Back in the Lion's Den (14 page)

A little later, as their breathing returned to normal, she said—surprisingly shyly in the circumstances, ‘You came prepared.’ Because even in their uncontrollable need for each other he had taken effortless time to protect her.

‘Around you I can’t afford to do anything else,’ he responded with a wry grimace as he brought himself up on his elbows, then carefully withdrew from her.

Of course he wouldn’t want to make her pregnant and risk finding himself in the sort of family situation he despised. Which was slap-bang in the midst of another stepfamily, she realised, if he did what he would probably consider to be his duty and married her. Which she wouldn’t agree to anyway, she thought wretchedly—even if she hadn’t had that bad experience with Niall—because there was no way that she’d be prepared to marry a man who resented having to take on Daisy, however strong his reasons were for not doing so, any more than she’d be prepared to marry a man whose only reason for marrying her was because she was having his child.

‘Conan …’ With her forehead creasing from the effort, she tried to tell him that this was all a mistake. That she hadn’t intended to make love with him and that the decision she’d made in France had been the right one. But the unintentional brush of his fingers against her inner thigh as he inspected the condom caused her breath to catch—which he capitalised on by turning the back of his hand against the still swollen bud of her femininity until she started to writhe against him, effectively silenced as his long skilled fingers did his bidding and tipped her over the brink for a second time, because he had known instinctively what she had been going to say.

‘Better get dressed,’ he whispered when it was over, pressing a feather-light kiss on her nose, drawing her attention to the fact that she was as good as naked while he had done very little more than unzip his trousers and loosen his tie. ‘You’re far too much of a temptation looking like this.’

A temptation to do what? See how many more times he could get her to capitulate? she demanded of herself, noting
that dark satisfaction in his voice. To have her bucking at his command, knowing that having sex with him was going against everything she’d made up her mind not to do? Because that was all it was to him, she thought fervently, scrambling up off the table and fastening her robe around her. Just sex.

Hurting and ashamed, berating herself for being too weak to resist him, and annoyed with him for reducing her to such a quivering mass of need, before she knew it she was flinging at him, ‘And you’re far too much of an arrogant swine to take no for an answer!’

Anger leaped like green fire in his eyes, but was quickly brought under control by his daunting self-command.

‘I wasn’t aware that what has happened between us here was anything but mutual,’ he rasped in a dangerously soft voice, and she could tell that he was only just managing to hold his anger in check. ‘You’re as hooked as I am, Sienna, so don’t blame me if that doesn’t tie in with your misplaced delusions of innocence in all this. You made love with me because you wanted to. Because where you and I are concerned you can’t help yourself any more than I can! And if you think I’m proud of myself for getting us both into this situation, then I can assure you categorically, darling, I’m
not!
’

Smarting from his words, shamed by her statement which had provoked them, she stood tensely, wishing she could retract it as he brushed past her and moved out to the minute little room off the kitchen that housed her small downstairs bathroom, telling herself that he had every right to be angry.

Because of course what she had been accusing him of was his failure to respect the decision she had made in France about not continuing an affair with him. But because of her frustration with herself for falling into his arms the minute he arrived, it had come out sounding like something far, far worse. With just that one remark she had relegated him to the worst kind of man imaginable. The type who bullied and bulldozed his way into a woman’s bed. Like his stepfather had with his mother. Like Niall.

She shivered as the memory of her marriage came back with shuddering force. She’d thought the past was over—done with. And it was, she assured herself rationally. It was just that sometimes things happened to bring it all back …

A familiar clunk from beyond the kitchen had her darting through to investigate.

Conan had just emerged from the bathroom, pulling the door closed behind him. As she’d expected, the loose handle, with its spindle still attached, had come clean off in his hand.

‘The one on the bathroom side keeps dropping off,’ she uttered by way of apology for her shabby little home, thinking how devastatingly sophisticated he appeared in her modest little kitchen—which certainly wasn’t the place for an enterprising self-made billionaire. ‘I bought some screws on the way home this morning. I was going to try and fix it when I had a minute.’

