Back in the Lion's Den (4 page)

‘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.

In a dark evening suit, white winged collar shirt and bow tie, he’d looked particularly spectacular—hard and confident and sophisticated—and he’d had the air about him of a man you couldn’t say no to—as he always had in his private life as well as in business.

She remembered the feel of that impeccably clad arm going around her as they’d taken to the floor. The way every nerve in her body had seemed to tense like a tuned up violin as his hand burned through the flimsy red fabric of her dress.

‘The telltale flush on those beautiful cheeks …’ Conan’s words as he remembered shook Sienna back to the present. They seemed to have given him licence to trace the fine structure
of her face. His fingers were long and skilful and she couldn’t seem to stop him, held in thrall by a sensuality that was as dangerous as it was thrilling as he continued reminiscing. ‘The dilated pupils. That nervous stammer that sprang from between those alluring and very provocative lips.’

I felt awkward with you! Embarrassed! But there was a reason for it! There was a reason for everything I did!

But she couldn’t tell him that.

Don’t tell anyone!
For a fleeting moment the words echoed through her brain—anguished and imploring.
Promise me you’ll never tell anyone! Especially Conan!

She felt straitjacketed by her emotions—just as she had then. But she had made a promise and she would never renege on that promise, she thought bitterly. Not now. Not ever.

Facing the censuring clarity of that glittering gold gaze, she said with a forced air of resignation, ‘Well, there you have me! It seems you were irresistible, doesn’t it, Conan? But not any more.’

He laughed softly as he lifted her chin with a curved forefinger, noting the way her breath shivered through her nostrils before his gaze rested on the trembling lashes that half veiled the darkening blue of her eyes. ‘No?’ he murmured silkily.

‘Aren’t you worried I might try to
bleed you dry?
’ she emphasised, taunting him with it, pulling back from him on legs that felt so much like jelly she was wondering how much longer they could hold her.

He merely laughed again, and said, ‘You couldn’t bleed me dry.’

Of course. He had far too many millions for that.

A deep bark followed by a childlike squeal of laughter filtered down from the terrace above them. To Sienna it was a welcome reprieve.

‘Go and make yourself at home. Settle in,’ Conan advised with a jerk of his chin towards where the sounds were coming from. ‘But remember … you’re playing a dangerous game,
Sienna. You won’t find me half so much of a push-over as my brother.’

She almost ran from him, back along the path, eager only for the safe, simple demands of Daisy and Shadow.

C
ONAN
looked up from the laptop and out of his study window, relinquishing his interest in the spreadsheet he was updating in favour of the more interesting scene by the pool.

In a skimpy white crop-top and shorts, Sienna was engaged in a workout. Daisy was crayoning in a sketchbook on the marble tiles in the shade of the sun-umbrella above the table just behind her. The hairy mutt, he noted with a derogatory grimace, was lounging nearby.

His niece was stocky, like her father, he decided, some uninvited emotion softening the firm line of his mouth. She wouldn’t ever inherit her mother’s petite figure, but she was a well-behaved and pleasant child, he’d observed since their arrival two days ago, and if she lacked any sort of maternal control then it certainly wasn’t evident.

Which was one point in her mother’s favour if nothing else, he acknowledged rather reluctantly, surprised by the way just the thought of another sparring session with his brother’s unscrupulous little widow could kick his libido into life, sending a burning ache down through the centre of his hardening anatomy.

Or was it just the way she was moving with those weights strapped to her ankles? Her slim, beautifully shaped legs lifting independently, her small breasts accentuated, as she lay with her hands behind her head, face turned upwards to the sun?

At that moment the little girl ran up to her. He watched
Sienna sit up, saw her smile as she pushed the hair out of the child’s eyes. The tender action reminded him of those times on the periphery of his memory with his own mother, when there had been just the two of them—before everything had changed after Avril had married his stepfather and then given birth to Niall. He had learned to harden himself against moments like these—against those early memories—and he did it now, saving the data on his laptop and closing down the program he had been using.

Whether he was happy about it or not, he thought, Sienna was his guest, and relations between her and his mother had been strained to say the least since he had brought her back with him. That was probably why she had chosen to come out to the pool area now, while Avril was up in her room taking a nap. She had definitely been going out of her way to avoid too much contact with his mother, with the result that she was spending far too much time alone. Something he intended to rectify as of now!

Standing with legs apart, ankle-weights substituted with hand-weights, her body angled, with her raised arm forming a perfect arc above her head, Sienna lost track of the seconds she’d been maintaining the position as Conan appeared, coming across the terrace in a white linen shirt and pale chinos.

His masculinity was glaringly evident in the corded strength of his throat above the open ‘V’ of his collar and in the larger ‘V’ of dark body hair shading his chest beneath his shirt. His chinos were fitted enough to reveal the narrow-hipped strength of his lower body, and the taut musculature of his thighs. His feet were thrust into backless leather mules, as fit and tanned and virile as the rest of him.

