Back in the Lion's Den (10 page)

His head lifted, his eyes meeting and locking with hers.

‘No,’ he breathed deeply in acceptance, and with his arm snaking around her waist very gently he drew her towards him.

She couldn’t drag her eyes from his—not until his face went out of focus. Then she slid her arms around him, gasping into his mouth at the coldness of his right hand on her bare skin just above the back of her nightdress, from where he had been holding the chilled bottle.

‘I’m sorry,’ he murmured, scarcely lifting his mouth from hers, and yet she could still detect the warm concern in his voice.

‘It’s all right.’ She sighed against the day’s growth of stubble beneath his lower lip, because nothing he did to her would ever be anything but all right. She didn’t know how she knew that, but she did.

His lips—like his arms—for all their strength were infinitely tender. So much so that she felt a well of emotion pressing against her chest. Because what she needed most of all right now was tenderness. Just as
he
did, she realised, with both hands coming up to cup his face, her tongue probing and exploring, melding with his as, with one arm supporting her back, he tipped her gently backwards until he was lying over her on the table.

‘Oh, Conan …’ Above the quiet hum of the fridge her voice was like a woodland nymph’s—no more than a sigh lost on a transient breeze.

She wanted this, she realised now. Had wanted it from the moment he had taken her in his arms on the dance floor at that company dinner—refusing to acknowledge it, despising herself for even imagining what it could be like …

‘Hush, hush.’ He pacified her between the whisper of kisses over her face and throat, his tenderness so arousing that when he took her lips again, deepening the kiss with intensifying eroticism, she groaned her need into his mouth.

‘Not now. Not yet,’ he murmured with a teasing warmth in his voice, although she could tell from the way his breath shuddered through him that he was having difficulty keeping control. ‘You belong in my bed, Sienna. Not here, like some cheap grabbed thrill with the boot boy—even if it is tempting to throw caution to the winds and savour the added thrill of the risk of being found out.’

How did he know that she felt like that? That she didn’t care any more about who saw them? That she almost welcomed the
idea of being discovered so that the whole wide world would know that this man was her lover?

And if she felt like that, then surely it must mean …

That she loved him?

But how could she? she wondered, shocked, when she had promised herself faithfully that she would stay immune. And not just with him, but with any man?

With her mouth welded to his, she sighed her despair against their mingled breath before he lifted her up, and with such little effort that she might have been weightless, carried her almost soundlessly up the marble stairs.

Did he know? He could tell what she was feeling—thinking—couldn’t he? So how could she hide whatever this feeling was when her body was betraying her with its desperate need to be closer to him, craving his loving and his attention? When it always would, she thought hopelessly, just at a smile from him or a simple word …

His room was dimly lit, from where a gap in the curtains allowed the beams of a nearly full moon to creep through. But its shapes were familiar to her like the familiar surroundings of someone visually impaired.

Which she was, wasn’t she? she thought with an abandoned excitement. Because they said love was blind, and she had to be blind if she could ignore the warnings of the person who knew him better than anyone about getting so intimately involved with him, if she wanted to scream out to the world that he was her lover as she had wanted to do downstairs.

He moved as stealthily as a panther across the room with her to the enormous bed, and she detected a hint of sensual amusement as he set her down on the cool sheet and said in a voice thickened from the strength of his desire for her, ‘This is getting to be a habit.’

‘Yes …’ Her breathing was as laboured as his, her murmur a simple acquiescence of all they were going to do and what they were about to become, of the changing of the balance of their relationship for good.

And how foolish was that? An inner little voice tried breaking through her sensual lethargy to goad her, but she was already too far beyond the bounds of reason to listen.

Blotting out everything but the stimulating impulses that were driving her, she was reaching for him as he slid in beside her, discovering with a spiralling excitement from the warmth of his hair-roughened skin that he had already discarded his robe.

‘Love me,’ she murmured, pulling him down to her, offering her eager body to him with an abandonment which she knew now she had never offered his brother. Not with this cauldron of mutual need and desire, she thought.

