A Forbidden Passion: No Longer Forbidden? / The Man She Loves To Hate / A Wicked Persuasion

“Adventures? I was reporting on civil wars! Crimes against humanity! Those sorts of tales aren’t fit for a woman’s ears, let alone the child you were then. The only reason I brought them up with Olief was because he’d been there. He understood the line that has to be drawn between exposing the horrors and scaring the hell out of people. You can’t do that kind of work without unloading somewhere.”

Rowan was struck by more than his words. His eyes darkened and his expression flashed with a suffering that he quickly shuttered away. Her view of his work had always been that it was genuinely glamorous and important, not just appearing that way like her own. His face was splashed on magazine covers, wasn’t it? He was no stranger to being a still, compelling presence before a camera. He had accolades galore for his efforts.

There was a toll for bringing forth the stories that held an audience rapt, though. Perhaps she was horribly self-involved, since she’d never considered what sorts of anguish and cruelty he’d witnessed in getting those stories. He would have pushed himself because he was a man of ambition, but his opinion pieces revealed a man who wanted to restore peace and justice. That wasn’t work for the faint-hearted. If he was tough and closed off it was because he had to be in order to get what he wanted for the betterment of humanity.

Everything in her longed to surge forward and somehow offer comfort, but his body language—shoulders bunched, head turned to the side—shouted back off.

She stared down at bare feet that were icy despite the carpet she stood on.

“I always wondered why you were always so …” Aloof? Emotionless? Haunted? “Quiet.”

She rubbed her arms, trying to bring life back into herself when she felt chilled to the bone. Her heart ached for him. Of course he would have needed someone to help put all those terrible sights into perspective. She wanted to scroll back time and watch from afar, allowing him the healing he’d so obviously needed.

“I wish you’d said something,” she said weakly. “I wouldn’t have got in your way with Olief if I’d known how bad it was.”

“No?” he challenged, with another shot of that searing aggression.

“Of course not! I’m not so self-centered that I felt threatened by your having a relationship with your own father.”

“Then why did you set it up for him to see us on the beach and take a strip off me for it? That was a depth of bitchiness that exceeded even my low expectations of you, Ro.” His recrimination made her knees go weak.

The tiny thread of hope she’d found and clasped on to, the tentative belief that she was making headway with understanding Nic’s reserve and softening his judgment of her, snapped like a rubber band, not only stealing her optimism with a sharp sting, but launching her into an empty space where there was only hard landings.

“Olief saw that?” The one person who liked her exactly as she was had seen her inept plea to be noticed and the humiliating rejection that had followed. Rowan wanted to sink through the carpet and disappear. She dropped her cringing face into her hands.

“Oh, give it a rest. The awards committee isn’t in residence,” Nic bit out.

“I passed Olief on the path, but I didn’t think he’d seen us!” She only lifted her mortified face because she was determined to make him believe her. “Do you honestly think I’d want anyone to know I behaved so cheaply? I can hardly face you.”

“Then why did you do it?” His eyes were cold and measuring, unwilling to accept her protest at face value. “It better be good, Rowan, because he made me feel like a pervert, saying men like me had no business with a girl like you. What the hell does that mean? Men like me? Too old? Or simply not good enough? Forget finding common ground after that. We were barely speaking.”

Her throat closed again. She felt sick with herself. She had to ’fess up or he’d believe forever that she was a tease, and worse—someone who had schemed to hurt him for no reason but a power trip. She couldn’t live with that. She wasn’t like that at all.

“I … I wanted to,” she managed in a strangled whisper, furnace-like heat unleashing in her to conflagrate her whole body. She felt like the candle flame swaying on its spineless wick, all her dignity melting into a transparent puddle beneath her.

“Wanted to what?” he demanded. “Make me look like an opportunist?”

“No!” Rowan pitied every minion who’d ever had to stand before him and explain herself. He was utterly formidable. But his demeanor was the kind of unyielding superciliousness she’d been knuckling under all her life. She was so tired of apologizing for being human and having flaws!

“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.”

But was he any different? A monsoon could blow in at this moment and he’d still be fascinated by those puppies.

She caught him looking. He wasn’t exactly being discreet, so it wasn’t a surprise to lift his gaze and find a smug grin of womanly power widening her lips. In the way of all beauties who recognized the advantage of their appeal, she assumed it was legal tender.

