The Taming of Xander Sterne

by Carole Mortimer

  There was nothing in Daisy’s face to indicate that she had. Her expression was one of tiredness rather than any sign of recognition for the man Sam had been talking to; Daisy’s eyelids were drooping and her cheeks were slightly pale.

  And really, why should Daisy recognise Malcolm? Her daughter hadn’t even seen Malcolm since she was two years old, and only rarely before then.

  ‘Who was that man, Samantha?’

  She swallowed before answering. ‘Just someone who obviously mistook me for someone else.’ She shrugged dismissively.

  Xander frowned. ‘The conversation seemed rather protracted just for you to tell him he’d made a mistake in identity?’

  Her mouth firmed stubbornly. ‘Nevertheless, that’s what I was doing. We might as well all go down in the lift to the car park together now that the two of you are right here?’ she prompted lightly as the lift doors opened and she stepped inside to look at him enquiringly.

  Xander had absolutely no doubt that Samantha was lying to him.

  The intensity of the conversation he had witnessed, the expressions on Samantha’s face as she spoke to the other man, certainly hadn’t looked as if she was politely assuring a stranger that he had mistaken her for someone else. The opposite, in fact. Samantha had initially looked distressed, and then her expression had become coldly impenetrable, followed by one of fear. Xander had also recognised an almost proprietary gleam of ownership in the other man’s eyes at one stage of that intense conversation.

  Because the man felt proprietary in regard to Samantha? Perhaps because he was an ex-lover?

  It was certainly a more plausible explanation for the heated encounter than the one Samantha had just given him.

  That flare of temper Xander had felt—and so feared feeling again—when he first saw the guy manhandling Samantha had now settled into a deep-down coldness.

  He still wanted to strangle the man, for daring to put his hand on Samantha, but it was in a cold and measured way, rather than down to a heated lack of control.

  Whether or not that control would last was anyone’s guess!

  ‘Fine,’ he agreed tersely to Samantha’s suggestion as he and Daisy stepped into the lift beside her, deciding to let the conversation go. For now.

  But he had every intention of making Samantha tell him the truth about the man who had accosted her.

  And sooner rather than later.

  * * *

  ‘Daisy okay?’ Xander enquired as Samantha hovered in the doorway of the sitting room after bathing her daughter and putting her to bed.

  ‘Already fast asleep.’ Samantha nodded. She’d changed into a thin blue sweater and faded jeans, her feet were bare, and her hair once again secured at her crown.

  ‘Join me for a nightcap.’ Xander held up a decanter of brandy, having removed his morning jacket and cravat, and unfastening the top button of his wing-collared white shirt. ‘And before you even think about saying no thank you, in your oh-so-polite manner—’ his voice hardened as he poured the brandy into two crystal glasses ‘—it wasn’t a request.’ He looked across at her challengingly.

  Sam felt an uneasy lurch of her stomach as she recognised Xander’s uncompromising expression. ‘I’m tired.’

  ‘It’s only a little after ten o’clock.’

  ‘And it’s been a long and exciting day.’

  ‘Then a brandy will help relax you before you go to bed.’ He left his walking stick beside the fireplace as he limped slowly across the room to place the two glasses of brandy down on the coffee table before sinking down onto the cream leather sofa.

  ‘I’m already relaxed.’

  ‘Liar.’ Xander could literally feel Samantha’s tension, and he could see it too, in the way she held herself so stiffly.

  She frowned. ‘I don’t think I care for the way you keep calling me that.’

  His eyes flashed darkly. ‘And I don’t think I care for being lied to.’

  Her mouth set in a stubborn line. ‘Then maybe you should stop asking questions I obviously don’t want to answer.’

  Xander felt some of his rising tension leave him as he smiled ruefully. ‘Now that was honest.’

  She frowned. ‘I am invariably honest. You just keep asking me questions that are none of your business, and then won’t accept it when I refuse to answer them.’

  ‘Would you please sit down and enjoy your brandy?’ he invited huskily as he patted the leather seat cushion beside him.

