More Than a Convenient Marriage?

“I wanted to kiss you,” she blurted with defiance, staring him right in the eye while every nerve ending fried under the responding flash of heat in his gaze. “I was attracted to you. We all have urges,” she excused with a shrug, desperate to play it down so he wouldn’t know how attracted. “I’d had a few drinks. It seemed like a good idea.”

For a long time he only stared at her, while the silence played out and the shadows closed in. Just as she began to feel sweat popping across her upper lip he moved closer, studying her so intently her skin tightened all over her body.

“You wanted a kiss bad enough to chase me to the beach for it?”

“Take your pound of flesh if you need it. Yes, I chased you and, yes, I realize how desperate that makes me seem. It was an impulse. I didn’t get out much and it was my birthday.” If she kept slapping coats of whitewash on it perhaps he wouldn’t see it for the act of lifelong yearning it had been.

“All those years of batting your lashes and trying to get a rise out of me... It wasn’t more of that same nonsense?”

She had to drop her gaze then, because it had very much been a culmination of that long, infernal effort to catch his interest.

His hand came under her jaw, forcing her chin up so she couldn’t hide from his penetrating glacier-blue eyes. “Because I can forgive a teenager for baiting a grown man, but at twenty you should have known better.”

“So you said then, and I wasn’t doing that.” Impatience got the better of her and she tried to pull away, dying inside as she recalled his angry kiss and his merciless rejection.

His hand moved to the side of her neck, long fingers sliding beneath the fall of her hair so his fingertips rested on the back of her neck, keeping her close.

“And today?” he asked, his tone dangerously lethal.

“Today you kissed me.” It took guts to hold her ground, especially when she was flushed with self-disgust as she recalled how she’d reacted: as if she still thought kissing him was a good idea. Her nails cut into her palms as she made herself face him and the crushing truth. “Or rather you tried to manipulate me with what mechanically resembled a kiss.”

He gave a little snort. “I’m long past the age of playing games. It was more than mechanics. We kissed each other.”

He made it sound like something to be savored. When he dropped his gaze to her mouth her stomach tightened. Her whole body tingled and her lips began to burn.

“We started something two years ago that wants finishing.”

Her hand came up instinctively to the middle of his chest. He hadn’t moved any closer, but she suddenly felt threatened. Her arteries swelled as all her blood began to move harder and faster. “Wh-what do you mean?”

“I’m not blind, Rowan.” He glanced down to where her still-bandaged hand pressed against his chest. His strong heartbeat pounded into her palm. “I noticed in the last few years that you weren’t a kid anymore. The only thing that stopped me taking what you were offering that night was a certainty that you didn’t mean it. If you had...”

She sucked in a breath and jerked back, pulling her hand into her breasts as though his glance at her knuckles had branded them.

Nic folded his arms across his chest, his shoulders hardening. “Did you mean it?” he demanded. “Are we finally being honest or still playing games?”

This was moving too fast. “I’m not going to sleep with you, Nic!”

“Because you still want to tie me up in knots for kicks?”

Was he feeling tied up? Insidious heat flooded into her pelvis, licking with wanton anticipation at her insides. He couldn’t be serious. She told her feet to run, but they refused. “We can’t have some kind of fling and then carry on as if...”

She trailed off, the little cogs in her head making hard, sharp connections that stuck long enough to reverberate painfully in her skull before clicking over to the next one as she took in the way Nic’s brows lifted in aloof inquisition.

She was a virgin, not sophisticated and experienced enough to have flings. Nic was experienced, though, and when he had flings he carried on just fine afterward because he never saw his partner again. Which was exactly what he intended with Rowan.

How had she not grasped that? He had come here intending to kick her out and never see her again. She’d won a stay of eviction, but after the two weeks were up they would not cross paths again—not unless it was by chance.

She would never see Nic again. Ever. How had she not taken that in?

Because she had subliminally believed that when she was ready she would seek him out. Never once had she thought there would be no Rosedale to come back to—no Nic prowling the grounds where she could put herself under his nose with only minimal risk and wait for him to notice her.

The gray void that was her future grew bigger and more desolate.

“As if what?” he prompted.

She gave a dry laugh, using it to cover the damp thickness gathering in her throat. “I naively thought an affair could make for awkward Christmas dinners in future, but that won’t be a problem, will it? I really am saying goodbye to everything I knew and—”

Don’t say it. Rowan swallowed and twisted her hands together, trying to rub sensation into fingers that were going numb. “I wish you had some feeling of having a home and family here, Nic. I really do. I’ll make us some sandwiches.”

She picked up the candle and walked out, leaving him in the glow of the laptop. She didn’t see how he stood in the same place long after the device timed out again, silent and alone in the dark.

CHAPTER FIVE

NIC WAS STILL LETTING Rowan’s remark eat at him the next morning, and he couldn’t fathom why. It wasn’t as if he hadn’t heard variations of it from other women.

He had concluded over the years that there was a deficiency in him that portrayed him as not needing what others did: a home, family, love. And since he had been denied those things all his life he had learned to live without them. He didn’t need them. It was a closed loop.

So why did he feel so unfairly judged by Rowan’s, I wish you had some feeling of having a home and family here? Even if he wanted to be different, he couldn’t. The thought of trying to change made his hands curl into fists and a current of nervousness pulse through his system.

“I’m going for groceries!” she shouted from the bottom floor, startling him from his introspection.

Good, he thought, needing a reprieve from the way she upset his equilibrium. “Check the car insurance,” he responded in a yell.

“Okay. Bye!”

He let out a sigh, forcing himself back to his desk and the work spread over it, dimly aware of the distant hum of the garage door and then the growl of a motor—

She wouldn’t.

Leaping to his feet, he shot open the window in time to see his vintage black convertible, top down, slithering with the speed of a hungry mamba up the curving drive. Tucking fingertip and thumb against his teeth, he pierced the air with a furious whistle.

The brake lights came on. Her glossy head turned to look back at the house.

Nic pointed at the front steps and met her there a few seconds later. Rowan chirped the brakes as she stopped before him, staying behind the wheel while all eight cylinders purred. Glamorous Tiffany sunglasses obscured half her face, but her mouth trembled in a subtle betrayal of nervousness before she sat a little straighter and gave him a lady-of-the-manor, “Yes?”

“What the hell are you doing?” He hitched his elbow on the top of the windscreen from the passenger side.

“You said to check the insurance. This one is still valid.”

“So is the hatchback.”

“This is more fun.” She pulled out one of her cheeky grins, trying to cajole him into indulging her.

He narrowed his eyes, determined not to fall for her act the way the rest of his sex did. “And you know that how?”

Her nose crinkled. “I might have taken Black Betty here for a spin once or twice before. But I always fill the tank.” The assertive finger she lifted fell. “Today that could be a problem, though. I took the petty cash from the kitchen, but it wasn’t much.”

“You are utterly shameless, aren’t you? I’m speechless.” Unaccountably, he had to suppress an urge to laugh.

“Okay. Well, could you...um...step back while you ponder what you’d like to say?”

“Get out of my car, Rowan!”

“Oh, Nic, don’t be like that,” she coaxed, leaning toward him so the chunky zipper of her flight jacket gaped open and showed him the line of her dark plum scooped-shirt plastered low across her breasts. Pale globes swelled over the top.

“Like what?” He tried not to get distracted. “I know you. You’ll start looking at a basket of puppies and won’t notice the rain’s started again.”