“I’ll put the top up at the first spit, I promise.” She slipped the car into gear.

He shook his head, as much at himself for revealing his weakness as at her for thinking she had him where she wanted him. “No.”

“Look at this gorgeous morning.” She gestured expansively at the broken clouds scudding across the brilliant blue sky. Streaks of sunlight bathed the rainwashed landscape in pockets of gold. “Doesn’t it make you want to feel the sun on your face and the wind in your hair?”

He never allowed himself to be susceptible to Rowan’s appealing enthusiasm. Old reflexes crowded a refusal onto his tongue. Park the convertible and use the hatchback. I have to work. Work was the one thing he did care about. It was always there and, since it was all he would ever have, he was making a legacy of it.

But a damp sweet breeze floated across his face, hinting at spring. It turned his mind to the instinctive pursuits of the season—the mating season. His blood warmed with male appreciation of the youthful female smiling up at him with such guile.

Seduce her. The words whispered on the air.

At the very least he should remind her that batting her lashes had consequences.

“Give me the keys,” he said on impulse.

“Oh, Nic!” Rowan cut the engine and flung open the driver’s door. As he came around to her side, a long thigh in tight green jeans stretched out. Tall boots were planted with firm temper. “Why do you have to be like this? You’re just like everyone else who thinks they own my life. ‘No, Rowan, you can’t possibly have five minutes of enjoying yourself. Take the housekeeper’s hatchback because that’s what you are now.’ What do you gain from these power trips, huh, Nic? What?”

She stood before him in the V of the open door. The full impact of her tough, piqued magnificence hit him like a truck. He’d thought to play her at her own game, but the stakes were high. It took everything he had to hold out a steady hand.

“I get to drive. Are you going to stand there and sulk or move to the other seat?”

“You’re coming with me? To the market?”

Her stunned surprise was mostly hidden by her sunglasses, but he got to watch her elegant chin drop and her glossy lips part. The urge to kiss her edged him into her space.

“Wouldn’t you like company? I have my wallet.” He felt for it.

She shook back her hair, taking a second to eye him warily. If he hadn’t felt the weak sunshine before, he got a full blast of fireball heat as they stood facing each other. The attraction built in exponential waves of silence, bouncing back and forth, compressing with super-nova potential for explosion. Excitement for the chase swelled in him like a wind catching a sail.

“Of course.”

Her winning smile was meant to disarm and it did.

His abdomen tightened, but when she made an abbreviated move to slip around him he stayed exactly where he was. He wanted her to brush up against him.

The barest hint of nervousness diluted her bravado before she stated airily, “I guess I’ll crawl through.”

She planted her knee in the driver’s seat and offered him a breathtaking view of her wiggling backside while she maneuvered into the passenger seat. Righting herself, she inquired sweetly, “Will you be warm enough without a jacket?”

“Plenty,” he drawled, his jeans feeling as snug as hers were. This was insane. “The market and back,” he stated as he dropped behind the wheel. “I have a corporation to run.”

“I know, and I appreciate you doing this.”

Her hand grazed his bare wrist as he turned the key. All the hair stood up on his arm.

“I want us to be friends, Nic.”

His insides turned over with the engine. She had to be kidding. Dislodging her touch, he reached across to steal her sunglasses so he could see her as clearly as she saw him. He wanted to watch her comprehend that they’d come too far for any more pretense.

“The extent of the attraction between us doesn’t seem to be penetrating for you. We’ll never be friends, Ro. People with this much sexual desire between them can’t be.”

The undisguised stare of masculine intent from Nic started a pull in her belly. Rowan resisted it with a clench of her stomach muscles. Through a night of tossing and turning she’d absorbed that Nic didn’t keep his lovers in his life. He was ruthlessly throwing her out of her home. She absolutely shouldn’t have an affair with him. But here she was, unable to resist flirting with him when she could see, at last, that she had an effect on him. Insidious thoughts crept in that she might be able to persuade him against his plans for Rosedale if she got close enough to him.

