She quickly and efficiently put her hair back into a sleek french braid, then left her friend’s apartment. Sian, Jane, Jane’s boyfriend Steven, and Joshua were going to Lake Michigan for the day, and she was determined to enjoy the holiday as much as possible.
Chances were that, after her impassioned speech last night, Joshua would be scared off from proposing for good. His older brother would have gone back to Chicago some time this morning, and that would be that. The whole situation was simple, really, just a storm in a teacup in the cosmic scope of things, and Sian could get back to her uncomplicated life. By the time she had driven back to her own place, she had firmly resolved to put the annoying Matt Severn out of her mind.
The original plan had been that everybody would help clean up, then take off to the Indiana Dunes in two cars. But when Sian went through the back gate, the garden was already clean and tidy. She looked around in surprise. All the signs of the party were cleared away and several full black plastic bags were piled neatly by the kitchen door.
The apartment was similarly neat and, after last night, echoed with emptiness. The muted sound of the shower came from the direction of the bathroom. Shaking her head in bemusement, for Jane had never before shown such initiative for housekeeping, Sian travelled down the hall and put a hand on the doorknob of her bedroom.
The door opened inwards, and it was not propelled by her. Caught off balance and still in motion, she collided with a very large body. Two hands shot out to grip her arms; her own, outstretched, splayed flat on a lean bare torso. For one sulphurous moment she felt surprisingly silken skin, the sinuous rippling of hard abdominal muscle, and she snatched her hand back as if she’d been burned while staring wide-eyed up into Matt Severn’s tough, formidable face.
She gasped, as her world tilted, “You!”
“Me!” agreed Matt mockingly, his hazel gaze snapping with some volcanic emotion.
His hands were large and warm, and curled easily around the circumference of her upper arms. He shifted them down to her elbows, and the sensation of those callused palms sliding along her sensitive skin was so shockingly intimate that she recoiled violently. “What are you doing here in my room?” she demanded, feeling exposed and invaded.
“Making the bed,” he said. Then, at her furious glare, he added with a careless shrug, “I had to sleep somewhere, didn’t I?”
Sian looked around a broad, tanned shoulder at the neat peach-coloured bedspread. It looked just as she had left it the day before, but a mental image of his long male body stretched out between her sheets, his rather long tawny hair spilling on to the pillow, produced the strangest reaction in the pit of her stomach. Swallowing hard and frowning fiercely, she muttered, “Why didn’t you just go home?”
“Temper,” he chided, then moved with silent, menacing deliberation to shut the door behind her. When she made an involuntary, protesting movement, he turned to lean against the panels, blocking the exit. “I was over the drinking limit. You wouldn’t have wanted me to cause a car accident, would you?”
“No, of course not!” she snapped, throwing her bag down on the floor in an impetuous gesture, inwardly struggling against a deep sense of unease at how he had trapped her into this confrontation.
His searing gaze was like two gold coins; he was as angry as he had ever been with her yesterday, Sian saw, and she was bewildered, for surely the break from hostilities should have cooled things down. “Where did you sleep, darling, and with whom?” he queried silkenly.
Match to dry tinder. Sian was barely aware of what she did, as she bent with striking speed to snatch up her overnight case and hurl it at his head. He hardly moved. One powerful arm flexed, and the case was caught in midair.
His expression was frightening. She snarled, “Get away from that door!”
“As you wish.” He pushed off from the barrier behind him, and began to stalk towards her, his half-clad body overwhelmingly powerful, those deep disturbing eyes of his afire.
She folded her arms tight across her chest, cupping her elbows, and fought an instinctive desire to back away from him skittishly. She would not let him intimidate her, especially here on her own home territory. It was where people psychologically felt most secure and relaxed; that was why they felt so violated when their homes were broken into. Not only were personal possessions lost forever, but their security was stolen as well. She suspected that his choice of venue for a private confrontation was made knowing fully well what kind of advantages he might hope to gain.
But Sian had moved around so much when she was young that she had instinctive guards erected against that sort of thing. Home and security were not the walls that surrounded her; home was where the heart was, and she carried hers with her. People mattered, not places or things, and, though this had been her bedroom for the last four years, in the end it was just another room. Sian had her poise back, and her angry, delicate face was thrown back as she faced him with an unflinching, unrepentant glare. She could have hurt him with the heavy case. She didn’t care.
Matt murmured speculatively, his attention focused on her like a spearthrust, “You weren’t with Joshua. You left far too early for that.”
She sneered at him, “How do you know we didn’t meet later?”
“You ran away from me, didn’t you? Coward,” he accused her mockingly, bringing a hand up to the taut lines of her jaw.
She jerked her face away and spat, “Don’t touch me! My God, you’ve got an inflated sense of yourself, and my sleeping arrangements are none of your damned business! Why don’t you go back to where you came from?”
“But, darling,” he purred from low in his chest, his naked golden chest that was making her crazy, “I’m on vacation as well. That’s why, when Joshua told me he intended to marry you, I decided to come and see how things were for myself.”
“Well,” she drawled, lips curling sardonically while her stomach turned into a hard rock of nerves, “we all know how successful that turned out to be. And what did Joshua think about all this?”
