by Dani Collins
He rounded his desk to confront her in the cold bluish glow. He couldn’t contain the confused hurt bottled against the spurned rock that was his heart.
“Do you have any idea what it’s like to meet your father for the first time when you’re an adult? To finally be invited into his home only to watch him fawn over the daughter of his mistress—a girl who isn’t even related to him—while knowing he never once wasted affection on his real flesh and blood? Now, to be fair, my mother was only a one-night stand—not a long-term companion like your mother—but he knew about me from birth. He paid for my education, but he never so much as dropped by the boarding school to say hello. I came to believe he was incapable of fatherly warmth.” He’d had to. It had been the only way to cope. “Then I saw him with you.”
Rowan drew in a breath that seemed to shrink her lungs, making her insides feel small and tense. Olief was the one safe, reliable, loving person she could go to without being told to try harder, commit deeper, be better. That was why his disappearance was killing her. She missed him horribly. She loved him.
And apparently Nic felt she’d stolen all those precious moments at his expense.
“At least that explains why you hate me.” Nic, like everyone, had expected better of her and, like always, she didn’t know how she could have been different. All she could do was what she’d always done: apologize. “I’m sorry. I never meant to get between you.”
“Didn’t you?” he shot back, his feral energy expanding until her skin prickled with goose bumps.
She felt caught red-handed. Her old crush on him sputtered to life in neon glory, making her feel gauche. The memory of today’s kiss, which she’d managed to ignore through sheer force of will since entering this room, was released like an illicit drug in her mind—one that stole her ability to think and expanded her physical perceptions.
Betraying heat flooded into her loins while the tips of her breasts tightened. She was hyper-aware of his male power held in tight restraint. For years he’d looked at her with bored aversion. Today he was seeing her, and his gaze was full of the force of his primal nature, accusatory and personal.
And for once she understood his animosity.
The defusing explanation didn’t come easily. Her throat didn’t want to let the words out. They were too revealing.
“I know I often interrupted the two of you. Please don’t judge me too harshly for that.” She had wanted so badly to catch Nic’s attention. Being in his presence had made her heart sing—not unlike right now, she thought in an uncomfortable aside, burning on a pyre of self-conscious embarrassment. “I wanted to hear your stories,” she excused, trying to downplay what a wicked pleasure it had been to eavesdrop on his rumbling voice. His analytical intelligence with such an underlying thirst for justice had drawn her irresistibly. Her fingers tangled together in front of her. “You were traveling the world while I couldn’t steal time to climb the Eiffel Tower in my own backyard. Don’t fault me for wanting to live your adventures.”
“Adventures? I was reporting on civil wars! Crimes against humanity! Those sorts of tales aren’t fit for a woman’s ears, let alone the child you were then. The only reason I brought them up with Olief was because he’d been there. He understood the line that has to be drawn between exposing the horrors and scaring the hell out of people. You can’t do that kind of work without unloading somewhere.”
Rowan was struck by more than his words. His eyes darkened and his expression flashed with a suffering that he quickly shuttered away. Her view of his work had always been that it was genuinely glamorous and important, not just appearing that way like her own. His face was splashed on magazine covers, wasn’t it? He was no stranger to being a still, compelling presence before a camera. He had accolades galore for his efforts.
There was a toll for bringing forth the stories that held an audience rapt, though. Perhaps she was horribly self-involved, since she’d never considered what sorts of anguish and cruelty he’d witnessed in getting those stories. He would have pushed himself because he was a man of ambition, but his opinion pieces revealed a man who wanted to restore peace and justice. That wasn’t work for the faint-hearted. If he was tough and closed off it was because he had to be in order to get what he wanted for the betterment of humanity.
Everything in her longed to surge forward and somehow offer comfort, but his body language—shoulders bunched, head turned to the side—shouted back off.
She stared down at bare feet that were icy despite the carpet she stood on.
“I always wondered why you were always so …” Aloof? Emotionless? Haunted? “Quiet.”
