Back in the Lion's Den

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‘And what about the man whose flat you were sharing the night your husband died?’ His tone had turned as hard as the earth they were skirting on either side of the path, where an endless profusion of white roses made her almost heady with their fragrance. ‘How long did he stay in the picture?’

‘I’d rather not discuss it, if you don’t mind,’ she responded, turning away.

Her profile, he noticed, was proud and challenging, yet insufferably alluring. He felt that stirring in his blood, that primal desire he had always recognised for his late brother’s wife, and always violently rejected with every bone in his body.

‘I bet you wouldn’t!’

Sienna’s expression as she looked his way again was almost careless, her pink creamy lips set in a sexy pout. He had the almost unbearable urge to crush them beneath his, to feel her body stir as his was stirring—and the evidence would be apparent if he carried on thinking like this! he thought censoriously.

She gave a little shrug, nonchalant and dismissive, as though her actions in the past were of no consequence whatsoever. That action caused the strap of her dress suddenly to slip off her shoulder. Its bareness was provocative, like pale silk begging for his touch.

Sienna reached for the fallen strap, sucking in her breath as Conan did the same, getting to it before she could and slipping it back on her shoulder.

‘Thank you,’ she murmured, breathless from the shocking electrical impulses zinging through her at the merest touch of his hand.

‘When did you have that done?’ He meant her tattoo, and his voice was cool, composed, holding none of the turmoil that was going on inside her.

‘On my eighteenth birthday.’

Something tugged at his mouth. ‘Before you knew better.’

She ignored that statement, because that’s what it was. Her tattoo was just another thing he didn’t like about her, she realised, telling herself quite adamantly that she didn’t care.

‘Daisy has a lot of energy,’ she expressed, wanting to get away from him and his flower-filled garden, finding both disturbing with her troubling awareness of his far too unsettling proximity. ‘Do you think that leaving her with Avril for too long is a good idea?’

They had stopped on the path. ‘For my mother’s welfare?’ From beneath his dark lashes he regarded her with a contemplative amusement. ‘Or for yours, Sienna?’

Her throat going dry, she swallowed. Goodness! The man was perceptive!

‘Why should I be concerned for my welfare?’ she bluffed, her heart rate quickening, pretending not to understand as she sent a glance seawards to where a flotilla of sailboats sported their jaunty colours as they skirted the peninsula.

‘Why are you always so jittery when you’re alone with me?’

‘I’m not jittery.’ Who was she kidding? ‘Why should it make me jittery being alone with you?’

‘You tell me.’

The warmth of the sun on her skin was a sensuality she could well have done without, and the hum of Mediterranean insects only emphasised the pregnant silence between them.

‘Is it because I’m the only one who knows your secret, Sienna?’

She looked at him quickly, her eyes hooded and wary. ‘My secret?’

Her tone, Conan noted, was tinged with alarm. What else had she been hiding for those two and a half years she’d been married to his brother?

‘The only one who knows the kind of girl you really are,’ he elaborated.

‘You think you know. Knew,’ she corrected emphatically.

He laughed softly. ‘Whose so-called “shopping trips” to London and all those wanderings around museums were just a smokescreen for an illicit affair.’

About to deny it strongly, she felt the significance of what he’d meant when he said he was the only one who knew suddenly dawn on her, so that unthinkingly she asked, ‘You didn’t tell your mother about your suspicions?’ She found that amazing. ‘You surprise me, Conan.’ She would have thought he wouldn’t miss a chance to tell Avril exactly what he believed he’d discovered.

‘And break her heart more than it was broken already to find that her son’s wife was cheating on him? Don’t you think she was devastated enough?’

Emotionlessly, because she would never give Niall’s brother the satisfaction of knowing how much she had been through herself, she uttered, ‘Your discretion becomes you.’

‘Which is more than could be said for your morals.’

‘Yes, well …’ Heated colour crept across her cheeks. ‘That was what you wanted to believe. You wouldn’t listen to anything I said when I tried to explain.’

‘That you and this Timothy Leicester were just good friends?’ He laughed again, more harshly this time. ‘It’s a worn-out cliché.’

‘No, we were more—much more than that, Conan.’ Her gaze glanced across his, hard and defiant. She recognised from the rigidity of his jaw the danger that lay in provoking him, and yet it was a danger unlike any she had known before …

It would be sheer folly to antagonise him, or to deliberately fuel his hostility towards her, and so she burst out truthfully, ‘I was never unfaithful to Niall. I loved him!’ It was wrung from the anguished depths of her heart.

‘You’ll forgive me if I don’t wholly acknowledge the authenticity of that statement. After all, we both know your capacity for telling lies.’ They were walking again, and with a courtesy that was incongruous with the harshness of his words he stopped to lift a low branch of oleander that was growing over the path, its stems heavy with pink blossoms, their sultry scent impinging on the air.

