Back in the Lion's Den (5 page)

His eyes narrowed as he searched her small, indignant features. Her eyes looked like smoky sapphires, and her mouth was pink and swollen from the mutually fierce hunger that
even with all his sexual experience had still left him reeling, and so hard with wanting he felt a weakness spreading along his thighs. ‘Is that how you feel?’

‘What do you think?’ she murmured indignantly.

‘I think we were both in a state of high tension and both had to let off steam,’ he stated pragmatically—almost laughably so in the circumstances.

Letting off steam! Was that all he thought it was?

Well, of course. What did you want it to be? a little voice inside Sienna jeered. He was Niall’s brother—Daisy’s uncle. Nothing more.

‘Now, if you’ll excuse me …’ That familiar mockery was back on Conan’s lips, yet it was incongruous with the huskiness of his voice and the inscrutable expression in his eyes. ‘Much as I’d like to stay and bring this pleasurable little interlude to its natural conclusion, I have to get back to work.’ And that was going to test his powers of self-discipline more than seemed humanly possible, he realised. Although the alternative was to stay and have her believe what she had accused him of earlier. When he’d always rejected
any
conscious attraction towards his brother’s wife. ‘Besides … I’ve never made love to a woman in anger—’ such behaviour was unpardonable and beneath him, he thought, fighting the long-buried demons that were threatening to surface ‘—and I don’t intend to start now.’

With one thrust of those muscular arms he propelled himself effortlessly out of the pool, water cascading from his magnificent body.

As he walked away, Sienna broodingly noticed how his shirt clung wetly to his broad back, accentuating every muscle, and how his chinos had moulded themselves to his firm, hard buttocks and his powerful thighs. A sharp ache of un-sated desire pierced her small, excruciatingly aroused body.

What had possessed her? And what must he think of her? she demanded of herself shamefully, watching discreetly from under her lashes as he scooped up the mules he’d obviously
kicked off to give chase to her. Her behaviour must only have cemented his opinion of the type of girl he thought she was, she decided hopelessly, for all his remarks about them both needing to ‘let off steam.’

He was a man very much in command of himself—and of his actions, she accepted reluctantly, grudgingly admiring the economy and grace with which he moved for a man of his height and build as he grabbed a towel from one of the sun loungers he was passing and began rubbing it casually over his hair. And a man who would consider the consequences of everything he did and said, she realised, even while she was resenting him. A man of surprising strength of character. Of principle, even. A man completely and utterly in control. And recognising that—along with what he had said just now about not making love in anger—caused a ridiculous ache in her throat.

‘How have you been today?’ Sienna asked, striving to be friendly as she came across her mother-in-law the following evening, on her usual shady seat on the terrace. ‘How are you feeling?’ She sank down onto the elegantly wrought, deeply cushioned chair beside her. Daisy was already in bed and Conan had been out for most of the day. She should have been relieved, she realised, and yet his absence was too noticeable to be pleasant.

‘As good as I’m ever going to feel, I imagine,’ Avril responded. ‘The doctors can’t seem to make up their minds as to what’s wrong with me.’ Even her rather resigned little shrug seemed like an effort. ‘Can you credit that? Conan pays them a fortune and they can’t even come up with a simple diagnosis. One says it’s simply post-viral syndrome. Another one even stuck his neck out and suggested I have ME.’

‘And you can’t get about?’ Sienna queried, sympathising. ‘Or take any form of gentle exercise?’ From casual comments Conan had made, Sienna knew he wanted his mother to try and get about more.

‘Exercise?’

From the way she said it, Sienna thought, anyone would think she’d suggested a trip to the moon.

‘That’s the answer to everything nowadays, isn’t it?’ Avril remarked rather derisively. ‘Especially with you younger generation.’

It was a conscious slight, Sienna decided, against all her years of training, and for a moment she felt as though she’d travelled back in time and was again the tentative, insecure creature she’d been, who’d often had to bite her tongue and had been made to feel like an interloper in her husband’s family. Now, undeterred, and with a wealth of experience of working with both the fit and healthy and the elderly, she said, ‘It’s the answer to a lot of things.’

‘Not in this case, Sienna—though your concern for me, I must say, is rather surprising.’

Because old hostilities were still there, she realised. And barely concealed where Avril was concerned.

