“Talk about the warring Irish!” he chortled with joyous mischievousness. “Matt does tend to have a rather provoking smugness whenever he’s in the right. I’d say he deserves to be knocked down a peg or two, just once in his life. So what do you say—let’s get engaged for a while to rub his nose in it.”
Sian brooded out of her window, black brows slanted. He’d be absolutely livid when he found out. What perfect, sublime revenge for the way he’d treated her! “All right,” she grinned back recklessly. “You’re on. But let me be the one to tell him. I want to wait for just the right moment to drop the bombshell.”
Joshua frowned. “Are you sure you know what you’re doing? Matt can be very forceful when he’s roused.”
“Don’t worry about that. I can handle him.” Why, Sian Riley, said her father’s lyrical voice at the back of her head, ’tis a bigger liar you are than even I am. But she squelched the ghost firmly, because whether she could handle Matt or not, she was bound and determined to get him, just once and good. Regardless of the consequences. Like Joshua said, he certainly deserved it and she—she had a whole lot of bent pride that demanded payment.
Joshua pulled on to a side street and they cut through a quiet neighbourhood until they reached the house of a friend of his where they could leave the cars. The beach was about half a mile’s walk along a forest path that followed a stream through several wide picnic clearings. As they climbed out and retrieved their bags from the car, the red Mercedes slid up behind them.
Jane and Steven had glowing eyes and high colouring and looked as though they had enjoyed themselves immensely. Matt wore an indulgent smile, layered tawny hair whipped off his forehead. He hadn’t troubled to put on a shirt and the longest bottom strands lay along the golden tanned skin at the base of his neck. Sian’s eyes moved all over him, from the amusement in his face to the expanse of his broad muscled chest. She couldn’t help herself.
He glanced at her, caught her looking at him and his lazy grin widened. She stiffened before she could control it, then a deliberate reminder of the mischief she had in store for him brought a remarkably sweet smile to her lips. That took him aback, she saw with deep satisfaction, and a wary look crept into those clever hazel eyes. Her mood turned sunny.
The men carried the heavy coolers of food and drink while Jane and Sian carried the bags, and after walking through the forest for several minutes they came upon the dunes. The heat rising off the sand brought a light sheen of sweat to Sian’s face, and she mopped her brow as she trudged behind Matt and Joshua. The closer they came to the blue sparkling lake that seemed as immense to the eye as any ocean, the more people they found.
“Whew!” said Jane, coming up beside her. The men had stopped and were discussing the best place to settle. “Everybody and their uncle must be here.”
“And their brother,” added Sian in a dry undertone, at which the other girl giggled.
Joshua was asking, of nobody in particular, “Should we try to get closer to the water?”
Matt said, one long, elegant hand shading his eyes, “Why don’t we try for slightly higher ground? The sun’s quite strong and we ought to try to spread the blankets close to some shade if we can.”
He had sent a quick glance down Sian’s body as he spoke, and, though he hadn’t specifically said so, she knew that he had made the suggestion in deference to her pale creamy skin. The thoughtfulness surprised her.
At last they chose a site on a rise about thirty feet up from the beach by the water, the blankets spread half in the sunlight, half in the shade of a nearby copse that also worked as an effective windscreen. Then everybody settled into the business of some serious relaxation.
Jane rummaged in her large tote bag until she produced a black and white soccer ball, which she bounced off Steven’s head when his back was turned. With a startled roar he leapt to his feet and she ran off laughing.
Sian smiled as she watched their carefree antics. There were no haggard signs of the stress they had all gone through in the last month as they struggled to finish papers and study for final exams. She and Jane had stalked around the apartment, short-tempered through lack of sleep and snapping at each other over the most ridiculous things.
Still, the work had been worth it. Sian was well qualified to seek out a position as a junior designer in a fashion house, though that wasn’t what she wanted to do. She nursed a secret ambition to set up her own design company but lacked the self-confidence in how to go about doing it in such a cut-throat industry. It was why she had decided to continue going to school so that she could supplement her knowledge of design with courses in marketing and business administration. That way she stood a better chance of at least some modest success. She wasn’t looking to make her fortune. She just wanted to earn a good living with some degree of independence.
Lost in contemplation of the future, she began to strip off her clothes absent-mindedly, completely unaware of the sudden still attention she attracted. Off came the pink top, revealing the pale rose bikini that moulded like a second skin over high rounded breasts. Down slid the elastic band of the skirt over a long, narrow waist, widening to a soft rounded belly and shapely hips. Her flawless ivory skin was so thin that delicate blue shadows could be seen in the strong sunlight at temples and wrists, the bottom of her soft beating throat, the backs of her knees.
She had just reached down for her bottle of water-resistant sun lotion when two long, athletically muscled legs entered her peripheral vision. Matt murmured silkily into her ear, stirring the tiny sensitive hairs at the nape of her neck, “Like me to rub some of that on to your back?”
Joshua had appropriated the ball, and Jane and Steven chased him down into the water, the trio laughing maniacally. Sian turned to look at Matt with a wide gaze more green than long whipped strands of sea oats and grasses. She smiled at him pleasantly. “Yes, thank you.”