Sienna moved under it and felt her hair lightly brush his arm. The contact was unwelcome, unwanted and electrifying.

‘Which brings me to the other reason.’

‘Other reason?’ She dragged her gaze from the blue water of a pool she had spotted on another level of the garden, glancing warily up at him as he let the branch go and fell into step beside her. ‘For what?’

‘For why you’ve always made every excuse under the sun to limit the time you spend alone with me.’

Had she? She hadn’t been conscious of it.

Heart beating erratically, she responded, ‘Simple. I just don’t like your company.’

‘That goes without saying. But it isn’t just my company that disturbs you, is it, Sienna?’

What was it then? she wondered, glancing out at the last of the sailboats that were still within her vision on the sparkling water. Because she wasn’t sure. Even when she’d been married to his brother Conan had disturbed her beyond belief. It was that raw animal energy that positively crackled from him that she found so unsettling, even without the dark enigma of his character, or the penetrating green-gold of eyes that seemed to strip her of her every secret—along with her floundering self-confidence—on those few occasions that she had come in contact with him. Eyes that assessed, judged and unhinged her so much that she was always glad to escape.

His ability to unsettle her, she realised despairingly, had only intensified with the years. But now, striving for equanimity, she murmured, ‘I really don’t know what you’re talking about.’

‘Don’t you?’ His smile was feral. ‘Oh, I think you do.’

She wasn’t sure when they had stopped walking, but now she felt the snare of those glacial green-gold eyes holding her as though in an invisible trap.

‘I’m talking about sex, Sienna.’

With her heart suddenly hammering against her ribcage, she echoed, ‘Sex?’ She uttered a brittle little laugh. ‘With you?’ Her mouth contorted at the concept of such an idea, masking the furore of wild sensations going on inside her.

Conan’s lips moved wryly, mocking, unperturbed. ‘Well, I wouldn’t have put it quite so graphically as that,’ he stated, watching the colour rise in her cheeks and seeming to relish every ounce of her discomfiture. ‘I was talking chemistry—unlikely though I know that seems. But then since when did physical attraction ever have anything to do with liking the object of one’s attraction, or even respecting them for that matter? And I know your respect for me is about as low on the scale of one to a thousand as mine is for you.’

‘That makes it all right, then, doesn’t it?’ she snapped. ‘I often get my kicks out of shacking up with men I can’t stand the sight of!’

‘Or with those who keep you in enough luxury to buy your affection until you find more interesting diversions elsewhere.’

‘Like I did with Niall, I suppose?’ she jibed.

‘You might think it’s something to hold up as a trophy, Sienna, but I don’t. My brother was besotted with you.’

‘Yes,’ she acknowledged, closing her eyes, clenching her teeth against the well of emotion that threatened to engulf her, the unshed tears that were locked inside her and seemed doomed never to know the mercy of release.

Niall had been besotted. Adoring. Almost obsessive in his love for her, so that sometimes she’d felt stifled by the possessiveness that had sprung from his insecurities. She’d been someone to flaunt. To show off. To place on a pedestal so high that sometimes she’d been frightened of toppling off. And sometimes she’d felt—to use Conan’s own words—like a trophy, a feather in Niall’s cap to parade over the man he’d most wanted to impress: his richer, harder-headed and far more successful older brother.

As he watched the emotions that chased across her face, a groove deepened between Conan’s thick eyebrows. Was she telling him the truth? Had she ever really loved his brother? Was that what was tormenting her? Plain and simple guilt? Or was it something else altogether?

‘Remorse, Sienna?’ He reached out and slid a hand around the nape of her neck. He heard her breath catch, felt her body stiffen, the pulse beneath his fingers beating a frenzied rhythm.

‘What are you hoping?’ To her own ears she sounded afraid, and her breathlessness was betraying to him that it was herself she was afraid of, the sensations that were ripping through her just from the touch of those cool fingers on her heated skin. ‘That I’ll fall for you so you can dump me? Because that’s about as likely as one of our spacecraft finding life on Mars tomorrow night!’

Way off in the distance the buzz of a speedboat encroached on the peaceful garden. Closer to hand, a gentle breeze played among the spiky leaves of the oleander tree.

‘I’ve always lived by the premise that’s anything’s likely.’ A complacent smile touched his lips. ‘And we both know you weren’t impervious to me even with two other lovers in the picture—don’t we, Sienna?’

Fear clouded her eyes. ‘You read it all wrong!’

‘Did I?’

He was referring to the firm’s dinner-dance that she had attended with Niall. Niall had been drinking with clients at the bar, trying to tie down a deal. Conan had come over to the table where she had been sitting alone and asked her to dance—just out of courtesy, she’d guessed.