Читать книгу Back in the Lion's Den - Elizabeth Power, Elizabeth Power - Страница 6

HE could hear the music coming from the fitness class before he reached it. A strong pulsing rhythm reverberating down the corridor.

On either side of him, behind glass partitions, enthusiasts were treading rubber and pumping muscle. He knew he cut an incongruous figure in his dark business suit, white shirt and tie, and was aware that two young women playing squash on one of the courts he was passing had stopped their game to watch him.

At six feet three and powerfully built, with the sleek black hair and rugged features of a Celtic heritage, he was used to the attention his presence elicited from the opposite sex. But while he might usually have spared a glance towards an admiring female today Conan Ryder’s mind wasn’t distracted from its purpose.

Ignoring their blatant interest, he strode determinedly on, the green-gold of his eyes remaining focused on the partly open door to the room where the beat was coming from. His broad shoulders were pulled back in a deliberate attempt to stem the adrenalin that was coursing through his body.

No one made him feel like this! The fight for the composure he prized pulled his jaw into a grim cast. Especially not a woman—and particularly not a woman like Sienna Ryder! He had a request to make—that was all. A request she’d probably refuse so that would mean a verbal battle with her to get her to do what he wanted. But he would win in the end. After that it was a matter of making the necessary arrangements and getting out.

‘That’s good, Charlene! Let your hips do the work! That’s lovely! You’re a natural! Let it f-l-o-w …’

He heard her voice above the beat as he pushed open the door with the flat of his hand. Clear. Encouraging. In control.

The lively rhythm was still pounding as he met the class head on and twenty pairs of female eyes turned his way, but his interest lay only with the petite figure of the young woman in a sleeveless red leotard and black leggings who was still directing the class with her back to him.

Her short dark hair was expertly shaped into the nape of her neck, its boyish style only adding to her femininity. Skin lightly tanned, the perfect proportions of her small, slim body were clearly outlined by the clinging clothes, yet there was a remarkably lithe fitness about her that hadn’t been so apparent when she had been married to his brother.

Coming up behind her, he let his gaze sweep over the graceful line of her neck and shoulders to the small butterfly tattoo he recognised just above her right shoulderblade, and felt a tug of unwelcome awareness at the very core of his masculinity. He found himself having to clear his throat before he stooped to make himself heard.

‘I’m sorry to interrupt your workout, but you were proving far too elusive. How does anyone get in touch with you? By carrier pigeon?’ Past hostilities gave a hard edge to the deep resonance of his voice. ‘Or would I have had more luck trying telepathy?’

Shock had registered in her eyes as she’d swung round—big blue eyes that met the green-gold of his now with a spark of contention, acknowledging the coldness in his tones.

‘Hello, Conan.’ Her smile was bright and forced, her small oval face assuming that look of cool detachment he remembered so well. ‘It’s lovely to see you again too.’

Her sarcasm wasn’t lost on him, but then he saw the blood drain from her cheeks as she said starkly, ‘Daisy? Is she all right?’

Her concern for her child was obvious, even if she hadn’t shown the same regard for his brother.

‘How would I know?’ he lobbed back across the fading beat. ‘I haven’t seen her in nearly three years!’ Censure stiffening every inch of his strong, lean body, he watched her dark lashes come down as that moment of panic gave way to undisguised relief as it dawned on her that he couldn’t possibly know anything about the welfare of his niece. ‘I’ve been trying to reach you for days, but your landline’s ex-directory, and each time I’ve called at the house you’ve never been around.’

She looked almost startled. Perhaps she had never expected him to find out where she lived. ‘We’ve been busy.’ It was a flat refusal to enlarge upon anything concerning her private life. ‘Why did you want to see me anyway?’

Tension pulled in his jaw at the rising level of female hormones in the hall. Now that the music had stopped he could feel those twenty pairs of eyes looking him up and down, as though they had never seen a man before in their entire lives.

Impatiently he demanded, ‘Can we talk somewhere else?’

Gesturing for her class to continue as another track started to play, Sienna simply jerked her head towards the open door.

Reaching it first, Conan caught the scent of the freshness of her skin as she stepped past him into the corridor. He noticed the sway of her slim hips as he followed her out, and with another stab of something way down in his loins noticed the shape of her firm buttocks, tantalisingly separated by the deep lines of the leotard, the narrow span of her waist as she went ahead of him with her head high, her back as proud and straight as any ballerina’s.

‘What do you want?’ she challenged, swinging to face him.

Her blood was racing just at the sight of seeing Conan Ryder on her turf. He was as hard and handsome as she remembered him. Business entrepreneur. Billionaire. And her late husband’s half-brother.