‘Then give them to me.’

She wanted to tell him that it was all right—that she didn’t need anyone to help her. But he was already taking off his jacket, so she went and fetched the packet of screws that was still in her handbag in the living room. When she came back he was repositioning the handle on the bathroom side, and she tried not to notice how his skin showed bronze through the fine white shirt as she handed him the screwdriver from the kitchen drawer.

As he worked he didn’t seem to care that he was kneeling in his best designer trousers, or that he was in danger of scuffing his expensive hand-made shoes on her rather worn quarry-tiled floor.

Perhaps he wasn’t too sophisticated to be able to fit in anywhere, she decided, admiring him, her heart swelling involuntarily, noticing how the morning sun shining through the kitchen window seemed to strike fire from his gleaming hair. She restrained the strongest urge to run her fingers through it, deciding that that would betray far too much of what she was feeling and might make him think she was getting serious
about him. Which was crazy, she thought, after all the intimacies they had shared.

‘There.’ He was trying the door handle he had just fixed, making sure it was working properly. ‘That should do the trick.’ His personal masculine scent impinged on her senses as he got to his feet.

‘Thanks.’ She watched him secure the packet of remaining screws before putting them with the screwdriver back into the drawer. A neat and tidy workman, just like her father, she decided. And, just like her father, a man who would never hurt her. Not physically anyway. Only emotionally, she thought. And only then if she allowed him to. But she wasn’t going to, was she? she tried convincing herself. Even so, her throat felt raw with emotion as she uttered tentatively, ‘What I said earlier …’ He was shrugging back into his jacket, his eyes dark and inscrutable, and she knew that deep down he was still angry with her for saying what she had. ‘I didn’t mean it like it sounded. I only meant—’

A broad thumb against her lips cut short what she had been trying to tell him. ‘I think we’ve both said enough for one day.’

The next second she was in his arms, with her cheek pressed against his jacket, her hand moving in an involuntary caress over the soft fabric of his sleeve. One steely arm was tightening with torturous possession around her middle, the other a clamping bar that lay diagonally across her back.

They were as one, she thought, enlivened by the power and the strength and the warmth of him. Joined at the chest and the hip and the thigh, her pelvis pressing with equal possession against his, drawn like a magnet to his hard masculinity, while her head swam with his scent and her heart beat out a message that she feared he wouldn’t fail to hear.

I love you!

She bit back the phrase that sprang too easily to her lips, knowing the words would be anathema to him after what he had told her that day at the villa. He was quite prepared for them to carry on as lovers, but that there could never be any
future for them. He’d never be a stepfather to Daisy, or any other man’s child for that matter, because of the violence he’d witnessed by his stepfather towards his mother, and because of the ridicule and brutality directed at him by the man who had shaped his early life.

Aching for him almost as much as she was aching for herself, she wanted to blurt out that she understood all the fear and misery that he must have gone through. That she had experienced the same sort of fear and misery herself. But what good would it do? she thought. The past was gone—as she had reminded herself earlier. So what benefit would it be to Conan to drag it all up? He knew that his mother was weak and his stepfather had been brutal. How could she destroy Niall’s image so completely in his eyes by telling him that the brother he’d loved had not only been weak—which he already knew—but that he had been afflicted with the same brutal streak? She couldn’t. Any more than he could forget the past and even think about building a happy, normal relationship with someone like her and Daisy.

All she could do, she decided, trying to drum up the strength, was tell him that she was sticking to the decision she had made in France—which was that she had no intention of sleeping with him again.

And she would have done it, too, she assured herself, if his pager hadn’t bleeped at the exact moment she decided to.

‘I’m sorry about this.’ He grimaced, releasing her so that he could take the call.

Which was curt, brief and to the point. He was needed and he had to go.

‘I’ll be in touch,’ he promised, touching her mouth fleetingly with his.

A few moments later she heard the powerful car growling away, leaving her frustrated and despairing with herself for not telling him when she had had the chance.