She rubbed her arms, trying to bring life back into herself when she felt chilled to the bone. Her heart ached for him. Of course he would have needed someone to help put all those terrible sights into perspective. She wanted to scroll back time and watch from afar, allowing him the healing he’d so obviously needed.
“I wish you’d said something,” she said weakly. “I wouldn’t have got in your way with Olief if I’d known how bad it was.”
“No?” he challenged, with another shot of that searing aggression.
“Of course not! I’m not so self-centered that I felt threatened by your having a relationship with your own father.”
“Then why did you set it up for him to see us on the beach and take a strip off me for it? That was a depth of bitchiness that exceeded even my low expectations of you, Ro.” His recrimination made her knees go weak.
The tiny thread of hope she’d found and clasped on to, the tentative belief that she was making headway with understanding Nic’s reserve and softening his judgment of her, snapped like a rubber band, not only stealing her optimism with a sharp sting, but launching her into an empty space where there was only hard landings.
“Olief saw that?” The one person who liked her exactly as she was had seen her inept plea to be noticed and the humiliating rejection that had followed. Rowan wanted to sink through the carpet and disappear. She dropped her cringing face into her hands.
“Oh, give it a rest. The awards committee isn’t in residence,” Nic bit out.
“I passed Olief on the path, but I didn’t think he’d seen us!” She only lifted her mortified face because she was determined to make him believe her. “Do you honestly think I’d want anyone to know I behaved so cheaply? I can hardly face you.”
“Then why did you do it?” His eyes were cold and measuring, unwilling to accept her protest at face value. “It better be good, Rowan, because he made me feel like a pervert, saying men like me had no business with a girl like you. What the hell does that mean? Men like me? Too old? Or simply not good enough? Forget finding common ground after that. We were barely speaking.”
Her throat closed again. She felt sick with herself. She had to ’fess up or he’d believe forever that she was a tease, and worse—someone who had schemed to hurt him for no reason but a power trip. She couldn’t live with that. She wasn’t like that at all.
“I … I wanted to,” she managed in a strangled whisper, furnace-like heat unleashing in her to conflagrate her whole body. She felt like the candle flame swaying on its spineless wick, all her dignity melting into a transparent puddle beneath her.
“Wanted to what?” he demanded. “Make me look like an opportunist?”
“No!” Rowan pitied every minion who’d ever had to stand before him and explain herself. He was utterly formidable. But his demeanor was the kind of unyielding superciliousness she’d been knuckling under all her life. She was so tired of apologizing for being human and having flaws!
“I wanted to kiss you,” she blurted with defiance, staring him right in the eye while every nerve-ending fried under the responding flash of heat in his gaze. “I was attracted to you. We all have urges,” she excused with a shrug, desperate to play it down so he wouldn’t know how attracted. “I’d had a few drinks. It seemed like a good idea.”
For a long time he only stared at her, while the silence played out and t
he shadows closed in. Just as she began to feel sweat popping across her upper lip he moved closer, studying her so intently her skin tightened all over her body.
“You wanted a kiss bad enough to chase me to the beach for it?”
“Take your pound of flesh if you need it. Yes, I chased you and, yes, I realize how desperate that makes me seem. It was an impulse. I didn’t get out much and it was my birthday.” If she kept slapping coats of whitewash on it perhaps he wouldn’t see it for the act of lifelong yearning it had been.
“All those years of batting your lashes and trying to get a rise out of me … It wasn’t more of that same nonsense?”
She had to drop her gaze then, because it had very much been a culmination of that long, infernal effort to catch his interest.
His hand came under her jaw, forcing her chin up so she couldn’t hide from his penetrating glacier-blue eyes. “Because I can forgive a teenager for baiting a grown man, but at twenty you should have known better.”
“So you said then, and I wasn’t doing that.” Impatience got the better of her and she tried to pull away, dying inside as she recalled his angry kiss and his merciless rejection.
