Kitabı oku: «The Brooding Stranger», sayfa 3

‘I’ve made some stew for supper.’ She faltered over the words as hectic colour suffused her face, fully aware that she had his attention more completely than a hunter fixing his sights on his prey before aiming his gun. Inwardly, she gulped. ‘There’s more than enough for two—that is if you haven’t already eaten?’

‘Is this a habit of yours?’

‘What? ‘

‘I mean do you normally extend spontaneous invitations to people you hardly know?’ Gray demanded irritably, booted feet firmly set on her doorstep like a captain at the helm of his ship.

‘You showed up the other day and came in without me inviting you. Is that any different?’

‘I asked you if I could come in and you said yes.’

‘Of course I did … you’re my landlord. So I do know you, don’t I?’

‘Damn it, woman, you’re on your own out here!’

He spoke as though she was far too relaxed about her personal safety for his liking. Karen was taken aback by the vehemence in his tone. Anyone who didn’t know them would think that he cared whether she was safe or not—which was utterly ridiculous when one considered the facts.

‘I know I’m perfectly safe here.’ She kept her voice deliberately soft. ‘I’ve only felt anxious once, and that was when I inadvertently crossed paths with the “big bad wolf” in the woods one day.’

For a moment a muscle tensed, then relaxed again in the side of Gray’s high sculpted cheekbone. One corner of his mouth quirked upwards in the beginnings of a smile. The gesture made him sinfully, dangerously attractive, and Karen had cause to question her wisdom at so recklessly inviting him to join her. Just then she remembered an adage she’d once read that the most dangerous wolves were the ones who were hairy on the inside. Maybe she’d be wise to remember that?

‘And he let you go?’ Gray parried dangerously.

Karen caught her breath. ‘Yes … he let me go.’

‘One day those big blue eyes are going to get you into a barrel full of trouble, little girl.’

‘I’m not a little girl, so stop calling me one. I’m a woman … a woman who’s been married, for goodness’ sake!’

‘Have you? Are you telling me you’re divorced now, then?’ With an impenetrable glint in his eye he shouldered past her into the sitting room.

Mentally counting to five, Karen slowly closed the door on the cold, rainy night outside. She shivered hard, but it was nothing to do with the weather. Glancing across at her visitor, she saw that he’d taken off his jacket and thrown it casually across the threadbare arm of the couch. Once again he moved across to the fire and held out his hands to its warmth—though Karen privately thought it would take a lot more than even a hundred blazing fires to warm the icy river that must pass for blood in Gray O’Connell’s veins.

‘I’m a widow.’ Finally commanding his full attention, she lightly shrugged a shoulder as he turned to survey her.

‘How long since you lost your man?’ It sounded almost poetic, the way he phrased it.

‘Eighteen—nearly nineteen months ago.’ She unfolded her arms to thread her fingers nervously through her hair, mentally bracing herself to receive some sort of barbed reply from this enigmatic man who clearly had so many defences that it was a wonder anything could pierce even a chink of his heavy armour. Not that she was looking for sympathy or anything.

‘Is that why you came here?’ His eyes raked her figure from head to foot, then returned to her face, where they reflected a provocatively unsettling interest in her mouth.

Karen grimaced uncomfortably. ‘Now, about that stew … I hope you’re hungry—’

‘How did he die?’ Though he stood-stock still, Gray’s relentless gaze ate up the distance between them as though channelling electricity—probing her reluctance to give him the information he sought with all the steely-eyed determination of a professional interrogator.

‘I don’t—I don’t really want to talk about it.’ She dipped her head, twisting her fingers into a long burnished strand of hair, then impatiently pushing it away again. Her troubled gaze studied the once colourful swirls woven into the homespun rug at her feet with exaggerated concentration.

‘I seem to remember you advising me that it sometimes helps to talk?’

Glancing up at him, Karen was inexplicably annoyed that he should throw what had, after all, been genuine compassion and concern back in her face.

‘You didn’t buy that idea when I offered it to you—why should you expect me to be any different in return?’

‘In my own case I knew it wouldn’t be of any use. You, however, are an entirely different case, Miss Ford. By the way, what is your first name?’

‘You obviously know that it’s Karen. You’re my landlord. The letting agents must have informed you.’

