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‘Don’t be so rude, Damian,’ Hester rebuked him. ‘Ros has a very interesting job and I’m sure her family is very proud of her.’
‘Hester, you might think it’s interesting to plough through George’s bits and pieces,’ he drawled. ‘Frankly, I’d get more of a thrill mucking out stables.’
‘Well, you’re not Ros,’ snapped Hester, looking slightly shocked. ‘And I’m sure your people are very proud of you, and rightly so,’ she added, smiling apologetically at Rosanne.
‘I haven’t got any people,’ blurted out Rosanne before she could stop herself. ‘I mean...I...my grandfather died last year.’
She wanted to leap to her feet and run—to escape this ordeal and to leave behind this stricken, inarticulate creature who had taken her over and was making her sound such a fool.
‘My dear, how sad!’ exclaimed Hester Cranleigh, reaching out a frail hand to her in reflex sympathy. ‘Was he all the family you had?’
‘Yes—he was,’ said Rosanne, her body tensing with the effort it took not to flinch from the hand patting solicitously on her arm. How could this woman possibly care? she asked herself savagely as hatred, hot and harsh, seared through her. ‘I was adopted when I was a baby, but my adoptive parents moved to Australia a few years ago.’
‘Was it your real or adoptive grandfather who died?’ asked Hester, removing her hand from Rosanne’s arm as though conscious of its lack of welcome.
‘He was my real grandfather,’ replied Rosanne, an edge of desperation in her tone. ‘The person I loved more than anyone else.’
‘Damian, would you mind taking my tray, there’s a dear?’ murmured Hester, the sudden frailness in her voice inexplicably cooling the heat of hatred within Rosanne.
‘I’m sorry,’ she whispered, convinced that they must think her deranged, ‘but I still find it difficult talking about my grandfather.’
‘Of course you do, my dear,’ sympathised Hester, as a granite-faced Damian towered above them and took the tray. ‘And I’m sure that, missing him as you do, you find it hard to realise how lucky you were to have had him—most adopted children don’t have a blood relative around to whom they can turn to ask all those questions that must inevitably crop up in their minds.’
There was an expression of dazed disbelief on Rosanne’s face as she turned and looked at the small, frail figure seated beside her... How could she possibly have allowed herself to make such a statement with a secret as dark as hers festering inside her?
‘Ros—would you like more tea?’ Damian’s tone was harsh as his words interrupted her reeling thoughts and his look, when she dazedly turned to face him, openly hostile.
‘No—no, thank you,’ she muttered, then addressed the woman beside her without looking at her. ‘Believe me, I know exactly how lucky I was to have had my grandfather.’
‘It’s sad that you didn’t get on with your adoptive parents,’ stated Hester quietly.
‘Now you’re being fanciful, Hester,’ teased Damian, while flashing Rosanne a scowling look. ‘She said nothing about not getting on with them.’
‘She didn’t have to,’ replied Hester, a questioning sadness in her eyes as they met Rosanne’s.
Rosanne hesitated, feeling strangely compelled to answer that questioning look, her nervousness in the face of such a compulsion exacerbated by the almost threatening look to which Damian was subjecting her from the sofa.
‘No—I didn’t get on with them,’ she eventually stated tonelessly. ‘But now that I’m older I can see that much of the fault for that lay with me.’
It was her discussions with her grandfather about her life with John and Marjory Grant that had opened her eyes to that fact and had made her realise that the Grants’ openness about her having been adopted had, in many ways, been her salvation. In a conservative, God-fearing household—with two much older natural daughters who were carbon copies of their parents—she would have stood out like a sore thumb anyway with her vibrant looks and fiery temper. But it was the sum of money for her future education that George Cranleigh had handed over together with his baby granddaughter that had set her so totally apart from the Grant family. From the age of six she had been sent to boarding-schools, as opposed to the local school the other two Grant girls attended, isolating her completely and compounding totally her sense of being the odd one out. In trying to salvage what faint conscience he might have had by providing for the future education of the baby granddaughter he had otherwise dumped as unwanted baggage, George Cranleigh had only ensured that she would always feel alienated and insecure.
