by Trish Wylie
The only noise in the room for a few minutes was the tapping of one end of Shannon’s pen off the wooden surface while she waited for him to say something or leave. Leave being her personal preference.
And she needed that time. That brief break from just looking at him. In order to try and calm her thoughts, to push back the momentary sense of panic that she’d felt when he said he’d ‘owed’ her something because of their ‘history’.
Maybe if she closed her eyes and tapped her heels together three times this little nightmare would just disappear? It might be worth a try…
She almost jumped out of her skin when he touched her.
If she hadn’t been wearing a T-shirt then maybe he wouldn’t have touched his heated fingers against her cool, bare skin. If she hadn’t still been recovering from the shock of seeing him again and everything he had told her in the space of a few minutes, then maybe the heat of that touch on her cold skin wouldn’t have felt like a bolt of pure electricity.
And then maybe she wouldn’t have spun round and snatched her arm from his long fingers so fast that she knocked her elbow hard off the edge of the counter.
‘Damn it!’
Rocking back from him she nursed her elbow, scowling at the sharp shard of pain working its way up into her shoulder while tears immediately stung in her eyes.
It really hurt! And it was all his fault!
She glared venomously at him.
Connor’s mouth twitched as he reached out to her again. ‘Let me see.’
Shannon sidestepped him. ‘No. Go away, Connor.’
‘I’m not going anywhere until you let me see your elbow.’ He stepped in front of her again.
So, with a smirk she lifted her hand past her shoulder to point her aching elbow at him.
‘Happy now? Or do you want to kiss it better?’
His dark eyes flamed briefly and Shannon gasped.
But when he attempted to reach for her arm again and she snatched it away again, this time with an accompanying grimace, he sighed loudly.
‘When did you get to be so pigheaded?’
Shannon tilted her head, mouth pouting, batting her lashes at him. ‘Oh, maybe around about the same time you became a big-shot multimillionaire?’
With all attempts at helping her rebuffed he finally refolded his arms across his broad chest, tilting his head without pouting or batting his lashes. He didn’t need to do anything more than stare at her to get his point across. He was losing patience. Fast.
And his words confirmed it. ‘Are you done with your little tantrum now?’
Shannon glared harder.
While he lifted his arm slightly, shrugging back the end of his sleeve to check his watch.
‘’Cos I have another meeting in a half hour, but I can wait a few more minutes for you to calm down if that’ll help any.’
She opened her mouth to say how very sweet that was of him, only to have him step closer so that she was trapped between the counter and his large body.
Uh-oh.
When he spoke again, his voice was lower, deeper; it held a more determined edge. So that she was completely distracted from sarcasm and instead mesmerized by his sheer maleness. Had he been this overwhelming up close before? She didn’t remember that part.
Barry White started singing in her head again.
‘I could have just sent you a letter, Shannon. But when I saw whose name was on the lease I decided to come and talk to you face to face, out of respect. This isn’t personal, selling the building, it’s just business. And I’ll make sure there’s a place for you to move to. I already told you that. There are plenty of other buildings in better places where you could run all these little things you do to amuse yourself.’
Shannon scowled, opening her mouth again, this time to discuss the meaning of the word
‘patronizing’ with him.
But Connor was on a roll. ‘Believe it or not, I didn’t come here to have a fight with you. I actually wanted to see you.’
Her eyes widened. ‘Why?’
This smile was slow, smouldering, sensuous. And whatever else might have changed about him, Shannon recognized that smile. He was turning on the charm. For her. Seven years too late.
‘I’ve always been curious why you left without saying goodbye. Don’t you think that was a little rude of you?’
‘You’re here to tell me off for my manners after seven years? You’ve got to be kidding me!’
She watched as his eyes made an intensive study of her, from the top of her head, to each of her eyes, along her nose, finally resting on her lips. The lips she involuntarily swiped with the tip of her tongue before parting them to draw in several short gasps of air.
‘I just thought that, considering what happened between us, you might have taken five minutes to say cheerio before you flew out of the country. It’s what I’d have done.’
Shannon swallowed hard. ‘After—what—happened?’
His gaze lifted, ever so slowly, locking with her wide-eyed stare as he leaned his head a little closer, his voice dropping to pillow-talk level. ‘Was it that easy to forget? I always thought the first time was supposed to be an unforgettable experience?’
Her breath caught. O-h-n-o!
‘You knew it was me?’
He chuckled, the dimples in his cheeks creasing. ‘Of course I knew. You knew I knew. It was all part of the game that night. There’s no way you could have thought that disguise worked?’
Well, actually…
Despite the ache in her elbow, Shannon lifted both arms, reaching her hands out to his chest to push hard, a wave of almost adolescent humiliation driving her to get as far away from him as possible.
‘Get away from me.’
She was halfway across the room before he spoke again, a hint of humour still in his voice. ‘We’re not done discussing the building and where you’re moving to.’