‘Perhaps I wanted to hear it from your own lips.’ Curling his fingers round the thick black leather belt he wore round his jeans, Gray seriously considered her. ‘You barely look old enough to have been married—let alone widowed.’

‘You know how old I am. I’ve already told you. And Ryan and I were married for five years. His death came as a terrible shock. There was no warning, so I wasn’t prepared. He hadn’t even been ill. He worked hard … too hard. Long hours, with not enough rest—but that’s the culture nowadays, isn’t it?’

Her eyes glazed over with distress. ‘The culture we’re all taught to so admire. As if there’s such virtue in working hard and dying young! My husband suffered a massive heart attack at the age of thirty-five. Can you imagine that? When he went, I wanted to die, too. So don’t stand there and tell me I don’t look old enough to be married, because in the space of those five short years with my husband I lived more life than most people do in ten times as long!’

She was shaking, emotion slamming into her like a train, appalled at giving in to such a passionate display in front of a man who probably regarded such outbursts as a certain sign of weakness … or at least a serious character flaw. If only she could take the words back, keep them private and unsaid, but it was clearly too late for that.

His handsome visage a cool, impenetrable mask of enforced self-control, Gray retrieved his jacket from the couch and wordlessly shrugged it on. As Karen struggled to regain even a shred of her former equilibrium, he came towards her, his expression grim. With her heart in her mouth she automatically stepped back. She saw the glimmer of disquiet in his gaze when she did, as if it took him aback that she might be afraid of him.

‘I’m sorry for your trouble, Miss Ford, and sorry that I clearly intruded where I had no right. I didn’t come here to make you revisit painful memories and upset you. I’ll see you in the morning as arranged—if that’s still all right? If not, we can leave it for another time that’s more convenient.’

Nodding miserably, Karen plucked the material of her soft wool sweater between trembling fingers, twisting it into a knot. ‘Tomorrow morning will be fine.’

‘Good. I’ll wish you goodnight, then.’ Gray’s glance greedily swept her pale solemn face, the distressed China-blue eyes with their long dark blonde lashes that reminded him of a fawn, and the full, almost pouting, trembling lips devoid of so much as a trace of lipstick. A man would have to go a long way to find such innocent unaffected beauty in a woman, he thought.

Karen heard him go to the door, lift the latch and step outside. As he went, her body seemed suddenly to move of its own volition, and she found herself hurrying after him. Out into the rainy night she ran, her eyes squinting up at the water that splashed onto her face, ignoring the cold, ignoring the wind that tore into her hair, sweeping the long sun-kissed strands into a dishevelled cloud.

‘Gray!’

The voice that called out his name was full of anguish and something else—something that Gray registered in his mind with tight-lipped control. Heat seared him like a brand at the realisation, making him rock-hard with need. He turned to survey her. Even in the dark he knew his light-coloured eyes burned as brazenly as a cat’s.

‘What is it?’

‘I just—I just want you to—’

‘Don’t ask me to stay, Karen. I’ll only end up hurting you. Trust me.’

Her lip wobbled as she struggled for the words to tell him what she felt. ‘I want—I need—Dear God! Do I have to spell it out for you?’

She was crying even as she spoke, her tears mingling with the rain. Why was it so hard to just say what she wanted? She missed the physical side of married life. She missed having someone to hold her and touch her and make her feel like a woman again. She didn’t want a relationship with Gray O’Connell. He was the last man on earth she could ever want that with. He was too angry—too wounded to be kind. But they’d both been hurt by life. Why shouldn’t they find comfort in each other’s arms for a little while? It didn’t have to mean any more than that, did it?

‘It would only be sex, sweetheart,’ Gray asserted coldly, as if intuiting her thoughts. ‘Nothing else. Not “making love”, not hearts and flowers and violins. Just sex. Screwing, plain and simple. Would you really settle for that?’

Shock slammed into Karen at his words. The strength seemed to drain out of her legs completely. Yet she stood her ground, blinking back tears, blinking back the rain that had already left a fine damp sheen on her sweater, soaking its way onto her skin.

‘Were you always this cruel?’ she asked boldly into the night. ‘I’ll bet you pulled the wings off dragonflies when you were a boy. I’ll bet you laid traps for poor defenceless animals … I bet you broke your poor mother’s heart!’