‘A bit of a rebel, were you?’ asked Hester, her tone implying approval.
‘Caused, no doubt, by that Irish blood she was telling me about earlier,’ drawled Damian in tones that were neither approving nor in the least friendly. ‘You’re looking a little tired, Hester—how about another cup of tea?’
‘No, thank you, darling,’ replied the old lady. ‘But perhaps Ros would now, to help wash down Bridie’s cake.’
Rosanne flushed guiltily as she glanced at the piece of cake, on the small table beside her, out of which she had only managed a single bite—the nervous tension churning inside her making her feel almost nauseous.
‘No, I shan’t, thank you very much,’ she said, reaching over and breaking off a small portion of the cake.
‘Perhaps it’s time we showed Ros George’s study—where she’ll be doing her work,’ suggested Damian. ‘Then we can get you tucked up for a rest,’ he added gently. ‘You look as though you could do with one.’
‘I think it might be an even better idea for you to take me up now—then you can show Ros the study.’ Hester turned to Rosanne, the exhaustion that had so swiftly overtaken her now etched plainly on her face. ‘I do hope you’ll forgive me, my dear. This wretched business of being an invalid can be such a nuisance. No—you stay there and relax,’ she protested, as Ros made to rise to her feet. ‘Damian will see me to my room,’ she added, reaching for the stick propped against her chair as Damian rose and strode over to help her. ‘And he’ll show you around George’s office and help you get settled in—or he’ll have me to answer to,’ she chuckled up at the man easing her to her feet.
‘You’ll have me quaking in my breeches if I don’t,’ he teased affectionately, slipping his arm around her as she leaned heavily on her stick.
‘And that’s another thing,’ chided Hester, as they made their laborious way across the huge room. ‘I’m not having you appear at the dinner table in your riding breeches—do you hear? Whatever will young Ros think of us?’
Their sparring remarks liberally interspersed with loving laughter, they made their slow progress towards the door—the stooped and fragile old lady and the tall, powerfully built, yet gracefully slender man against whose arm she leant.
They were part of her family—the family she had dreamed since childhood that she would one day find, thought Rosanne, the memory an ache within her that mirrored itself in the eyes that followed them.
But the Cranleighs had made certain she would find no one, she reminded herself bitterly. Paul and Faith Addison were the names entered as her parents on her birth certificate. She closed her eyes, reliving the rage of anguish that had been her grandfather’s when he had seen that document.
‘My God, not only was Cranleigh heartless, he also criminally falsified the records!’ he had raged. ‘Addison was your grandmother’s maiden name—we gave it to Paul as his middle name. Dear God, how could anyone cut off an innocent child from her roots so brutally?’
It had always been George against whom Grandpa Ted’s helpless rage had been directed...but he was a chivalrous old gentleman who would never speak ill of a woman, no matter what he might think of her. Yet now Rosanne found herself wondering if that really was the case. Her every instinct recoiled from the idea of Hester Cranleigh being involved in such cruel deception.
Wishful thinking would change nothing, she told herself harshly, her eyes opening to gaze down at the hands clenching and unclenching agitatedly in her lap. She was a Bryant and needed nothing from the Cranleighs, she reminded herself in an attempt to lessen the black despair engulfing her; she had had all the love, and more, she could ever have asked for from her darling grandfather.
‘Hester won’t be coming down for dinner this evening,’ announced Damian, his face like a thunder-cloud as he strode across the room towards Rosanne. ‘And that harrowing little orphan-Annie scenario to which you subjected her probably set her back months. Just what the hell do you think you’re playing at?’
Rosanne leapt to her feet, her reason deserting her.
‘How dare you speak to me like that?’ she demanded hoarsely, resentment and loathing burning in her eyes. ‘You know absolutely nothing about—’ She broke off, her lips clamping tight with the horrified realisation of what she had been about to hurl at him in thoughtless rage.