Shannon laughed sarcastically. ‘Oh, we’re done, believe me. And there’s no discussion to be had about this building, because I have a long lease and I won’t be moving anywhere.’
‘The sale is already agreed. It’ll take approximately six weeks to go through the solicitors. So you don’t really have a choice. And the next owners might not be so considerate about where you end up—unless you have some history with one of them too.’
Son-of-a—
She swung round and advanced back to him with gritty determination. She wasn’t some naïve teenage girl any more. And the sooner he realized that, the better.
‘I have a choice all right. I’ll fight you for this place if I have to, because it’s not just a crumbly old ruin to me. But I don’t expect you’d understand that any more than you understand how lower than low it was of you just now to bring up what happened way back then. Believe me, if I had to go back I’d do things a lot differently.’
His humour disappeared instantaneously. ‘Including what happened with me?’
The answer to that was swift, borne from the gaping wound she still carried buried way, way deep inside.
‘Especially what happened with you. That was the biggest mistake of my life. And if I could go back in time it would never happen!’ She looked him down and back up, her next words enunciated with distinct iciness. ‘Never in a million years.’
The air in the foyer went chilly. Arctic, in fact.
‘Well, then, I’ve just had any questions I had about the way you left answered, haven’t I?’ This time when he smiled there was no hint of his earlier humour, his voice deadly calm. ‘You’ll get written confirmation of the sale in the next few days along with a list of alternative buildings. Choose one.’
‘Don’t bother sending anything. I’m not moving.’
Nodding, he glanced down at his watch again. ‘Fine, then. Have it your way.’
Even after the doors had creaked shut behind him, Shannon still stood in the one spot, hands on her hips, head tilted back, as she took long deep breaths to try and calm herself.
Connor F
lanaghan.
But as the deep breathing gradually brought her rapidly beating heart under control, the bare facts of their confrontation rose to the fore.
She had to stop him.
But could she, Shannon Hennessey—who had never once fought to stay somewhere before—stand up and fight for the place she now called home?
Yes, she could and she would. With whatever weapons she had in her mature arsenal.
Connor Flanaghan had a heap of trouble headed his way!
CHAPTER TWO
WHY WAS IT that, on top of everything else, he had thought it would be a good idea to go see Shannon Hennessey again?
Connor was still asking himself that question long after he’d left her. After he had been to three different meetings and looked over five buildings and was finally hauling off his tie in his suite in Galway’s top hotel.
Pacing around the large, perfectly ordered room, he went over it in his mind.
Her name on the lease had been the last thing he’d expected to see. And, yes, curiosity had probably had a hand in him visiting her personally rather than sending an agent as he normally did.
But there’d been a time in his life when Shannon had almost been a part of the furniture.
Always there, always in the background, so shy at the beginning, but then funny and cute and bright—the stereotypical girl next door. Swiftly followed by the time when he had noticed she was growing up, ‘debating’ everything with him, challenging him, flirting with him—treading closer and closer to that fine line between friendship and something more.
Until the one night he had let her play her somewhat dangerous game through to its logical conclusion.
But she was something altogether different now, wasn’t she? Oh, yeah, now she was all grown-up. It had been no teenager or naïve virgin that had looked at him the way she had that afternoon. It took a fully grown woman to look at a man that way, with heavy-lidded eyes that had darkened in colour to a deep emerald-green, heating his blood faster than standing in front of an open flame ever would have. With just that look, a swipe of her full mouth with the pink end of her tongue, and he’d had a dozen memories from that one night with her bounce straight into the front of his mind.
Through every one of his afternoon appointments he’d still been able to see her face, hear her voice, mentally visualize that damn lock of hair of hers that constantly worked loose.
Yep, she’d left him angry and sullen for the rest of the day, because, if nothing else, his ego didn’t appreciate her bitterness about that one night.
He paced up and down in the room, restless in the same soul-deep way he had been for weeks now. The root cause of it was easy to pin down, but the added complication of seeing Shannon again and the associated long ago memories that came with that…
Well, that had been an added complication he could have done without.
And yet practically the first thing he had done was go see her and bring up the subject of that one night. Maybe it had been crass of him, poorly handled. Okay, he would possibly have to admit to that. Shannon then throwing at him the fact that she wished it had never happened had maybe only been what he deserved as a result.
But it didn’t make him any the less resentful of her reaction. And, little did she know it, she’d picked the wrong time to make him resentful.
The shrill sound of a mobile phone drew him out of his dark brooding, forcing him to take a moment to search the pocket of the jacket he had thrown to one side. But a quick glance at the screen simply made him scowl all the harder while he sighed and let it ring out.
He didn’t want to talk to Rory. Not yet.
What he wanted was a drink someplace noisy with a crowd of people who wouldn’t know him and enough pretty women to take his mind off the one woman.
What he didn’t want in the first place he found was to see Shannon again. Was someone, somewhere, just hell-bent on keeping him in a foul mood? If they were then they were doing a very good job.
