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

He bit back a groan and reached for the coverlet, folding it from the far side of the bed until it wafted gently over her. This was better. She was getting too far under his skin with her fancy meals and empathetic speeches. This was supposed to be about sex. That was how he’d rationalized it and it was the only way they could come together.

Rowan’s shock this evening perturbed him. She had ideals about family that were completely at odds with his own experience. It worried him, made him think that at some point she’d look to him to reflect some of those values and he simply didn’t have them.

Uncurling his tense fists, he moved stiffly to the door, reminding himself that he might want to relieve sexual frustration with Rowan, but he didn’t need to. He didn’t need her.

He was on the beach, cold waves lapping at his knees, before he could draw a breath and begin to think clearly again.

Rowan’s confusion at waking with the coverlet dragged across her was too sensitive a topic to pick apart first thing in the morning—especially when a nameless agitation made her feel so aware, like her skin had been stroked by a velvet breeze all evening and then it had been too hot to sleep.

Yet it was another windy day of scudding clouds and intermittent rain.

Nic was locked in his office down the hall, not looking for her. Or rather he had come looking and then left without touching her, leaving her heart as skinned as her knee, tight and tender and itchy. Which was juvenile.

The only way to suffocate her sense of irrelevance was to face up to another heartache of equal anguish. She went into the master bedroom and spent a long time with a sleeve held to her cheek, a collar to her nose, whole gowns clutched to her chest.

“You’re a little old for dress-up, aren’t you?” Nic’s voice, rich and cool as ice cream, broke the silence an hour later, prompting a shiver of guilt and pleasure.

Rowan’s first instinct was to toss aside the scarf she was tying over her hair and throw herself at him. She made herself finish knotting it in the famed Cassandra O’Brien style, then faced him. “People always tell me I look like Mum and I say thank you. But is it a compliment?”

“She was very beautiful, and so are you—but not because you resemble her.”

Rowan blushed, but more because the admiration in his gaze was unabashedly sexual. She swallowed back the silly excited lump rising in her throat, trying to hold her wobbly smile steady as she loosened the scarf.

“What did you come in here for, full of such extravagant compliments? Keep that up and you’ll see how much I resemble her when it comes to …” she tilted him her mother’s infamous man-eater smile “… encouraging male admiration.”

Something fierce and dangerous flashed in his Nordic blue eyes before he strolled forward on predatory feet. “I’m quite aware of how much you encourage it. I’ve seen you lay on the charm time and again. Why? Are you really as insecure as she was?”

His disparagement didn’t allow her for one minute to think his attitude stemmed from jealousy or possessiveness.

Yanking the scarf off her neck with a burn of her nape and a cloud of painfully familiar sandalwood, Rowan replaced it on the hook beside the mirror. “How am I supposed to know what I am when I’ve always been told who to speak to, where to go and how to act?”

She moved away from him, angry and hurt that he was judging her and, yes, insecure. How could she develop an identity if her ability to make decisions had so rarely been tested?

“When Mum sent me to Paris I thought I’d finally be able to make more of my own choices, but it didn’t work out that way. That was partly my fault, of course. The more I put into dance, the more I wanted to succeed to prove to myself I could. It’s not easy to walk away from that much investment. It’s like gambling. I kept thinking the next production would be the one that put me on the front of the stage, not the back. Mum would finally be happy and I’d be free to strike out then.” She hitched her shoulder, lashed by how nascent and unrealistic that dream had been.

“And when you finally did have the chance you drank your face off and scared yourself,” he said, from where he’d stayed behind her.

“I did,” she agreed with a chuckle of defeated acknowledgment, elbows sharp in her palms and shoulder blades aching with tension. “The grief and guilt didn’t help with that.” She sighed, still ashamed of the way she’d behaved, but she had to move past it. She was determined to.

She pivoted to offer him a laissez-faire smile.

“So now I’m back at ground zero—the only place where I sometimes had moments of feeling like I knew who I was and what I wanted. I’m hoping for inspiration, but it eludes me. You’re a worldly man. Give me advice on what to do with my life.”

Rowan’s expansion on the picture of a life hemmed in by her mother’s dominating personality disturbed Nic. It was such a different upbringing from the fortunate one he’d judged it to be. To keep from dwelling on the struggles that pulled far more empathy out of him than he was comfortable with, he focused on her oblique request, touring his father’s suite to see if his idea was feasible.