In two strides Gray was in front of her, his dark face just inches away from hers, his warm breath fanning her face, making little clouds of steam in the rain. ‘My mother took her own life when I was three. Maybe having me was to blame? Who knows? But whether it was me or my father I’ll never know, and I have to live with that every day. So my advice to you, Karen, would be to think twice before you make such a throwaway comment again, damn you!’

The impact of the bitter words made Karen go rigid. Then, hardly realising what she was doing, she slowly raised her hand tentatively to touch his lips with her fingertips. They were infinitely soft to the touch—soft, but inherently stubborn. Velvet clad in iron. But right then she saw past the anger of the man, past the torment of the grown-up who didn’t know where to go with his pain, and instead saw the small three-year-old boy who had been abandoned by his mother and ultimately abandoned by his father, too. Grief twisted her heart.

Gray grabbed her wrist to wrench her hand roughly away. Before she could react he wove his hands through the damp tresses of her hair to crush her lips beneath his mouth in a bruising, destroying kiss that made her body go limp with dazed reaction and turned her blood into a river of seething, molten desire so hot she thought she would be consumed by the sheer, staggering ferocity of it.

His tongue mercilessly swept the soft warm recesses of her mouth, taking brutal hostage of her flesh and her senses with all the insatiable relentless hunger of a man who’d gone without meat or drink for days—tearing into her with passion, demanding everything, sparing her nothing, until her heart pounded in her chest as if she was riding in a speeding car bent on crashing. When his hands left her hair and moved downwards to drag her hips hard against his, his manhood surged like steel against the giving flatness of her belly, leaving Karen in no doubt of the heat and the hardness in him. A kind of drugging sensuality rolled over her like a wave, robbing her of the power to think, to rationalise, to remain sane.

‘Was it like this with your husband, Karen?’ As he tore his mouth from hers Gray’s eyes burned down at her as though in the grip of a fever. He ignored the rain that was soaking them both as though it didn’t even exist. His midnight lashes blinked the moisture away temporarily.

It took several moments for Karen even to register the question. Her lips were aching and bruisingly tender from his passion, her body crushed against his hard, lean length as his arms held her captive, and it was hard to even remember who she was. Tragic Karen Ford from suburban England—a woman who wrote lyrics about passion, who sang songs all about the kind of love that consumed body and soul but had never personally experienced herself.

The shocking realisation was both a revelation and a trauma. It was as though she was utterly betraying Ryan’s memory by even contemplating it. A sudden vision of her husband’s tender smile imposed itself on her mind, cutting through the sensual fog that enveloped her. It made her twist urgently out of Gray’s embrace to call a halt to the madness. Disgusted with herself for almost succumbing to nothing more than base lust, Karen wiped the back of her hand across her still throbbing lips.

Moving several steps away from the man who had only moments ago taken her body hostage, she anxiously straightened her sweater, pushed back her hair to tidy herself, and tried desperately to summon back the woman who always strove to do the right thing, who didn’t give way to wild, uncharacteristic impulses that threatened to land her in a cauldron of hot water that would scar her for ever and play havoc with her soul.

‘My husband was a good, kind man.’

‘But it’s plainly not kindness you want from me, Karen—is it?’

Gray’s lips twisted mockingly, and Karen felt a shaft of pain pierce her heart like a hot red spike.

‘Don’t.’

‘Don’t what?’ he demanded derisively, hands either side of his hips, an imposing dark figure dressed in black, his sombre face a pale, startling contrast in the eerily atmospheric light of the moon. ‘You’ve got to decide, Karen. Either you’re just a girl or you are a woman. When you know the answer perhaps we can come to some mutually satisfying arrangement?’

‘I don’t want—I mean I’m not interested in—’

‘Liar.’ He spat the word out like a poisoned dart headed straight for her heart, making Karen feel deeply, unforgivably ashamed of her own wanton nature. A nature she’d had no trouble keeping under strict control when she was married to gentle, undemanding Ryan, with his beguiling smile and soft voice. Yet in a few short minutes with this hard unyielding stranger that unknown trait had burst free like some wild wind, sweeping everything aside in its path—including her dignity and common sense …

‘I think you should leave.’ Her words made a liar of her, too, because even now her body was craving Gray’s touch as powerfully as any drug a person could be addicted to in spite of her shame and remorse.