  Samantha walked further into the room, but she made no effort to sit beside him as she instead picked up one of the glasses of brandy from the coffee table and took a large swallow, only to then draw her breath in sharply as the fiery liquid caught the back of her throat. ‘Whoa,’ she gasped breathlessly, her cheeks becoming flushed, tears blurring her vision.

  Xander chuckled softly. ‘You’re supposed to sip a fine brandy, Samantha, not glug it back like cheap wine.’

  ‘And what would you know about cheap wine?’ she scorned as she moved to sit in one of the armchairs, bending her legs at the knees before tucking her bare feet beneath her, the glass of brandy cradled in both her hands.

  ‘Absolutely nothing,’ he acknowledged dryly. ‘So who was he, Samantha?’

  ‘Who was who?’ She tensed guardedly.

  A very revealing guardedness and tension.

  ‘The man at the hotel. Was he a past lover?’ Xander pressed. ‘Or maybe a current one, that you discovered was out on the town with another woman behind your back?’

  ‘Don’t be ridiculous!’ she snapped crossly.

  ‘Which part of what I said was ridiculous?’ Xander raised his brows. ‘The old lover or the new lover?’

  ‘Both,’ she dismissed. ‘I don’t have any old lovers, and I’m too busy working and being a mother to Daisy to have the time for any new ones either.’

  Interesting...

  Did that mean that Daisy’s father had been the only man ever to share her bed? To touch every naked inch of her?

  That seemed a little hard to believe when he knew that Samantha had been divorced for the past three years. Was she saying she also hadn’t had sex with anyone for the past three years?

  Xander didn’t think he’d ever gone three months without a woman in his bed, let alone three years.

  He looked across at her now through narrowed lids. ‘How old are you?’

  ‘I— What?’ She looked nonplussed by the question.

  ‘How old are you?’ Xander repeated with a shrug. ‘It’s a simple enough question, I would have thought.’

  Simple maybe, but Sam didn’t see what her age had to do with anything, let alone their present—and deeply personal—conversation. ‘How old are you?’ she countered challengingly.

  ‘Thirty-three,’ he answered without hesitation.

  That put Sam in the position of looking petty if she didn’t reciprocate.

  She sighed. ‘I’m twenty-six.’

  His brows rose. ‘You must have been very young when you married?’

  She grimaced. ‘What does age have to do with anything when you fall in love?’ Or believe you’ve fallen in love.

  ‘I can’t answer that, as I’ve never fallen in love.’ Xander shrugged. ‘That means you could only have been twenty-one when Daisy was born.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And just twenty-three when you and your husband separated and then divorced?’

  Sam felt her tension deepen as she wondered exactly where this conversation was going. ‘Yes.’

  ‘And you’re saying that you haven’t had sex even once since then? Not even with your ex-husband, for old times’ sake?’ Xander seemed to remember reading that a high percentage of separated couples did that.

  Samantha’s face paled, her hands shaking as she tightly gripped the glas
s of brandy. ‘Don’t be disgusting,’ she finally managed to gasp.

  Xander’s eyes were narrowed as he gave a slow shake of his head. ‘I don’t buy the story you gave me earlier, Samantha. I believe you did know the man who spoke to you at the hotel. That you know him very well.’

  ‘Did you know him?’

  ‘Me?’ Xander frowned as he brought an image of the man back into his head. ‘I couldn’t see his face properly, because he was turned away from me, but I didn’t know him, that I’m aware of.’ Although it was interesting that Sam had asked. ‘I still think that you did, or still do, know him very well indeed.’

  She sat forward to slam the bulbous brandy glass down onto the table beside her with such vehemence that some of the alcohol spilt over the rim of the crystal glass. ‘How did we progress from me telling you I’m tired, to you accusing me of having once been intimate with some stranger I met in a hotel who mistook me for someone else?’

  Considering Xander’s misgivings these past months, in regard to his own temper, and his doubts in his ability to control it, Samantha really did look amazing when she was angry.

