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

CHAPTER EIGHT

THE beef melted on his tongue, prepared better than anything any chef he’d ever hired had managed. Nevertheless, it still might have been a slice of his own heart filetted onto the plate, given the way it stuck to the roof of his mouth.

He should have kept his mouth shut. His entire life had been shattered when the truth of his parentage had come to light. It was not something he talked about, and yet it had flowed out uncontrolled with only a sip of red wine to lubricate it. Because he was relaxed by sex? Because physical closeness had fooled him into feeling emotionally comfortable with Rowan?

What to do now? If he refused to speak of it she’d know it was something that still had the power to wring out his insides.

At the same time there was an angry part of him that wanted to take her view of Olief and shake it up, make her see he wasn’t a superhero. He was flawed. Or Nic was. He’d never figured that one out—whether it was his parents’ deficiency or his own.

“Who was she? I mean, how did Olief know her?”

Her curiosity was not the lurid kind. He might have stood that. No, her brow wore a wrinkle of concern. She had never been ignored, so she didn’t understand how any child could be.

Again the deep fear that he was the problem pealed inside him.

“He didn’t know her. Not really,” he said, keeping his tone neutral. “She was an airline hostess. He said it happened as he was coming back from being away in some ugly place.”

“Do you think he did that often? Mum was always terrified he’d cheat on her because he’d cheated on his first wife, but— Wait. Don’t tell me.” Rowan held up a hand, face turning away. “It would kill me to hear that he did.”

“I have no idea,” Nic said flatly. “He didn’t have any other children. I’m quite sure of that. That was the reason he didn’t want his wife knowing about me. They tried their entire marriage to have a baby and she couldn’t conceive.”

The briefest flinch of anguish spasmed across her features, too quick for him to be sure he’d seen it before it dissolved in a frown of incomprehension. “But if he wanted children why didn’t he see you?”

“He was ashamed of me.”

Her eyes widened and her jaw slackened, but she quickly recovered, shaking her head. “You don’t know that.”

“He told me, Rowan. I asked him that exact question and that’s what he said.”

“He was ashamed of himself. If not, he should have been,” she said, with a quick flare of vehement temper.

Her anger, when Olief was like a god to her, surprised him, cracking into and touching an internal place he kept well protected. His breath backed up in his lungs.

“Why didn’t your mother do something? Insist he acknowledge you. Or did she? You said he paid for your education?” Rowan pressed.

“He paid for my schooling, yes.” Nic set two fingertips on the bottom of his wineglass, lining it up with precision against the subtle pattern in the tablecloth. Every word he released seemed to scald all the way up his esophagus. “She didn’t make a fuss because I was her shameful secret, too. She hadn’t told her husband that she was already pregnant when they married. When he found out she took what Olief was willing to give her—tuition at a boarding school so they could all pretend I didn’t exist.”

Rowan had a small appetite at the best of times, but it evaporated completely as she took in the chilling rejection Nic had suffered. He was very much contained within his aloof shell at the moment, his muscles a tense barrier that accentuated what a tough, strong man he’d become, but shades of baffled shame still lingered in his eyes.

Everything in her ached with the longing to rise and wrap her arms around him, to try and repair the damage done, but she was learning. This was why he was always on his guard. He’d been hurt—terribly. Rowan had no trouble believing Olief had wanted to shield his wife, but to hurt a child? His own son?

“How …?” She took a sip of water to clear her thickened throat. “How did the truth come out?” she asked numbly.

Nic pointed at his hair. “My mother and her husband are both Greek, both dark. Babies and toddlers might sometimes have blond hair, but by the time I was entering school and still a towhead, not to mention looking nothing like the man I thought of as my father, it was obvious a goose egg had been hatched with the ducks.”

Rowan dropped her cutlery, unable to fully comprehend what he was saying. “So he supported sending you away? After years of believing he was your father? What sort of relationship do you have with him now?”

“None. Once my mother admitted I wasn’t his he never spoke to me again.” Nic spoke without inflection, his delivery like a newscast.

“You can’t be serious.”

“He was a bastard. It was no loss to me.” He applied himself to his meal.

Rowan cast for something solid to grasp on to as a painful sea of confusion swirled around her. “You can’t tell me that everyone who was supposed to be acting like a parent in your life just stuck you in some horrible boarding school like you were a criminal to be sent to prison.”

With eyes half-closed in a laconic, flinty stare, he took a deep swallow of wine. “I didn’t mind boarding school. I had the brains and the brawn that allowed a person to succeed there, and I realized quickly that I was on my own so I’d better seize the opportunity. What’s in this sauce besides wine? It’s very good.”

Rowan soaked in the tub, still reeling under the blows Nic had been dealt as a child. He’d barely said another word after his stunning revelations, only cleaned his plate and excused himself to work.

Rowan had almost let out a hysterical laugh as he’d walked away. She so recognized that remote, unreachable man. All those years when she’d heard him described as Olief’s estranged son she’d blamed Nic. Nic was the one who showed up at Olief’s invitation like he was doing Olief a favor. Nic was the one who never left so much as a spare toothbrush in the rooms set aside for him. Nic was the one who took off for hours in his black roadster, never saying where he was going or when he’d be back.

Olief had so much to answer for.

Rowan was angry with him. Furious. He’d broken something in Nic. The boy had needed his real father to step up when his supposed one had rejected him. Instead Olief’s disregard had made Nic incapable of trusting in human relationships. How could Olief have done it? Why?

With a pang, she faced that she’d never know—although she wouldn’t be surprised if it had something to do with the harsh mental toll Nic had mentioned with regard to being a foreign correspondent. Olief had been doing that sort of work then. Perhaps Olief simply hadn’t had anything to offer his son.

It still made Rowan ache to reach out to Nic and heal him in some way—not that she imagined he’d let her. If anything, he probably resented letting her draw so much out of him. That was why he’d locked himself in his office again.

Drying herself off, she brushed out her hair and wondered if she should go to him, not sure she could face being rebuffed if he shut her out.

With a yawn, she counted the hours of sleep she’d got last night—not many, as she’d tried to work out ways to talk Nic around to her views on Rosedale. She’d slept after their vigorous hours in bed, but not for long. Once she’d woken to find him gone she’d risen and started work in the kitchen. Now her soak in the tub had filled her with lethargy.

She set her head on her pillow for a moment and picked up her feet. She was a master at catnaps….

Nic nudged open the bedroom door and took in Sleeping Beauty, one hand tucked beneath her folded knees, the other curled under her chin like a child. Her hair was a tumbled mass, her lips a red bow, her face free of makeup and her breath soft. She was as innocent as they made them.

While he’d finally given in to the guilty tension swirling like a murky cloud through him and come searching for release. Base, masculine, primordial forgetfulness. His flesh responded to the nearness of hers with a predictable rush of readiness, blood flooding into his crotch so fast it hurt.

Her being asleep was a gift, he acknowledged with sour irony. He hated being so weak as to be unable to resist her. If her eyes opened and flashed at him he’d be lost. If she woke and rolled onto her back—

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.

“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?