‘I don’t like seeing anyone sick or suffering,’ Sienna explained, brushing a rose petal from the loose white skirt she had teamed with a pale blue camisole. ‘Especially when they can be repaired.’

The woman uttered a feeble laugh. ‘I’m past repairing.’

‘No, you’re not,’ Sienna returned decisively.

She was well aware that Conan’s mother was little more than sixty-five, and couldn’t help wondering if the woman’s depression and mysterious debilitating illness had swayed her towards such fatalism. She also couldn’t help thinking either how alike Niall and her mother-in-law were—in that way at least. Because her younger son had shown the same kind of resignation about a lot of things. Unlike Conan, Sienna realised intuitively, who would bend the world to his will if he had to. But then he was only Niall’s half-brother, and had been born with a different set of genes …

‘You know, you’re much more confident than you were,
Sienna.’ She could feel his mother studying her from behind her smoky grey lenses. ‘Confident. And much more … mature.’

‘I’ve had to be,’ Sienna remarked, cringing as she recalled the optimistic young bride Niall had first brought with him into this family circle—a circle she’d fitted into as badly as the proverbial square peg!

‘You didn’t have to do it alone.’ She meant bringing up Daisy, and Sienna felt her stomach muscles tightening. ‘Conan tells me your parents are still in Spain. And yet they get to see her?’ she expressed, when Sienna nodded.

When
she
hadn’t. That was clearly what the other woman was saying.

‘I’m sorry.’ Sienna stared at the bright blossoms draping the flower-decked pergola, not knowing, in the circumstances, how she could have done things any other way. ‘I really am.’

‘There were faults on both sides,’ her mother-in-law was admitting surprisingly. ‘I realise that now. You were far too determined. Too strong-willed for a man like Niall. And far too young to take on the responsibilities of a wife and mother. You weren’t …’ Her voice tailed off, as though she’d thought better of expressing her views aloud.

‘I wasn’t the sort of wife you would have chosen for him?’ Sienna supplied crisply, remembering this family’s rejection of her a little less painfully than she once had.

‘I know I might have made you feel like that.’ A sigh seemed to shiver through the woman’s thin frame, but all she added—as though it excused everything—was, ‘He was my
son.
’

Despite everything, Sienna’s heart went out to her, her lungs locking tight with emotion.

She didn’t want to be discussing this—raking up the past. Her memories of that time, and of the situations she had been put into, which had helped condemn her in this family’s eyes, still made her smart with the injustice of it all. And there had been none more condemning or unjust than Conan’s scorching censure. But then what would
anyone
have thought of a
mother who’d left her sick baby to go out partying? Without even bothering to ring up and check?

No, it was worse than that. Who had deliberately switched off her phone!

She could still see the condemnation in those green-gold eyes as he’d marched her away from that party. Still remember her desperation and panic over what might be wrong with Daisy, her futile attempts to make Niall’s brother believe that her little girl had been fine when she’d left the house. To try and explain.

He hadn’t listened, of course. Who would have? There had been far too much evidence against her.

Sick with self-remorse, she hadn’t even been able to convince herself that she hadn’t been that negligent. Not until later. Not until after her name had been reduced to mud in the Ryder family’s eyes and they had notched up yet another black mark against her …

‘If you’d been Conan’s wife he would never have indulged you in the same way my younger son seemed to want to. He might be a very wealthy man, but he’s not weak-willed and easily swayed like his brother was. I’m afraid if it had been Conan you’d chosen he’d soon have pulled you into line.’

No, he wouldn’t! Sienna fumed silently. Because there had been no ‘pulling into line’ that had needed to be done. She was surprised though to hear Avril describe her younger son as weak. ‘Then I must thank my lucky stars that that’s one union you’re never going to see,’ she said with a forced little laugh.

‘Am I missing something?’ Conan’s deep warm voice caused goose bumps to break out over Sienna’s skin.

She hadn’t seen him since he’d left to attend some business meeting that morning. Now, as he crossed the terrace to where they were sitting, wearing an impeccably cut silver grey suit, white shirt and silver tie, he looked so vital and dynamic against the backdrop of his luxury residence that the very sight of him took Sienna’s breath away.

‘What have you two been talking about?’ he enquired smoothly.

Her nostrils dilated at the elusive spice of his aftershave lotion as he moved into their sphere, her senses filling with him, her body tingling as his gaze ran over her camisole and her feminine skirt. In spite of her fluttering pulse, and motivated by her memories of his insensitivity and by this frighteningly lethal power he seemed to have over her, she looked up into those rugged features to say pointedly, ‘You.’

