by Dani Collins
“Good work, Holmes. I should have consulted government-issued safe work plans prior to retreating from the tide, I assume?”
A pithy look, then, “It’s a wonder your mother didn’t drown you at birth. Do you want help or not?”
She grudgingly held out a hand. “I don’t even know why you want to help me.”
“I don’t,” he replied flatly, going down on one knee and reaching for supplies. “But I am an adult, and adults take responsibility rather than doing whatever selfish thing they want.”
“Is that a dig? Because I’m almost twenty-two. A fully-fledged adult.” Even to herself she sounded like a petulant child and, really, reminding him it was nearly her birthday was the last thing she ought to do.
“All grown up,” he said, with an ironic twist to the corner of his mouth. Renewed tension seemed to gather in his expression as he smoothed a bandage against her wrist.
“Yes,” she claimed pertly. Her pulse involuntarily tripped under his dispassionate caress, making her subtly catch a breath.
His gaze came up sharply, the blue like the center of a flame.
She was transported back to the feel of his arms as they’d stood wet and trembling on the beach, his arousal hardening against her. Heat flooded into her, chasing away the last of her chill, cooking her alive. She should have felt appalled and disgusted, but to her eternal shame she was energized by the crackle of sexual awareness in the air.
“All grown up,” he repeated, with flint in his tone, and lifted her hand to press his lips against the bandage, a cruelly mocking glint in his eye.
She flinched and pulled her hand away, even though she’d barely felt the pressure of his mouth. That so hadn’t been kiss-and-make-it-better!
Derisive amusement darkened his eyes. “No? That’s not like you, Ro.”
Her heart took a long plunge of disgrace. At the same time she felt herself begin to glow with heated longing and other weakening sensations, even as uncertainty and intrigue muddled her mind. Desperately she reminded herself of how unaffected and ruthless he could be.
“What are you doing, Nic?” she asked, trying unsuccessfully to clear the huskiness from her throat. “Offering a clumsy seduction in hopes of getting what you want out of me?”
“Oh, I’m far from clumsy. I know exactly what I’m doing when it comes to seduction.” The hard tone was coupled with a look that might as well have swept the towel from her body and left her as nude as she’d been in the shower.
Had she really wished over the years for him to notice her? Really notice her? This was a horribly defenseless feeling! Every single occasion of testing a flirty glance or enticing him with a smile came back to her as mortifyingly obvious behavior that was now giving him the chance to get the better of her.
“You’re having a go at me,” she accused, as much to remind herself as to let him know she saw through him. “I’m sure other women wither at your feet when you bring your best game, but I’m not one of them. Act solicitous all you want, but I know you don’t care. You don’t want me. You don’t even like me.”
He took a moment to smooth a plaster over her second palm, finally asking with detached interest, “Do all of those things have to be in place at once?” He met her gaze with a look of cool consideration.
She pressed her lips into a tight line, stung by the implied agreement that he didn’t like her. Yet still wanted her. That shouldn’t excite her, but her blood seemed to slow and thicken in her arteries, making her feel hot and full of power.
“Since when did you even think about me before you decided I was in the way of something you wanted?” she managed, trying to ignore the internal signals bouncing with anticipation inside her.
His shoulders went back and his jaw hardened. “One has nothing to do with the other. I may want you to sign some papers, but that has nothing to do with physical chemistry.”
“Chemistry that cropped up today of all days?” she scoffed, flushing with anger because her reaction to him had been torturing her forever. “It certainly wasn’t there two years ago, was it?” she prodded, thinking, Shut up, Rowan.
“You want to go back to that?” With a flash of the tested anger he’d shown her then, he reached forward to cup the back of her wet head and pulled her forward to meet the crush of his mouth over hers.
“N-n-n...!” She almost got the word out, but it turned into a whimper of surprise, then disintegrated under the assertive rake of his very knowledgeable mouth.
No champagne or the romance of a windswept beach this time. This was raw, unapologetic and incredibly beguiling. He kissed with the same command and purpose that emanated from the rest of his being. He was in control. He would take what he wanted. Their last kiss and the biting lecture that had followed had been a warning she should have heeded. Nic was a powerful, dangerous man.
Who knew how to level a woman with a kiss.
She brought her hands to his wrist and shoulder, overwhelmed yet helpless to the enthralling press of his lips over hers. There was no fighting him as he took her mouth—not because he was stronger, but because he made it so good. She could practically taste his contempt, his selfish demand that she give up everything to him, but there was skill here, too. A wicked appeal to the primitive in her. He drew her into the kiss even when she knew she shouldn’t let herself be drawn.
Her inner being expanded toward him, tendrils of heated pleasure reaching for connection. She moaned, unfamiliar imperatives climbing with primal force in her. This was Nic. He didn’t want her. He was messing with her. But this was Nic. She’d fantasized about him for years.
The light scrape of his teeth suffused her with heat. The proprietorial thrust of his tongue, the captivating taste of his mouth over hers, stabbed excitement through her, nudging her into a dark world of wild sensations and ravenous desire. Her limbs curled toward him like stems toward the sun, wanting more. It was crazy. Distantly she recognized this possession of her mouth had a purpose: arousal. He intended to take her all the way.