‘What is it I know nothing about?’ he demanded, scowling down accusingly at her.
‘Nothing—just forget it,’ she muttered defeatedly. ‘I came here to do a job, not to be harassed and shouted at by you—so just leave me alone!’
‘One thing I have no intention of doing is leaving you alone, my unwelcome Ros,’ he retorted with a grim travesty of a smile. ‘Hester Cranleigh happens to be one of those exceptionally rare creatures among mankind—a generous, warm-hearted and indiscriminately loving person who would never knowingly do even her worst enemy harm. I’d move heaven and earth to ensure her last days are spent in relative peace—and the chances are I’ll end up having to move both, given the memories this work on her husband’s biography will inevitably resurrect. But what she doesn’t need is harrowing tales of your ghastly childhood to—’
‘I never said anything about having had a ghastly childhood,’ cut in Rosanne indignantly. ‘And I certainly don’t go round telling harrowing tales about myself!’
‘Well, they’re harrowing to a woman who’s been forced to relive her past and who could well have had a grandchild around your age, had her daughter not lost the baby. You prattling on about how wonderful your relationship was with your grandfather—how the hell do you think that must have made her feel?’
‘And how was I supposed to know any of that?’ demanded Rosanne, trembling with rage and disbelief. If only he knew, she kept asking herself, what would his reaction be?
‘Well, you know now,’ he snapped, his eyes dark and unyielding as they glared down into hers.
‘What I do know is that you seem to have an extremely fertile imagination,’ she informed him coldly. ‘But you needn’t worry because, as I tried to make clear earlier, I’m not given to talking about my private life to strangers, so Mrs Cranleigh won’t be subjected to any voluntary disclosures from me that are likely to upset her.’
‘And they sure as hell wouldn’t be involuntary, would they, Ros?’ he demanded harshly. ‘It’s only when you lose that so-called Irish temper of yours that you ever let anything slip, isn’t that so?’
Rosanne tried to take a step back from the man towering accusingly above her and found her legs wedged against the edge of the chair.
‘Yet when you’re in control of yourself,’ he continued ruthlessly, ‘I get the feeling that not a single word passes those delightfully tempting lips of yours without having first been coldly weighed up and calculated.’
‘As I said before—you have an extremely fertile imagination,’ said Rosanne hoarsely. She had been here scant hours, she thought dazedly, and already she had been subjected to far more than she had ever dreamed she could take—and the vast majority of it from someone she had never even considered as a potential threat.
‘Ah, so you deny you feel the world owes you something, do you?’ he challenged softly.
‘Why on earth do you think I feel that?’ she protested, aghast.
‘Because it’s written all over you,’ he replied. ‘And I must say I find the idea of your becoming an embittered, shrivelled-up harridan most disturbing,’ he added, placing his hands on her shoulders and drawing her towards him with a casual ease that stunned her into immobility.
‘You do?’ she croaked dazedly.
‘Oh, I most certainly do, darling,’ he chuckled, his hands sliding lightly down her arms. ‘That’s why I feel almost duty-bound to light that fire just begging to be lit inside you—and to do so before it’s too late.’
‘You mean before I become that shrivelled-up harridan you’re so worried I’ll turn into?’ asked Rosanne, the scepticism she had intended not manifesting itself the least satisfactorily in her tone. He was being outrageous and they both knew it, but she desperately hoped that the disturbingly sensuous effect that his nearness and the teasing lightness of his touch were having on her was something of which she alone was aware.
‘I was right—you do have a brain,’ he murmured with an exaggerated sigh of contentment, then suddenly pulled her against the length of him.
‘Well, you can’t have much of a brain if you think I’m going to fall for a line as blatant as that,’ she said, but her intended laugh deteriorated into a choked gasp as she quickly turned her head to avoid the confidently smiling mouth descending towards hers.
