The Hired Husband

It was several long drawn-out seconds before the realisation that what she had believed to be distant thunder, or even the crazed pounding of her heart echoing inside her head, was in fact another, louder round of appreciative applause from their audience. A couple of the younger guests even added enthusiastic wolf whistles to the chorus of approval.

With carefully feigned reluctance, Keir broke the embrace and turned a slightly rueful smile on her heated face. To the onlookers, it must have appeared quite genuine, but Sienna had sensed the careful judgement that had had him ending the kiss the full space of several heartbeats before he’d lifted his head. She had seen the calculating look he had directed into her glazed eyes, the triumphant twist to that wide mouth as it had abandoned hers, leaving her aching for more.

Straightening fully, Keir slung a possessive arm around her waist as he turned to face the assembly of friends and relations.

‘I’m afraid my wife—’ a chorus of cheers greeted his use of the word for the first time since the completion of the marriage ceremony ‘—has strong feminist views that mean she insists on using her own name instead of adopting mine. Some of you may find that rather unromantic, but personally I have no problem with it. After all, when she indulges my every whim in everything apart from this…’

A careful emphasis on the words ‘my every whim’ left no room for doubt as to exactly what other things he had in mind.

‘Who am I to deny her this one wish for independence if it means so much to her?’

Milking the situation for all it was worth, he smiled down into Sienna’s flushed face, his appearance to all intents and purposes every inch that of the doting husband.

‘Don’t be embarrassed, darling,’ he reproved softly. ‘You’re amongst friends here. Everyone knows how we feel about each other.’

Struggling against a crazy desire to kick him hard on the ankle, in order to let him know exactly how she felt about the charade he was acting out, Sienna forced herself to swallow down the anger she couldn’t afford to reveal. Painfully conscious of Francis Nash, standing just a few feet away from her, watching Keir’s fooling with an intently speculative air, she managed a rather sickly smile.

But she knew that the curve of her lips wasn’t matched by the look in her eyes, which were flashing furious reproof and a warning of later retribution into Keir’s mocking face. He really was taking things way too far. Nothing like this had been mentioned in their agreement.

But Keir appeared totally unmoved by the silent rage in her eyes. Instead, taking advantage of the fact that a waiter carrying a tray full of glasses of champagne had just come within reach, he appropriated one of the crystal flutes and held it aloft, dark eyes smiling knowingly down into hers all the time.

‘If you’ll indulge me,’ he declared to the surrounding audience, ‘I’d like to propose a toast. To Sienna—my beautiful bride, and the woman who has made me the happiest man in the world by becoming my wife today.’

The man really was incorrigible! In spite of herself Sienna found it impossible to hold back a disturbed squawk of protest at this blatant lie. If Keir didn’t stop, someone was going to see right through his over-the-top performance and so start to wonder what the real truth was.

‘Keir!’ she protested softly, knowing that any further show of anger or impatience would only make him worse, drive him to even more dangerous extremes. ‘You’re embarrassing me.’

Immediately he was apparently all repentance.

‘I’m sorry, darling. You’re right. There’s a time and a place for this, and that’s not here and now. We’ll finish later…’ Deliberately he let his voice drop a couple of octaves, so that it became a husky purr, rich with sensual promise. ‘When we’re alone.’

Which earned him yet another cheer of enthusiastic appreciation from the spectators, all of whom completely misunderstood the reasons behind the burning colour that suddenly flooded the bride’s face.

‘I’ll look forward to that,’ she shot back in swift retaliation. ‘But for now we have our guests to see to. Please, everyone—help yourselves to drinks. I’m sure you’re ready for them. Lunch will be served in half an hour. In the meantime…’

She directed her attention back to Keir, her voice and her expression hardening as she did so.

‘I think you and I had better circulate—talk to a few people… I’ll take this half of the room…’

She had nerved herself for further play-acting on his part, perhaps even a downright refusal to do as she asked, but surprisingly it didn’t come. Instead Keir simply lifted his glass in a silent, mocking toast before turning and strolling off in the opposite direction from the one she had indicated.

Silently Sienna watched him go, small white teeth worrying at the fullness of her lower lip as she did so. It would all have been so much easier if she could have been in love with Keir, even just a little. After all, that shouldn’t have been too hard. He was the sort of man almost any woman with red blood in her veins would have fallen head over heels for. Tall, strong, impossibly good-looking, with the sort of potent hardcore sexuality that turned susceptible female brains to jelly, leaving them incapable of thought.

He was successful too. A self-made man. A man she could be proud to have at her side, proud to call her husband even for such a strictly limited time. But he would never have her heart. That wasn’t hers to give. She had already lost it to someone who had proved every bit as unworthy of her love as her father had been of her mother’s lifelong devotion.

No, she mustn’t think about Dean. Sienna’s teeth dug in harder as she fought against the tears that burned in her eyes. She had thrown in her lot with Keir, and that was the way her future lay—at least for the term of their contract together. It was an arrangement that she had been convinced could work so well for both of them. But today Keir had behaved in a way she’d never seen before.