“He thought it was a good idea, actually,” was Matthew’s surprising reply, albeit said in an extremely dry tone of voice. His eyes were all over her. She felt as if she were being eaten alive. “Obviously one look at you was supposed to dispel all my preconceived notions.”
Sian’s jaw flexed against a furtive, psychic bruise and the expression in her own gaze went flat and dead. The implication that even in person she did not meet up to his high standards was insultingly obvious, and she absolutely hated her own inability to prevent this man from so casually hurting her. She said, choked, “I’ve had enough of this abuse.”
“I haven’t finished yet.”
He held her, two hands on her slim shoulders, with damnable ease. There was a high flush under her creamy skin, a tight line to her normally soft mouth, an unconscious shift to defensiveness in her posture.
Matt frowned. He said clearly and forcefully, “Listen to me. For some time Joshua has been coming home full of admiring stories in which a certain Sian Riley figured largely. He talked about Sian’s poise and wit, and the clever way she could manoeuvre a situation to gain the advantage. Sian had travelled all over the world, and had famous rock-star friends and midnight swims off private yachts in the Mediterranean. Sian was the life and soul of the party. Sian told him just exactly how to manipulate a difficult professor. Sian cleaned out all his friends in a poker game, so that he had to ask for an advance on his next month’s allowance.”
Her eyes grew gradually larger and more bewildered as he spoke, for the person he was talking about wasn’t her. Everything he said had an element of truth to it, but the emphasis was all wrong.
Was that really how Joshua saw her? What about all the characteristics she considered important, like her sense of humour, compassion, and caring? The picture Matt was portraying was a figure made of cake icing, all soft and frothy and without real substance. W
hen at the last he mentioned the poker game, she could no longer remain silent.
“That stupid game!” she cried angrily, moving under his grip with sharp impatience. “I didn’t even want to play but they were so insistent, so determined to pit their wits against someone who had been taught by a legend—my father! You don’t know what it was like.”
“I have been to university myself, once upon a time,” he reminded her drily. “I know what kind of idiotic macho stunts get pulled. So you took all their money from them.”
“What was I supposed to do—give it back?” she retorted. “That might have been convenient for you, but their pride would never have allowed it! It was better they were taught a lesson by somebody who knew when to stop, instead of meeting up one day with a card shark who would get them into real trouble.”
“Such a hard woman,” he drawled, one corner of his mouth pulled in deep, scoring that dimpled crease into one lean cheek.
If only she was! If only she could find some way to unmake that deep-seated need of hers to be accepted and become entirely self-sufficient, so that people like Matthew could never find their way past her defences to wound her with careless words! A dark shadow of self-mockery crossed her face and she said bitterly, “Is that how you see me?”
“I didn’t say that I didn’t agree with you, or that I wouldn’t have done the same under the circumstances,” he pointed out impatiently. “I’m merely explaining how you come across, from what Joshua was telling me. That’s the person I was warning away yesterday, don’t you understand? Whereas in reality you turned out to be something—quite different.”
She didn’t understand the strange note in his voice. All she could grasp was that his explanation was nearly an apology. She was staggered, and, to cover up her reaction, said quickly, “Ouch! Admitting that must have hurt. And how did Joshua take it, when you told him?”
Matt raised a single, haughty eyebrow and laughed so softly that Sian’s colour rose again as she realised what she had betrayed by her question. If he’d had suspicions before about her implication that she’d spent the night with Joshua, now he knew for sure.
His hands relaxed and caressed her shoulders. He told her with cutting deliberation, “I didn’t tell him anything. This was between you and me, and it wasn’t any of his business. I did tell him that I still considered you completely unsuitable for him. He does not have my approval on any proposal of marriage; I’ll do everything in my power to keep it from happening, and from here on in he’s on his own.”
After everything else he had just said, that was like a slap in the face. Blank outrage had Sian’s jaw dropping wide open, then it shut with a snap that jarred her teeth and she said violently, “Damn you, Matt Severn, I’ll tell you just what you can do with all your presumptuous meddling—”
He was inexplicable. All traces of his former anger had quite dissipated somewhere in the course of the conversation, and now he laughed aloud, his hazel eyes twin windows to devilry. It silenced her as nothing else could have. He took hold of her French braid and tugged at it. Her head fell back as she stared up at him, stunned and immobilised, as he brought his face down until they were nose to nose, eye to perplexed, molten eye.
“Joshua,” said Matt with a white, keen smile, “took it like a man. On the other hand, you, I’m glad to say, are taking it just like a woman.”
My God! she thought gibberingly—it looked—it seemed—after all he’d said and done, he wasn’t about to try to kiss her…?
Matt’s gaze lowered to the exposed line of her vulnerable throat, then lowered further to roam along the lines of her vest top. He stopped suddenly, masculine body frozen and breathing arrested, and the oddest expression flickered across the hard lines of his face.
She watched him in frozen confusion, and unable to protest anything. He bent, not to her lips, but to her arm. Surprise and a deep searing of lightning sensation trembled through her. Her upper arm, slim, the fragile creamy skin so prone to easy bruising, showed the clear imprint of his hold on her from the day before.
