The Hired Husband

Lucille Alexander. The stepmother from hell and his own personal demon. The woman he had described with deliberate understatement as the one last ‘complication’ he’d had left to deal with in order to be free of all the problems that had been weighing him down over the past ten years. The woman whose greedy demands had forced him into this marriage that was not a marriage but a purely business arrangement.

And as he turned slowly to face her the wave of revulsion he couldn’t control left him in no doubt that the prospect of getting her out of his life once and for all made the pretence and subterfuge totally worthwhile.

CHAPTER THREE

‘IS SOMETHING wrong?’

‘Wrong?’

Keir’s voice was distracted, his attention obviously elsewhere, and the dark-eyed gaze he turned in his wife’s direction was hooded, shaded with hidden thoughts that she couldn’t begin to understand.

‘Why should anything be wrong? After all, we’re both now going to get exactly what we want.’

What had put that cynical note into his voice, roughening it until it scraped her already over-sensitive nerves raw? But the truth was that ever since Keir had come back to her side at the start of the formal wedding lunch it had been clear that his mood had changed dramatically. The playful teasing that had so disturbed her had vanished, replaced instead by a darker, brooding distance.

‘Well, you could at least act as if you were just the slightest bit pleased to be married to me,’ Sienna hissed in the whisper necessitated by her determination not to be heard by her mother at her side and Keir’s best man at his. ‘If you continue to stare at your plate as if it was poisoned, and push the food around without tasting any of it, people will begin to wonder just what’s wrong with you!’

Especially those who had just witnessed his Oscar-winning performance as the most lovelorn and devoted husband of the century.

‘Right now you look more like the condemned man who can’t even bring himself to eat his last meal…’

No, anger was the wrong approach entirely, drawing a disturbing response from him. Seeing the rejection that flared in his eyes, the way that one long-fingered hand clenched over the starched white damask of his napkin, Sienna hastily adjusted her tone and expression in the hope of appeasing him.

‘It won’t be long before this is all over,’ she tried soothingly. ‘There’s just the traditional speeches and cutting the cake and then we can call it a day.’

Thankfully, she hadn’t given in to the urgings of her friends and planned an evening party to round off the celebrations. She had been unable to square the idea with her already uncomfortable conscience, seeing it as taking hypocrisy way too far. And with Keir in this mood it would have been more like a wake than any sort of revelry.

‘We’ll soon be able to be on our own again.’

‘And that will be so much better, will it?’ Keir snapped coldly. ‘Mr and Mrs Keir Alexander—oh, I’m sorry, I forgot. You want this marriage so little that you don’t even think it’s worth changing your name. So I see very little reason why you should be looking forward to our being alone…’

Sienna was astonished at how much his words stung. They were largely the truth, after all, so there was no reason for the sudden twist of pain she was experiencing.

With a sensation like the slow trickle of icy water creeping down her back, she found herself once more in the grip of the appalling unease of earlier that afternoon. It was as if some alien had moved in, taking over the shell of the person she had thought was Keir and replacing him with a total stranger.

But he was a stranger she was now legally tied to. For better for worse. For richer for poorer—in their case, definitely for richer, unless something went terribly wrong. Which it might do if she couldn’t jolt him out of this black mood. Already interested eyes were turning their way, obviously made curious by their absorbed concentration on each other, the muttered conversation that was so clearly not made up of words of love.

There was just one way she knew to get through to him.

‘Keir…’ Deliberately she gentled her voice, making it softly sensual. ‘Darling, don’t be like this…’

She wasn’t sure which startled him the most. The murmured endearment or the gentle hand she laid on his. But she couldn’t be unaware of his reaction, seeing it in the sudden widening of his dark eyes. It was there under her fingertips too, in the tension that stiffened his muscles against her, the threat of rejection that he only just controlled in time. She knew how tempted he was to repulse her gesture in a response that would be totally inappropriate to the impression they were trying to create, and she knew just as surely exactly when he decided not to use it.

‘I’m sorry.’ It was a low, deep sigh. ‘I’m just a bear with a sore head today.’

‘A sore head!’

It was Sienna’s mother who had caught the comment, her laughter-warmed tones lightening the atmosphere dramatically as she echoed his words, leaning forward to smile into Keir’s dark, shuttered face.