‘Yes, I think perhaps I should.’

With a distant look in his eyes that told her he wasn’t even seeing her any more, Gray pivoted abruptly and disappeared into the rainy night as if he had been nothing but a disturbing figment of Karen’s fevered imagination, conjured up by her longing and her loneliness.

Biting back a sob as she turned unhappily back towards the house, she knew with certainty that in her rational everyday mind there was no way on this good green earth that she would ever have conjured up a man like Gray O’Connell. Only a fool could expect anything more than hurt from such an angry, embittered soul as him …

CHAPTER THREE

GRAY splashed whiskey into a tumbler about a quarter of the way up the glass, then raised it to his lips. Despising himself for succumbing to a device that really was a last resort in his book, he took one long draught, emptied the glass and set it carelessly back down on the old oak sideboard. An answering fire burned in his gut, but even that wasn’t hot enough to scorch out what ailed him. Just what did he think he’d been doing, treating a grieving young widow as if she was his for the taking? Just because she’d done him the courtesy of listening to his litany of regrets when he’d turned up unannounced at the cottage that first time, it didn’t mean that he should presume she would now give him anything he asked for!

He groaned out loud, shaking his head. Chase looked up curiously from his place by the fire, then dropped his head mournfully down onto his front paws again as if to say What’s the point?

Precisely … What was the point? Gray agonised. There were plenty of likely women in the town and thereabouts—women who would be only too willing to warm his bed. Some of them had done just that—if only briefly—in the past. After Maura had left him he hadn’t cared about who they were, just that they were willing.

He almost reached for the whiskey bottle again at the thought of such recklessness. He’d protected himself, of course—he didn’t want anyone jumping up and down accusing him of making them pregnant—but just the same it wasn’t the kind of behaviour he was proud of.

But now, after two years of being unattached and heart-free—he scowled at that—he couldn’t believe he could be so affected by a little witch with honey-gold hair and an angelic smile, and a body that he ached to have wrapped round him naked. Neither the faded jeans nor the baggy shapeless sweater she’d been wearing had been able to totally disguise the long-legged, shapely body beneath the clothes. It had taken every ounce of willpower Gray had in him to refrain from taking her out there in the rain—up against the wall of the cottage, most likely. Desire had been running high in both of them, like sizzling sparks along a fuse wire. He’d felt it in every exquisite tremble of that taut and sexy little body of hers. Gray imagined her big blue eyes widening in shock, then capitulating in passion as she opened to receive him.

The vivid picture he conjured up had heat slamming into him with such ferocity that there wasn’t a single cell in his body that didn’t want her right there and then—that wouldn’t have pushed aside every single scruple he had left just to lose himself in the heat and softness of that alluring young body even as her sweetly musky scent drove him slowly crazy.

He was a passionate man—a man who put his heart and soul into everything he did, whether it was pushing his body hard in a workout, making money, painting pictures or making love. But he could honestly not recall another time in the whole of his thirty-six years when he had wanted a woman as badly as he wanted the chaste little widow. And the damnedest thing about it was that he had no business wanting her at all. Not when she was clearly still nursing her hurt over the death of her husband. Only a heartless bastard would take advantage of such a situation, and that was one title he’d tagged himself with for long enough.

‘She’s nothing but trouble with a capital T,’ he said out loud, his rich, resonant tone ringing out in the big, sombre drawing room with its dark oak panelling and ruby-red carpeting. For such an impressive room, its furnishings were sparse, to say the least. A more kindly observer might suggest minimalist. One large antique couch sat a few feet back from the huge brick fireplace with its open hearth, its once deep red cushions now sadly flattened and faded to a more sedate and dusky plum.

There was nothing comfortable about it, if the truth be known, but then Gray had become so careless of his own comfort of late that he scarcely gave the matter much thought. A few once beautiful but now faded Turkish rugs were laid indifferently here and there across the rich carpet, and one large oak sideboard and a heavily embossed armchair—renovated for Maura’s benefit, not his—was the only other furniture. On the walls were various old portraits that he’d got as a kind of ‘job lot’ when he’d purchased the grand old house, but none of them was of any relation of his as far as he knew. He’d been meaning to put them into storage, but lately he hadn’t had the heart to even think about the task, let alone do it.