Spotting him, Daisy scrambled to her feet, already running up to him with her colouring book.

His reluctant smile for the little girl made Sienna’s stomach twinge with something indefinable before he squatted down on his haunches to look at the picture his niece was showing
him. She caught his soft words of praise—not gushing, but understatedly genuine—before he said something else more quietly that had the little girl darting off in the direction of the house.

‘Take the dog with you, Daisy,’ his deep voice instructed, and an obedient click of her tongue had Shadow leaping up and bounding after her.

Sienna straightened from the exercise she’d been doing with her hand-weights, letting both her arms hang at her sides. Her heart rate was usually up a bit after she’d finished a workout, she realised, but the sight of Conan had her blood pounding as though she’d been running hard.

‘Does everyone do what you tell them to?’

His smile was wry. ‘Usually.’

She didn’t doubt it—especially those who were on his substantial payroll. He was the type of man for whom waiters and porters materialised like genies, while others, like Daisy and Shadow, vanished at will.

‘I thought you were working? Avril said you were working at home today.’

Did he think she was gabbling? She certainly sounded as though she was.

‘I was,’ he said, coming closer. And when she could only stand and look at him, rooted to the spot by the breath-catching spell of his very aura, he added, ‘I saw you from my study. I decided the time had come not to have you spending so much time on your own.’

She smiled a rather nervous smile. ‘Did you bribe Daisy with some particular treat to get her out of the way?’

He made another wry movement with his mouth. ‘Now, what on earth makes you think that?’

‘I think you could bribe your way out of anything you wanted to.’

He laughed—a warm, deep sound that had her reminding herself of how ruthless he was when she realised she was in danger of forgetting it. ‘I simply told her that Claudette has
taken some pastries up to my mother, and that Avril has asked Daisy to join her.’

‘That’s nice,’ Sienna expressed, glad at least that her daughter was forming a bond with her new grandmother, even if
she
wasn’t.

Those slow strides brought him nearer, and Sienna’s breath caught almost audibly in her lungs.

‘May I?’

She handed him the moderate weights she was still clutching in her tense fingers, watching him assess their poundage, weighing them both together in one tanned and strikingly tapered hand.

Crazily, for a moment she considered those hands making a calculated assessment of her body, feeling, touching, moulding …

Shocked by the disturbing imagery, mentally she shook it away. ‘I’m not hoping to be Mr Universe,’ she elucidated, a little more sharply than she had intended when she saw his mouth twist almost mockingly. ‘Just to keep myself toned up.’ Perhaps he considered those weights light, but then in those strong brown hands four times as much probably would be! she thought, shaken by her wayward thoughts about him.

‘I should hope not.’ She could feel his gaze travelling down over her figure where a moment ago she had imagined his hands travelling the same path. ‘You’re perfectly acceptable as you are.’

Wishing she’d worn a bra, with a rush of colour to her cheeks she felt the betraying thrust of her breasts against the stretchy fabric of her top.

‘The last time I saw you at a poolside you were wearing a swimsuit from Dior,’ he reminded her, concluding his disconcerting survey of her body. ‘And you were positively dripping with gold.’

Gold she had sold—along with all her other jewellery, her fast car, and the rest of the things he obviously believed she’d
cared about! she thought bitterly. To pay off the debts she’d been left with after Niall had died.

‘That wasn’t me!’

‘Wasn’t it?’ He laughed again, not so warmly this time, the sinews working in his strong throat. ‘I’d recognise that figure anywhere—although I’d agree that nowadays you’re certainly … fully toned.’

His scrutiny of her was electrifying, moving as it did with slow deliberation over the golden slopes of her shoulders, touching on the firm, yet willowy arms, and coming to rest with appreciative male satisfaction on the betraying fullness of her breasts.

‘I mean it wasn’t …’ How could she explain to him how ostentatious she’d found that jewellery? How she’d worn it merely to please Niall, because he had bought it for her? And that the extortionately pricey swimsuit hadn’t been something she would even have dreamt of buying for herself—let alone considered wearing! That she’d only been persuaded to after Niall had presented her with it as a substitute for the plainer, less tantalising one she’d chosen herself from her favourite high street store? ‘I was a different person then, Conan,’ she said tonelessly, with a dryness creeping up her throat. ‘We all were.’

His sensuous mouth moved in contemplation before he laid the weights down with that casual grace of his on one of the glass poolside tables.

‘Were we?’ he remarked, turning his full attention back to her again. ‘Does a leopard ever change its spots?’

‘No, apparently not!’ she flung back at him, hurting and angry, because there was no way that he would ever change his opinion of her. His prejudices were set in stone! ‘I’m not staying here talking to you when you only came out here to try and antagonise me!’

