AllFreeNovel
Share Us
Hastily she caught herself up, gritting her teeth against the outburst that had almost escaped her. No matter how much she wanted to scream out, to fling her pain at that arrogant dark head, hurl reproach into his cold, set face, she wouldn’t let herself.
To do so would be to divulge just how badly he had affected her, expose the hurt she lived with every day, the anguish of her broken heart. She wasn’t prepared to let him see that. It was one dark satisfaction of his monstrous revenge that she was determined to deny him.
But Ronan wasn’t prepared to let her off so easily.
‘Never have…?’ he questioned swiftly. ‘Never have married you?’
‘Never have been surprised to find me in the garden,’ Lily retorted archly, grateful for the speed of thought that had got her out of an unpleasantly tight spot. ‘If you’d found out more about me you would have known that my father ran a small garden centre and I got my interest in horticulture from him.’
She aimed to match his own casual tone and was delighted to find that she had managed a close approximation, even if it was light-years away from what she was really feeling.
‘I love cultivating flowers and shrubs, preparing the soil, planting, feeding, nurturing—and pruning them back when necessary. It must have something of the same sort of satisfaction as looking after a child.’
‘And would you be that way with a child? As a mother, would you…?’
‘Oh, no, you can never control a child in quite the same way.’ The way she rushed to answer the question betrayed how uneasy it had made her feel. ‘All you can do is love it, care for it, and then let it go. You can hope you’ve taught it right and wrong, but in the end you have to set it free and let it follow its own path.’
‘And would you be able to do that?’ Ronan asked as they reached the kitchen. ‘What if you felt they hadn’t learned right from wrong, as you hoped?’ There was an odd note in his voice. ‘If, say, the father…’
‘What is this, Ronan?’
Lily swung round from where she was filling the kettle at the sink, golden eyes blazing with a mixture of anger and distress.
‘Some roundabout way of trying to find out if you left me pregnant when you walked out? Well, you needn’t worry; you won’t be lumbered with any unwanted consequences from that night we spent together. As I recall, you were only too careful to make sure that such a thing didn’t happen—though you couched it in very different terms at the time.’
‘I protected you as much as myself,’ Ronan snarled, and it gave Lily a small sense of triumph to see that the normally impenetrable icy calm of his carved features no longer looked quite so assured. The thought that her words had hit home went some tiny way towards easing the hurt of her memories.
‘And what, precisely, were you protecting me from?’ she asked, pushing home her advantage while she had it.
As soon as she had asked it, she regretted the question deeply. She didn’t want to know the answer, didn’t want to hear him say that he had never really wanted her at all, that he had used a condom because he couldn’t bear the full intimacy of making love to her without one.
‘I didn’t think I needed any such thing, remember? I thought I had married the man I loved. The man who loved me.’
‘And how would you have felt if I had left you pregnant?’ Ronan shot back. ‘If I’d fathered a child on you that neither of us wanted?’
Not true! a tiny, irrational part of Lily’s heart cried. If it had been Ronan’s child she would have wanted it, loved it in spite of everything.
But to admit that to him would be the height of foolishness. It would be letting him know how deeply her feelings had been rooted, how much devastation he had brought to her by walking out as he had.
And besides, she was forced to wonder if in fact it was really true. Ronan’s callous cruelty had fatally damaged all she had ever felt for him. He had blasted her love apart on that first morning of their marriage, shattering it into microscopic splinters that could never ever be put back into place again. One of those splinters had lodged in her heart, where it had festered, poisoning everything she now thought about him.
‘So why didn’t you go through with it? Did you lose your nerve?’
‘Lose my nerve?’ Ronan frowned his incomprehension.
‘I mean, that would have been the ultimate revenge for whatever Davey’s supposed to have done, wouldn’t it? Leaving me stuck with a reminder of you for the rest of my life. So why didn’t you do just that? Or am I supposed to believe that you do have some small saving grace, some touch of conscience? Are you claiming that your lust for retribution has its limits after all?’
‘Believe it or not, it’s the truth!’