‘You’d be surprised, the number of women who respond to that sort of drivel,’ he murmured unabashedly, his lips sending disconcertingly sharp shocks of pleasure through her as they played against her cheek. ‘And frankly, if I were a woman, I’d be inclined to use my fists on the likes of me,’ he added with a chuckle, while his arms slid slowly around her.
‘A thought something along those lines had just crossed my mind,’ said Rosanne, appalled to hear breathless excitement instead of dismissive lightness in her tone. She was almost immediately distracted from that problem by yet another—the fact not so much that his mouth seemed to be making rapid progress towards hers, but that her every instinct now was to turn her head that fraction that would unite their mouths.
‘You know, that’s the second time today that a woman has had me quaking in my breeches,’ he chuckled, his lips now nuzzling against hers with such electrifying effect that Rosanne was incapable of even considering whether or not she had accommodatingly moved her head. ‘Oh, hell, that reminds me,’ he sighed—a sigh that mingled their breaths in a way Rosanne was finding every bit as inflammatory as a full-blown kiss. ‘Hester will skin me alive if I don’t obey her orders.’
His abrupt release of her came so unexpectedly that for a moment he had to put out a hand to steady her.
There was a half-smile playing against his lips as he gazed down at her.
‘Well, at least we got that problem sorted out,’ he murmured. ‘So now I’d better lead you to the great man’s study.’
He turned and began strolling across the room.
‘And what exactly was that problem we’ve allegedly just sorted out?’ Rosanne called after him, a strange lightness—almost a feeling of frivolity—dancing through her.
He paused mid-stride, then spoke without turning. ‘As you didn’t use your fists on me this time—I’ll not insult your intelligence the next time.’
The teasing softness of his laughter sent a shiver through her, a shiver that was anticipatory, yet almost as pleasurable as those she had experienced so sharply in those brief moments in his arms.
She was smiling as she began walking after him. Damian Sheridan as an enemy was a frighteningly daunting prospect, whereas Damian Sheridan in romantic pursuit of her...
His steps slowed as he reached the door, then he turned. The eyes that swept her from head to toe as she walked towards him were predatory eyes, dark with the promise of desires in which romance would play no part.
And the shiver that rippled through her, as he turned once again, was one suddenly filled with foreboding.
CHAPTER THREE
ROSANNE watched Damian as he read her day’s notes, the unpalatable truth striking her that she actually looked forward to these daily meetings of theirs.
Perhaps its apparent preoccupation with Damian was her mind’s way of trying to bring a little respite to the constant pressure she was under, she reasoned half-heartedly, and once again found herself wondering how they might have got on had there not been that in-built wall of hostility between them. She knew the Irish were renowned for their way with words, yet Damian’s wit was razor-sharp and cutting and, despite so often finding herself on the receiving end of it, she still found it almost mesmerisingly attractive...just as she did the softly drawled inflexions of his speech. In fact, she found just about every aspect of Damian Sheridan disproportionately fascinating, she informed herself dejectedly, and gained little comfort from reminding herself how sorely in need of mental distraction she was—not only from unrelieved pressure, but from the fact that the actual work she was doing was boring beyond reason!
‘Riveting,’ drawled Damian, tossing the notes on to the desk and leaning back in the chair he had drawn up beside hers. ‘It’s a wonder you manage to keep awake, having to sift through all that dross. It’s hardly likely to leap into the bestsellers list once it’s published, now, is it?’
Rosanne flashed him an uncertain look, his words triggering off something that had been niggling at the back of her mind. Perhaps she should have rung Lawrence Hastings, her co-owner in Bryant Publishing and its managing director, she thought nervously, and asked for his opinion.
He being one of her grandfather’s oldest friends and, she had often suspected, one whom he had confided in totally, it was Lawrence who had overseen her having the training that had made it possible for her to do this job.
But her overall knowledge of publishing was minimal and it was, she suspected, simply her own ignorance causing her to feel as puzzled as she did by her professional dealings with Hester Cranleigh.