Her heart skipped. She shouldn’t let this happen, but she wanted to. And he wasn’t a force to be stopped. He reached to her lower back and pulled her hips toward him, forcing her knees to part and bracket his waist. Her shin struck the register. A ringing pain slashed through her wanton stupor, making her jolt in shock. Her towel slipped.
Oh, God, what was she doing?
* * *
Nic checked the urge to overpower Rowan’s recoil and drag her back into the kiss. Into the bedroom or onto the floor. Anywhere. She was flushed, and her breath was stuttering from between glossy kiss-swollen lips. Her eyes were still cloudy with desire, the honeyed taste of her sexual appetite still tangible on his tongue.
The beast ran hard in him, fighting against being steered back into its corral. Nic’s chest heaved and the hot coil of pressure behind his fly demanded release. He had one hand braced on the wall and used the other to reach for her jaw, ignoring the mental warnings trying to penetrate his fog of carnal hunger. This time he’d let it happen.
Before he could tilt Rowan back into the direction they’d been headed, her pale expression and the flash of a worried look downward stopped him. She leaned cautiously to examine her leg, her hand pressing the middle of his chest to push him back.
He followed her gaze and the sight froze him. Not the scrape on her knee. That was little worse than a tumble off a bicycle would produce, but the scars down her shin were horrific.
“What the hell?” He sat back on his heels, physical arousal taking a backseat to shock. The depth of her injury, communicated by the crisscross of thin white lines, revolted him. He reached one hand behind her knee and had to school his clenching muscles to take care as he lifted her ankle in the other hand, studying the full extent of the damage.
Her shin wasn’t the only issue. She had old scars all over her feet, framing kno
bbly toes with cracked nails that were only partially healed.
Rowan flexed her foot. “Don’t.”
“Hurts?” It had to. The marks spoke of repeated injuries.
She snorted. “I’ve lived with pain at that end of my body for so long I don’t even notice it. I don’t like anyone looking at my feet.” Her lashes swept down in self-conscious dismay. “They’re ugly.”
“They’re not pretty,” he agreed, smoothing the pad of his thumb over an old callus, astounded by the time and effort it would have required to form the thick bump. “This is from dancing?”
“We all get them,” she defended, and attempted to pull from his grip.
He held on. He hadn’t meant to sound so appalled, but he was inexplicably angered. The big scar was bad enough, but at least it was understandable. It had been an accident. These others...
“Why would anyone do this to herself?” he questioned, channeling an unexpected surge of concern into impatience. “I’ve seen foot soldiers coming off a month-long march with better feet.”
She flushed and pushed her damp hair behind her ear. “It’s part of the process. They’ve gotten a lot better since I’ve been off them.”
“Because your leg was broken.” He looked again at the long scar. Everything Rowan did was superficial, but suddenly he couldn’t be dismissive of what she’d been going through. Her remark about being in constant pain echoed in his head along with her old claims of “doing the best I can” to Cassandra’s livid, “How can you not be ready?”
It occurred to him that his impression of Rowan as a slacker was largely based on those overheard accusations that Rowan wasn’t trying hard enough. That perturbed him. He generally formed his own opinions, but he’d been seeing her with a skewed view to hold her at a distance. He didn’t often mislead himself like that.
“How many surgeries have you had?” he asked, setting her cut foot on his thigh.
“Three. I’m a little concerned about the pins, actually,” she confided hesitantly. “I think they’re killing me right now because they got cold. Does anything feel out of place?” She bit her lip, the apprehensive pull of her brow more concerning than her actual words. She was suppressing very real distress.
A chill took him as he carefully felt up and down her calf. The male in him was aware of lean muscle under smooth pale skin, and fascinating shadows beneath the drape of the bathsheet across her thighs. He’d got a too brief glimpse of her through the steamed walls of the shower and was dying for a proper study of her form. He focused on determining whether she’d rebroken something, but that thought filled the pit of his stomach with ashes—not unlike the defeated fury that had taken him as he’d run up the beach, afraid he wouldn’t reach her in time.
He turned his mind from that raw terror.
“It seems okay. Will you dance again?” He already knew the answer, and tension gathered in him, resisting the truth.
She leaned forward to palpate the shin herself, brushing his hands off her calf, remaining silent. He lifted his gaze from watching her massage her torn muscles. Her mink lashes formed a pair of tangled lines.
“On tables,” she finally replied with a tough smile, “but not on the stage.”
Expecting the answer didn’t make it easier to hear. He was taken aback by a surprisingly sharp stab of sympathy. As a journalist, he’d spent his life asking people for their reactions to events, but he had never asked anyone How do you feel about that? He wanted to ask Rowan, but her snarky response grated, compelling him to say, “You never wanted to dance anyway. It was a bone of contention with your mother, wasn’t it? Her insisting you go to that fancy school? You must be relieved.”
She gave a little snort of cynical amusement and dipped her head in a single nod that left her damp hair hanging. “Yes, I can honestly say I was relieved when they finally admitted I would never get back to my old level and asked me to leave so someone with whole bones and genuine passion could take my spot.”