S
IENNA
had been determined to finish with Conan after that last time he had called, when they had wound up making love on her sitting room table. But that was easier said than done, she’d soon discovered, when she was drawn to him physically in a way that defied all rational argument, and when emotionally she was head over heels in love with him, even while her head kept warning her of the hopelessness of the situation.

Because when he’d called the next time—aware that his niece was off on a school trip—and taken her out for a lunch she had been too weak to refuse, and then the time after that, when he’d dropped Daisy off at her grandmother’s and whisked Sienna to an exhibition by her favourite artist that she had been longing to attend, on both occasions he’d brought her back to the house and they had inevitably wound up making love.

Now, hearing his car purring away after another abandoned hour of paradise with him on her little single bed, Sienna tugged her duvet straight with intensifying annoyance at herself as common sense reminded her that if she was stupid enough to imagine that he might suddenly have a change of mind-set and want a long-term relationship with her—and consequently Daisy—then she was just living in cloud-cuckoo-land. Apart from which, she reminded herself with increasing self-recrimination, she didn’t just have her own feelings to consider, but Daisy’s.

The little girl had become extremely attached to him, and
was continually asking Sienna when he was coming round. But she knew for a fact that when he did pick Daisy up to take her to see Avril he was merely acting as a go-between for his mother and his little niece. He seldom stayed to spend that much time with Daisy. And when he did eventually bring her home, having bought her ice cream, a book of animal stories or various other treats he obviously thought a caring uncle should provide, Daisy never wanted to see him leave—something that had started to spark off tantrums the minute he did.

Sienna was glad, therefore, when towards the end of September he went away for three weeks, tied up with the potential take-over of a floundering communications network in Europe. It gave her some space to think, although it wasn’t easy being left to question the inadvisability of what she was doing—for her own sake as well as Daisy’s—when another part of her—the part that wouldn’t listen to reason—was aching for him with a need that was almost unbearable.

Her mother rang a couple of times while he was away, fishing for any whiff of intimacy between Conan Ryder and her daughter. Sienna knew her mother would have loved to be able to tell her friends that her daughter was romantically involved with the illustrious billionaire, but managed to stay firmly non-committal. Jodie’s questions, however, weren’t so easy to evade when she came round to show off her new baby boy.

‘He comes to see Daisy,’ Sienna dissembled, when her friend teasingly remarked upon the number of times she had seen the BMW parked outside the house.

‘Even when she isn’t here?’ Jodie responded knowingly.

Which just went to show how dishonestly her relationship with Conan was making her behave, Sienna realised, rebuking herself. Not only with her friend, but with her own daughter! Because she had made sure from the outset that Daisy didn’t get to know that she was sleeping with Conan—something that Conan himself had had no problem going along with. After all, he had exercised the same discretion in France, she
remembered, although it wasn’t until after he had warned her not to fall in love with him that day at the villa that she had realised why. He didn’t want his niece seeing him as anything more than the dutiful uncle he was—least of all as a potential father!

Well, that’s all right by me! Sienna thought grittily, forcing herself to see what a complete idiot she was being in allowing him to use her in the way he was—although that didn’t stop her impulses going into immediate overdrive the following day when he telephoned to let her know he was back.

She was expecting to see him on her own when he came round that Thursday morning, but an unexpected school closure for some emergency repairs had found her having to delegate her afternoon’s training sessions at the gym. It also meant that Daisy was there when he called.

‘Let me take you both out,’ he suggested generously, spectacularly clad in dark jeans and a black leather jacket, and concealing any disappointment he might have felt—if he was harbouring any.

Reluctantly Sienna agreed, and wasn’t sure afterwards whether he’d really enjoyed being in the pet and aquatic centre that he took them to, or whether he had just been making the best of it, when what he had really intended that morning was to have her alone, naked and in bed. Something his eyes told her he still wanted every time they met hers over Daisy’s oblivious little head, and which produced a throbbing response in Sienna even while she nursed a sort of torturous satisfaction from knowing he’d been denied having his own way.