He was right, though. It had been three years—or as good as—since she had fled from Surrey to her home town just outside London, escaping his cruel taunts and his accusations with an eighteen month old toddler in tow. Three years since that tragic accident of Niall’s that had left her widowed and her child fatherless.

It was clear from Conan’s disparaging manner that his opinion of her hadn’t changed. Now, alone with him, she felt less like the confident, self-sufficient woman she had become, and more like the emotionally dependent girl who had taken the lash of his tongue with no means of defending herself. Nothing that would explain her actions, why she had lied, her obvious guilt. Not without baring her very soul to him, and there was no way she was ever going to do that.

Closing her mind against the bitter pain that threatened to well up inside of her, she murmured in a voice that was near to cracking, ‘For what reason could you possibly want to see me?’

‘Not you.’ Those incisive words cut across her with the precision of a scythe. ‘Daisy. I’m here to insist you let Daisy come back with me.’

‘What?’ Her stomach muscles tightened at painful echoes of the past. ‘I’d do everything in my power to take Daisy away from you.’ Yet her hackles were rising too, at the sheer arrogance of his statement, making her respond with, ‘Insist? You insist, Conan?’

‘She’s my brother’s child,’ he reminded her harshly. ‘She also has a grandmother she hasn’t seen.’

‘She also has a mother who wasn’t good enough for any of you—remember?’ It was a pointed little cry. Poignant, bitter and accusing.

Conan’s black lashes swept down over the glittering green of his eyes—thick long lashes, she’d always thought, that most women would give their eye teeth to achieve. His face was lean and hard, high cheekbones stark against the proud nostrils that flared momentarily above his angular, darkly shadowed jaw, and the taut line of his wide, uncompromising mouth was compressed.

‘All right,’ he breathed heavily at length. ‘I know we’ve had our differences.’

‘Our differences?’ She almost laughed in his face. ‘Is that what you call them, Conan? Being accused of being an unfit mother and an unfaithful wife?’

His penetrating eyes hardened like chips of green glass, but all he said was, ‘Yes, well …’ It was clear he didn’t want to discuss the accusations he had made. ‘That doesn’t alter the fact that you had no right to deprive Daisy of her family.’

‘I had every right!’ The star-shaped studs in her ears glinted as she brought her head up sharply, colour touching her cheeks at his glaring audacity. A confrontation with him was bad enough, but being so scantily dressed made her feel at even more of a disadvantage—especially since he was so big and so potently male. ‘Niall was all the family she had. Niall and me!’ That wasn’t strictly true, Sienna thought, because there were her parents, although she didn’t see them that often since their move to Spain.

‘Niall was my brother.’

‘Yes, well … a pity you didn’t remember that when he was alive!’

She had hit a raw nerve. She could see it in the way that sensuous mouth of his hardened, and in the way his irises seemed to darken like woodland pools at dusk. Perhaps being reminded of how he, a self-made billionaire, had refused his own brother help when he’d been in desperate financial straits didn’t sit too comfortably on his conscience. With lethal softness, however, he said, ‘You still want to goad me with that?’

Something warned her to be on her guard and not to antagonise him unnecessarily. Even so, the raw pain to which he had subjected her three years ago, with his implacable assumptions and his inexorably cruel accusations, had her uttering tautly, ‘I don’t want to do anything with you, Conan Ryder.’

His gaze grazed over her shoulders, touching briefly on the swell of her small firm breasts. He was unpitying and unscrupulous and she didn’t like him, and yet she felt the sick stirrings of a ridiculous heat lick along her veins.

‘Did I ever ask you to?’ he enquired silkily, the cruel mockery that played around his mouth leaving her in no doubt as to what he meant.

No, he hadn’t, she thought with an inexplicable little tingle along her spine, and she had never thought of him as anything other than her husband’s elder brother. Of course she’d been aware of his countless attributes during those two and a half years she had been married to Niall. What woman wouldn’t have been? she reasoned resentfully. He was good-looking, dynamic, and unbelievably wealthy. He was also a dark and silent entity she’d never quite been able to fathom out, although his ruthlessness and insensitivity had been all too apparent at the end. She would have had to be an android not to have noticed him, at least. But she’d loved Niall. Loved him with a passion that had nearly driven her insane …

‘If I remember correctly,’ he was saying icily now, ‘you were too busy breaking your marriage vows without any help from me—though I doubt it would have taken much more than a snap of my fingers, even with your lover in the picture.’