His hand moved to the side of her neck, long fingers sliding beneath the fall of her hair so his fingertips rested on the back of her neck, keeping her close.
“And today?” he asked, his tone dangerously lethal.
“Today you kissed me.” It took guts to hold her ground, especially when she was flushed with self-disgust as she recalled how she’d reacted: as if she still thought kissing him was a good idea. Her nails cut into her palms as she made herself face him and the crushing truth. “Or rather you tried to manipulate me with what mechanically resembled a kiss.”
He gave a little snort. “I’m long past the age of playing games. It was more than mechanics. We kissed each other.”
He made it sound like something to be savored. When he dropped his gaze to her mouth her stomach tightened. Her whole body tingled and her lips began to burn.
“We started something two years ago that wants finishing.”
Her hand came up instinctively to the middle of his chest. He hadn’t moved any closer, but she suddenly felt threatened. Her arteries swelled as all her blood began to move harder and faster. “Wh-what do you mean?”
“I’m not blind, Rowan.” He glanced down to where her still-bandaged hand pressed against his chest. His strong heartbeat pounded into her palm. “I noticed in the last few years that you weren’t a kid anymore. The only thing that stopped me taking what you were offering that night was a certainty that you didn’t mean it. If you had …”
She sucked in a breath and jerked back, pulling her hand into her breasts as though his glance at her knuckles had branded them.
Nic folded his arms across his chest, his shoulders hardening. “Did you mean it?” he demanded. “Are we finally being honest or still playing games?”
This was moving too fast. “I’m not going to sleep with you, Nic!”
“Because you still want to tie me up in knots for kicks?”
Was he feeling tied up? Insidious heat flooded into her pelvis, licking with wanton anticipation at her insides. He couldn’t be serious. She told her feet to run, but they refused. “We can’t have some kind of fling and then carry on as if …”
She trailed off, the little cogs in her head making hard, sharp connections that stuck long enough to reverberate painfully in her skull before clicking over to the next one as she took in the way Nic’s brows lifted in aloof inquisition.
She was a virgin, not sophisticated and experienced enough to have flings. Nic was experienced, though, and when he had flings he carried on just fine afterward because he never saw his partner again. Which was exactly what he intended with Rowan.
How had she not grasped that? He had come here intending to kick her out and never see her again. She’d won a stay of eviction, but after the two weeks were up they would not cross paths again—not unless it was by chance.
She would never see Nic again. Ever. How had she not taken that in?
Because she had subliminally believed that when she was ready she would seek him out. Never once had she thought there would be no Rosedale to come back to—no Nic prowling the grounds where she could put herself under his nose with only minimal risk and wait for him to notice her.
The gray void that was her future grew bigger and more desolate.
“As if what?” he prompted.
She gave a dry laugh, using it to cover the damp thickness gathering in her throat. “I naively thought an affair could make for awkward Christmas dinners in future, but that won’t be a problem, will it? I really am saying goodbye to everything I knew and—”
Don’t say it. Rowan swallowed and twisted her hands together, trying to rub sensation into fingers that were going numb. “I wish you had some feeling of having a home and family here, Nic. I really do. I’ll make us some sandwiches.”
She picked up the candle and walked out, leaving him in the glow of the laptop. She didn’t see how he stood in the same place long after the device timed out again, silent and alone in the dark.
CHAPTER FIVE
NIC was still letting Rowan’s remark eat at him the next morning, and he couldn’t fathom why. It wasn’t as if he hadn’t heard variations of it from other women.
He had concluded over the years that there was a deficiency in him that portrayed him as not needing what others did: a home, family, love. And since he had been denied those things all his life he had learned to live without them. He didn’t need them. It was a closed loop.
So why did he feel so unfairly judged by Rowan’s, I wish you had some feeling of having a home and family here? Even if he wanted to be different, he couldn’t. The thought of trying to change made his hands curl into fists and a current of nervousness pulse through his system.
“I’m going for groceries!” she shouted from the bottom floor, startling him from his introspection.
