‘Please, Conan.’ She pushed against him, but her body betrayed her as she trembled in his arms.
‘Changed your mind again, sweetheart?’ he snarled. ‘Still hankering after Charles?’
‘No, no. You don’t understand. I never wanted Charles, not the way I want you. I never loved him,’ she cried—and stopped. She had told him more than she’d ever wanted him to know.
Conan’s grip tightened for a second. She felt the fierce tension tautening his huge frame and then abruptly he let her go, and if the wall had not been behind her she would have crumpled to the floor. ‘Don’t lie to me, Josie.’ He took a step back but still he towered over her. ‘I saw you, remember?’ he prompted with biting cynicism. ‘Or have you forgotten?’
She tilted her head back to stare into his dark eyes, as hard and unforgiving as sin. Something inside her snapped, and she lost it completely.
‘Oh, I remember very well...too well,’ she snarled. He was so bloody superior and she had had enough of feeling guilty. ‘You want the truth? I’ll give you the truth. I was a young girl with a crush on a blond-haired Adonis I had barely spoken to. The day Charles was supposed to be helping me at the church fête was the first time he asked me out. You were right. I went out with him three times in all, hardly a great love affair. Is that blunt enough for you?’
Conan went rigid, his eyes darkening with suppressed anger. That had got to him, she thought savagely, but she wasn’t finished yet. ‘The night I went to bed with him I’d had too much to drink, and I thought I loved him. When you found me lying on the bed, I wasn’t glowing in the aftermath of love. I was thinking, If that’s sex, it’s horrible.’ She didn’t notice the narrowing of Conan’s eyes, or the flash of some indefinable emotion contort his rugged face.
‘The very next day, I think I knew I’d made a mistake, because I wasn’t even sad that Charles had left. If anything I was relieved. Three weeks later, after a few telephone calls from Charles, I was certain. Talking to him without his image to blind me, I knew we had nothing in common. Then I discovered I was pregnant. I love my baby and wouldn’t be without her for the world. But the horrible truth is I never missed Charles at all, and I never intended to marry him.’
‘And you expect me to believe you?’ Conan said curtly.
His casual dismissal of her blunt confession was the last straw for Josie. ‘I don’t really care.’ With her small chin jutting out belligerently she continued. ‘I’m sick of feeling guilty. In fact I don’t feel guilty any more. The first night you and I made love, the only reason I froze for a second was because I remembered the other time and was afraid. I tried to explain, but you wouldn’t let me. It wasn’t my fault you chose to think it was because I loved Charles.’
Josie didn’t see the look of absolute horror in Conan’s eyes. She laughed, a harsh sound in the momentary silence. ‘In fact I should thank yon for deceiving me into your bed when I had amnesia. Not remembering I had been afraid, by the time I discovered you’d tricked me, you’d certainly cured me of any inhibitions. Ironic, isn’t it?’ Suddenly the futility of arguing with him hit her, and, brushing past him she picked her purse up from the sofa. Opening it, she withdrew the letter.
‘I actually came here to give you this.’ Sitting down on the sofa, she held the letter out towards him. ‘I don’t understand you at all. You married me to get the Manor and now you’re giving it away.’
Conan crossed the space dividing them in two lithe strides and, dropping down beside her, he grasped her by the shoulders. ‘I don’t want the Manor if I can’t have you, and Kathleen as well. I married you for one reason only. Because I love you. I used the excuse of getting the estate back to persuade you.’
She stared at him in shocked disbelief. ‘But you said your father was going to leave it to me if I didn’t marry you.’
‘He might have said something along those lines, but as I held all the mortgages he had taken on the property over the years it was an empty threat. The first time I saw you, my reason for visiting Beeches was to make a deal with my father. I agreed to pay all his debts and he agreed to my taking over the Manor. The next time I saw you, Charles knew I was coming down that night to finalise the deal. So, you see, nothing could have persuaded me into marriage,’ he declared huskily, ‘Unless I wanted to.’
‘So you didn’t marry me to get the house?’ Her heart turned over in her breast. ‘I don’t understand.’ But she was beginning to.
‘Oh, I think you do,’ he said softly. ‘I fell in love with you at first sight. I was driving past the vicarage garden, saw you and had to stop. When I approached you I was struck by your beauty, your innocence. I was so bewitched, I hadn’t the sense to ask your name.’ A bleak expression darkened his rugged features. ‘Then Charles arrived and claimed you. I couldn’t speak, I was so gutted, so I walked away.’
‘Oh, Conan.’ If only she had known, Josie thought.
‘I know; childish of me. And later I was incensed with rage and jealousy when I discovered Charles had...’ There was naked agony in his voice. ‘Anyway, when he died it was tragic. But I saw my chance and took it. I was prepared to have you any way I could get you.’
Josie believed him; it was there in the fierce determination in his dark glance. This proud, arrogant man loved her and she was humbled at the thought.
‘Oh, Conan if only I’d known,’ Josie whispered, placing her hand on his arm; the fact that he had been prepared to accept her unconditionally filled her with remorse. ‘I’ve been such a fool and I was so jealous of Angela.’
‘There was never anything between us, I swear.’
‘I believe you.’ She gazed into his dark eyes, her own deepening to purple, allowing all her love for him to show in their shimmering depths. ‘And I love you quite desperately.’
Conan bent his head and their mouths met and clung, draining from each other every last bit of pain and anger in a passionate, deeply loving kiss. His arms tightened around her, and he lowered her back against the sofa. Raining tiny kisses over her face, he declared huskily, ‘I love you, and baby Kathleen, more than life, and nothing else matters. I’ will never let you go again.’
Josie wrapped her arms around him, glorying in the length of his hard body pressing her down into the soft cushions, and buried her face against his neck. ‘You are my life,’ she whispered softly. ‘I think I—’
‘I’ve told you before.’ One strong hand swept a few stray curls from her brow, and his dark eyes glinted with love and desire as he recognised the sensual gleam in her own. ‘You think too much...’ And for a long time they did not think at all.
A week later the whole village of Beeches crowded the church as Kathleen Devine Zarcourt was christened, her proud parents looking on with love...
ISBN : 978-1-4592-5204-2
A HUSBAND OF CONVENIENCE
First North American Publication 1999.
Copyright © 1999 by Jacqueline Baird.
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