The house was beautiful, right enough. It had the kind of faded grandeur that many old Irish houses descended from the landed gentry often possessed. But now many of the owners of such houses couldn’t afford the soaring upkeep they entailed, and despite the fact that Gray could afford it easily it was still soulless when all was said and done—even with his housekeeper Bridie’s loving administrations. What else could it be with just one singularly unhappy man and his bear of a dog living in it? It occurred to him just then that his father’s cottage was far more homely and welcoming. But then that was down to his beautiful shapely tenant and nothing to do with him.

As a picture of Karen filled his mind, scented candles and blazing fire an alluring backdrop, he shook his head with a fresh spurt of anger, desperately trying to dismiss it. He couldn’t understand it. The woman set him on fire with just one innocent glance from those incandescent blue eyes of hers. Doubly so because there was no falsity to be detected anywhere in their crystal silky depths—just a warmth he wanted to gravitate towards and a hurt that he found himself desperate to ease. That wasn’t like him. It wasn’t like him at all.

Besides, it was as plain as day that she didn’t need a hard, embittered man like Gray. The woman’s trusting soul and generous heart needed a man more in the mould of the way he guessed her husband must have been. Someone gentle and loving, no doubt—someone with infinite patience, someone selfless who worshipped the ground her perfect little feet walked on.

A rueful grin split his lips. The thick white socks she’d been wearing on a previous occasion hadn’t gone unnoticed. She had feet like a ballerina, perfectly poised, with a delicate but distinct little arch that was positively sexy. He wondered what she’d look like wearing nothing else but those chaste white socks and that beguilingly angelic little smile of hers? The thought caused him serious agony. For God’s sake! Just give her a wide berth from now on, man!

The instruction careened through his brain, wiping the grin clean off his handsome face. Scowling, Gray turned and stalked across the sea of ruby-red carpet, heading determinedly for the large scullery-type kitchen to chop up some steak for Chase’s dinner …

Karen sat in the window seat sipping her tea, straining for the sound of the ocean, which on a calm, still day could just be detected by those of a soulful enough disposition wanting to hear it. Her whole body was tense with waiting. Waiting for Gray O’Connell to show up with whatever bits and pieces of furniture he wanted to install in the cottage. Perhaps after last night he’d changed his mind?

Her heart took a dive as she remembered how vulnerable she’d made herself to the man, how incapable she’d been of holding back the tide of feeling so strong that it had threatened to knock her off her feet. Was that what passion did to a person? Made them lose their reason and dignity?

If Gray hadn’t strode away when he had, like some compelling black shadow melting into the darkness, Karen had serious doubts as to whether she would have restrained herself from practically begging him to share her bed. No wonder she was so keyed-up at the idea of seeing him again. How on earth was she even going to be able to look him in the eye? As if the man didn’t have enough advantages, without his sexually frustrated tenant throwing herself at his feet!

With a little groan she shook her head, then scrubbed at the condensation from her breath that clouded the windowpane. Everything could do with a coat of paint, she thought suddenly, her glance assessing. The white emulsion on the small square frames was grey and flaking, and the same washed-out tone on the walls was equally ready for some kind of springlike makeover. Would it be presumptuous of her to ask her taciturn landlord if she could apply a fresh coat of paint here and there? she wondered. After all, it could only be to his advantage. She was quite prepared to buy the paint and undertake the task herself.

The sound of a vehicle approaching had her leaping off the seat and hurrying to the kitchen sink to empty her half-consumed mug of tea. Pulling out a drawer, she let her fingers busily scramble through the jumbled contents that consisted of matchbooks, packets of incense and the odd battery and paperclip, to reach for her hairbrush. She pulled the cushioned comb through her hair, wincing at the occasional tangle it wouldn’t easily unravel.

Squinting into the small make-up mirror she’d left propped up against a line of cookery books on a shelf above the fridge, she grimaced at her flushed cheeks and over-bright eyes. It was hardly the composed visage she so desperately needed to present to her intimidating landlord, with his rangy good-looks and stinging glance that was currently the major stumbling block and disruption to her peace of mind.

A loud rapping on the door had Karen dropping the hairbrush haphazardly back into the drawer and slamming it shut with a bit too much gusto, causing the ill-fitting container to get jammed halfway and then refuse to budge. Cursing her own impatience, she left it as it was, then flew out into the sitting room to get the door.

