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Lily took a deep, steadying breath. She’d said it once and she’d say it again and again until he believed her.
‘I’ll do it. Ronan, please believe me. I’ll pay back every penny if it takes me the rest of my life!’
Ronan’s sudden silence, the way he stood over her, looking deep into her eyes, shocked her into stillness, a terrible realisation dawning on her like an icy hand clutching at her nerves.
‘It—isn’t money, is it?’ she managed shakily.
The ferocity with which he shook his dark head left no room for doubt in her reeling thoughts.
‘And what hurts is that you ever thought it could be. Did you really believe I was the sort of man who’d act as I did for money?’
‘No…’
Deep down inside Lily admitted to herself that she’d always known. That she’d never really believed him capable of that, even in the middle of hating him with all her heart. Even then she had never thought that he could really be so petty, so vindictive, so downright cruel.
Swallowing hard, she forced herself to meet the laser-like blaze of his eyes, her chin coming up and her shoulders straightening as she nerved herself to accept what was coming. It wasn’t going to be easy, she knew, but it had to be faced.
‘I know you didn’t tie Davey into the sort of contract he claims you did. Which can only mean that my brother lied to me from the start. So why don’t you tell me what really happened, Ronan? Why don’t you tell me the truth?’
CHAPTER TWELVE
HE DIDN’T want to tell her.
The realisation set Lily’s nerves jangling, pressing the panic button that sent her pulse-rate into overdrive, beating high up in her throat so that she could hardly breathe. What could be so bad that he wanted to protect her from it?
He didn’t want to tell her.
The words beat inside Ronan’s skull like a pain. Because now it seemed that everything he had feared when lying awake in the darkness of the night had come true, and he didn’t know how to live with that truth.
He had believed that Davey had told Lily everything and that, if not actually condoning his crime, she had connived with him to get him away. He had believed that she had tried to buy her brother’s safety, and so convinced himself that anything he took from her was justified on her own amoral terms.
But now it seemed that she was innocent of any such thing. She didn’t know what Davey had done, and, blinded by the need for revenge, he had taken her life and smashed it, trampling on her feelings with only the faintest protest from his conscience.
So what did that make him? No better than her damn brother, that was for sure. And now she wanted the truth.
And if he told her he knew what would happen. She would hate him more than ever, and with good cause. She would want him out of her life for good, and he would have lost any chance of ever finding out more about the real Lily, the one he had so blindly refused to let himself see when he had started out on this.
But at least he could make things as easy as possible for her. If it could ever be easy for her to find out that she had been used and lied to by both himself and her brother.
And so he insisted that they dressed and had breakfast before they talked. But for both of them it was just a question of going through the motions, neither of them eating much, and obviously grateful for the chance to stop pretending to swallow food they had no appetite for.
At last Ronan took his coffee through into the lounge and Lily followed him silently, torn between wanting to know the whole truth and a cold, sneaking fear of just what she might discover about Davey and Ronan himself.
‘You’d best sit down,’ Ronan instructed when she hovered in the doorway, unsure of what to do.
‘Will I need to?’
She regretted the impulse of flippancy as soon as the words were out. Anyone looking into Ronan’s face, seeing the frown that darkened his features, the bleakness of his eyes, would know that levity didn’t fit with the mood at all.
‘Sorry,’ she muttered, plumping herself down in a chair.
Her stomach seemed to be turning somersaults while filled with the frantic fluttering of a thousand butterfly wings, so that she felt distinctly nauseous. The smell of her own coffee sickened her so that she hastily put it aside.
‘It’s strange how one’s life can change in six months,’ Ronan began, his tone as sombre and joyless as any judge pronouncing a life sentence. ‘Just twenty-four short weeks, and everything you ever believed in or held dear can be destroyed or so irrevocably damaged that there’s no possible hope of repair.’
Six months? Lily wondered. It hadn’t been even four since she had first meet Ronan. But in those weeks her life had been blasted apart as if in the grip of some violent typhoon.
‘I know,’ she said feelingly, and at her quiet words Ronan’s dark head jerked up, blue-grey eyes blazing into hers.