Sienna’s sea-coloured eyes went to where Keir stood, his dark head thrown back, his face alight with laughter at something his companion had said to him. Suddenly she was brought up hard against the truth of just how very little she actually knew about this man who was now her husband.

If looks could kill, Keir thought wryly, catching that turquoise glare from the opposite side of the room, then he would surely have fallen down dead right on the spot, shrivelled into ashes by the force of Sienna’s anger. She hadn’t liked his teasing earlier, and clearly the thought of it still rankled. He hadn’t realised just how volatile his new wife’s temper could be.

His wife. Carefully he tested the word inside his mind, not yet sure exactly how he felt about it.

‘Keir!’ A powerful handshake was accompanied by a hearty slap on the back from a tall man with a bushy dark beard and laughing hazel eyes. ‘Congratulations, mate! I never thought I’d see the day that you joined the ranks of married men. This Sienna really must be some woman.’

‘Believe me, she is.’

Keir could only pray that his words didn’t sound as insincere spoken out loud as they did inside his head. Richard Parry had been his friend for over twenty years now, ever since they had first met up at secondary school, and if anyone was likely to smell a rat at his sudden decision to marry then Rick was that person.

‘She has to be. I was really beginning to wonder if you were married to that company of yours. You seemed to spend every waking hour of your life in the office.’

‘There have been some problems.’ The muscles in Keir’s jaw tightened, making his reply sound clipped and distant. ‘My father’s death was so unexpected that it left a lot of things unresolved…’

‘But that was—what?—eighteen months ago? Surely you’ve sorted things out now?’

‘Just about.’ Keir nodded slowly, his eyes darker than ever as he thought back over the past year and a half. ‘There’s one last complication I have to deal with, and then everything will be just how I want it.’

In his business world at least. His personal affairs were quite a different matter. But right now all he could think of was the relief that that one ‘complication’ had been lifted from his shoulders. It had been the bane of his life for ten years, and he hadn’t been able to wait to see the back of it. Only now did he feel free to turn his attention fully to the vexed question of his reckless marriage.

‘And when can we expect to hear of a whole new generation of Alexanders?’ It was Richard’s wife who spoke, her voice soft and gentle as her nature, bringing her husband’s head round to her at once.

‘Give the poor lad a break, Jo! He’s barely put the ring on her finger! Let him at least enjoy the honeymoon before you wish the joys of parenthood on him. Not everyone wants to be plagued with the sort of brood we’ve got.’

The laughter in Richard’s voice was belied by the way his eyes lingered on the swell of his wife’s stomach, evidence of how close he was to becoming a father for the fourth time.

‘But you always said you wanted children, didn’t you, Keir? And I think you’d make a wonderful father—if the way you get on with Sam, William and Hannah is anything to go by.’

‘Your children are like their mother, Joanna.’ Keir smiled. ’They’d get on with anyone at all without any trouble. But I don’t think you should look for the chance of a couple of playmates for your gang at any time in the near future. Sienna and I haven’t even talked about having kids…’

What would be the point when this charade of a marriage they had embarked on wasn’t meant to last much longer than a full-term pregnancy anyway? But he couldn’t admit that to Rick and Joanna, who were so blissfully happy in their own union that they would find it hard to understand the convoluted reasoning that had led to his taking Sienna as his bride.

‘Now if you’ll excuse me…I’d better rejoin my wife.’

Coward! Keir reproved himself as he turned away and began to weave a path through the crowd to where Sienna stood on the opposite side of the room, pausing occasionally to shake a hand, acknowledge congratulations and good wishes. But his mind wasn’t on what he was doing. He knew he couldn’t have faced any more of Joanna’s gentle questioning without blurting out something that might have given the game away completely.

The trouble was that Rick and his wife had known him for too long. They had been there all those years before when, under the influence of rather more wine than had been wise, he had declared with impassioned certainty that he would never marry unless he knew it was for ever. That only the conviction that the relationship would last for a lifetime, nothing less, would get him up the aisle and put a ring on his finger.

So how had he ended up doing just that, in the certain knowledge that what he had entered into was just a temporary contract? Stopping dead abruptly, Keir looked down at the thick gold band now encircling his wedding finger, twisting it round and round in an uneasy movement. How come he had compromised all his ideals in this way?

Because he was so much older now—and he would say wiser. He knew that such ideals were nothing but fantasies, impossible to achieve. He had been hit over the head with a strong dose of reality that had driven all the dreams from his mind. These days he was realist enough to know that sometimes a pragmatic compromise was the best you could come away with.

‘Keir, darling, I’m so glad to see you…’

This time the hand on his arm was much smaller, finer, totally feminine. Adorned with an extravagant display of gold and diamonds, the slender fingers were tipped with long, pointed nails painted in a violent shade of red. As Keir stiffened instinctively a wave of some heavy, musky perfume assailed his nostrils, turning his stomach.

He would recognise that overpowering perfume anywhere, just as he would recognise the sound of her voice and that false-toned ‘darling’ that they both knew she didn’t mean in the slightest. She only used it for the benefit of everyone else around, in order to maintain the illusion—in reality they had never felt anything other than total hatred for each other.

‘Lucille.’ He bit the word out, her name leaving a foul, bitter taste in his mouth.