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

“I said no.” He walked out.

Nic kept his distance for the next several days. If Rowan had lazed around underfoot he might have given her a piece of his mind, but she was actually doing as he’d told her to. She’d made a few trips to the other side of the island to fetch empty boxes. Garment bags had appeared with labels and markers. Every day, when she wasn’t leaving him a meal downstairs, she spent hours packing up the master bedroom.

If she had come to him he might have engaged, but he would not go looking for her. He was too proud. So proud it made his shoulders ache with hollow pressure. But the way she’d taken everything he’d told her and thrown it back in his face had been a blow. It was a perfect example of why he didn’t let people in. He didn’t want anyone to have the power to hurt him. If that meant he didn’t get the closeness—the sex and laughter and moments of basking in the light of a woman’s smile—so be it. Those were things he refused to crave anyway.

And if he had a curious tingling in his chest, almost like he was missing her—well, that was pure stupidity. She was right down the hall.

Or was she? He thought he heard a knock and clicked off his shaver.

“Nic?” She was in his lounge. Grabbing a towel off the rail, he hitched it around his hips and pulled the bathroom door inward.

Rowan was halfway around the sofa, heading toward the double doors that led into his bedroom. She started when he revealed himself, visibly taken aback to find him so close and fresh from the shower, but what did she expect at six-thirty in the morning?

She was in a short robe belted loosely over a torturously short babydoll nightgown. Her warm sleep scent, like almonds and tea, teased his nostrils. Despite going months without a woman on many occasions, he suddenly and acutely felt this recent abstinence.

A flustered blush colored her cheeks and she took a half step back, then held her ground within his reach even though he could tell she was discomfited.

Desire pulsed through him with increasing punches from his strengthening heart rate, reacting to her tousled hair and fresh-from-bed look. He wanted to heave her over his shoulder and carry her to his unmade sheets, but alongside his immediate lust was a pang of surprise at how exhausted she looked. Her eyes were green gems in bruised sockets, her skin thin and pale.

He wasn’t exactly sleeping well himself. Every day was a fight to incapacitate his sex drive with punishing workouts. Every night he woke to erotic dreams anyway, heavy and aching to go to her.

Funny how there was no satisfaction in knowing she was suffering too. He shifted his weight so his feet were braced wide, hopeful that his uncontrollable response to her wouldn’t become obvious.

“Yes?” he demanded.

She swallowed and ran a hand through her hair, reminding him how silky and thick it was, how good it had felt to grasp a handful of the luscious waves and kiss her until neither of them could breathe.

Her breath sucked in and she said in a rush, “I just heard the ferry horn. It’s coming now. I totally forgot they change the schedule on weekdays.”

His sex thoughts dissipated under something that made him pull inward with apprehension—even though he didn’t know why a change in the ferry schedule was such a crisis she had to burst in here, wringing her hands over it. “So?”

“That means I have to pack and leave now, unless you’re coming and want to make other arrangements to get us to the city by two.”

His brain stalled on pack and leave. The rest penetrated more slowly and didn’t make a lick of sense. “What?”

Rowan folded her arms across her chest in a move that was so defensive he instinctively knew he didn’t want to be enlightened. She spoke with exaggerated patience that annoyed him further.

“I thought I would have more time to reason with you, but I’ve just realized I don’t. I have to go now. Unless you’re willing to have the helicopter come and get us in a few hours? In that case we have all kinds of time to fight.”

“About …?” He tensed right down to the arches of his bare feet.

Her mouth pursed before she took a brave breath and stated, “The service.”

CHAPTER NINE (#ulink_2cd23b06-4d5d-5420-8571-bdb07a3867fc)

“WHAT? Service?”

The way Nic chomped the words made Rowan tremble internally, but it was far too late to back down. She’d known as she set this up that the worst part would be now, when she told him—and there had been a lot of hard parts, not least of which had been finding the money. She’d put off telling him as long as she could, avoiding him, checking that he couldn’t overhear her calls. All the way along she’d known she’d need to set aside patience and temper to make him see she was doing the right thing.

Now, though, a mental clock ticked in her head. The ferry’s horn usually sounded when it reached the tip of the island. It took ages to empty and reload, so she had at least thirty or forty minutes to get to the marina, but she suspected that wouldn’t give her enough time to talk Nic around to her way of thinking.

There wasn’t enough time in the world for that. If only he wasn’t naked and looking like the biggest, angriest Viking ever to rip off his shirt and go berserk.

“I made it clear we weren’t holding a service.” That low, livid voice nearly made her knees collapse.

“We aren’t holding one, are we?” She spoke with admirable civility, keeping the quaver out of her voice. “I am. Courtesy demands I invite you. Could you make up your mind? I have to run if you’re not coming.”

“How could you?” His fingers curled as if he wanted to close them on her neck.

“Option two, then? We’re fighting.” Her temper caught like a cat’s claw. She might have kept her distance while she made the plans, aware that continuing their sexual relationship while going behind his back would make this betrayal worse, but he had completely ignored her for days! That hurt. “Or are you literally asking me how I did it? Because I don’t need your permission and I have resources.”

“Table dancing?” he derided.

“What else?” she taunted to hide the smart. “Of course in order to earn enough to pay for this big party I’m hosting I’ll have take off my clothes this time.”

Outrage arced from him like an electric bolt, making her jerk as he seemed to rise taller and loom over her. “That had better be a lie.”

“What’s it to you?” she cried, the words coming straight from the forsaken nights that had piled up in the last few days.

This was the hardest time of her life and he was making it harder with his hot and cold attitude, the exquisite peaks of pleasure he’d brought her to and the pit of dejection he’d left her in. Her incendiary anger carried her forward, resentful words charging off her tongue.

“What do you care if I sell myself on street corners and buy gold-plated urns? I’m just a girl you sleep with when you’re bored. I don’t rate so much as a good morning or a thanks for lunch or a kiss goodnight!”

An inferno of anger roared in his eyes. Wrong thing to fight about