Startlement flickered past the mischief in his own hazel eyes. Got him again, she thought with satisfaction, but he recovered himself with admirable ease and took the bottle to squeeze a portion into one large hand. She put her back to him and pulled her braid to one side while he started to rub her shoulders.
She had steeled herself for the alien sensation of his touch roaming by consent over her body, but found she was relaxing almost immediately under the warm surprise of his extremely gentle hands. He worked over the muscles of her back with unhurried sensitivity, discovering knots of tension and kneading them loose with care. Her head began to droop as she gave an unconscious sigh of pleasure.
“What happened to the open warfare?” he asked. The smile had carried to his voice.
She said, “It’s gone underground in a change of tactics. I believe they call it ‘low-intensity conflict’.”
She felt rather than heard his laugh. Low and husky, it reverberated through his hands to her body, and her heart missed a beat. “You won’t give up, will you?”
“Did you really expect me to?” she returned sweetly. “Besides, you don’t strike me as the kind of person who would give up easily yourself.”
“You’re right. I don’t, especially when I see something I want. Then I go after it, and nothing short of flood, fire or act of God can make me stop,” he murmured.
She could well understand that. He wouldn’t have got where he was today as a valued and respected senior partner for a huge multinational architectural firm if he hadn’t had that unswerving drive to mould his actions. Certainly she had caught the backlash of his aggression; unleashed and in full force at the workplace, it would be something to see. His was the kind that erected towers and moved mountains.
“I stand warned,” she said, and hoped the quiver of her voice could be attributed to an answering amusement, instead of the real cause which was the unbelievable magic he was working on her body.
He reached up to massage the exposed nape of her neck and she must have made some sound, for th
e pressure in his fingers immediately eased and he asked, “Did I hurt you?”
“No,” she replied, muffled. “My neck’s just stiff because I slept on it wrong.”
Then she almost flinched, half expecting another sardonic remark about her sleeping habits. Instead Matt said gently, “Where, over here? Hold still a minute. There, how does that feel?”
Sian turned her head experimentally and said, surprised, “Much better, thank you.”
“You’re welcome,” he told her, then purred, “Want me to do your front?”
She threw back her head and laughed out loud, the sound like music in the air, and held out her hand for the lotion. “Not on your life! The warfare hasn’t gone that far underground!”
He shifted to settle on the sand beside her, looping his arms around upraised knees, showing no inclination to join the others who were cavorting in the water. She shifted her gaze away from the flex of those powerful-looking biceps and bent her attention to applying lotion to the rest of her body.
After they had sat watching the swimmers and the silence had stretched for several minutes into something like peace, Matt turned his head and looked at her. “It won’t work, you know.”
“What won’t?” she asked, startled and wary.
“What you’re trying to do.” He regarded her with a cool, measuring stare and said, soft and deliberate, “I’m no young, inexperienced boy you can get around by using your charm.”
The predator was back, curled and waiting his moment in the sun for a chance to spring, the hard eyes unblinking on her sun-flushed face, that mobile mouth taut. But for the first time Sian saw past the impact his forcefulness had on her and smiled. It was nice to see him doing the reacting for a change.
An attempt at innocence would be a mistake, for he had been right. She leaned back on her elbows and returned stare for stare. “Is that what you think I’m trying to do?”
“I think,” he said slowly, not returning her smile, “that you would try to charm the leaves off the trees if you thought it would be to your advantage.”
Sian’s eyes narrowed, a quick, telling gesture; and the slim lines of her eyebrows became tokens of unpredictability. She said abruptly, “People are like circles, don’t you think?”
His face became shuttered, the thoughts moving behind the mask with subterranean speed. After a moment he asked, “How so?”
She drew him a picture in the sand, slim forefinger moving lightly through the grains, of circles interlocking. “Like so. Joshua sees this part of my circle, and he thinks what he sees is me. Part of it is, but that isn’t all I am. We show different aspects of our personalities to different people; we assume roles. Child to parent, friend to friend, lover to lover, enemy to enemy.”
The quick hazel eyes lifted lightly to her face, the sun reflecting out of his eyes in vivid sparks. “And which are you?” he asked. Probing, ever probing. “Child, friend, lover, or enemy?”
The lines of her face were pared, stripped of every social convention, clean of animation until what was left was a patient and unforgiving intelligence.
“You drew a circle of all those preconceived notions about who I am, and what I would do,” she said quietly, and clenched her fist in the sand of her drawing. The tendons stood out, dusted with gold. “You think you’ve dropped your original ones, but you’ve only gone on to form others. You’re just so arrogant, Matt. That’s your biggest failing and that’s how I’m going to get you, because, every time you turn your back on me, I’ll be jumping out of the circle.”
Chapter Three
Matt just continued to watch her, large and powerful as some transcendent classic, enigmatic as the Sphinx. In the glare of the unrelenting sun his brown face showed marks of imperfection that made his handsomeness so very human. There was a dangerous attraction in the tiny laugh-lines fanning from his eyes and the faint signs of exhaustion that lingered from recent overwork, for they made him all that more approachable. He was no invincible juggernaut; he was a man, with more than his fair share of a man’s strengths and not a few of the failings.