‘He wasn’t my lover! And you’re still as misguided as you ever were if you think I would ever have thought about setting my sights on a man like you!’ Memories of the last time she had stood and faced him like this clawed at her consciousness, the ugly scene forever etched on her memory. ‘For your information, Conan—’

I loved your brother, she had been about to say, but broke off as the door to her gym class opened, enveloping them in a pounding rhythm.

A young woman came out, her smile for Conan openly inviting before she crossed behind him to the women’s cloakroom, forcing him to move closer to Sienna.

In her tight, revealing clothes she suddenly felt naked beside him, and the air left her lungs so that it felt difficult to breathe.

This close to him she could smell the lemony fragrance of his cologne. It didn’t help either that he was so formally dressed, probably having just come from some high-flying meeting, she guessed grudgingly, where he’d made multi-million-pound decisions that would increase his global fortune tenfold! But his nearness was stifling, and Sienna took a step back—which was so obvious that he couldn’t have failed to realise why.

Apart from the lift of an enquiring eyebrow, however, fortunately he made no comment.

‘My mother needs to see Daisy,’ he stated as the cloakroom door closed quietly behind him. ‘So do I.’ Sombre lines were etched around his mouth and jaw and a deep groove corrugated the healthily tanned skin of his forehead. ‘My mother hasn’t been herself lately …’ He couldn’t bring himself to tell her what was really wrong, how worried he was about Avril Ryder; he wasn’t going to beg. ‘And I feel she would benefit from a visit from her only grandchild. She hasn’t seen her since she was eighteen months old. Neither of us has.’

‘And you think you can just come here and take Daisy away? Just like that? That I’d even allow it?’ Fear rose in her again but she forced it back. ‘She doesn’t know you, Conan.’

‘And whose fault is that?’

‘She doesn’t know you,’ she reiterated, ignoring his censuring demand. ‘Neither of us does.’ Or did, she amended bitterly, reminded of his heartlessness, his lack of compassion—not just towards her, but towards his own brother.

‘I’m the child’s uncle, for Pete’s sake! Not that you’ve ever given her the chance to find out. There have been no photos. No contact. Do you know what that’s been like for Avril? Her grandmother? Don’t you think she’s had enough to contend with in losing Niall—without losing his baby daughter as well when you took her away?’

‘I was driven away,’ she breathed fiercely. ‘And you seem to forget … I lost something too.’ Her eyes were shielded, their lids heavy with the pain of remembering. ‘I lost a husband. And I had to contend with a lot of accusations and blame. Don’t you think I felt bad enough without being made to feel I was responsible for what had happened to him? That I was responsible for his drinking and getting into debt? I knew what you thought of me—both of you. You made it clear often enough that you thought Niall had married beneath him.’

‘I’ve never said that.’

‘You didn’t have to! It was there in every last criticism of everything I said—everything I did. Your mother could scarcely contain her shock at him marrying a barmaid! Albeit a temporary one, until I could get my career on track! But that was the crux of the matter, wasn’t it? You were determined not to like me from the start.’

‘I’m not responsible for my mother. As for me, I only acted on what I observed with my own eyes.’

‘And what was that? Besides my supposed infidelity, that is?’

Condemnation set his features in harsh lines, so that he looked like one of the warring Celts whose blood still pumped through his proud, pulsing veins. ‘You know very well. Niall was weak where money was concerned. He was living above his means and you did nothing but encourage him.’

Because she hadn’t known. Because she’d been too young to recognise the signs: his irritability, his drinking too much, his mood swings.

‘“Bled him dry”,’ she reminded him. ‘That was the phrase I believe you used.’

He didn’t negate or deny it. How could he? Sienna thought grimly. He wasn’t a man to pull his punches, or hide behind lies and subterfuge—as she had—whatever else he might have done.

‘I can’t talk about this now,’ she uttered quickly, hearing the last track on the album she’d selected earlier come to an abrupt end. ‘I’ve got to get back to my class.’ This meeting with Niall’s brother was more traumatic than she’d ever have imagined possible, and it was with aching relief that she pulled herself away.

‘You’ll do as I ask, Sienna.’

She stopped in her tracks, swinging round to face him again, her eyes wide with defiance and disbelief.

‘Oh, will I? And what do you intend to do to try and bully me into it? Concoct some tale about my being an unsuitable mother and get an injunction to try and take Daisy away from me, as you threatened before?’ Beneath her bravado was a sick anxiety that he might try to do just that—somehow use his power and influence to get even with her for how he believed she had treated Niall.

‘I didn’t come here for that.’