Being close was heady, but frightening. She’d grasped at the let’s-be-friends routine to slow things down. He wasn’t having it, and the sexual energy between them couldn’t be ignored when they were crammed together in this tiny car, her sunglasses dangling from his fingers behind her head. He was caressing her face with his gaze, taking in the telltale bags under her eyes that she’d tried to cover with makeup. She couldn’t help dropping her gaze to his mouth and recalling the way those lips had hardened against hers, feasting and appreciating.

The lips in question curled into a knowing smile.

“I—” She became aware of a slow burn inside her, like a fuse that had been lit and was taking its time creeping toward the cache of gunpowder.

“I want you, Rowan.” Her sunglasses slid down her shoulder into her lap as his fingers combed her hair over her ear. “I’ve wanted you for a long time. And knowing you want me too means I have no reason to keep my distance any longer. It’s only a matter of time before we satisfy our curiosity.”

“Curiosity?” she repeated, her heart trip-hammering as she processed that he’d wanted her for a long time. “You make it sound so …” Unemotional. Of course it was pure physical desire for him. It still managed to pierce her with a sweet shot of excitement.

Blinking to ease the sting in her eyes, she shrugged, fighting the urge to turn her lips into his wrist, where his warm hand cupped the side of her head. God help her if she revealed she was motivated by something far more tender than basic earthly appetites.

As a bit of self-protection, she murmured, “You make it sound like you just want to get to the bottom of this.”

She waited a beat before she gave him the limpid, ingénue blink that would tell him she knew exactly what a double-entendre she’d just delivered.

It only took a stunned second before he tipped back his head in a hearty laugh—a rare full-bodied sound that melted her heart. Thanks, Mum, she thought with a caustic nod of acknowldgement to the woman who’d taught her the valuable art of flirting. Cassandra had always used it aggressively, to bring a man in line with her wants, whereas Rowan wielded it for defense. But at least it was in her repertoire of skills.

“Well, it would go a long way to easing the tension between us, wouldn’t it?” Nic mused as he released her to gun the engine and pull away.

The wind whipped Rowan’s hair into her eyes. She slouched into the sheepskin collar of her jacket, but it was more like sinking into the miasma of thrilling emotions filling her. Nic wanted her.

It shouldn’t make her tremble like she was six and it was Christmas morning—not when it came with warnings of painful consequences—but all her sexual awareness as a woman was wrapped up in this man. Her adolescent hormones had first been stirred by his solitary masculine figure striding from the surf. As she had matured all her searches for a mate had been a search for Nic’s attributes in another man. Of all the kisses she’d experienced none had been topped by the brief, savage touch of Nic’s lips on the beach that night two years ago.

Until yesterday.

Peeling a tendril of hair from her eyes, she replaced her sunglasses and then found Nic’s in the glove box. He slid them on with the silently efficient way he did everything else. Adeptly. With confidence. With a proprietorial attitude as if he owned the road, knew each curve and how to manipulate it.

Good grief, he didn’t have to seduce her. She was doing it for him!

It must be the pending anniversary, she concluded with pensive insight. She’d always had a crush on Nic, but her emotions were exaggerated right now, making her more sensitive and quick to react to any offer of intimacy. She was moving into a state of closure, one that was going to have many fronts if Nic really did expel her from Rosedale and tear it down. Her entire life was being compressed and squeezed through the eye of a needle. Hardly anything of the old life would come with her. Out of desperation she was reaching for anything and everything to hang on to, including Nic.

Especially Nic.

A stuttering sigh ripped through her chest, hidden by the drone of the engine and the rush of the wind. She glanced at him to see if he was tracking her inner struggle.

He kept his attention on the road, his profile starkly beautiful in its intensity, his cheeks still shiny from his morning shave, his mouth the only thing about him that seemed to relax. She longed to trace his mouth with her fingertips.

Maybe she needed to give herself to him in order to get over him once and for all.

Her stomach swooped and her head grew light. The thought of sex with him scared the hell out of her, but her shudder wasn’t all trepidation. It was also a delicious betrayal of anticipation. She wanted him.

She forced her hands to uncurl on her thighs, aware that she was kidding herself if she thought sleeping with him would help her get over him. She wanted to go to bed with Nic because deep down she thought maybe, somehow, it would make him like her. All night she had tossed and turned, tormented by the mistakes she’d made that had led him to look down on her. She wanted to make up with him. Sleep with him. He was the only man she’d ever wanted to sleep with. That was what it came down to.