Good, he thought, needing a reprieve from the way she upset his equilibrium. “Check the car insurance,” he responded in a yell.
“Okay. Bye!”
He let out a sigh, forcing himself back to his desk and the work spread over it, dimly aware of the distant hum of the garage door and then the growl of a motor—
She wouldn’t.
Leaping to his feet, he shot open the window in time to see his vintage black convertible, top down, slithering with the speed of a hungry mamba up the curving drive. Tucking fingertip and thumb against his teeth, he pierced the air with a furious whistle.
The brake lights came on. Her glossy head turned to look back at the house.
Nic pointed at the front steps and met her there a few seconds later. Rowan chirped the brakes as she stopped before him, staying behind the wheel while all eight cylinders purred. Glamorous Tiffany sunglasses obscured half her face, but her mouth trembled in a subtle betrayal of nervousness before she sat a little straighter and gave him a lady-of-the-manor, “Yes?”
“What the hell are you doing?” He hitched his elbow on the top of the windscreen from the passenger side.
“You said to check the insurance. This one is still valid.”
“So is the hatchback.”
“This is more fun.” She pulled out one of her cheeky grins, trying to cajole him into indulging her.
He narrowed his eyes, determined not to fall for her act the way the rest of his sex did. “And you know that how?”
Her nose crinkled. “I might have taken Black Betty here for a spin once or twice before. But I always fill the tank.” The assertive finger she lifted fell. “Today that could be a problem, though. I took the petty cash from the kitchen, but it wasn’t much.”
“You are utterly shameless, aren’t you? I’m speechless.” Unaccountably, he had to suppress an urge to laugh.
“Okay. Well, could you … um … step back while you ponder what you’d like to say?”
“Get out of my car, Rowan!”
“Oh, Nic, don’t be like that,” she coaxed, leaning toward him so the chunky zipper of her flight jacket gaped open and showed him the line of her dark plum scooped-shirt plastered low across her breasts. Pale globes swelled over the top.
“Like what?” He tried not to get distracted. “I know you. You’ll start looking at a basket of puppies and won’t notice the rain’s started again.”
But was he any different? A monsoon could blow in at this moment and he’d still be fascinated by those puppies.
She caught him looking. He wasn’t exactly being discreet, so it wasn’t a surprise to lift his gaze and find a smug grin of womanly power widening her lips. In the way of all beauties who recognized the advantage of their appeal, she assumed it was legal tender.
“I’ll put the top up at the first spit, I promise.” She slipped the car into gear.
He shook his head, as much at himself for revealing his weakness as at her for thinking she had him where she wanted him. “No.”
“Look at this gorgeous morning.” She gestured expansively at the broken clouds scudding across the brilliant blue sky. Streaks of sunlight bathed the rainwashed landscape in pockets of gold. “Doesn’t it make you want to feel the sun on your face and the wind in your hair?”
He never allowed himself to be susceptible to Rowan’s appealing enthusiasm. Old reflexes crowded a refusal onto his tongue. Park the convertible and use the hatchback. I have to work. Work was the one thing he did care about. It was always there and, since it was all he would ever have, he was making a legacy of it.
But a damp sweet breeze floated across his face, hinting at spring. It turned his mind to the instinctive pursuits of the season—the mating season. His blood warmed with male appreciation of the youthful female smiling up at him with such guile.
Seduce her. The words whispered on the air.
At the very least he should remind her that batting her lashes had consequences.
“Give me the keys,” he said on impulse.
“Oh, Nic!” Rowan cut the engine and flung open the driver’s door. As he came around to her side, a long thigh in tight green jeans stretched out. Tall boots were planted with firm temper. “Why do you have to be like this? You’re just like everyone else who thinks they own my life. ‘No, Rowan, you can’t possibly have five minutes of enjoying yourself. Take the housekeeper’s hatchback because that’s what you are now.’ What do you gain from these power trips, huh, Nic? What?”