The rooms sprawling from the southwestern turret of the house were befitting of a billionaire media mogul—expansive and masculine, yet with enough womanly touches to prove one had lived here with him. Nic briefly glanced in the walk-in closet, approving of its size, reassured by contents that were even more extravagant than he’d expected. He detoured out of interest to the well-appointed lounge, with its balcony overlooking the sea, noted the his and hers bathrooms and acknowledged the bed—big as the Titanic.

Rowan watched him with an inquisitive frown. “Have you never been in here before?”

“Never. You?”

“Loads,” she said with a careless shrug.

Dismissing a weary of course she had, he gave the framed portraits a final considering look. “I think you should sell your mother’s things and use the money to get a degree in something practical like business admin.”

Rowan’s love for her mother might be very much of the dutiful variety, and stained with resentment and angst, but she was appalled by Nic’s suggestion. “I can’t do that!” she protested.

Nic lifted his brows at her vehemence. “Why not?”

“Mum loved this table and that mirror … You can’t just tear down someone’s life and make it disappear.” Her lingering sense of duty to preserve Cassandra O’Brien’s mystique made her balk at the idea completely. “And business admin? Why don’t you suggest I become an accountant? Or something really exciting like an insurance actuary? Maybe there’s a library somewhere that needs its Dewey Decimal System overhauled?”

“Put it all in storage and wait tables, then.” A muscle tightened in Nic’s jaw, giving Rowan the crazy impression that she’d injured him. “I don’t know you any better than you know yourself,” he stated, in a comeback that returned very nicely any wounding she’d delivered. “Given what you just said, this is a decision best made by you, isn’t it?”

Nic took on his warrior stance, strong and mute. If he wasn’t the product of Thor and Athena she didn’t know what he was, all masculine power and superiority.

His confident presence called to the woman in her, but his subtext didn’t escape her. He wasn’t contradicting her need to move on, and his mention of disposing of her mother’s things reinforced his expectation that she’d do so.

Taking a surreptitious breath to ease the panicky constriction in her lungs, she nodded, mulling over what he’d said. “You’re right. I need to figure it out on my own. But there is one thing we should plan together.” She shoved aside the barbed wires curling around the tender walls of her heart to allow the statement out. “We need a memorial service.”

He jerked back his head in immediate refusal. “I don’t. Why would you?”

“Everyone does.” She hugged herself tighter.

“No. It’s a social convention that many subscribe to, particularly if they’re of a religious bent, but that doesn’t mean you and I have to buckle to it.”

“It’s not buckling! It offers closure.” He couldn’t really imagine she’d sign a piece of paper and that would be it, could he?

Rowan stared at his impermeable expression and got a sick, hollow feeling in her stomach. She was such an idiot. She had thought sleeping with him would change things. Change him. Soften his edges and make him feel … something.

Nic shook his head at Rowan’s stare of horrified objection, continually amazed by how sentimental she was. His inner core tightened protectively against that weakness. What was nostalgia but revisiting old pain?

“What did you have in mind? You and I reading poetry to each other over a marker on the lawn?” he asked.

“You don’t have to be like that about it!” Her sniff of affront was followed by a haughty set of her chin that made him feel about two inches tall. “I thought we’d say something nice to people who care about them in a chapel in Athens.”

“Oh, you want a party,” he said with sudden realization, disgusted with himself for beginning to credit her with more substance. “Why didn’t you say so? No.”

“It’s a service!” Rowan argued. “People need one. Aren’t you getting emails and phone calls? Their friends are asking for a chance to pay their respects.”

“Which they’ve done,” Nic insisted. If he had to field one more empty platitude or soupy look he’d drop himself from a plane into the sea. “There is absolutely no reason to drag it all into the limelight again—or is that your goal? Feeling a bit isolated here, Ro? Then leave.”

Well, that certainly told her how much he valued their time together! Rowan’s belligerent chin took his dismissal as a direct hit, pulling in and—she feared—crumpling before she steadied it.

“Is there really nothing in you that feels a need to say goodbye? Or are you only willing to give Olief as much time as he gave you?” It was a cruel thing to say. He’d spent hours on the search personally, and hiring teams of divers and pilots …

He didn’t remind her of all that. He only stared flatly at her. The silence stretched. His stance hardened and his jaw clenched.

Her belly quivered in apprehension.