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‘Like the fact that you never loved me? Oh, don’t worry! I certainly don’t labour under that particular delusion any more. You disabused me on that score only too thoroughly.’
‘Did I ever claim I loved you?’ Ronan shot back, with a ferocity that made her reel backwards as if he had actually lifted a hand to slap her in the face.
Had he?
Eyes dark with shock, she looked back over the few short weeks of their courtship, the rush to their hasty marriage. ‘I want you,’ he had said. ‘I have to have you. You must marry me!’ But never a word of love.
And like a fool, head over heels in her own feelings, lost in her own dream of perfection and happy ever after, she had supplied those words for him, deceiving herself into believing that she had actually heard them.
‘No…’ she admitted slowly. ‘No, you didn’t.’
His nod was a gesture of dark satisfaction. Case for the prosecution proved. No room for argument.
‘And now…’
But Lily couldn’t take any more. Couldn’t sit here and let him drive home even more just how little she had actually meant to him. How he had used her so callously for his own cruel ends. It would be like pounding blunt nails into an already raw and desolated heart.
Pushing back her chair with an ugly scraping sound, she got to her feet in a rush.
‘I’m tired. I want to go home.’
But Belvedere House didn’t feel like home any more. For the first time since Ronan had taken her there on their wedding day, the house seemed to have lost its warmth. It no longer had the sense of security that had made her feel so safe there. Now it was somehow cold and alien to her.
She couldn’t forget that Ronan had bought it. Ronan had meant it to be yet another part of his hateful scheme. He had led her to believe that it was the home of her dreams when he’d planned to destroy those dreams before they even had a chance to form.
‘Cold?’ Ronan had caught her shiver of distress.
‘A little. The rain’s cooled the air.’
That was an approximate truth. The shower that had broken during the journey home had brought a distinct chill with it, but Lily knew that the feeling that gripped her was emotional rather than physical.
‘The room would soon warm up if I lit a fire.’
This time the shudder that shook her slim body in the rose-coloured dress was more convulsive. She couldn’t cope with that. Not now; not ever while Ronan was nearby. Nightmare images of heat and smoke filled her mind, pushing her close to panic.
‘There’s no need!’
‘It won’t take a moment…’
His persistence seemed to scrape at her already overstretched nerves. Every other night he had let her end the evening whenever she chose, making no comment or protest when she gave some excuse in order to retire early. But now he seemed intent on keeping her here and prolonging the evening further.
‘I said there’s no need!’ Distress made her voice sharp. ‘I’m tired. I’ll be much warmer in bed.’
‘Alone?’
‘Of course alone!’
But even as she spoke her treacherous body tingled in a disturbing recollection of how it had felt not to lie alone in the wide king-sized bed. How it had been when Ronan’s long, powerful body lay beside her, curved close against her spine. How it had felt to have him move over her, cover her…
‘Why are you so keen to get upstairs all of a sudden?’ Suspicion sharpened the question, narrowing the blue-grey eyes as they swung round the room, as if searching for something. ‘Is Davey back? Have you seen…?’
‘Davey? No!’
The quaver of her voice on the words was the result of a sudden and stunning revelation that had suddenly slammed home in her mind. At times tonight she had actually forgotten about Davey, and Ronan’s campaign of revenge. For just a few brief moments she had wanted to be with Ronan as it had been before, when they had been together as a couple, just the two of them, with nothing else to interfere.
And he had felt the same. She knew he had. Often during the evening she had looked up to find his eyes, strangely darkened, fixed on her, and it had been there in the burning intensity of his gaze, an intensity he had never tried to hide.
She’d seen it, too, when they had danced together, and again when he had leant so close to her at the bar. Even when he had been angry with her that electric current of awareness had still sparked between them, holding them together with a magnetism that was too strong to be denied.
And perhaps she could use that feeling in order to help her brother. She should have used it that way before now, pressing home her advantage while she still had one.
‘Ronan, please—about Davey.’
‘I don’t want to hear about your bloody brother!’ Ronan snarled, but she forced herself to persist in spite of the ferocity of the glare he subjected her to, the seam of threat that ran through his words.
‘But you must listen! Why won’t you take back this house, or at least let me sell it and give you the money to pay what my brother owes? It’s the very least—’
‘And that would leave you without a home. You’ve given up your flat so where would you live?’
‘I—I’d manage.’
Lily was only listening to the question with part of her mind. Most of her attention was centred on the way Ronan had reacted, on the faint, instinctive response he had made to her words ‘what my brother owes’. That combined with the realisation that his concern for her well-being was genuine and unrestrained to leave her feeling strangely uncomfortable.
‘I wouldn’t hear of it.’ It was flat, unyielding, no room for negotiation. ‘And I don’t want to discuss it any further. I want to forget all about Davey and his sins for tonight. I want to talk about us.’
‘Like you said before. There isn’t any “us”.’
But even as she spoke she recognised the lie for what it was. Nothing more than a defence, a fragile shield put up against the effect he was having on her mind and her heart. If Ronan could see how pitifully weak and inadequate it was, he could brush it aside with a single contemptuous flick of his hand.
Or the right words.
‘There could be if you let it happen,’ he said, the softness of his voice curling around her like warm, scented smoke so that she struggled to ignore the enticement in it. ‘We’re here together…’
‘We’re here by accident! Here in the house but in no way together. The reasons…’
She didn’t dare mention Davey again. That was to risk destroying the tenuous peace that had formed between them.
‘The reasons why you’re here make that impossible.’
‘But it doesn’t make sense that we should both deny what we want.’
‘Both…deny—I’m not!’ She couldn’t put into words what she feared he meant.
‘You’re lying to yourself again, my Lily.’
Ronan hadn’t moved, hadn’t taken a single step towards her, but all the same she felt his closeness like the static in the air before a violent thunderstorm. At any moment she expected to hear the crash of thunder, see the flare of lightning, and knew that her whole life was in danger of going up in flames in an instant.
‘There’s only that man we won’t mention to come between us, and he’s not here. So what’s to stop us spending what’s left of the rest of the night together?’
There’s the fact that I love you and you feel nothing for me, she answered silently. The fact that anything you do will just be the result of uncaring lust, nothing more. An unemotional response to a very primal urge, a taking of pleasure as primitive and basic as any animal might indulge in.
And yet she would be lying to herself if she didn’t admit that she was tempted.
She was supremely conscious of his height and breadth as he stood beside her. Every nerve seemed to be on red alert to the musky scent of his body, the burnished colour of his hair where it fell onto his forehead above those brilliant blue-grey eyes. It was impossible not to recall the exhilaration she had felt when they had danced together, the tiny electric shocks of awareness that had pricked at her spine when he had touched her.
She wanted this man as much as she had ever wanted him on her wedding day. More so, because then she had been innocent, unaware of the ecstasy of fulfilment his lovemaking could bring her. And nothing that had happened since then had changed a thing.
Plenty more fish in the sea. That had been Hannah’s pragmatic response when she had heard of Ronan’s desertion. But the simple fact was that she didn’t want anyone else. She yearned to feel this man’s arms enclose her, know the heated delight of his kisses on her skin. But above all else she wanted to make love with him. And she wanted it now.
What is to stop us spending what’s left of the night together?
Drawing in a raw, uneven breath, she knew there was only one answer.
‘Nothing.’ She heard her voice say it before the thought had fully formed in her mind.
‘Nothing?’ Ronan echoed on a very different note.
Still he didn’t move, and Lily was sure that he sensed, as she did, how precariously balanced the moment was. One false move and she would take flight, fleeing like some panic-stricken bird sighting a hungry cat, heading for the sanctuary of her room.