His heart kicked as he disagreed with anyone claiming Rowan lacked passion. He was still tingling from their kiss a minute ago. He didn’t let the sensation escalate, though, sidetracked by her bitter revelation.
“When they admitted?” he repeated. “You wanted to quit and they wanted to rehabilitate you?” He reached for a bandage to cover her knee, aware of his sympathy dwindling. She was a shirker after all.
“Madame is a close friend of Mum’s. She knew Mum wouldn’t want all those years of training to be for nothing, but she also knew as well as I did that I had reached my potential before the accident and that I’d never be good enough. She pushed me anyway, and I tried until my ankle gave out. We finally agreed I was a grand failure and the silver lining was that my mother would never know.”
He didn’t want to be affected by the wounded shadows of defeat lurking behind her sparking eyes and pugnacious chin, but he was. Rowan might have quit, but because she was a realist about her own limitations, not a quitter. He wondered what else he’d failed to see in her before today.
“If you didn’t like dance, why did you pursue it?” he asked.
A brief pause, then a challenging, “Why did you go into the same field as Olief?”
It was a blatant deflection from his own question—one that deepened his interest in her motives. He answered her first, though. His reason was simple enough.
“I was curious about him so I followed his work. You can’t read that many articles on world events and not feel compelled to discover the next chapter.” He shrugged and began patching her other knee. “I wasn’t trying to emulate him. Were you? Trying to emulate Cassandra?”
Rowan made a noise of scorn. “Not by choice. Count yourself lucky that no one knew you were related to Olief when you started out. You were able to prove yourself on your own merit and do it because you wanted to. I was pushed into dancing as a gag. It was a way for my mother to stand out, because she had this little reflection of herself beside her. She was allowed to quit when she and Olief got together, but I still had all this ‘potential’ to be realized.”
Nic had never framed his abandonment by his parents as good fortune, but he’d never taken a hard look at Rowan’s situation and seen it for misfortune either.
He frowned, not enjoying the sense that he’d been blind and wrong. None of Rowan’s revelations changed anything, he reminded himself. He still wanted full control of Marcussen Media. She still needed to sign the petition forms, grow up, and take responsibility for herself—not party her way across Europe at his expense.
Rowan watched Nic’s concentration on her fade to something more familiar and removed and suspected she knew why. She dropped her gaze to the bandaged hands she’d clenched in her lap, the fetid crown of disloyalty making her hang her head. In her wildest dreams she had never imagined Nic would be the person to crack this resentment out of her. She’d anticipated taking her anger to the grave, because only the lowest forms of life said anything against Cassandra O’Brien. A good daughter would certainly never betray her mother when she was gone.
“Not that I hated her for forcing me into it,” Rowan mumbled, trying to recant. “I understood. She was my age when she had me. All she knew was performing, and that sort of career doesn’t wait around while you raise a child. She didn’t have any support. Her family disowned her when she left to become—gasp!—an actress. You have to be an opportunist to survive in that business, and that’s what she was trying to do. Survive.”
She risked a glance upward and saw that Nic didn’t exactly look sympathetic. He was closing off completely to what she was saying, his lip curling in cynical understanding of words like “opportunist” and “survivor.”
Rowan clenched her teeth, thinking she would be calling on all the skills Cassandra O’Brien had ever taught her when it came to surviving. That had been the real source of animosity between mother and daughter: the
things Cassandra had done to keep them both fed and clothed. The men she’d brought into their home—the homes she’d brought Rowan into. The pressure for Rowan to ‘make it’ so they had a fallback position if things went south. The fact that when it came right down to it Cassandra had been most concerned about her own survival at the expense of her daughter’s happiness, and had alternately been threatened by and quick to exploit her daughter’s youth and beauty.
The tenderness of pressure on a cut pulled Rowan back to Nic pressing a bandage into place on the bottom of her foot.
“What are you going to do now?” he asked.
“That’s the million-dollar question, isn’t it? I’m not exactly brimming with marketable skills.”
“Perhaps you should have addressed that as soon as you left school, rather than making a spectacle of yourself with the rest of the Euro-trash.”
Ouch. Although a tiny bit justified. She hadn’t seen how truly shallow most of her friends were until she’d tried to rely on them as she dealt with everything—not least of which was this utterly directionless feeling of not knowing who she was or where she was going. Her friends had coaxed her to drink her way out of her funk. Something she’d briefly been led into before realizing how quickly she could turn into her father. That had scared her back onto the straight and narrow, but she couldn’t believe Nic’s attitude toward her bad turn after all she’d told him.
“I had to go somewhere when I was kicked out of residence. I wasn’t ready to face this empty house so I stayed with friends. Where else was I supposed to go? To you, big brother?”
The warning that flashed in his icy blue eyes spoke of retribution for that label. She took notice, clamping her teeth together and leaning back an inch, not willing to get into a kissing contest again.
His nod was barely perceptible, but it was there, approving of her smart and hasty retreat. That irritated her. She didn’t want to be afraid of him and she wasn’t. She was afraid of herself and how weak he made her feel.
Sitting straighter, she said defensively, “Perhaps it wasn’t the best coping strategy, but I had a lot to deal with.”