  Everything about her seemed to spark with life: her hair, her eyes, that flush in her cheeks, a puffy fullness to her slightly parted lips, her nipples aroused and pressing against her bra and the thin jersey of her jumper.

  ‘I don’t know—how did we come to that?’ Xander asked softly. ‘Maybe if you were to stop ly— Maybe if you told me the truth,’ he amended as Samantha looked ready to explode if he called her a liar one more time tonight, ‘I wouldn’t have to keep asking the same question but in a different format.’

  ‘The question being who was the man at the hotel earlier?’ she snapped impatiently.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I’ve told you, I don’t—’ Sam broke off her protest as the sound of a piercing scream filled the apartment.

  ‘Daisy!’ She sprang quickly to her feet, not sparing Xander a second glance as she fled from the room and down the hallway to her daughter’s bedroom.

  CHAPTER SIX

  SAM HAD LEFT Daisy’s door slightly ajar and a night light on, as she always did, and she quickly pushed the door fully open now before running across the room to where her daughter was sitting up in bed. Daisy’s eyes were wide, the tears streaming down her feverishly flushed face as she continued to scream.

  ‘I’m here, Daisy.’ Sam sat on the side of the bed to take her daughter into her arms. ‘It’s okay, darling,’ she soothed as her daughter struggled to be set free. ‘It’s Mummy, darling. It’s Mummy, Daisy,’ she repeated firmly as she stroked her daughter’s hair back from her flushed face.

  Daisy stopped struggling but still trembled as she now looked up uncertainly. ‘Mummy?’

  Sam smiled at her reassuringly. ‘You had a bad dream, darling. Just a dream,’ she soothed as Daisy, calmer now, snuggled against her for comfort.

  At the same time Sam’s thoughts were inwardly racing. Had Daisy recognised Malcolm at the hotel earlier, after all? Either consciously, or subconsciously? And was that the reason for her daughter’s nightmare?

  It was like one of those night terrors that Daisy had suffered from as a very young child, but she hadn’t had a single one in the past three years. Not since they’d left Malcolm.

  ‘Is she okay?’

  Sam turned sharply to look at Xander as he quietly entered the bedroom, an anxious frown on her face as she wondered how Daisy would react to the presence of a man in her bedroom so soon after her nightmare.

  ‘Xander!’ Daisy pulled out of Sam’s arms before launching herself off the bed towards him.

  Giving Sam a very definitive answer to that question.

  Xander only just managed to open his arms in time to the little girl. As it was, he had to drop his walking stick on the floor, swaying precariously for several seconds as his injured leg threatened to collapse beneath him. Daisy might only be a lightweight, but her sudden weightfirm grasp on his leg caused a jolt of pain from Xander’s thigh down to his knee.

  Xander glanced at Samantha, noting the pallor of her cheeks, and the tears glistening in her shadowed eyes, her expression dazed, lost, as she sat on Daisy’s bed looking at them both. Had there been something more sinister to Daisy’s nightmare than that the little girl had simply had an over-stimulating day?

  Daisy gave a yawn as she nestled against him and he slowly led her back to the bed.

  Within seconds of her lying down, it seemed, the little girl had fallen back to sleep, as if the nightmare had never occurred or woken her up screaming. Chances were—Xander hoped—that Daisy wouldn’t even remember she’d had the nightmare in the morning.

  Her mother looked far less composed, Xander noted. Samantha’s expression was still one of devastation, her face drawn and pale, shadows having deepened in those beautiful eyes.

  ‘Let’s go and finish our brandy,’ Xander encouraged, wincing slightly as he straightened from picking his cane up from the bedroom floor.

  ‘Maybe I should stay here for a while, just in case?’ Samantha looked worriedly at her sleeping daughter.

  ‘We’ll hear her if she calls out again.’ Xander held his hand out to Samantha as encouragement for her to stand up and leave the bedroom with him. It was the most he could manage, his leg now a painful and throbbing ache. ‘Come on, Samantha,’ he encouraged gruffly, knowing he badly needed to sit down.

