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‘Are you sure you won’t have one?’
‘No.’ Lily shook her head firmly. ‘And do you really think that you should? After all, if you’re driving…’
She let the rest of the sentence fall away. But if she had hoped that he would take up the hint she was sadly mistaken.
‘Nice try, Lily,’ Ronan drawled sardonically. ‘But you’re forgetting that I’m not going anywhere. I’m staying right here…’
‘Davey won’t be back!’
‘I might have other reasons for staying.’ The bottle was tilted towards the glass.
‘Oh, don’t!’ Lily couldn’t hold back any longer. ‘It’s barely six o’clock. You’ll make yourself ill if you carry on like this.’
‘Are you saying you’d care if I did?’
‘Believe it or not—yes, I would!’
His expression made it clear that belief was not uppermost in his mind.
‘And have you asked yourself why I might be tempted to drink myself into a stupor?’
‘Would you tell me if I asked?’ Lily shot back. ‘Ronan, you’re frightening me. You never used to be so intemperate.’
‘And you weren’t always so pure and prudish—apparently as virginal as the flower for which you’re named!’ Ronan flung at her savagely, but Lily was glad to see that he replaced the whisky bottle and moved to fling himself down in a nearby chair. ‘So tell me, my sweet Lily, how much of all this has Davey told you?’
‘Everything!’
‘Everything?’ It was a sound of pure disbelief, indigo eyes regarding her with frank scepticism.
‘Yes, everything! All the sordid details; everything he did wrong. He confessed to it all.’
‘And you still support him? You condone what he’s done?’
If the truth were told, Lily believed that Davey had been all sorts of a fool, totally irresponsible. He needed a good kick in the pants, and something of a fright to bring home to him just how idiotically he had behaved.
What he didn’t deserve was the vindictive stalking Ronan had subjected him to, the ruthless determination to take the fullest revenge possible, no matter what it cost. He hadn’t earned the fear that disturbed his nights and haunted his days, turning his skin grey with panic at just the thought of Ronan Guerin.
‘Be fair, Ronan.’
She came to sit in a chair opposite him, her hands open in a pleading gesture on her knees, her slim body inclined towards him. Her golden eyes begged him for understanding of her wayward brother.
‘He’s very young—not even twenty when you met him—and rather foolish.’
‘You can say that again.’ His expression was set hard as ever, no sign of any softening in his steely eyes.
‘And now he feels terrible—so guilty…’
‘And so he bloody well should! He deserves all that’s coming to him. All that and more.’
There wasn’t a trace of pity in his inimical blue-grey eyes, nothing she could appeal to and hope he might listen.
‘One thing,’ he went on in a very different tone. ‘You haven’t asked about yourself. Haven’t you wondered where you fit into this?’
‘Oh, that’s easy.’
She wished it wasn’t, but she had no alternative but to face the harsh facts. She had come to that painful conclusion in the darkness of the night, after long hours of soul-searching and questioning.
‘Easy?’ It had an odd inflexion, one that jarred uncomfortably with everything that had gone before.
‘Oh, come on! You’re not going to try and claim it was anything different! It’s quite simple. You wanted to get at Davey through me. You couldn’t find him but I was a sitting target, and you guessed that hurting me would punish my brother more than any attack on him.’
A weak part of her wanted to think that perhaps he might just have had a tiny twinge of conscience at what he had done. That that had been why he had given her the house and the allowance, which amounted to more money than she’d ever had in her life.
But when she looked into Ronan’s face again she could see no trace of any such thing. Instead her glance seemed to recoil off the glacial hardness of his eyes, freezing in their icy glare.
‘That’s how it was, wasn’t it? It was like some sort of vendetta where a whole family has to pay for the crimes one of them commits. Davey hurt the Guerins so his whole family is culpable. That is how you see it, isn’t it?’
‘Yes,’ Ronan said slowly, ‘that’s exactly how I see it.’
