No,’ he sighed heavily. ‘I don’t suppose it does.’
Shay didn’t even question the way Lyon had stepped down from his undoubted anger at their arrangements being known by the press, shut him out of her mind completely as they began the drive to the house, grateful for the self-discipline she had learnt from her writing, needing mental as well as physical control to maintain the daily schedule of work she set for herself in order to meet her deadlines. It would have been so easy to have sat back and lived on Ricky’s wealth, to have treated her writing as a mere hobby to keep herself amused. But she hadn’t wanted that, had made it into a career. She felt an inner peace now that she had.
God, why was she wandering in this way! They would be at Falconer House soon, the scene of her greatest happiness, greatest humiliation, and finally her greatest pain.
It was a huge house, big enough for several families to live in comfortably, but she still didn’t know how she had managed to live there for two years after her marriage to Ricky, didn’t know how she was going to visit there now. Because visiting was all she intended doing. She couldn’t stay on there, not even if Lyon asked her to do so. And she knew that he was going to ask her to do just that, that it probably wouldn’t even be a request but an order. It was one she would enjoy disobeying!
CHAPTER TWO (#ulink_f047cb28-de51-5513-9b10-3a5ffef83f36)
‘GOOD GRIEF, Matthew!’ Shay’s exclamation was instantaneous on seeing him. ‘What have you been doing to yourself?’ She looked askance at the sling supporting his immobile arm.
The awkwardness she had envisaged upon entering the Falconer house again was forgotten in her concern for Matthew. His wheelchair had moved silently across the hall carpet as he came to meet them in the entrance hall, Shay shocked to see how pale he was, almost as white as the bandage on his arm beneath the sling.
Matthew Falconer had been in a wheelchair when she had first been introduced to him six years before, an explanation for his incapacity never offered by any of his family, although she had heard from the office grapevine when she still worked for Lyon that Matthew had been injured in a skiing accident at the age of nineteen, his legs severely damaged, and had been in a wheelchair ever since.
She had also learnt, from experience, that Matthew’s inability to walk in no way detracted from his masculinity, or his ability to put a person in their place with a few well-directed words! After a few minutes of being in Matthew’s dynamic presence people tended to forget he was in a wheelchair, the electronically-operated machine having so many gadgets on it he could perform practically anything an able-bodied man could do—except, of course, walk.
‘Can’t you think of a better greeting than that after all this time, Gypsy?’ he drawled wryly, pain having etched lines into his handsome face over the years that shouldn’t really have been there on a man of only thirty-five.
Gypsy. It was a long time since she had heard that particular nickname, two long heart-breaking months! The three younger Falconer men had taken the space of one afternoon to come up with the name Gypsy for her; Lyon had instantly hated it, refusing to call her it. But Ricky had continued to use the name after they were married, and hearing it now brought tears to her eyes.
‘Matthew.’ She bent and kissed him warmly on one rigidly hard cheek.
He managed a tight-lipped smile. ‘You always were an affectionate little thing,’ he muttered. ‘Too affectionate on occasion.’ He shot a sly glance at the stone-faced Lyon.
She had forgotten Matthew’s cryptic, sometimes cruel, sense of humour, holding back her own smile with effort; one thing the Falconer men could never be attributed with was tact!
Matthew turned fully to his older brother. ‘The two of you came back alone?’
Shay turned in time to see Lyon’s warning look, instantly feeling a ripple of apprehension down the straightness of her spine. Lyon was displeased with his brother for asking the question, and she had a feeling she was the reason for his annoyance with Matthew.
‘Yes,’ he replied tersely, dismissively. ‘What happened to your arm, Matthew?’
The younger man shrugged. ‘The controls of this stupid machine went haywire for a while and I hit the ground,’ he told them with self-derision. ‘It’s nothing serious, just a sprain.’
‘You didn’t mention it when I telephoned yesterday,’ Lyon scowled.
‘I said it’s only a sprain,’ Matthew bit out tautly. ‘I’m in a wheelchair, Lyon, not senile! I don’t need you fussing over me like an old woman every time I accidently cut myself shaving!’ He looked at the older man challengingly.