It was late in the afternoon when Conan drove them back to her place. Daisy had slept most of the way home, but was her usual energetic self by the time Sienna let them all into the house, and immediately flew out into the garden after Shadow.

Shortly afterwards, having finished the coffee that Sienna had made for them both, Conan set his mug down on the draining
board and moved back to her where she was standing at the kitchen counter.

Her breath seemed to lodge in her lungs as his arm snaked around her.

‘I’m going to have to go,’ he whispered from behind, causing her blood to race as his hand slid upwards to cup one soft responsive breast which yielded too eagerly beneath her bra and the smooth fabric of her sweatshirt. His lips inside the wide neckline sent hot and tingling sensations along her spine.

‘I don’t want you to go!’ Daisy’s torn little appeal had Sienna pivoting away from him. Too late, she realised, because her daughter had already seen everything. ‘I don’t want you to go!’ the little girl reiterated passionately, already starting to cry, and Sienna could feel another tantrum coming on. ‘Why can’t you stay with us?
Why
can’t you?’ Daisy was sobbing bitterly as she clung to one jean-clad leg, looking up with tears streaming down her face at the man she had clearly grown to adore.

‘Because I have to be somewhere else, Daisy.’ Conan dropped to his haunches to talk to her.

Immediately sturdy little arms went around his neck. ‘No, you don’t,’ her muffled little voice sobbed above the creak of his straining leather.

‘Yes, I do, Daisy.’ There was an odd inflexion in his voice, Sienna noted, as his arms moved tentatively around the little girl, the sight so painfully heart-wrenching that she had to turn away and busy herself with the tin of dog food she had just opened.

‘Then why can’t we come and live with you?’

When she turned around there was such an intensity of emotion in the eyes that lifted to hers that she felt it as tangibly as her own. What was it? she wondered achingly. Hopelessness? Desperation? An appeal to her to get him out of this situation he had unintentionally created?

‘Go and take this out to Shadow, Daisy,’ she advised tremulously,
holding out the dog’s bowl and looking helplessly at Conan when the little girl didn’t even turn around.

‘Go and do as your mother wishes and then we’ll talk about it, Daisy.’ He spoke softly—deeply—with just enough promise in his voice to get her to comply, which after a few moments’ hesitation she did.

‘What the hell are you trying to do?’ Sienna threw at him angrily as soon as Daisy was out of earshot.

‘What do you mean, what am I trying to do?’ He was upright, dominating her tiny living space again.

‘Giving her reason to hope like that! She might only be four years old but she isn’t an idiot! She saw us, Conan. And now she thinks we’re all going to be one hunky-dory little family!’

‘Then you’re going to have to somehow explain to her that we’re not.’

‘
I’m
going to have to explain? And what am I supposed to say to her, exactly?’ she demanded, refusing to acknowledge how much his last insensitive statement was affecting her. ‘She’s had one man in her life snatched away from her. How am I going to tell her not to get to attached to another who’s likely to be disappearing at any minute?’

‘What’s that supposed to mean?’ he challenged impatiently.

‘It means,’ she informed him, punching the swing bin open with unnecessary force and dropping the dog food tin inside, ‘I don’t want her thinking you’re for real!’

‘Well, of
course
I’m for real.’ His eyes were incredulous as they followed her movements around the limited space. ‘I’m her uncle, for goodness’ sake!’

‘Unfortunately she isn’t old enough to compartmentalise!’ The spoon she’d been using clanged noisily as she tossed it down on the stainless-steel drainer. Behind her she caught Conan’s heavily released breath.

‘I’ve told you. I can’t be a father to her, Sienna—or make a lifelong commitment to you, if that’s what you’re intimating.’

‘It isn’t!’ Heaven keep him from guessing that she might
have ever dared to imagine that. That she had had enough of this pretence and waiting around for precious phone calls from him. Had enough of aching for him night after night. Loving him while knowing that because of his past and all the brutality he had suffered he would never, ever allow himself to love her back.