  Sam looked up at him blankly, too disturbed still by Daisy’s nightmare to be able to respond.

  Nightmares had been a regular occurrence when Daisy was much younger, and at the time Sam hadn’t equated them with the tension of living with Malcolm. She had only realised that significance when they had abruptly stopped once she and Daisy had moved out of Malcolm’s house and begun living on their own.

  Until tonight.

  It was too much of a coincidence, surely, that this should have happened after seeing Malcolm at the hotel earlier?

  Admittedly Daisy had given no indication at the time that she had recognised her father, but maybe it hadn’t been a conscious recognition but a subliminal one? The mind often played strange tricks on people, so maybe Daisy had recognised Malcolm without even being aware that she had?

  ‘Samantha?’ Xander asked again gently.

  She blinked, focusing on him with effort. ‘Sorry.’ She grimaced, giving herself a mental shake as she stood up. ‘That was...unexpected,’ she murmured as she followed him from the bedroom, leaving the door wide open this time, the better to be able to hear Daisy if she should call out again.

  ‘Just over-excitement, do you think?’ Xander wondered, replenishing their brandy glasses once they had returned to the sitting room, before handing one to Samantha. ‘You’ll feel better if you drink some more of that,’ he encouraged gruffly. ‘Slowly this time.’

  Sam obediently took the glass from him, still worried about Daisy’s nightmare, and not in the mood to argue with Xander over a glass of brandy. ‘It was a different sort of day for her, with lots of unusual, if exciting, stimuli,’ she answered him woodenly.

  ‘But?’ Xander observed her closely as he moved to sink down onto the sofa.

  Because he really did think he was now in danger of falling down.

  And wouldn’t that look just wonderful, very manly, if he were to keel over and collapse at Samantha’s bare feet?

  His leg was giving him hell, after he had been on it for so many hours already today, and it hadn’t helped when Daisy had launched herself at him just now when he hadn’t been expecting it.

  Although physically painful, having Daisy turn to him in that way for reassurance and comfort had surprisingly felt quite nice.

  To know that Daisy liked him enough, trusted him enough, to want to turn to him for comfort was a good feeling after Xander’s weeks of uncertainty about himself.

&n
bsp; It made him even more determined to be worthy of Daisy’s trust.

  Samantha looked as if she was in need of a little comfort too right now.

  ‘Come and sit beside me,’ he instructed in a voice that brooked no argument. ‘Don’t make me have to stand up again and come get you, Samantha,’ he added with a pained wince.

  She looked at him blankly again for several long seconds, almost as if she had forgotten he was there, before moving stiffly across the room to sit down beside him.

  Maybe she really had forgotten he was there?

  Surely children of all ages had nightmares? A result of a too-active imagination at that age? Xander seemed to remember having them as a child himself. Of course, his had been due to living with his bastard of a father, but—

  His gaze sharpened on Samantha as he once again took in the pallor of her cheeks, and those dark shadows in her unusual amethyst-coloured eyes.

  He recalled the sense he’d had earlier that she was lying to him...

  ‘The man at the hotel...’ he spoke softly now ‘...he was your ex-husband, wasn’t he?’ It was a statement rather than a question. Because Xander didn’t need to ask the question when he already knew, instinctively, that he had guessed correctly.

  The man who had accosted Samantha at the hotel, and taken such a painful grip of her arm, causing her face to pale as he spoke to her so intensely, was Samantha’s ex-husband, and Daisy’s father.

  Sam turned on the sofa to look at Xander, intending to deny the statement, only to think better of it as she saw the implacability of his expression, and the challenge in the darkness of his eyes. As if he expected her to deny it, and was silently warning her against even trying.

  She drew in a deep and ragged breath before answering him.

  ‘Yes,’ she sighed. ‘Yes, he was,’ she repeated, her shoulders slumping as she sank back against the sofa, head resting back as she closed her eyes. ‘It was— I— It was such a shock because I haven’t set eyes on him for almost three years.’