‘Don’t you think it’s about time you got around to spitting it out?’ demanded Damian sourly, his demeanour indicating, as it so often did, that he was here only reluctantly—an attitude Rosanne found infuriating, given that it was he who had insisted on such meetings.
‘To spitting what out?’ she asked coldly, her face tightening with the effort it took to control her anger.
‘Whatever it is you’re so laboriously turning over in your mind,’ he replied. ‘For one so inclined towards secrecy, you can be extraordinarily transparent at times.’
‘I’m not secretive,’ she denied hotly, then almost groaned aloud as she realised that during the past couple of weeks her fear of giving herself away must have made her seem almost paranoidly secretive.
‘How exactly do you see yourself, darling—as an open book?’ he murmured derisively. ‘Dinner after dinner, I’ve listened in awe to your masterly parrying of every single question Hester has put to you. In fact, I’m so nearly convinced you’ve something to hide that I’m toying with the idea of putting a private detective on you—just for the heck of it,’ he finished off casually.
Rosanne struggled to keep a grip on herself as she heard her own sharp intake of breath.
‘Feel free,’ she retorted with as much careless concern as she could muster. ‘Though it seems criminal to waste that sort of money merely to have it confirmed I’m a normal, humdrum sort of girl doing a job she enjoys and who happens to have a perfectly healthy penchant for privacy.’
‘Now that was a minefield of a statement, if ever I’ve heard one,’ he stated softly, his narrowed eyes coolly assessing. ‘Humdrum your life may be, but normal it most certainly isn’t, judging by what little Hester has managed to worm out of you in these past couple of weeks.’
Rosanne gritted her teeth in frustration with herself for having so rashly placed herself at the mercy of his incisive tongue.
‘In fact,’ he continued relentlessly, ‘that primly virginal picture you’ve managed to paint of yourself has put ideas into her head—if I’m not mistaken, she harbours the delusion we could be turned into an item.’
‘Into a what?’
‘Into a couple,’ he replied, eyeing her coldly. ‘Or rather into a billing and cooing couple of lovebirds— Hester’s constantly on the look-out for the girl of her dreams for me,’ he added morosely.
‘Forgive me if this sounds obtuse,’ said Rosanne, only just resisting a strong urge to pick up her keyboard and smash it over his head, ‘but your terribly subtle approach to me on the day I arrived led me to believe that you had every intention that we should become what you refer to as an item.’
‘Yes, but not the sort of item Hester has in mind,’ he replied, without so much as a flicker of embarrassment. ‘I’ve a nasty feeling she has Bridie standing sentry outside your bedroom door by night,’ he added with an exaggerated sigh.
‘Bridie?’ echoed Rosanne, having difficulty keeping her face straight.
‘She’d hardly entrust something like that to James, now, would she?’ he murmured innocently, while his eyes twinkled lasciviously.
‘I’m sure she wouldn’t,’ replied Rosanne. She really had to admire his gall, she thought weakly. He had made it quite plain that, whatever dreams Hester might have on his behalf, she herself didn’t feature in his own—yet now he was flirting with her! ‘Anyway, I thought Hester had plans for you and the slavishly adoring Nerissa,’ she added as an uncharacteristically demure afterthought.
‘You really are most unobservant, Ros,’ he sighed. ‘That threatened dinner invitation to the Blakes hasn’t materialised since you arrived on the scene—to my mind a most ominous development.’ He suddenly flashed her the most wicked of smiles. ‘You know how I live in terror of Hester—not to mention Bridie—and wouldn’t, therefore, dare lay so much as a finger on you without extreme provocation.’
‘Very wise,’ murmured Rosanne, more than a little surprised to find herself responding so easily in kind to this almost indolent flirtation in which he was indulging.
‘So how about your sneaking along to my room tonight? I’m in sore need of a dose of slavish adoration.’
Rosanne managed to compose her face into a look of deep contemplation, then shook her head with a sigh of regret.