‘I can’t give her what my brother would have given her,’ he went on, as though he hadn’t heard her, ‘and I won’t even begin to try. You think I’m guilty of a closed mind? Well, just consider the hypothetical situation of us marrying. Daisy’s
your
daughter. Yours and Niall’s. You must have had plans for the way you were going to bring her up—still have those plans to teach her what’s right from wrong, prepare her for adult life. Supposing I had conflicting views and we disagreed over her upbringing, or anything else she did or might want to do? Then we’d find ourselves in the unenviable situation of taking sides, and that would only lead to jealousy and animosity—or worse,’ he expressed, grim-mouthed. ‘And that sort of hypothetically perfect family I can do without!’

‘Like yours, you mean?’ Her tortured little reminder hung like a pollutant on the air between them.

‘Yes, if you’re so determined to press home the point,’ he rasped, his nostrils flaring. ‘Exactly like mine!’

‘And I’ve told you before … every stepfamily on the planet isn’t exactly like yours. Not that it affects
me
one iota …’ She had to keep him believing that, and to emphasise that point she added, ‘I don’t want to be tied down any more than you do … but you’re too ready to generalise. Every one of those families isn’t always at each other’s throats or …’ She hesitated, still less than comfortable with describing the cruelty that had not only dogged his childhood but had tainted her short marriage. ‘Or turning violent,’ she got out at last.

From the way his face hardened she knew she had touched a raw nerve. ‘Tell that to someone who’s prepared to share your rose-tinted opinion,’ he said coldly. ‘And if you’ll pardon
me for saying so, Sienna, you’re hardly in any position to judge.’

Oh, aren’t I?
her heart screamed bitterly, almost driven to reveal exactly what she had had to endure in being married to his brother. But it would have been a useless exercise in retaliation, she realised, which would serve no purpose but to hurt him. And only because she had been careless enough to fall in love with him, she thought miserably. But that was her problem, not his.

His problem was that he’d been shaped by the destructive jealousy and aggression that had sculpted his early life, and there was nothing she could do or say that could chisel away at those prejudices of his—because they were set in stone.

‘Perhaps I just happen to have more faith in human relationships than you do, Conan?’ she told him painfully. And with all the courage she could muster pressing like a lead weight against her chest, she said, ‘I don’t think we should see each other like this any more.’

She almost felt the tension that ripped through his body. ‘You don’t mean that?’ he whispered, taken aback.

No, she didn’t, she agonised, clamming up, because how could she bring herself to say anything that would end this love affair with him for good?

As he moved towards her, though, her hands shot up to stave off any intention he might have of trying to change her mind. If he touched her, she wouldn’t have a chance, she thought, panicking, and he knew it. ‘I’m serious, Conan,’ she croaked.

He drew up sharply, his mouth moving in a parody of a smile. ‘You’re tired. We both are,’ he remarked, as though that was the answer to all their problems. ‘We’ll talk about this some other time.’

With his lips lightly brushing her forehead, he was gone before she could utter another word.

When he telephoned the next day she refused to see him, and when he rang again each day for the rest of that week her
answer was the same. When she didn’t hear from him the following week, she remembered he was away on a business trip. Then, during that week, with the half-term holiday coming up, she received a call from her parents, inviting her to Spain. With time off from the gym for Daisy’s school holiday, Sienna was more than happy to accept.

At least she wouldn’t be tempted to go back on her word about making a clean break with Conan—which she knew she had to do for Daisy’s sake, if not her own. She knew that if it hadn’t been for Daisy she wouldn’t have been strong enough to do it. And she’d had to. She had to remain strong for the sake of her sanity and her self-respect. She owed herself that much at least.

But all the pep-talks in the world, which she was constantly having with herself, didn’t help to lessen the pain she was suffering being without him. As it had stood she had started to despise herself for being his ready mistress whenever he took it upon himself to call her. But even that less than happy state of affairs had been preferable to this empty longing, this burning need for him that kept her awake each night and left her chastising herself as, like an automaton, appearing normal on the outside, she somehow managed to get through each day.