‘Hello!’ Breathless, she stared up at Gray, winded by her sudden exertion as well as an unsettling feeling of intense anticipation at seeing him again.

Those mysterious grey eyes of his considered her for several tension-filled seconds without him uttering a word. Was he even going to say hello back? Karen’s stomach lurched, then lurched again. Dry-mouthed, she let her gaze move downwards to the deliberately provocative curl of those ruthless brooding lips. The same mocking lips that only just last night had all but burned her, highlighting an aspect of her nature that she now knew without a doubt she’d long suppressed.

‘My, my … What big eyes you have, Miss Ford.’ His voice, low and laced with a deliberate taunt, turned the blood in her veins to the consistency of sluggish warm treacle.

‘Barring the name—isn’t that supposed to be my line?’ she quipped back, astounded that she’d managed to even get the words past her throat. Trouble was, she was remembering the provocative, compelling taste of that taunting mouth and wondering how she was going to pretend that nothing disturbing had happened when they both knew it had. That destroying, passionate kiss from Gray had turned everything Karen believed about herself on its head, and there didn’t seem to be a single thing she could do to restore that belief to where it had been before.

After assessing her for a couple more seconds, Gray bestowed upon her a disturbing lingering smile. ‘A man could quite forget his own name, standing here looking at you,’ he ruefully told her. ‘And that wouldn’t do. It wouldn’t do at all. Regarding the furniture that I’ve brought—if you don’t like it, or it’s not to your taste, then I’ll change it for something that suits better. Not that I’m enamoured of the idea of a shopping trip any time soon, but maybe for you, Miss Ford, I’ll make an exception.’

‘I’m sure whatever style you’ve chosen will be just fine,’ she murmured, the mere idea of going on a shopping trip with Gray O’Connell churning her insides like butter.

‘Good.’ He grinned. ‘What a refreshing change to meet a woman that’s so amenable.’ Turning abruptly, he stepped back outside.

When she finally remembered to breathe again, Karen’s breath was distinctly shaky. There was no doubt that the man was good-looking—if in a kind of arrogant, couldn’t-careless, everybody-else-be-damned kind of way—but when he smiled. His smile was like the sun lighting up the greyest of gloomy days, or a full moon brightly showcasing the myriad stars that it shared the night sky with. His fathomless long-lashed eyes were stop-you-in-your-tracks amazing, and his mouth—his mouth had a deliciously enigmatic curve that was without a doubt provoking and made her toes curl. It also transformed his face from darkly handsome to hauntingly, irresistibly beautiful. How could a woman ever forget it? All Karen could do was blink up at him, saying nothing. It was as if she had suddenly lost the power to think, let alone speak, when he looked at her like that.

Striding across the grassy area round the house onto the narrow unmade road that led to the dwelling, Gray opened the rear doors of a large white transit van. Karen saw a tall, slim young man with a thatch of unruly fair hair, dressed in paint-splattered jeans and a scruffy black tee shirt, clamber out of the front seat and amble up beside him—presumably to assist with whatever he’d brought in the van.

The first item to emerge was a beautiful Victorian two-seater sofa with cabriole legs, upholstered in natural linen. Its condition was immaculate, and between the two of them the men brought it into the house and deposited it beside the older worn version that it would replace. Lifting the three small green velvet cushions that adorned the old couch, Gray threw them down onto its smarter replacement, then glanced directly over at Karen where she stood awkwardly and bemused by the door.

‘That’s a lot better, don’t you think?’

There was something almost endearing about the glance Gray gave her—almost as if he was unsure of her reaction and sought her approval. The thought was so surprising that an answering sensation of warmth curled in Karen’s belly, bringing with it a surge of affection towards the aloof, complex man who acted as if he didn’t need anything from anyone—let alone affection.

‘It’s great.’ She lifted her shoulders with a shrug of pleasure.

‘By the way, this is Sean Regan. Sean—meet Miss Ford.’

‘Call me Karen.’ She stepped forward to shake the younger man’s hand, already warming to the unrestrained friendliness she saw on his eager, attractive face, and noting the two little silver earrings he wore in one earlobe with a feeling almost akin to maternal indulgence. Which was ridiculous, because he could only be a couple of years her junior—if that.