He was aware of the contention in her voice. It was evident in the way his mouth twisted in mocking amusement.

‘For heaven’s sake, Conan, take her away and do something with her!’ Avril suggested, with more strength than she’d seemed capable of. ‘Or she’ll be having me jogging round the cape and back before I know where I am.’

‘Well, that wouldn’t be a bad thing, would it?’ he expressed surprisingly with a wry smile at his mother—a smile that changed to one of heart-stopping sensuality as it came to rest on Sienna. ‘It seems my mother’s given me licence to do whatever I want with you …’ The innuendo was unmistakable, and the light that flickered in the Celtic gold of his eyes as he offered her his hand burned with sensual mockery. ‘So we’d better not disappoint her, had we?’

I
MPELLED
by something stronger than her own will, she took the hand he was holding out to her. It was warm and strong and incredibly stimulating, sending a sharp
frisson
through her racing blood.

‘Where are we going?’ she asked, her fingers still in his as he brought her out across the front portico with its marble columns to the bright red convertible Ferrari standing on the drive.

‘You’ll see.’

‘What about Daisy?’ she asked, concerned, as he opened the passenger door for her.

‘Daisy’s asleep,’ he assured her, surprising her with the knowledge that he must have checked up on his niece before joining her and Avril on the terrace. ‘She’s all right, I promise you.’

It came as quite a shock to realise that he was the only person whom she would have accepted that from without needing to check it out for herself. But why? she wondered, puzzled. When she didn’t even like him? When he was the last man she would choose to be with? If she’d had a choice!

‘I have to pick up some documents in Cannes,’ he enlightened her as the Ferrari growled away. ‘We won’t be gone long, but I thought you might appreciate getting away from the house for an hour or so.’

Had he really thought that? she wondered, with an insidious
warmth stealing through her—until she became aware of just how she was behaving.

Careful, she warned herself, realising that she was in grave danger of weakening towards him. As most women would, she accepted without any reservation, drawn as they were to those darkly aloof features and that uncompromising air of command mixed with that smoky sexuality of his that put every other man in the shade. But then they didn’t know how unpitying he was, did they? she decided bitterly.

The air was pure and sweet as they drove through the forested hills, passing swathes of olive and citrus groves, and villages perched high above the sun-streaked sea.

‘Do you come here very often?’ she enquired, needing to say something because he wasn’t.

‘As often as I can. Long weekends. Bank holidays. But almost always for the summer.’

Breathing in the aromatic scents of wild herbs and lavender, Sienna returned, ‘I can see why.’ With its craggy coast, its mountains, and its interminable cypress trees piercing the dramatic blue of the sky, this landscape fitted him as if he was part of it. Unyielding. Implacable. Untamed. ‘My parents always liked Spain, so we went there virtually every year,’ she told him. ‘Self-catering—that sort of thing. Cheap and cheerful, as Mum called it, but we had some great family holidays together.’

‘That sounds good,’ he remarked distractedly, making her wonder if he was just saying that. After all, what was camping on the Costa Brava compared with a billionaire’s security-guarded villa in the South of France?

‘What about you?’ she murmured a little hesitantly, eager to know more about her late husband’s brother. After all, he hadn’t always been rich.

She knew he’d left home while still remarkably young, and according to Niall had had a variety of mundane and often laborious jobs until some lucky break and the right contacts had tested his entrepreneurial skills and set him on the road to
where he was today. He’d made his fortune in telecommunications, she remembered, although his enterprises these days ranged from anything from technology to high finance. As a man, however, he was an enigma—he always had been—and he and Niall had been as different as wind and fire.

‘What
about
me?’ He was changing into a lower gear to take a winding road up the steep hillside, the action drawing Sienna’s attention to his lean dark hand.

‘Did you have family holidays?’ she enquired, slamming down the lid on her speculation over how those strong skilled hands would know their way around a woman’s body.

‘Well, not quite as adventurous as yours sound,’ he admitted dryly.

‘Niall said you never knew your own father?’ she ventured, aware that he’d been born illegitimate and that he might not want to talk about it.

‘No,’ he said uncommunicatively, seeming, from his curious glance in her direction, to have picked up on that rather breathy note in her voice at the turn her thoughts had taken about him.

