Partners by Contract (12 page)

‘The thank-you kiss,’ he explained for the benefit of her wide-eyed, uncomprehending gaze.

The innocuous request made her heart thud loudly against her ribcage.

Was he joking or not? Not, she decided, reading a worrying, sober inflexibility behind the eyes which had come to rest on her parted lips.

‘I didn’t know the present had a price label attached,’ she responded, trying, with only moderate success, to adopt the same light-hearted, bantering tone he had.

One strongly delineated eyebrow rose sharply. ‘I just thought you might like to be spontaneous and affectionate.’

Meaning she was stiff and awkward?

‘Spontaneous seems to scare the hell out of you,’ he observed slyly.

Phoebe got the impression the provocation was deliberate, that he was in some way testing her limitations, but it didn’t matter at this stage. She needed to prove to herself as much as him that she could do it. That she could act with at least a semblance of normality around Connor and not fall to pieces every time they inadvertently touched.

Connor saw the stubborn lift of her chin and released a sigh.

Phoebe rubbed her sweaty palms against the seat of her jeans. She stretched up on tiptoe and, holding her breath, aimed a chaste salute at his cheek, but she wasn’t tall enough. With a sigh of exasperation she grabbed his head and tugged it down towards her.

Connor timed the fractional turn of his head to perfection. Their lips touched. Phoebe’s tightly closed eyes shot open and encountered deep drowning blue.

Breathing hard, she sank down onto her heels. ‘You did that deliberately!’ she accused hotly as she waited for the earth beneath her feet to stop tilting. The texture of his lips had been exactly the way she recalled it.

Even from the fleeting contact it was obvious she’d have to dump the theory that her imagination had distorted and sensationalised the kiss thing over the years. His lips had lost none of their potency and magic. Other things hadn’t changed either. Things like the fact he was off limits. Things like he’d loved and almost certainly still did love her sister.

Connor didn’t try to deny her accusation. ‘Wasn’t the possibility that I wouldn’t play fair part of the excitement?’

The colour that had flooded Phoebe’s face faded even more swiftly than it had appeared.

‘What excitement?’ she demanded in an outraged whisper, her tremulous voice as shaken as her face.

‘The excitement that’s making your heart beat this fast.’ He placed his big hand palm down against her ribcage.

Phoebe froze, her dilated pupils fixed on his long fingers spread out against the dark cloth of her jacket.

‘The same excitement that’s making your limbs feel weak,’ he continued inexorably.

The weakened limbs he spoke of finally obeyed her bidding and she took a stumbling step backwards. ‘Stop playing games, Con!’

‘Happily!’ he responded immediately. ‘The sooner we stop pretending the better, as far as I’m concerned.’ He fixed her with a gaze that smouldered with angry frustration.

‘What is it with you?’ she cried. ‘Do you sleep with all your female staff on a rotational basis?’

A flicker of irritation passed over his starkly handsome features. ‘Just for the record,’ he said, enunciating each word with biting precision, ‘I am not sleeping with Ellen!’

‘Why not?’ she was startled into unwisely replying.

‘I haven’t slept with anyone since Penny.’

The bluntness of his confession snatched the air out of her lungs all over again. She gulped and nodded. Of course he hadn’t. He’d loved her twin deeply. Anyone who had seen them together would have known that. The longing to recapture what they’d had was, no doubt, what all this sexual tension was coming from. It was better not to have any illusions about such things, she told herself sternly.

‘It wouldn’t work, Con.’

A wary expression drifted across his face. ‘What wouldn’t?’

‘I don’t blame you.’

‘No doubt, that would be good news if I knew what the hell you were talking about.’

‘Penny has gone. I suppose it’s only natural to try and... But you wouldn’t be able to fool yourself I was her for very long.’

CHAPTER SIX

C
ONNOR
stared at Phoebe so strangely she wondered if she’d suddenly sprouted a second head. He took a deep, steadying breath before he responded to her faltering explanation.

‘You can’t blame a man for trying, can you? Just think of the convenience factor alone. I wouldn’t even have to close my eyes when I pretend I’m making love to my dead wife.’

Phoebe’s throat locked tight. His anger was electrifying. ‘You’re annoyed,’ she observed somewhat inadequately.