She was dancing on a small wooden dance floor to one side of the room, with a man way too ‘pretty’ in Connor’s mind. That was her type now, was it? Somehow she’d never seemed the kind of girl to be easily swayed by someone so fashion-conscious.
But if Connor had been remembering only a half hour ago the girl next door she used to be, then the sight of her matching her lusciously curved body’s moves with the tall man’s only confirmed his thoughts of her being all grown-up now. And then some.
Leaning an elbow on the long polished bar, he nodded to the barman and placed his order, flashing a smile at the woman who was turning with her own drinks in hand, before he leaned back, one foot resting on the brass rail raised slightly off the floor, and continued watching Shannon through hooded eyes.
If she kept dancing like that then every red-blooded man in the room would soon be doing the same thing, wouldn’t they?
And she’d have no one to blame but herself for the swarm of attention that might bring her as the night went on and alcohol clouded the judgement of those males’ good manners. Would ‘pretty boy’ step up and fend them off—defending his territory, seeing off the competition?
Somehow Connor didn’t think he looked the type.
All right, so there had been a time in Connor’s life when he’d have had an avid appreciation for the kind of blatant sexual confidence in a woman that would bring that kind of trouble to his door. But this was Shannon.
And he found he didn’t appreciate the exhibitionist in her quite the same way as he had with other women. If anything, it was like a red rag to a bull. He might just have to see for himself if ‘pretty boy’ was up to the task of some healthy competition…
As if in challenge, the man wrapped an arm around her waist, his fingers splaying against the skin revealed between her short black top and the waistband of her tight jeans, while he tilted his chin to watch as she brought her pelvis in against his hip, moving in a way that only had one point of reference off a dance floor that Connor could think of.
But he couldn’t stop watching. He was a red-blooded male after all. The only thing that set him apart from all the other red-blooded males was that he had experience of what it felt like to have her body wrapped around his, to be buried deep inside her while her body clamped around his hard length as she fell over the edge.
On that one night she was so damn keen to forget.
With a quick flick of her head, her long blonde hair cascaded over one bare shoulder, the errant corkscrew curl immediately coming back to rest against her cheek. Then, with a smile on her lips, she glanced up. And her sparkling green eyes found his across the room.
Connor nodded his head once in acknowledgement. He didn’t look away, didn’t smile.
He just continued to watch as she moved her hips again, her arms hanging back a little behind her body as her shoulders moved from side to side—the movement pushing her breasts up and forwards.
Two minutes.
Yep. That was all he was giving her. And then he was gonna walk right on over there and tap her partner on the shoulder. To see, just out of curiosity, how she might react to that.
If she would fight him off before he could remind her of why singling him out as her first lover shouldn’t be something she regretted doing. Or to see if she would remember how well their bodies had fitted, a little reminder of how they had moved and could move together.
After all, it wasn’t as if she had complained at the time, not that Connor recalled…
Oh, yeah, he’d dance with her all right, he’d let her move her hips in against his side while he waited to see if her emerald eyes would darken the way they had when she’d looked at him that afternoon.
Only this time round they’d play the game his way.
But before he counted down the minutes she leaned up to speak into her partner’s ear as the music changed, kissing him briefly on the cheek before she extricated herself from his hold and walked towards Connor with a tantalizingly confident sway of her hips.
She flashed him a brief look from the corner of her eye before standing on tiptoes beside him, her hand rising to run through the long curls of hair so they were off her forehead, leaning across the bar with a killer smile to order a drink, the barman smiling in blatant appreciation at her.
Connor tossed money onto the polished surface in front of her—taking care of her drink—then leaned back again to survey the crowd. Silently waiting to see what she would do next. Telling himself he’d take an apology for the way she’d been earlier, any time she felt ready to hand it out. He could still be a good guy when he put his mind to it…
He smiled at another passing female who smiled appreciatively at him on her way past with a friend, lifting his beer to take a long drink, while, glass in hand, Shannon turned round and mimicked his stance, surveying the crowd with her back against the bar.
Eventually he couldn’t resist asking, ‘Come here often?’
‘It’s one of our favourite places, actually, within staggering distance of home. Why, are you planning on selling here too?’
‘I don’t own it.’ Ignoring her sugary-sweet tone, Connor lifted his bottle to his mouth again. ‘You and your boyfriend can dance here to your heart’s content.’
‘Not that it’s any of your business, but he’s not my boyfriend. I’m not his type.’
He glanced at her from the corner of his eye, a small smile on his mouth. ‘Prefers brunettes, does he? Man after my own heart, then.’
‘Nope.’ She quirked an arched brow in challenge as she turned her body towards him, her head tilting forwards a little so he could hear her lowered voice above the music. ‘I’m not quite man enough for him, if you get my drift. He’d like you though, if you want an introduction?’
Connor couldn’t help it; he laughed. Shaking his head as he turned towards her, his elbow on the bar, he said, ‘Oh, I think we both know that won’t be necessary.’