Ronan sounded as if the words had had to be dragged from him with red-hot pliers, and the steel-blue eyes were smoky with some emotion she couldn’t interpret. But Lily was past taking her cue from what she could see in his strong-boned face. It was as if she had tasted blood, and the rush of exultation she had experienced from knowing that she could hit back, if not enough to hurt then at least to disturb him, made her tongue run away with her.
‘Not that it would have mattered, anyway,’ she declared recklessly. ‘After all, nowadays no one has to go through with a pregnancy they don’t want. I could quite easily have rid myself of your little—leaving present.’
He’d needed that, Ronan reflected, giving himself a sharp, mental shake in order to get his thoughts back on track. If he wasn’t careful, he’d find himself going soft, which could lead to all sorts of trouble. But luckily, just when he was beginning to wonder if he’d been completely in the wrong, she came out with something like this. Something that proved she was Davey’s sister through and through.
‘You’d have done that?’ He didn’t trouble to hide the disgust in his voice. ‘You’d…’
Of course she would never have considered an abortion. But he thought she might, and the shock on his face was satisfaction enough for now.
‘Luckily for you the question isn’t relevant. I suppose I should at least be grateful to you for that.’
‘Not grateful…’
He was about to add something more, but Lily didn’t give him the chance. Filling a mug with coffee, she slammed it down on the table in front of him.
‘The drink you ordered, sir! And I’d be grateful…’ deliberately she laced the word with acid ‘…if you’d drink it quickly and be on your way.’
He ignored the mug, reaching instead for her free hand and holding it up.
‘You’re still wearing your wedding ring.’
‘And why not?’
Lily snatched her hand away as if she’d been burned, curling it into a tight fist and hiding the gleam of gold against the blue flowered cotton of her tee shirt.
‘I am still your wife in the eyes of the law at least!’
‘The law only,’ Ronan reminded her with brutal candour. ‘But that’s a matter that’s almost as easily rectified as an unwanted baby.’
He greeted her gasp of shock with a small, grim smile, picking up his coffee at last, indigo eyes watching her intently over the top of the mug.
‘Heard from Davey lately?’
The abrupt change of subject and the deceptively off-hand tone he used threw Lily badly off balance, as she strongly suspected they were intended to.
‘D-Davey?’ she hedged nervously. ‘No, not a word. He…’
But some tiny movement, some uncontrolled glance towards the door had given her away. The mug slammed down onto the table again, hot brown liquid spilling everywhere.
‘He’s here, isn’t he?’ The question came with a vicious force, Ronan’s eyes blazing into her shocked golden ones. ‘Your bloody brother’s been here all this time! Where’s he hiding? Upstairs?’
CHAPTER SIX
‘NO…!’
It was a cry of despair, but far too late. Already Ronan had swung away from her and marched out into the hall. His long legs taking the stairs two at a time, he reached the landing before Lily had even started up, and barely paused to consider which door to open.
‘Cornwell!’
Some malign instinct took him straight to Davey’s room, kicking open the door in a way that was unnervingly reminiscent of every police drama she had ever seen in films or on a TV screen.
‘Cornwell! Where the hell…!’
The dark fury and barely reined-in violence in his voice made Lily’s stomach twist sickeningly. Her legs threatened to buckle underneath her but still she forced them upwards, coming to an unsteady halt at Ronan’s side.
‘He’s been here!’
What was the point in denying it? she thought weakly. The evidence was incontrovertible, plain for anyone to see.
The bed, rumpled and unmade, could have been slept in by anyone, and the few clothes bundled onto the chair or dropped carelessly on the floor were the anonymous jeans and sweatshirts that formed a sort of uniform for anyone under twenty-five. But carefully propped up against the wall was the damning proof: Davey’s beloved Gibson guitar, without which he never went anywhere.
‘Where is he?’
It was low and savage, making her shiver in uncontrolled fear. She felt as if the fury that made his brilliant eyes burn almost translucent might actually shrivel her into a heap of ash where she stood.