‘How perceptive of you,’ he snarled back with a nasty smile.

‘I’m not trying to be cruel, Con.’ Even as she spoke Phoebe was conscious of the mindless hunger coiled low in her belly, biding its time, waiting for a chink of weakness in her defences. ‘But what am I supposed to think? Why else would you make a pass at me? I don’t want to be Penny’s stand-in, and I’m not in the market for a second-hand lover.’

His lip curled contemptuously. ‘So when I touch you, you feel nothing...’

‘I didn’t say that!’ Her jaw ached from gritting her teeth.

‘Your hypocrisy has its limits, then.’

‘Meaning what exactly?’ she demanded in a soft, dangerous tone.

‘All this stuff about your birthday and missing Penny doesn’t quite ring true when you and I both know you
made a series of feeble excuses not to spend that day or any other with her for the last two years of her life.’

The heat of Connor’s temper reduced by several degrees as he observed his words find their target. Phoebe couldn’t have looked more devastated if he’d struck her or—more likely scenario—kissed her. He knew that tough measures were necessary if he was going to break down the wall she’d built between them, but it didn’t stop him feeling like a grade-A rat.

Phoebe ran the tip of her tongue over the dry outline of her lips and pressed her hands flat to either side of her head.

‘That’s not true,’ she denied hoarsely.

It had been incredibly hard to act normally, seeing Connor and Penny together, the perfect happy couple, when she’d felt sick with jealousy.

After several hellish visits she’d no longer trusted herself not to reveal something of her feelings in front of them. Besides, it had hurt so damned much! It had seemed a logical step to keep the contact to the bare minimum. The periods of non-contact had gradually got longer and longer until she’d seized any excuse to avoid being with Penny and Connor.

The unwavering expression of disbelief on Connor’s face shattered her shaky defiance

‘I had my reasons,’ she muttered huskily.

‘Which were?’

‘Leave it alone, Con,’ she pleaded, turning her back on him.

‘Don’t worry. I can guess.’

The dry words had Phoebe spinning around, her eyes wide in alarm, her studied indifference replaced by outright panic.

‘You can?’ Terrified he might take her ill-judged exclamation
as an invitation to elaborate on a deeply mortifying theme, she began to disjointedly babble. ‘Don’t bother yourself, Con. I’m not interested in playing g-guessing games...’

‘And even less interested in hearing the truth,’ he returned, his hard glance sweeping scornfully over her face. Phoebe hunched her shoulders miserably, as if trying to make herself a smaller target for those condemnatory eyes.

After a short tense silence he slowly exhaled and shook his head.

‘I get the message, Phoebe.’ He swept a hank of hair out of his shadowed eyes with an intensely weary gesture. ‘Come along up to the house. You’re shivering.’

She was, but not from the cold.

‘I want to go home.’ Which was where exactly?

She lifted her chin firmly, as appalled at the self-pitying direction of the pathetic little mental postscript as she was at the feeble quiver in her voice.

Phoebe knew better than most that she had more going for her than the vast majority of people on the planet. People didn’t die of broken hearts, they got on with life, and if they had any shred of sense they didn’t fall into a morass of self-pity.

‘I’m in no condition to stop you but, even given the antiseptic qualities of saliva, it would seem sensible to clean that wound on your thumb without delay.’

Taking into account what she’d thought he was going to be accusing her of mere moments earlier, it didn’t seem so bad being called a thumb-sucker.

‘Hardly a wound.’ Phoebe found herself speaking to Connor’s broad back. She stood indecisively for a moment, watching his uncompromising rear view. Her face screwed up into a mask of intense frustration.

He was right, there was no way he could force her to do anything.

‘So what,’ she muttered darkly, ‘am I doing, trotting meekly along after him?’ Anyone would think I wanted to be publicly outed as the sort of woman who covets her sister’s man!

The patio doors that opened out onto the terrace led into a large room with a vaulted roof. Phoebe’s eyes were instantly drawn upwards towards the original exposed timbers of the massive A-frame supporting the lofty roof. A minstrels’ gallery dominated the far end of the room and a decorative wrought-iron spiral staircase led up to the raised area with its book-lined wall. To her left, half of the rough plastered wall was concealed by an enormous tapestry, its jewel-bright colours muted by age. The rest of the walls were exposed stone. The floor, too, was stone-slabbed, worn smooth with age.