‘No. You just want me to hand her over without all the hassle. Well, I’m sorry, Conan, but the answer’s still no. Daisy’s not going anywhere without me, and I’m certainly not putting myself back into the lion’s den, thank you very much!’

‘Oh, I think you will, Sienna.’

‘And what makes you so sure?’

‘Conscience, sweetheart. If you have one.’

Her small chin came up as she said bitterly, ignoring the patronising way in which he had addressed her, ‘Like you, you mean?’

She didn’t wait to catch any sniping response.

Making sure Daisy was asleep, Sienna kissed the little girl’s soft cheek before extinguishing her bedside lamp, unable to resist stroking the silky chestnut hair that curled against the pillow.

Like Niall’s, she thought poignantly, pulling the duvet up over the chubby arm wrapped around her pink hippopotamus. Daisy had inherited her father’s colouring, not hers.

Going back downstairs, she opened the back door to let in a big bouncing bundle of white shaggy fur, filled a bowl with the dog’s supper, and then started the ironing—normal things she did every day, except tonight things felt anything but normal.

Meeting Conan again had opened up all the unhappiness of the past, forcing her to dwell on wounds she’d thought had healed, forcing her to think, to remember.

She had been just twenty when she had met Niall.

With her parents having sold their UK home to live abroad, Sienna had chosen to stay in England on her own. Her parents had always done their own thing. They liked sun, sea and sand, and Sienna had been happy for them, while relishing the prospect of occasional holidays in Spain.

She had been working as a receptionist at her local gym when she had met Niall. He had been a regular member there, and had often come into the bar where she had sometimes helped when it was short-staffed. She had instantly warmed to his wicked sense of humour. He’d been witty and charming, and just a little bit crazy, and she’d been swept off her feet before she had known what hit her.

Her parents had flown over for the wedding, which had been a short civil ceremony after a whirlwind romance. Faith and Barry Swann and Niall’s mother—a barrister’s widow—were poles apart, and while they’d tried to befriend her new mother-in-law it was clear that Avril Ryder hadn’t really warmed towards them. It had also been clear to Sienna from the start that the woman believed she had trapped her youngest son into marriage by getting pregnant, which was something over which Sienna had been silently smug, proving her wrong when Daisy had arrived exactly a year to the day that they had married.

Conan had been at the wedding, interrupting some important business conference he’d been attending in Europe, and the cool touch of his lips on her cheek as he’d wished her well after the ceremony had been as formal as it had been unsettling.

It had been clear, though, that Niall looked up to his brother, and Sienna had understood why. Already approaching his late twenties to his half-brother’s twenty-three, and spearheading a global telecommunications company, Conan Ryder had been a mind-blowing success—dynamic, wealthy and sophisticated. It had been apparent to Sienna from the start who Niall was trying to emulate in the way he spoke, in his image, even in that air of glacial composure that Conan exuded.

Niall had been a top sales executive working at Conan’s head office, though not before pulling himself out of university and destroying his mother’s hopes of him following his late father into the legal profession. Nevertheless, he had been good at his job, and determined that she would reap the benefits—from the clothes he had bought her to every conceivable luxury she had wanted in their modern four bedroom home, a house he had mortgaged only a few miles from his half-brother’s Surrey mansion.

But he’d played as hard as he worked. Often too hard, Sienna remembered painfully, as she ironed the back of one of Daisy’s little blouses for at least the third time. Because it had been that reckless sense of fun and that daredevil attitude towards almost everything that had killed him during those five days in Copenhagen at that stag party that had gone terribly wrong …

Pain and remorse pressed like twin bars against her chest, and she forced herself to breathe deeply to ease the anguish.

While he’d been alive he’d been driven: always trying to compete—almost obsessively so, she reflected—with his elder brother. But Niall hadn’t had Conan’s focus—or his ruthlessness, she thought bitterly. Because when Niall had got into dire financial straits and had asked his brother for help, just a couple of weeks before he’d died, Conan had refused. Niall had been devastated. It was only then that he’d told her how far they had been living above their means and just how much money they owed. She’d been too young and far too naive to realise it!

Both Conan and her mother-in-law had blamed her for her husband’s overspending, and for the worry she had caused, which had led to his drinking and his ultimate accident.

‘It wasn’t my fault!’ she’d shot back at Conan that last day, just a week after Niall’s funeral, hurting, agonised, reproaching herself for going along with everything Niall had expected of her—given her—even when her instincts had told her that he was wrong, or that it seemed he was being far too extravagant. ‘And if you’d helped him when he came to you for help perhaps he wouldn’t have got so drunk as not to know what he was doing!’ she had flung at him bitterly, too overcome by grief to care what she was saying.