‘Yes, I suppose you do.’
He dropped his gaze to his coffee mug again, staring into it as if he felt as little enthusiasm for the drink as she had done.
‘And I suppose my situation was very similar to the one you found yourself in when you were seventeen. Six months ago I would have said that I had almost everything a man could want. I had a thriving business, work that absorbed me, more money than I knew what to do with. I had success, health, but most of all I had a wonderful family.’
Lily’s heart kicked sharply in her chest, making her gasp out loud.
‘I had a family,’ he had said. The words tolled inside her head like some terrible death knell for any hopes she had. They were made all the more ominous by the recollection of Ronan’s response to her questions about his guests at the wedding.
‘No family,’ he had said. ‘There’s no family.’ And with a terrible feeling like a knife being twisted in a wound she heard his voice confirm her worst fears.
‘I had a father, mother, and a little sister I adored. Now…’
‘Oh, God, Ronan! What happened?’
‘Your brother happened.’ His face changed as he spoke, the sensual mouth twisting bitterly, eyes hard as tempered steel.
‘D-Davey?’
‘Davey.’ The confirmation was cold and harsh. ‘Davey bloody Cornwell. Let me tell you about your brother and my family. About what I call the “Cornwell effect”.’
No! Lily wanted to cry. She longed to close her ears with her hands, blot out the sound of that appallingly controlled voice. She didn’t want to hear the things it would tell her. But she knew she had to go through with this, even if it destroyed her very soul to do so.
‘Tell me.’ It was just a whisper. But Ronan needed no encouragement. He had already determined on a path and he was going to follow it, no matter what.
‘My sister, Rosalie, was just coming up to eighteen and in the final year of her A level courses…’
Rosalie. Lily’s nerves tightened even further, recalling that ‘Rosalie used to say’ which he had cut off so abruptly. She had thought he’d meant some ex-girlfriend, but he had been talking about his sister.
‘She was very bright, very beautiful. Here…’
He reached into a pocket and pulled out his wallet. Extracting a photograph, he tossed it onto the table between them so that Lily could see it clearly.
A young girl, tall and slim. Her vivid colouring was Ronan’s intensified: bright blue eyes and tumbling auburn hair. Her smile was wide and brilliantly happy, and Lily winced inside at the thought of that ‘I had a little sister.’
‘She had a wonderful future ahead of her. She was going to university. She wanted to be a lawyer, and she would have made it too, but she met your brother.’
His right fist slammed into the palm of his other hand with a violence that made Lily start fearfully, flinching back into her chair.
‘I introduced her to Davey.’
‘Oh, don’t!’ Lily pleaded, unable to bear the bitterness of self-reproach in his words.
The look Ronan turned on her was blackly sardonic, bitterly mocking in a way that tore at her heart.
‘In the pack of lies your brother seems to have told you, there was one bit of the truth. I did put him under contract—but only to rescue him from the mess he’d already got himself into.’
‘And why did you do that?’ It seemed an impossibly generous thing to do.
Ronan shrugged off her question.
‘Davey doesn’t have a monopoly on messing things up. When I was nineteen, and in my first year at university, I almost went off the rails. I was having too much fun to work so I skipped lectures, didn’t hand in work. It was only when I realised that I had to re-sit my exams or be thrown out that I got my act together. So I knew something of how he felt. And besides, Davey has real talent. He’s an amazing musician with the soaring voice of an angel. He’s also a brilliant songwriter who could write the most amazing lyrics. He played me a couple of his compositions. They would have made the devil himself weep.’
The words were choked off and for the space of several heartbeats there was a silence so profound that Lily felt it close around her throat, stifling any attempt to speak. She couldn’t take her eyes from Ronan, from the pallor of his ravaged face, the anguish that burned in his eyes.
‘They made Rosalie weep,’ he said rawly.
‘Oh, God!’
Lily fought against tears she was afraid to let fall. She feared that Ronan might think they were for Davey, and so misjudge where her sympathies lay. The terrible problem was that she was beginning to feel there was no one person who deserved her tears most. Already her heart was breaking for everyone involved in this story.