‘This is incredible,’ she breathed appreciatively. The London house Penny and Connor had bought after their marriage had been very much a reflection of her sister’s tastes. This eclectic mixture of textures and tones and antique and modern was, she instinctively knew, all Connor.

Connor opened the door of the cast-iron woodburner set in the large inglenook. ‘You like it?’ He steadied himself against the wooden mantel, threw a large log onto the fire and closed the glass leaded door.

‘Who wouldn’t?’

‘Take a seat.’

Just when she’d thought she couldn’t feel anymore self-conscious than she already did, his sapphire eyes sought and held hers and she discovered she’d been wrong. Surely he could hear the thud of her heart from where he was standing?

‘Didn’t anyone ever tell you it’s rude to stare?’ she challenged
him crankily. Because she didn’t feel capable of much else, she dropped down into the chunky square leather sofa he’d indicated.

‘I thought beautiful women got used to being stared at.’

‘Well, I haven’t. Not that I am...beautiful that is...’ Phoebe’s voice trailed off into a cracked whisper as she cringed inside at the crassness of her response and wished hard that the sumptuous upholstery would complete its job and swallow her up properly.

If Connor felt obliged to rush in with reassurance, her humiliation would be complete, but he didn’t. Not that it mattered...but it would be nice to hear him say, just once, that she was beautiful. Blinking rapidly, she closed off this wistful line of speculation.

‘I always thought you were a pragmatist, Phoebe.’

The unexpectedness of this comment, delivered in a tone tinged with disapproval, made her expression grow wary. ‘I think I am,’ she replied cautiously.

‘Then why won’t you consider the partnership deal?’ One winged brow rose as he mentally reviewed what he evidently considered her unreasonable attitude.

‘What is this, a two-pronged attack?’

‘This issue is quite separate from the personal one.’ Phoebe’s jaw dropped. Unbelievably, he looked as if he believed what he’d said. ‘If you eliminate the personal complications,’ he continued in the tone of someone patiently pointing out the obvious to someone less intellectually blessed, ‘this post is exactly what you’ve been looking for.’

Eliminate... Phoebe’s indignation grew. She couldn’t believe the degree of clinical detachment Connor was displaying after what had just passed between them.

‘How would you know what I’m looking for, Con?’ She choked, injecting her reply with a liberal dusting of scorn.

‘I know you.’

Again his steel-clad certainty needled her. Her lips tightened into a mutinous line as she ran her finger along the leather-bound spine of a book open to mark his place. With a shake of her head she raised her defiant eyes to his.

‘You knew me, Con. A lot has happened to me since we knew one another. Four years is a long time...’ As far as she knew, four years ago Connor hadn’t read romantic poetry—Donne at that. ‘People fall in love...marry...have children...’

If things had been different, she mused, a flicker of regret drifting across her expressive features, perhaps she and Thierry might have made a go of it.

The French doctor had certainly made it clear he’d wanted that, but though Phoebe might have been the pragmatist she claimed, she had never contemplated marriage without love. She’d felt warmth and affection and even attraction for Thierry, but not love. He’d been philosophical when she’d admitted that to him. They’d parted as friends.

‘And did you do any of those?’

Startled by the harshness in his tone, Phoebe glanced up and saw the dark colour seep out along the crest of his slashing cheekbones.

She held out her naked left hand. ‘No ring.’ If she and Connor had been lovers, she couldn’t imagine them parting as friends. Just look at them when all they’d shared had been a kiss!

Connor’s eyes narrowed as he regarded the slim, narrow hand she held out for his inspection. The lack of a ring didn’t eliminate the possibility of a love affair—maybe more. The tension in his guts tightened viciously.

‘And if you were wearing one, I suppose one you’d want it to stay there for keeps?’

‘Of course!’

A slow smile softened the contours of his chiselled features as they roamed at will over her upturned face. ‘So, you see, deep down you’ve not really changed,’ he observed smugly. ‘You’re still a hopeless romantic.’

For a dizzying moment Phoebe had the disturbing impression that he could see deep down—he could see her thoughts. The whimsical notion brought a sheen of sweat to her upper lip, which she nervously dabbed with the tip of her tongue.