So Davey really had told her everything. He found it surprisingly difficult to accept. When she’d asserted that she knew it all he had privately doubted that her brother would actually admit to what he had done, had been sure that some degree of shame would have led him to hold something back.
But it seemed that he had underestimated the family loyalty between these two. Lily not only knew of her brother’s crime, she had actually done her damnedest to try and help him escape justice by offering cash to compensate for his actions. As if money could go any way towards filling the great aching hole in Ronan’s life. He already had more than enough, and what use had all his damned wealth been when he had come up against real need?
Ronan’s silence, some tiny change in his expression, made Lily wonder if perhaps he might just be reconsidering. If there was the remotest possibility he’d give her another chance, she had to take it.
‘Is there nothing I can do?’
He eyed her assessingly, his eyes the colour of storm clouds.
‘Would you really have sold the house?’
‘Of course! And I still would if you want me to. I’d—’
She broke off nervously as Ronan suddenly got to his feet, his action bringing home to her just how tall he was, how surprisingly graceful, each muscle honed to perfection.
Once she had known what it felt like to be on the receiving end of that strength, to feel it used for positive reasons, not in any hostile way. She had felt it enclose her softly, hold her, support her. Then she had delighted in it, in the sensation of his arms around her, the knowledge that he would only ever use it for her, never against, and his slightest touch had made her shiver as if an electrical charge had run through every cell.
But this time her overwhelming feeling was an anxious uncertainty that set her nerves on edge, and the shudder that shook her slim body had nothing at all to do with pleasure but was tinged with genuine fear.
That sensation intensified, twisting her nerves to screaming pitch, as Ronan leaned over her chair and slid strong, square-tipped fingers under her chin. Exerting only the tiniest amount of force, he lifted it until her wide amber eyes were forced to meet the burning intensity of his.
Thirty seconds, forty, fifty slowly ticked away in total silence as he held her there, transfixed, unable to move. She was barely able to breathe, incapable of thought as he searched her face, seeming to want to probe deep into her soul to find the answer to some question that only he knew or understood. Not knowing what it was he was looking for, Lily could only keep still, meet that searching gaze with as much courage as she could muster, and wait.
At long last Ronan drew in his breath on a deep, uneven sigh and released her chin to rake one strong hand through the burnished silk of his hair.
‘If you ask me, your brother doesn’t deserve you,’ he muttered roughly. ‘Either that or you’re all sorts of a fool.’
Hearing the unexpected raggedness of his words, Lily’s heart gave a faint leap. It was as if she had suddenly caught sight of a tiny speck of light at the end of what had seemed like an endless, very dark tunnel. Was it possible that there was a chink in his previously impregnable armour? That he might actually listen?
She had to try one last time.
‘Look, can’t we work this out between us?’ she pleaded. ‘Can’t we…?’
He was tempted. God, he was tempted! But involvement with Lily was a complication he just couldn’t afford. If he let her, she would dissuade him from the path he was determined to follow. And that would mean that her brother would get off scot-free, that he would never pay for the suffering he had caused.
‘There is no we!’ His words slashed through hers like a brutal sword. ‘Nothing personal. No “us”—and there never will be! This is between Davey and myself.’
‘Oh, no, it isn’t!’
Lily pushed herself to her feet when he would have moved away and put an end to the conversation by the simple expedient of turning his back on her. She caught hold of his arm and held him, restraining him when he would have walked away. Ronan looked down at her hand for a moment, clearly planning on shaking off her ineffectual hold, but then, surprisingly, reconsidered and simply let it lie.
‘You involved me!’ Her voice shook in response to her heightened emotions. ‘You made it personal when you asked me to marry you!’
‘That wasn’t personal,’ Ronan put in coldly. ‘I knew who you were. You were Davey’s sister and that was all that mattered.’
Lily was frankly stunned to find that she was still standing, that her legs still supported her. She felt as if they might disintegrate into tiny shards of shattered glass if she so much as tried to move. And her heart was in much the same state, so desolated by the calculated cruelty of his reply that it had splintered inside her.