She made to move past him, but the table was blocking her way on one side, and as she moved to go around the other
he side-stepped, so that she couldn’t pass without the risk of falling into the pool.

His hands were raised palm-outwards in defence against her verbal attack. ‘Believe me—that wasn’t my intention.’

‘Wasn’t it?’ Hot colour stained her cheeks. Her eyes, in contrast, were dark and accusing. ‘You wouldn’t miss a trick in trying to have a go at me. You might think I’m guilty of sleeping around during my marriage, but at least I wasn’t the one lusting after my brother’s wife!’

Her words seemed to stun him rigid.

Feeling the waves of condemnation burning from him, and already regretting her rash remark, Sienna darted a glance around for the quickest means of escape.

‘Would you mind repeating that statement?’ he rasped, in a dangerously low voice.

Yes, I would! she thought hectically, wishing she could retract it. And, shamed into flight—desperate to get away from him—she turned and plunged headlong into the pool.

She had only swum a few metres when she heard the deep splash behind her, felt herself being rocked by the displacement of water, and realised with a small gasp of alarmed amazement that Conan was giving chase—fully clothed!

She did a blazing front-crawl to the other side of the pool, reaching it with a determined grab for the tiled edge. But with a small gasp of dismay she heard Conan coming up behind her, felt a strong, determined hand pulling her round.

For endless pulsing moments they glared angrily at each other, the sun beating down a relentless observer, striking bronze from the transparency of Conan’s shirt where it now clung to his skin, burning across Sienna, though not as much as she was burning inside.

She had never seen him look so wild or so untameable, and she didn’t know what galvanised her into what happened next. But as his curiously ravaged face dipped low she was lifting hers to meet it, their angry passion given rein in a mutually antagonised kiss.

Conan didn’t know what he had been intending to do when he’d come after her, but this, he realised, plundering her soft eager mouth, was the only ultimate outcome. Maybe her words had struck a raw chord in him because of his long denial of his body’s uncontrolled response to her. The wanting he had never allowed himself to entertain even when he had been shocked into realising how nervous she was in his arms during that dance that night, and how he obviously affected her. Even if she refused to acknowledge it, he thought grimly. But there was no need for denial or for any reservations now.

As he shifted his arm to pull her into the rock-hard length of his body Sienna made a guttural sound deep in her throat, clawing at the warm wetness of his rippling back with desperate and greedy hands.

She hated the man, and yet …

Driven by desire, and the intensity of a passion such as she had never known before, she gave in to its demands, letting her trembling hands slide up to tangle in the soaked black thickness of his hair, responding to that hungry, insistent masculine mouth with unrelenting demands of her own.

Oh! Dear heaven …
She gave a tortured groan—a low, anguished sound from deep inside her. She wanted more than this! She wanted all the things she had been imagining with him, which were responsible for the self-degradation that had had her flinging that insult at him just now. She wanted him to—

Her thoughts were driven from her mind as his hands suddenly spanned her waist, lifting her up so her legs automatically moved around him.

Supporting her with his arm, he was tilting her head back, his mouth closing over her clinging top through which her nipples were protruding in unashamed arousal. Never had she known such wanting as his actions sent red-hot spears of desire piercing down through her body, igniting a flame at the very heart of her femininity.

She could feel his own arousal, pulsing and hard, and
moved against him like a wild thing as he pulled up her top so that his hands could claim the aching fullness of her eager breasts.

Sensations coursed through her, piling one on top of the other, feeding on each other. Sensations fuelled by a desire that had been driven by anger and yet which was now exploding in a furore of feelings such as she had never known.

She had been in love with his brother; she had thought she knew everything about sexual desire. But nothing in her life or in her short-lived marriage had compared with or prepared her for the driving urgency of this pure raw lust …

Cruelly she was reminded of their earlier confrontation, and of how much Conan despised her. It made her realise that was all that this … this madness was. Lust, she thought bitterly, and she wrenched herself away from him, her feet touching bottom, her face screwed up in disgust as she pulled at her top, turning her head away, unable to face the mocking derision she knew she would see in his eyes.

‘What’s the matter, Sienna? Can’t you look at me?’ His voice was surprisingly hoarse, and he sounded as breathless as she was.

Chancing a glance at him, she noticed that his eyes were fathomlessly dark, his eyelids heavy from the heat of his desire. His mouth wasn’t derisive at all. The full lower lip pulled was taut, as if he was having some inner battle for control. Beneath that tantalisingly transparent shirt she could see the way his chest was rising and falling heavily.

‘I didn’t intend that to happen either,’ he admitted.

‘Didn’t you?’ Remaining hostile, she decided, was the only way of saving face. How else could she explain those moments of insanity that had gripped her? That had dictated her actions? ‘I would have thought your greatest wish was to see me humiliated.’