‘What about your stepfather?’ She knew he had adopted Conan as his own son when Conan was four or five, and that the man had also given him his name.

‘What about him?’ His tone was frosty to say the least.

‘Did you get on with him?’

‘No.’

It was obvious from the lack of any further information that he clearly didn’t like this probing into what was, after all, his very private life. And if she knew anything about Conan Ryder it was that he guarded his privacy like Fort Knox. His involvements with women, if reported upon, were done so with absolute discretion—such was the respect he seemed to generate with the world’s media. And if he gave interviews—as he sometimes did—it was only ever in connection with the commercial side of his life. That was unless the paparazzi got hold of something they thought would be worth reporting and
managed to photograph him unofficially—as they had at that airport with Petra Flax.

A covert glance at him through her dark lenses revealed a profile as harsh and forbidding as the cliffs above which they were driving, and the knuckles of those long tanned hands appeared white as they gripped the wheel.

With a little mental shrug Sienna delved into her skirt pocket for the cell phone she’d brought with her. ‘Just checking on Daisy.’ She felt the need to explain when he sent her an enquiring look, and guessed from the quizzical arching of his eyebrow what he was probably thinking. She hadn’t always appeared to care so much.

It came back to her now—sharper than ever—the night Niall had telephoned, insisting she meet him at that party. A party she’d had no inclination to attend. She’d gone along for the sake of his job, leaving Daisy with their babysitter, after Niall had requested her support with some clients he was trying to close a deal with.

When Conan, with a face like a marauding Norse god, had turned up at that party a few hours later, Niall had been nowhere to be seen. Later she was to discover that he’d slipped away with his clients to a casino, leaving her to bear the brunt of Conan’s pulsing anger alone.

What the hell did she think she was doing? he’d demanded. Enjoying herself regardless while her child had been taken ill and his mother and the babysitter were going half out of their wits?

She’d responded to his unrepeatable accusations as to the sort of mother he thought she was with defensive anger. Hadn’t she checked her mobile at least a dozen times that evening to make sure she hadn’t missed any urgent messages? No one had been more paranoid than she about leaving Daisy, and everything had been fine when she had left.

But when she’d taken her phone out of her clutch bag she’d been shocked to find it was switched off, and Conan’s low opinion of her had only increased tenfold.

Later, when they were alone, Niall had admitted to her that it was he who had switched off her phone. “I just wanted you to relax,” she remembered him saying, feeling a bittersweet ache for how much she had loved him—trusted him then. “You’re always so wound up and worrying about her unnecessarily. And I knew I had my phone on me.” He just hadn’t thought when he’d left the party with those clients.

He’d bought her a pendant the next day. A golden heart on a chain with a diamond piercing its centre, virtually getting down on his knees and begging her to forgive him for showing her up in such a bad light with Conan and his mother. He’d only been thinking of her after all, she’d accepted, when all the fuss had died down. And Daisy had been all right. So she’d forgiven him. As she always had, she thought poignantly. Until that last time …

Conan’s stop in Cannes was a ten-minute affair while he picked up some business papers from one of the prestigious hotels there. While he was gone, Sienna marvelled at the number of equally prestigious cars, the chic shops and the chic people who were patronising them. But the crowds along the palm-fringed promenade made her appreciate why Conan had chosen to buy a house in the peace and isolation of the peninsula, and she told him so when they were on the road again.

‘I’m glad you approve,’ was all he said, although she couldn’t help wondering if he sounded pleased.

Because it became clear as they were driving back that he really had brought her out for no other reason than to enjoy herself, she asked, ‘Why are you doing this if you despise me so much?’

Behind the dark designer lenses, his eyes didn’t leave the road. ‘Does there have to be a reason?’

‘With you?’ She stole a discreet glance at his ruggedly sculpted profile and those broad shoulders—he’d removed his jacket—and her stomach did a little flip. ‘Oh yes, I think so.’

‘Perhaps that incident between us in the pool the other day aroused my curiosity.’

‘About what?’ she croaked, thinking that that wasn’t all it had aroused.

‘About why a couple who—to put it a little less dramatically than you put it—don’t appear to like each other should find themselves in the sort of unlikely situation we found ourselves in yesterday. Because do you know what I’d really like to do with you, Sienna?’