‘Would that be the result of rather too exuberant a stag night last night, son-in-law?’ she asked teasingly. ‘I would have thought you and your friends’d have more sense…’

‘Now don’t blame me!’ James, the best man, joined in on a note of amused protest. ‘Whatever Keir got up to last night, he did it on his own! And as for a stag night, all we had was a very sedate meal together at the beginning of the week, so you can’t hold me responsible for the way he’s feeling today. Unless you had some sort of debauched evening that you didn’t invite me along to, you rogue,’ he added, with a none too subtle dig of his elbow into Keir’s ribs.

‘Nothing of the sort,’ his friend returned, switching on a grin that even came close to convincing Sienna, though she was well aware of how very far from genuine it actually was.

Along with the grin went a belated attempt to look affectionate, by turning his hand on the table top until his strong fingers enclosed hers completely, his grip warm and firm. The slow, deliberate movement of his thumb against the sensitivity of her palm dried her throat, the softly sensual circles he was drawing setting her heart thudding and heating her blood.

Keir’s wicked, slanted glance in her direction told her that he knew exactly what he was doing. That he had turned her own weapon of the potent effect they had on each other back on her with devastating results.

‘I’m afraid what was occupying me last night was business, pure and simple,’ he confessed ruefully, his voice revealing nothing of the emotion that Sienna knew would shade hers if she tried to speak. ‘A deal that needed finalising.’

‘The night before your wedding!’ James was obviously disbelieving. ‘Keir, man, couldn’t it have waited?’

‘No way.’

The shake of his dark head that accompanied the flat statement was as firmly emphatic as the words.

‘I wanted this particular matter behind me once and for all, so that I was free to concentrate on my bride. It’s just that negotiations went on much longer than I had expected…’

Lucille had been as difficult as it was possible for her to be, damn her, Keir reflected grimly. She and her lawyer had held out for every penny she could get away with, and then some. There had been times when he had come close to giving up on the whole thing and walking out, but then, just when he had been about to declare that he had enough, that she could forget it, she had finally capitulated and signed on the dotted line.

‘I didn’t get to bed until well after midnight, and then I didn’t sleep too well.’

‘What was the problem?’ Sienna inserted rather tartly, the sensual haze that had enclosed her evaporating with a rapidity that left her shaken and disturbingly on the edge of tears.

It was his comment about being free to concentrate on his bride that had changed her mood. She was only too well aware of the fact that it had been inserted solely for the benefit of their audience. It had no grounding at all in reality. In fact the real truth was that, crazily, she didn’t even have the faintest idea what they were going to do once the wedding was over.

‘Wedding nerves?’

‘Something like that.’

‘Oh, come on! That’s the bride’s prerogative, not the groom’s!’

She couldn’t believe that Keir—strong, independent, determined, cold-blooded, heart-free Keir Alexander—had lain awake worrying about the coming day. Refused to even consider that he might have felt as apprehensive as she had about the marriage ceremony and what they were getting themselves into.

Not Keir. He was the one who had been as cool as the proverbial cucumber all the way through this. Once she had convinced him it was the answer to both their problems, he had taken every single thing in his stride, handled each detail, every small hiccup, with the cool assurance that was so much a part of his nature.

‘Are you saying that a man can’t feel unsure and apprehensive on the night before his wedding—overawed by the prospect of what’s ahead of him—the responsibility he’s about to take on?’

‘N-no…’

The look in his eyes disturbed her. They were darker than ever, shadowed by something she didn’t understand. And now that she looked more closely she could see smudges of weariness underneath them, marks that she had never noticed before. The faint lines that fanned out from the corners of his eyes looked more pronounced too, as if etched there by strain and worry.

‘Or are you claiming that if I’d rung you when I couldn’t sleep I’d have found you wide awake too, sharing the same sort of feelings?’

‘Well—no, I wasn’t.’

The truth was that, worn out by rushing around here there and everywhere for the past five weeks, she had fallen asleep as soon as her head had touched the pillow. Even the last minute butterflies in her stomach at the prospect of the day ahead had been overcome by the thought that tomorrow, finally, all her worries would be over.