Matthew’s mouth stroked the marks, nibbling at her flesh, the hand that was so offensive at the party now cupping the curve of her elbow as gently as if it were an eggshell.
Her breathing was ragged, severely disrupted. Her jaw clenched. Her mouth worked. Her head bowed over his angled shoulder; she could not tear her eyes away from the incredible sight of him. She did not know if she looked at him in tenderness, or in fury.
Just when she had wrested enough control from her shuddering mind and body to blast him clear to California, he let go of her with his face set and rigid, straightened, turned on his heel and left. The door settled gently into place again, and she was alone.
Sian’s hands crept to her heated face. She was burning up all over from anger and excitement; she felt as if she were spinning like a top. She tried to encompass the enormity of what had just happened, but her turbulent, seething emotions were just too powerful to grapple with and all her usual poise had flown clean out of the window so long ago that it couldn’t be recalled in a hurry.
That—that man. There wasn’t anything awful enough, wide enough, deep enough to describe how confounding, fluctuating, provoking, exasperating he was. He left her floundering and stole away all her sense of proportion. Once she had considered herself experienced, but Matt was a mushroom cloud surpassing anything she could ever have imagined.
Of just one thing she was certain. He had an innate talent for making her angrier than she’d ever been before! Sian picked her bag up from the floor and surrendered to the same insane impulse that had made her chuck it to begin with. It smashed into the wall above the bed where he had slept, then slid into a satisfyingly humble heap on to the floor.
Well. That felt good. But it wasn’t good enough.
Twenty minutes later, Sian came out of her bedroom with the canvas bag in which she had packed her sun lotion, dark glasses, a clean towel, comb and a small plastic pack filled with cleansing tissues.
Steven and Jane rode in Matt’s Mercedes sports coupé while Sian rode with Joshua, glad for the opportunity to have a long overdue talk with him.
The sky was cloudless and it was steaming hot. Sian put on her sunglasses and climbed into Joshua’s car, and was quiet and thoughtful during the first part of the forty- five-minute drive up to Lake Michigan, very conscious of the sleek, purring red sports car that shadowed Joshua’s sedan.
Finally Joshua said, with a sideways glance and a tentative smile, “Mad at me?”
“At you!” she exclaimed with a little laugh as she turned to him. “Why should I be mad at you?”
His expression eased somewhat, but he still looked anxious and uncertain. “For not having the courage to just come right out and ask you to marry me. For going to my brother instead. Sian, you have to understand. Matt’s always been there for me. He’s more like an uncle than an older brother—so capable and assured and interested in what I’m doing. I honestly didn’t expect him to react the way he did.”
His eyes pleaded with her, and she stifled an impatient urge to grab him by the shoulders and shake him. He looked so earnest and handsome, tall and clean-limbed and graceful, but she just couldn’t see him in quite the same way as she had before the party, or that talk with Matt in her bedroom.
Joshua was a beautiful golden boy. He admired the superficial aspects of her life and had made her into some kind of plastic idol. How dashing and exciting she must seem to him, with her exotic experiences and cosmopolitan outlook on life! No wonder he was infatuated, but where was the depth of perception and width of understanding in that? Where was the meeting of equals, the consent of kindred minds that saw and desired mutual goals in life?
She realised, then, that the kind of lasting relationship she wanted was one that had to be built on maturity and steadfastness that would produce the kind of stable, nurturing environment in which children could be ra
ised. Joshua couldn’t provide that for her, and it would be unfair to both of them to ever try to pretend otherwise. If she married him, she would be a mother but never a wife.
“I do love you,” he said softly, and she sighed. There was that four-letter word again, complicating things, scrambling the brains of otherwise intelligent people and turning life into a comedy of manners. Why couldn’t everyone see what a mess it made of things, and that everything was so much more simple if one stuck to the gentle emotions like affection and respect?
“I love you too, darling,” she told him and gently touched his arm. “But I don’t think it means the same thing to me as it does to you.”
His face fell. Oh, dear, he looked as if he’d just been denied a particularly succulent ice cream cone. She really must find some way to stop comparing him to a child! He muttered, “Does that mean that there isn’t any hope?”
“I think probably yes, it does,” she said quietly. “I don’t know how things will work out in the future, but right now it doesn’t look very realistic. We’ve gone out together and had a good time, and we enjoy each other’s company, but that isn’t enough to support the kind of lifelong relationship you’re proposing, is it?”
He looked out of his open window, brooding and unhappy but not, she noticed wryly, heartbroken. She just sat back and waited, and, after a few minutes, he stirred himself to say grimly, “So Matt was right after all.”
Her sharp indrawn breath whistled in her throat. Underneath all the personality conflicts was an essential core of truth, and she replied with stiff honesty, “Much as it pains me to say so, yes. But, Joshua—that doesn’t mean he has to know it, does it?”
His head snapped around and he stared at her, before jerking his attention back to the road, and a slow smile of pure enjoyment broke the unhappiness that had darkened his youthful face. “You really have it in for him, don’t you?”
“I’m no peacemaker,” she admitted, green eyes snapping. “And he did start it.”
A Solitary Heart Page 3