She had wanted desperately to cry. To break down. To alleviate the pain pressing like a dead weight against her chest. But standing there in the sumptuous drawing room of Conan Ryder’s Regency home, where she’d come to return the last of Niall’s things, her tears wouldn’t come. She had felt only a numbing emptiness that had given her an air of spurious indifference—which had only cemented her guilt in his brother’s eyes, promoting what he’d decided he already knew: that she’d been cheating on his brother.

‘My brother was in trouble and you weren’t even aware of it—too wrapped up in your spending and your … boyfriend to notice.’

‘Oh, I noticed all right!’ It was a bitter little cry, torn from beneath the veneer of icy detachment she was feeling.

‘And you did nothing to help him.’

‘I was his wife—not his nursemaid!’ She realised how cold and brutal that sounded. She was trying to defend herself and failing miserably, wanting to scream at Niall for leaving her to face his family like this—alone. Hurt, angry, reproaching herself …

‘My mother has expressed concerns that you aren’t mature or responsible enough to look after a child—and quite frankly I agree with her. I want my brother’s offspring to grow up as a Ryder, under this family’s roof. Not in some other man’s home, bearing some other man’s name.’

‘She’ll grow up as I consider fit,’ she assured him, stung by the things her mother-in-law had said. But then Avril Ryder—whom, she noted, hadn’t emerged from her own wing of her eldest son’s exclusive residence—had never made any attempt to conceal her disapproval of her other son’s match. There was no way, though, that Sienna ever intended changing her child’s name—even if she did end up with another man in the far distant future. ‘You’re not her father, Conan,’ she reminded him coolly. ‘Even if you’d like to think you are.’

‘No.’ Derision curved his uncompromising mouth at that. ‘Fortunately I can’t claim to be among those to have had the pleasure.’

Her hand clenched with the almost uncontrollable urge to lash out at him, to feel the sting of her palm as it met the hardness of his cheek which might shake her out of this numbing misery. But she’d decided that enough damage had been done already.

‘I don’t have to stay here and take this from you,’ she responded quietly, hating herself for the tingle of awareness that had run through her at his blatant innuendo a moment ago. ‘But if you’re trying to make me feel cheap, then go ahead. I was never good enough for you, was I? Either of you,’ she’d added accusingly. ‘Is that why Niall made such a mess of things? Because he was made to feel he wasn’t good enough either? Because he felt so overshadowed by his much smarter, richer and generally more favoured elder brother?’

If he’d looked angry before, he’d looked livid then, his proud nostrils flaring, the skin above his upper lip white with rage. ‘You don’t know what you’re talking about,’ he’d rasped.

‘Don’t I?’ She went on goading him, unable to help herself, needing something—anything—to ease the burden of confusing emotions that were ravaging her. ‘I know you did next to nothing to support him—in anything—and that when he came to you for help you refused him any financial backing! Well, don’t worry! We’ll be leaving tomorrow. You won’t have to put up with me soiling this family’s precious pedigree any more!’

‘You take Daisy away from here and you’ll have me to answer to. Is that clear?’

‘As crystal! What do you propose to do?’ she taunted. ‘Sue for custody?’

‘If it comes to it.’

‘On what grounds?’ she challenged, suddenly wary. ‘That I’m an unfit mother?’ Painfully she remembered the instances that had helped tar her with that particular brush—the circumstances that she couldn’t explain even if she wanted to.

‘If I find you wanting in that regard, I won’t hesitate in applying for Daisy to be made a ward of court, most certainly.’

From anyone else she would have considered it an idle threat. From Conan it merely struck the deepest fear into her heart.

He was rich and powerful enough to make any court take notice of charges he made against her. And though she doubted that the Ryders would ever be allowed full custody of her daughter, she still feared what he might try to do with his staggering influence and his money.

‘Well, perhaps I should marry my boyfriend!’ she threw back desperately, pandering to his previous accusation. ‘And then you wouldn’t be able to do a thing! Stay away from me, Conan!’

She’d stormed out of the house and their lives without another glance back, paying off her debts and setting up home in the little terraced house she’d managed to mortgage with the small amount of capital left over from the sale of the house she had shared with Niall.

But now Conan had turned up again, still as judgmental as ever, and with a lethal maturity only acquired by three more years of honing that indomitable strength of character alongside his superb masculine physique. Of increasing his wealth and power and making himself one of the most talked about entrepreneurs of his generation—both in the playgrounds of the rich and in his corporate life. It amounted to three more years of getting what he wanted. And he wanted Daisy …

When the doorbell rang, she almost dropped the iron.