And then Conan’s lips and hands and the whole electrifying weight of his body numbed her to everything else but the galvanising sensations that were driving her mindless for him. Although the way he slowed the pace in measured, leisurely adoration of her body kept her on fire until she thought she would implode if he didn’t grant her the release and fulfilment she craved.

When it finally came it had her gasping above the shuddering groans that accompanied his own burning orgasm, an all-consuming mutual inferno of pleasure that lasted and lasted and lasted.

It was such a profoundly moving experience that as the final contractions throbbed out of her Sienna’s emotions welled up in scalding tears, which gave way to uncontrolled sobs that shook her slender body.

Held against his shoulder, she let it all out, a torrent of hot, unleashed emotion that she couldn’t have held back if her life had depended upon it.

‘I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.’ Ashamed, she tried to get up, but the gentle touch of his fingers pressed her back as he raised himself up sufficiently so that he could look at her.

‘What is it? What’s wrong?’ he enquired, sounding deeply concerned.

Sienna shook her head, unable to answer. How could you
tell a man who didn’t particularly like you—let alone respect you—that making love with him had been the best experience of her twenty-five years? Ever. How could you do that unless you also told him that you thought you were falling in love with him? And only a fool would do that after all she had been through.

Sniffing back emotion, she shook her head again, trying to regain control, some degree of dignity.

‘Do you always cry like this after you make love?’ He sounded gently amused, yet surprised too.

‘Don’t all women?’ she parried, grasping the clean, folded white handkerchief he’d just reached over and taken out of the drawer of his bedside cabinet.

‘No.’

She smiled weakly, blowing her nose. ‘Then it must be the effect you have on me.’

‘Clearly,’ he agreed, with a cocked smile. His thick winged brows were drawing together in puzzled bewilderment. What was she saying? That she hadn’t been like this with any of the other men she’d known? Before he knew it, he was asking, ‘What happened between you and my brother?’

Of course. He still believed she’d had a lover.

She didn’t answer at first. How could she, she thought, when there were some things that were far too personal?

Striving to sit up, she was relieved when he permitted it this time.

‘We were having problems,’ she admitted, looking down at the handkerchief she was twisting in her hands. ‘We always seemed to be arguing in the end.’

‘What about?’ he pressed.

‘I don’t know.’ She gave a little shrug. ‘Everything. Money. Daisy. His drinking.’

I’m sorry. I’m so, so sorry …

The regrets of that other time echoed down the years, but mentally she shook them away.

‘Sienna?’

Lying on his side now, supported by his elbow, he could see the tension in her slender back—the way she was holding herself rigid as though she was fighting an inner battle with herself. One that hurt—like hell.

He placed a hand on her shoulder, his touch gentle but firm, and compliantly she allowed him to draw her back into the warm circle of his arms.

‘His job. Being a father. His debts. I think it was all too much for him,’ she murmured, her voice sounding far away. ‘And he was always working so hard. Driving himself …’
To try and compete with you,
she added mentally, but didn’t say it. ‘We even stopped making love. I thought it was all my fault. Because I was tired looking after Daisy. I thought maybe motherhood had made me unattractive …’

Conan laughed softly, his eyes incredulous. ‘Are you kidding? Your pregnancy, Sienna, made you blossom—and, believe me, it lasted.’ He didn’t tell her that there had been times when he’d found himself thoroughly envying his brother. Aside from all those other occasions, he thought, when he’d been a child, desperate for his stepfather’s approval. For one ounce of the praise and affection his brother had taken as his birthright. ‘I wanted you, Sienna.’

His comments had made her blush, he noticed, stroking her damp cheek, watching colour infuse the delicate skin. ‘And it was mutual, wasn’t it?’ he prompted, thinking how her unexpected disclosure might go some way to explaining why she had taken a lover, even if it didn’t excuse it. And why he had picked up on those pheromones she’d given off whenever she was alone in his company, but particularly at that dinner-dance that night. But was it because of
him?
Or had her lack of sex with Niall made her that desperate for a man? Any man? he wondered, finding the thought less than flattering, though he knew he had no right even thinking that way about the woman who’d been married to his brother. ‘Tell me the truth.’ For all his ethics about what was right and wrong, it was suddenly imperative that he should know.

