Partners By Contract

‘You could at least make an effort!’ she burst out, keeping a wary eye on a stray sheep that had wandered into the road. ‘It’s very uncomfortable, of course.’

‘My knee?’

His flippancy exasperated her. ‘That, too,’ she agreed, refusing to get angry. Anger made you say things you regretted later and she needed to keep a careful guard on her tongue.

Connor’s lips curled into a derisive smile. ‘Uncomfortable. You always were good at understatement, Phoebe.’

‘By the time you’re fit to come back to work I’ll be gone. When I applied for the job,’ she continued doggedly, ‘I had no idea that you were the partner I was standing in for.’

‘And when you did?’

That was a question she’d been asking herself a lot. The truth was, some masochistic part of her hadn’t been able to resist a glimpse of the new life Con had built for himself. The temptation of seeing where he worked, the people he knew, had been too great for her to resist. Phoebe refused to acknowledge the possibility that subconsciously a little part of her had hoped that this would happen, that deep down she’d wanted to see Connor again.

‘Fair question,’ she admitted with a beleaguered shrug.

‘An honest answer to a fair question seems reasonable.’

‘You wouldn’t recognise reasonable if you fell over it,’ she snapped, forgetting for the moment about keeping her temper. She took a deep steadying breath. ‘I’ve already explained. I thought I’d be long gone before you came back, and when Will asked me to stay a little longer after your accident I couldn’t refuse. With hindsight, of course, I can see—’

‘I tried to write to you,’ he interrupted abruptly. The crack in his resonant voice made her startled eyes swivel in his direction. In profile she could see a maverick pulse thumping like crazy in his lean cheek. Her eyes slid as if preconditioned to the firm sensual outline of his lips and her tummy muscles did a lot of squirming.

With a tiny snort of denial she managed to tear her eyes away and nodded.

‘I know.’ She trained her eyes with glassy fixed concentration on the road ahead.

Connor raked a hand through his blond hair. ‘You must know that I never intended that we lose touch completely...or at all...’

Aware his eyes were on her face, Phoebe kept her facial muscles still, presenting a bland mask to his searching scrutiny.

‘The letters kept being returned unopened. Then you left with no forwarding address.’

‘It seemed easier that way.’ Her composed tone didn’t even hint at the hours she’d spent agonising over the decision not to open his letters. ‘You’re the one who said you didn’t want to see me again.’ The bitterness crept, unintended, into her voice and she knew it was unrealistic to suppose he hadn’t heard it, too. ‘And I gave you every justification,’ she added with painful honesty. She didn’t want him to think she was trying to shift the blame.

‘You gave me...!’ he snarled. Connor closed his eyes, his chest heaving with the effort to control his feelings. ‘Stop the car, will you?’

‘I can’t. I’m already running late.’ If she stopped the car she’d have to look at him.

‘What happened was...’ A deep sigh reverberated through his powerful frame. ‘It was in the heat of the moment, Phoebe,’ he rasped.

The moment was long gone, but the heat remained. A lot of heat! Phoebe, her eyes locked in forward position, didn’t see the colour seeping slowly across the high contours of his cheekbones.

It had been a few days after Penny’s funeral when Connor had come across her curled up in a foetal ball on a sofa. The room had been dimly lit. She’d stopped crying just long enough to plead with him not to turn on the light.

If only I hadn’t kissed him!

A kiss—even an innocent, well-intentioned one—in those circumstances, when emotions were running high, when the people involved were both hurting like hell and feeling empty, was always going to be liable to go horribly wrong.

When you added the fact that one person, namely herself, had been nursing a forbidden passion for the other for some years then the odds on something going horribly wrong became a lot shorter. The horribly wrong part became almost inevitable when the person instigating the kiss happened to possess a face and body identical to the wife the grieving husband had just lost.

‘Sorry about that, Con,’ she’d said huskily when the storm of weeping had at last abated. She’d slipped out of his light, comforting embrace.

‘There’s no point keeping it locked in, Phoebe,’ Con had replied gently, levering himself onto the arm of the sofa and looking compassionately down into her tear-stained face. ‘And there’s no need to apologise for crying—not to me.’

The kindness in his voice had made the tears well afresh. ‘Oh, God!’ she gasped shakily, grabbing the loose hem of his blue denim Oxford shirt and mopping her face. ‘S-sorry.’

Connor had produced a tissue from somewhere on his person and Phoebe had blown her nose noisily on it.

‘Before, I couldn’t cry, now I can’t stop. How about you?’

‘Me?’

‘Have you cried, Con?’

He didn’t answer, she hadn’t really expected him to. Con wasn’t a sharing, caring, sort of bloke. Even in the semi-lit room where his features were reduced to a series of hard planes and complementary brooding shadows, she could tell his control had stepped up a notch, the tension emanating from his lean frame was almost tangible.

‘Let’s throw a bit of light on the subject, shall we?’ she said thickly, reaching for the table lamp.

Her painfully tear-swollen eyes narrowed against the sudden light.

‘We all have our own ways of coping, Phoebe.’

‘In other words, butt out and mind my own business.’ It was desperately hard to keep her tone light. The empty expression in his eyes made her want to cry all over again.

‘I wouldn’t be so rude...’

‘Yes, you would.’ She was comforted to see the faint amused quiver of his wide sensitive lips. The humour didn’t extend to his eyes, but it was a start.

‘I’m making allowances for your fragile emotional state, but—’

‘I think you’d be better off to make allowances for your own fragile emotional state,’ she told him bluntly. She could almost see him visibly withdrawing further from her. ‘All right.’ She held up her hands in a gesture of surrender. ‘I won’t mention empathy,’ she promised.

Dark eyes meshed with navy blue. The colour of Connor’s eyes always was a fair barometer of his mood—the more intense his feelings, the deeper the shade.

‘A deal,’ Connor agreed, extending his hand to her.

Phoebe’s fingers were enclosed in his as, still seated, he hoisted her to her feet. ‘I just can’t believe she’s gone...’ The tears started flowing once more as the extent of her loss hit her—as it did many times a day—all over again.

‘I know...’

‘I know you know,’ she gulped with a watery smile.

His strong fingers tightened around hers so vigorously that she actually cried out.

‘Sorry,’ Connor said as she rubbed her crushed hand against her shoulder.

She brushed aside his concern with an impatient gesture. ‘It would have been better if it had been me. I wouldn’t have been missed nearly as much,’ she cried, bitterness quivering in her broken voice.

Connor was on his feet before the hissing sigh of anger had passed between his tightly clamped lips. Phoebe gave a startled bleat as she was grabbed unceremoniously by the shoulders. He just stopped short of shaking her, but it was obvious from the expression of blistering fury on his face that it had been a close thing.