With an inward shiver, she steeled herself against such observations, for she could not afford to soften. One slide into the tender side of her emotions and she would be in trouble. In that one respect he was like her father, for he too was a soul-stealer, one of that rare breed that women invariably fell for all over the world. He could lay his tawny head against a woman’s breast and call forth all the feelings Sian was so determined to avoid, accept them as his due, and then walk away without a backward glance. He was more than dangerous; he was lethal.
“You’re not a forgiver, are you, Sian?” he commented, almost absently. The keen focus of his attention took apart the definition of her.
“No, I’m not much of a forgiver,” she agreed, after a moment of deadly silence. It was an acknowledgement made in honesty, without pride or prevarication. Fair warning, tit for tat. An eye for an eye.
Then, quietly, he said an astonishing thing. “I hadn’t realised that I had hurt you so much.”
Reaction animated her expression as her green eyes flared, and she turned her head away in a harsh jerk that sent her french braid whipping over one shoulder. “Did you?” she returned, with the faintest mocking edge of vicious rejoinder. “Or did you just get in my way?”
“Are you so sure,” asked Matt then, wise and gentle as he bent forward over her half reclining body, “that I’m the one with the preconceived notions now, and not you?”
The change in his position cast a shadow over her face. She glanced up swiftly. He was a silhouette against the vast bright bowl of the sky, and all she could see was the outline of his head, which contained some fugitive quality that brought an unconscious parting of her dry lips. The tip of her pink tongue darted out to moisten them, and some slight change in the inclination of his head made her extremely aware of the act and shortened her breath.
He whispered, and the sound of it came over her like a warm breeze, “All I said to you earlier was that I considered you unsuitable for Joshua, and you are. You’re far too strong and volatile for someone as young and inexperienced as he, even down to the lovely curves and graceful shape of your perfect body. He hasn’t got the capacity to give you the depth of emotion and quality of passionate lovemaking that you deserve. If you marry him, you will always ache for what you don’t have, and he will always feel inadequate without quite understanding why.”
She trembled and longed to take the weight of her torso off the uncertain strength in her arms, but if she tried to sit up now she would bring herself within inches of his face, and the ravishing devastation pouring forth from that sexy, ruthless mouth. So, rather than moving towards him, she tried to attack instead. “Maybe somebody like Joshua has just what I’m looking for,” she mocked, wishing her voice didn’t sound so husky. “After all, you can’t control his money forever.”
Matt sounded amused. “I had that one coming, didn’t I? All right, Sian, I take it back unreservedly. A person who could handle that poker game the way you did, with reluctance, finesse and compassion, could never settle for a shallow, short-sighted goal such as money. What are you really looking for?”
The insight that she had only recently wished for in Joshua was present in abundance in his older brother, but Sian did not rejoice in the finding of it. Instead she felt exposed and self-protective.
“Try stability, for one,” she said, her tone clipped. “Plenty of people build secure relationships on other things besides love and passion, which can fizzle out so easily once the honeymoon stage of the marriage is over.”
“Could you actually settle for a marriage of convenience?” He made the question into a statement of incredulity, twisting her meaning into a concept that sounded unacceptable. “Would you really do something like that to a man like Joshua who was in love with you? If I were you, I would think about that long and hard, because it seems t
o me that there’s an element of cruelty in it, especially if you were to fall in love with someone else.”
“No, of course I wouldn’t!”
“Ah,” he stated flatly, “then you would marry a man who wasn’t in love with you.”
“Love doesn’t have to come into it!” she replied heatedly, impatient scorn crossing her upturned expression. “Everybody always makes so much of love and marriage going hand in hand, when stability and constancy are the important factors—and passionate affairs are distinctly overrated, when all they appear to bring are confusion and unhappiness to the parties concerned! Love is fine for those who want it, but it doesn’t hold the least part in my plans, thank you very much! I prefer my heart just the way it is—whole and unbroken!”
“Now I begin to get a picture of your Utopia,” remarked Matt coolly. “Polite conversation at the breakfast table and a weekly, joyless performance of your conjugal duties. Heaven help your children if you achieve your dream, because a more sterile existence I cannot imagine.”
She could no longer remain where she was and twisted sideways to rise out from under him. “That’s because you subscribe to the popular belief that one has to be in love to be happy,” she retorted over her shoulder, brushing away the grains of sand that clung to her elbows. “Whereas I am happy just the way I am, and I fully intend on staying that way!”
“Unawakened, unfulfilled, untouched,” he murmured, a snake in the garden of paradise. “Take care to build your briars very high, sleeping princess, otherwise real life will creep in when you least expect it.”
“Rubbish,” she said in a strong voice, but she crossed her arms defensively around a shaken stomach.
He continued, as if he hadn’t heard her, “And I’ll tell you this for nothing. Yes I believe in love, because, unlike you, I have been in love before, and it was not the naïve, helpless emotion you seem to think it is but a full-blooded, enriching experience in which passion and serenity were equal partners.”
A Solitary Heart Page 4