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For one appalling moment she thought that Ronan was going to react violently to her dramatic gesture. Every muscle in his already taut frame tightened even more, his hands clenching as his eyes blazed down into hers. Lily nerved herself for the explosion she felt sure must come, and didn’t quite know how to react when instead he drew in a deep breath and let it out again with agonising slowness.
‘For better, for worse,’ he muttered enigmatically, leaving Lily incapable of decoding the dark undercurrents that took the words to a point light-years away from the way they would be spoken in a wedding ceremony.
‘Oh, very definitely for worse!’ she spat at him. ‘I don’t see how things could deteriorate any further.’
‘And so you want to go home?’
The question surprised her so much that for a couple of seconds she couldn’t get her brain working well enough to consider it.
Home. He meant go back to Belvedere House, to that beautiful building where she had once thought she would live with him as his wife.
Home. She would be there with Ronan in the silence of the night, would have to go to bed once more, knowing that he was just along the corridor. And as on every other night this week she would hear the small, intimate sounds of him preparing for bed, the opening of a door, the rush of the shower…
Suddenly the noisy anonymity of the club seemed infinitely preferable.
‘I thought you came out to work.’
She was proud of her coolly indifferent delivery, thankful that she had given away nothing of what it had cost her to pitch it that way.
‘Don’t let me hold you back. After all, the night is still young.’
‘You want to go on?’
‘I don’t want to go back.’ Carefully she avoided that emotive word ‘home’. ‘And who knows? Now that I’m no longer branded as your possession…’
Provocatively she waved her ringless hand under his nose, concentrating on the flare of fury in his shadowed eyes so that she wouldn’t have to think about the pang of distress that ripped through her at the sight of her naked finger.
‘At the next place I might just meet someone who knows how to give a girl a good time!’
The place he took her to was very different from the club they’d just left. Lily felt that she had never been so glad to see anywhere as she was to find herself safely inside the small, old-fashioned bar, where the atmosphere was one of quiet relaxation in contrast to the frenetic excitement of the club they had first visited.
They reached it after a brief, unpleasant, deeply uncomfortable ride. Ronan hadn’t spoken a single word to her throughout the journey, and he had driven the Mercedes at a speed that expressed the inner fury he was keeping under ruthless control. At times Lily had been genuinely afraid for her life, thankful that Ronan’s skilful handling of the powerful vehicle had kept them from any sort of an accident.
‘Drink?’ he enquired curtly once they were inside.
‘Mineral water, please.’
She would have liked to ask for a large brandy to settle her nerves after the nightmare drive through the dark streets, but refused to let Ronan know that he had rattled her in any way.
He was still at the bar when Lily felt someone touch her gently on the elbow. Turning sharply, she saw a young woman standing at her side. Tall and voluptuously curved, with long dark hair, she was perhaps twenty-two or three, her smile nervous and unsure.
‘Excuse me, but are you with Mr Guerin?’
At Lily’s puzzled nod, her smile grew a little more confident.
‘I’m Allie Gordon. My father owns this place, with my mother.’
‘I thought it must be a family business. It has that sort of a feel.’
It had struck her right from the start. The room might be dowdy and in need of redecoration, but the wine bar had a friendly, relaxed atmosphere that had appealed straight away.
‘I’m surprised your father wants to sell.’
‘Oh, he doesn’t want to, but it has to be done.’ There were deep shadows in the wide blue eyes. ‘That’s why I’m here, to talk to him about it. You see, my Dad’s ill—we just found out he has Alzheimer’s. He’s going to need constant care, and Mum can’t look after him and run this place as well. Besides, we’ll need the money.’
Ronan was coming back to the table, glasses in his hand. Lily had barely time to murmur, ‘I’ll see what I can do,’ before Allie had hurried off again.
So what did she do now? How could she persuade Ronan to buy the wine bar at a price that would give the Gordons the money they obviously needed?