‘You overwhelmed me, that’s all,’ she dissembled, sitting up again. Because there was being straight with him, and there was being downright stupid. There was no way she was going to tell him exactly how she had felt when he had taken her in his arms that night because she had only just realised it herself. And because … Well, because she just couldn’t, that was all. ‘I know you don’t want to accept it,’ she tagged on, her blue gaze coming level with his, ‘but I never cheated on your brother.’

His eyelids came down, concealing what he was thinking, his chest lifting and falling heavily.

Did he believe her? she wondered, aching for him to tell her so and realising now that she
had
to make him understand.

‘Tim’s mother and my dad were some sort of distant cousins. They were like family, and we all used to go on holiday together. When Tim’s parents moved to Spain he was only seventeen, and he wanted to stay in England, so Mum and Dad let him move in with us. We used to go clubbing together, or to the cinema if one of us was at a loose end. He was part of the gang I kicked around with.’ Her childhood playmate. The son of the couple she’d always called Aunt and Uncle. And, after he’d moved in, the big brother she’d never had. ‘When Mum and Dad decided to move to Spain too, and I got my flat, they asked him if he’d keep an eye on me. There was never anything romantic between us,’ she stressed, needing to convince him.

Because for Timothy Leicester there had never been anyone but Angie Thompson. Angie who had given him the runaround at school and at college, until just before she went away to university when she’d realised he was the nicest thing walking on two legs.

‘I looked on him as a brother, and his girlfriend was like a sister to me until she went off to Brazil to save the rainforest. When you turned up at Tim’s place that morning to tell me what had happened to Niall—I know how it must have looked, but you wouldn’t listen to the things I’ve just told
you—then or afterwards—when I tried to explain.’ Because all he had seen in that one bedroom flat was a rumpled double bed, and belongings lying around that were exclusively masculine. And he had already been persuaded of her guilt, she remembered, by the people who had had her investigated. ‘Angie was already in Brazil, and I knew Tim was planning to join her, but I—’ She broke off, her breath coming shallowly, suddenly finding it impossible to articulate the words that would vindicate her. ‘I just wanted to see him before he went,’ she said instead.

‘When I turned up with Daisy and decided to stay the night he gave up the bedroom and slept on the sofa. I tidied it up after he’d left for work,’ she went on. So there had been nothing but her futile attempt—already muddled by the shock of learning about Niall—to convince his brother that he hadn’t just stepped into an illicit love-nest. ‘I was too upset to string two sentences together.’ So numbed by what had happened and by everything that had driven her to Tim’s that weekend that she hadn’t even been able to cry. So Conan had decided she didn’t care. ‘I was also scared stiff of you,’ she admitted, with a rather sheepish smile. ‘As I said, you overwhelmed me.’

He inclined his head ever so slightly, in the briefest of acknowledgements. But of what? she wondered piercingly. That she was telling the truth? Was that what had brought his incredible lashes down over his eyes and made his breath seem to shiver through him? Or was it just relief in deciding at last that he wasn’t sleeping with the enemy?

‘And what about now, Sienna?’ he exhaled, disappointing her because he didn’t actually say he believed her. Although she hadn’t actually told him everything, had she? she admitted to herself, already starting to tingle from the sensuality with which he pressed, ‘Do I overwhelm you
now?
’

That sexiness of his voice and the way he was looking at her with such a febrile glitter in his eyes made her pulses start to throb, sending a resurgence of hot desire licking along her veins.

‘No, you’ve just made me realise that I’ve got you exactly where I want you,’ she murmured provocatively, pushing him back so that she could admire the flawed perfection of his amazing body.

Sensuously then, and very slowly, she anointed him with kisses, her tongue marking a path along the line of dark hair that ran from his chest, down over his waist to his tight, lean abdomen, straying only to pay particular attention to those angry slashes that spoke so vividly of his character, and were testimony to the sort of man he was.