She had a good idea, but she didn’t want to acknowledge it. Her heart was hammering and her mouth felt as dry as the Sahara. ‘Put me on the first plane home?’ she hedged.

‘That would be the most sensible course of action to take, I agree,’ he admitted. ‘For both our sakes.’

‘Then why don’t you?’

‘Because there’s more than just ourselves in this to consider.’

‘And if there weren’t?’

‘Then I’d take you home to bed and not let you out of it until we’d burned this whole crazy thing out of our systems. And do you know what’s making it so hard to stop myself from doing that?’

With her pulses fluttering in response to what he had just said, she quipped unsteadily, ‘No doubt you’re going to tell me.’

‘Knowing that you want it too.’

‘Now, wait a minute … !’ Confusion and embarrassment reddened her cheeks beneath the healthy lustre of her windblown hair. ‘Just because we shared one kiss it doesn’t mean—’

‘That wasn’t just a kiss.’

No, it wasn’t, she thought. It was a culmination of something fuelled by hostility and resentment and which had been building with unstoppable force from the moment they had set eyes on each other again.

But, taking her silence for denial, suddenly he was pulling into a lay-by.

‘What are you doing?’ she challenged, her heart leaping, her throat contracting painfully as he turned off the ignition.

‘What do you think I’m doing?’ he murmured suggestively.

She shot him a warning glance and he laughed very softly.

‘I thought you might appreciate the view,’ he surprised her by saying, removing his sunglasses.

They were parked on a hilltop, with the shimmering sea below them, and it felt as though there were only the two of them in the world. It was late enough for the cicadas and lizards to have begun their evening chorus, and a late finch was chirruping in the scrubland beside the car. Affected by the sounds and scents of nature, and all the beauty around them, she found the stillness of the evening brought a painful lump to her throat.

‘Why did you treat Niall so badly?’ It slipped out before she could stop it, subdued yet quietly direct.

‘Why did
you?
’ he retorted.

She didn’t answer, looking away from those harshly probing eyes towards the west, where the sun was turning the sky from brilliant gold to fiery red. What would it matter what she told him now? His brother was dead, and there were some things that couldn’t be changed no matter what was said.

‘Do I take it from your silence that you’re admitting to that affair at last?’

Her head pivoted to face him. ‘No!’

That cynical curl to his mouth told her he didn’t believe her. ‘Did you realise Niall was aware of it, Sienna?’

Watching the shadows that flitted across her face, Conan couldn’t help thinking that she seemed shaken by his disclosure. In fact she looked positively shattered by it, he thought, surprised. But then what wife who had just found out that her husband had known about her extra-marital relationship wouldn’t? he thought scornfully.

‘He couldn’t have been. I mean … there was nothing to be aware of,’ Sienna uttered, bemused. And, as it dawned on her just what Conan was saying, ‘You mean … he was the one who told you …?’

She couldn’t go on. She felt hurt, bewildered—devastated.
She’d known that Niall had been insecure. Possessive. Even unsure of her. But not to the degree that he’d have expressed his concerns to anyone else …

‘Why would he have had reason to suspect you if it wasn’t true?’

His brother’s flaying demand shook her out of the numbing shock of what she had just learned.

‘Because just like you he wouldn’t accept that a man I cared about could be anything other than romantically involved with me,’ she flung at him bitterly.

‘A man you cared about?’
he underscored derogatorily, a black winged eyebrow climbing his forehead.

‘Make of it what you will!’ she snapped, folding her arms and clutching her elbows tight in a totally defensive gesture against all he was saying.

‘My brother obviously did.’ Conan was giving her no quarter. ‘Did you even realise how crazy he was about you?’

‘Yes.’

‘And what was wrong with that, Sienna? Does a man’s loving you make him somehow less of a man in your eyes?’

‘Of course not!’

‘Just an inconvenience, then?’

‘No!’

‘Then what were you doing that morning in another man’s flat—especially one you
cared
about—’ his tone was censuring ‘—if you weren’t having an affair?’

Relaxing her arms a little, she said pointedly, ‘Would you believe just visiting him?’

Harsh scepticism touched his mouth. ‘I might if it hadn’t been so obvious that you’d been sleeping there. Or if you hadn’t been so ready to lie to your husband about where you were going every time you went “shopping” for the day, dragging your toddler along with you to witness your illicit little affair. So why did you—
if
you’re as innocent as you say you were? Answer me that.’