‘Well, what do you think?’ Ronan’s unexpected question jolted her out of her thoughts and into speech before she had time to consider further.
‘I think you should buy this place.’
‘Do you now?’ Ronan returned cynically. ‘Would that sudden conviction have anything to do with whatever Miss Gordon had to say? Oh, yes, I saw her hurry away from you just now. Aren’t you afraid I’ll take everything she’s got and bleed her dry?’
The flare of anger in his eyes was matched by a dark smile that told her he was well aware of the quandary his sardonic question had forced on her, and he gave a low, grim laugh.
‘I tell you what. You can sit in on the negotiations when I talk to her, and if you think I’m cheating her you only have to say. Oh, don’t look so sceptical, darling! I promise you—anything you don’t like comes out of the contract straight away.’
Lily’s nerves knotted painfully at the thought of trying to confront him over anything—least of all when he was on his own territory, so to speak.
‘But I don’t know anything about…’
‘You’ve run your own business for years, haven’t you? You’re no fool, Lily, you know what’s fair and what’s not. Just think of what you’d have wanted for Davey and take it from there.’
Think of what you’d have wanted for Davey. The message of those words seemed to reverberate round the room, picking up ominous echoes that warned her they had meant much more than just their surface interpretation.
‘Ronan…?’
But he had already gone, shouldering his way across the room towards where Allie Gordon now stood behind the bar. Lily twisted her hands together in her lap. The thought of taking any part in the future of this girl and her family was awesome in its sense of responsibility.
But from the moment Ronan settled the girl at their table, buying her a drink before he launched into a concise summary of what he proposed, Lily knew she had nothing to fear. There wasn’t a single thing in all he said that she could object to in any way. Unversed in the details of such business deals as she was, it all seemed perfectly fair—more than that, in fact.
‘Well?’ Ronan enquired when the negotiations were over and Allie, a wide, excited smile on her face, had left them alone again. ‘Nothing to say? I never expected you to be so silent.’
‘That’s because I couldn’t criticise a thing,’ Lily admitted honestly. ‘You’ve been more generous than I ever imagined.’
‘It was no more than Davey got,’ he told her, frowning darkly when she turned frankly sceptical golden eyes on him. ‘Oh, for God’s sake, Lily! Do you really believe that just because this kid’s female, quite beautiful and shaped like a perfect Venus, I’d offer her a better deal than I gave your brother?’
‘N-no.’
It wasn’t at all comfortable to realise that the feelings that tied her tongue into knots weren’t caused by his comments about her brother. She had to face the fact that the twisting pang of misery—of bitter jealousy—was caused by the fact that he’d said the other girl was beautiful and shapely.
She had liked him too. It had been written all over her face. In her radiant smile, the way she had looked deep into his face, the husky note in her voice. Lily had been shocked to find herself wanting to put a hand on Ronan’s arm in a blatant ‘hands off, he’s mine’ gesture of possession.
And just what would Ronan have thought of that? Of her laying claim to a marriage that didn’t exist? A marriage she had denied earlier that evening by throwing the ring he had given her into the canal. And a marriage he had never intended to be real, seeing it only as the ultimate act of revenge.
Hastily she tried to change a subject that had become too uncomfortable to tolerate.
‘You surprised me in another way this evening—in that club. I never saw you as a rock music fan.’
‘I like music, full stop,’ Ronan returned. ‘Anything and everything.’
‘So do you just listen, or do you perform as well? Do you play an instrument?’
‘I wish I did, but it’s a skill I’ve never acquired.’
Lily’s head went back, her eyes widening and a smile curving the fullness of her lips.
‘The great Ronan Guerin admitting to a failing! Now you have surprised me.’
‘Good.’ His eyes danced, picking up glints of gold from the lamps above them. ‘I meant to. You have some major illusions about me that I’d like to disabuse you of.’
That caught her on the raw, with its echoes of the pointed remark he had made about Davey only moments before, destroying the relaxed mood that had settled round them.
