Because she knew that, no matter how she had been treated by both Danvers brothers, Piers had worse coming to him if he was now seeing his brother as the noble knight in this terrible farce they were all taking part in.
Had he never heard of Lancelot and Guinevere?
‘But before I let myself see all of this you happened,’ he continued. ‘With you, I saw my chance to make Rafe hurt as I believed he had made me hurt. And I’m sorry, Shaan.’ At last he turned to face her. ‘But I went for it without giving a single thought to how my actions were going to hurt you until it was too late to do anything about it.’
‘Me?’ Shaan
frowned, having completely lost the thread of this. ‘But why should you think that I could give you the power to hurt Rafe in any way?’
He frowned too, as though her question had thrown him. ‘We all saw it, Shaan,’ he proclaimed, as if that should make it all clearer. ‘Every one of us that was involved in that bit of bulldozing we did at work the day we all bumped into you. We all stood there and watched in stunned disbelief the great man himself fall like a ton of bricks for the little typist from his own typing pool!’
He let out a grim crack of laughter while Shaan came slowly to her feet as the full, ghastly extent of Piers’ revenge plan on his brother began to take shape in her head.
‘You mean…?’ She had to stop to swallow, having difficulty pushing words through the sudden bank of anger beginning to pulse inside her. ‘You mean, you singled me out and made me fall in love with you simply because you believed you were stealing something that Rafe wanted for himself?’
He didn’t answer—didn’t need to—because it was all so horribly clear now.
Piers had cynically used her, played on her feelings, coolly stretched the whole farce out to their actual wedding day before deciding to put a stop to it—and all because he’d believed he was getting one back at Rafe?
‘But Rafe was never in love with me, you cruel, crass, blind fool, Piers!’ she spat at him angrily. ‘You put me through all of that for nothing!’
‘Of course he is,’ he maintained—and had the damned gall to start grinning at her! ‘It was the buzz of the year around the executive offices! Rafe of all people,’ he murmured with cruel, dry satire, ‘losing touch with his usual impregnable cool while he bit Jack Mellor’s head off and scrambled around looking for an excuse to send him off to apologise to you so he could discover who you were without being too obvious about it!’
He let out a rueful laugh, his blue eyes alight with enjoyment at the memory of the whole novel experience. ‘If he hadn’t been flying off to Hong Kong that same day, he would have been laying siege at your door, Shaan, I’m telling you,’ he insisted. ‘He was hit that hard and that badly.’
Could it be true?
The very suggestion was enough to take Shaan’s legs from under her. She sank back into the chair as she began to teeter on the very edge of a desperate hope.
‘But what about Madeleine?’ she whispered.
‘Madeleine?’ Piers stiffened slightly, and all sign of that sardonic humour was wiped clean from his features as he suddenly became gruff-voiced and defensive. ‘She’s over him now,’ he said. ‘It was all just a silly female crush she had on him,’ he explained, ‘which Rafe tried telling me often enough without me wanting to listen,’ he added. ‘But it hurt that Madeleine of all people would turn away from me towards Rafe. And I think Rafe had to be quite brutal with her in the end to snap her out of it.
‘But,’ he sighed, ‘by then I wanted nothing to do with her, so she ran away to her mother in Chicago, and we didn’t see each other again until Rafe dragged her back here when he realised what I was trying to do with you.’
None of which meant that Rafe was not in love with Madeleine himself, Shaan told herself firmly. Only that he had too much integrity to steal the woman his brother loved.
Unlike Piers; she made the grim comparison ‘Tell me, Piers,’ she questioned quietly, ‘would you have gone ahead and married me if Madeleine hadn’t come back?’
His shoulders hunched inside the elegant cut of his jacket, his fair head dipping so he could stare down at his feet for a moment. ‘I didn’t pull back from marrying you for Madeleine’s sake,’ he told her. ‘I did it because Rafe came to me and begged me not to do it to you.’
‘Oh, come off it, Piers!’ Shaan crossly denounced that. ‘You’d already arranged to marry Madeleine on the same day you were supposed to be marrying me!’
His head came up, guilty colour heightening his cheekbones. ‘I was going to leave Madeleine standing at the altar, not you, Shaan…’
And he acknowledged Shaan’s shocked and horrified expression with a grimace of real self-contempt.
‘I would have done it too,’ he admitted. ‘If Rafe hadn’t come to me that morning looking desperate and so damned wretched that I…’ He stopped to swallow, then on a tense sigh went on. ‘You’re right, Shaan. I am crass. I know it, you know it, and, my God, but Madeleine and Rafe both know it!’
There was another pause, another self-contemptuous grimace that said he wasn’t liking this person he was revealing himself to be. ‘Rafe laid his damned soul bare for me that morning,’ he said hoarsely. ‘And I’ve never felt so damned despicable in all my wretched life for forcing him, of all people, to have to do that.’
Rafe had actually gone to Piers that morning and begged him not to marry her?
‘So you’d better damned well love him, Shaan,’ Piers muttered threateningly. ‘Because a man who is prepared to lay his pride at the feet of another man for the woman he loves deserves only the best kind of love back in return.’
He’s got it, she thought as a warm glow began to suffuse the very centre of her being. Oh, yes, he’s most definitely got it!
CHAPTER ELEVEN