Partners by Contract (14 page)

Penny had done a lot of things better than Phoebe. She’d been a more accomplished cook, tidier and she’d sung on key. The trouble was that these improvements hadn’t pleased Connor. They’d left him feeling dissatisfied.

The signs had been there from early on if he’d wanted to see them. Penny had warned at one point that she was going to scream very loudly if he said ‘Phoebe used to’ once more. She’d only been half joking. Later there hadn’t been many jokes, but there had been some screaming and shouting and recriminations. Eventually the screaming had been replaced by apathy. It had only been then that Connor had started listening to what Penny had been saying.

‘Face it, Connor, you married the wrong sister. But, as they say, it’s never too late to remedy your mistakes. I intend to.’

‘Do they? I don’t think they were talking about this sort of mistake,’ he responded dully. He seriously doubted whether he’d ever be as philosophical as Penny.

Penny gave his shoulder a quick affectionate squeeze. ‘Don’t worry,’ she promised, ‘I’ll talk to her, and soon. I think we’ve all wasted too much time being miserable.’

‘I’m sorry I made you miserable, Pen.’

‘I know you are, but it affords me some comfort to know that I was always much nastier to you than you were to me,’ she confessed with engaging candour.

Before she had the opportunity to make good her promise, the express train she was travelling on jumped a red light—the driver, it transpired had suffered a massive heart attack—and collided with a heavily laden goods train.

Phoebe raised a hand to her spinning head. ‘That’s not possible.’ Deep down she knew it was true. Perhaps she always had known—she just hadn’t wanted to admit it.

Connor no longer looked angry. If anything, he looked weary—intensely weary, and sorry for her.

‘Don’t look at me like that!’ she yelled, seeing the compassion in his deep-set eyes. ‘I don’t want your pity.’

‘Think about it, Phoebe,’ he said, taking her face between his hands and looking down into her face. ‘How could Penny
not
know?’

When he put it like that...

‘She knew you better than anyone. When we talked about it—’

‘You talked about it?’ Phoebe felt the bitter taste of bile rise in her throat. The shocks were coming too thick and fast for her spinning brain to cope with.

‘Well, it was yelling early on when I wasn’t prepared to listen to what she was saying,’ he admitted with a twisted smile. The period of denial had lasted for several months. ‘But by the time of the accident we were planning to call it a day.’

‘Divorce?’ Phoebe whispered as her head fell weakly forward against his chest. I thought I was the only one keeping secrets. Poor, poor, Penny. Her heart ached for the pain her twin must have felt. ‘This is all my fault,’ she muttered.

‘There’s genetics for you. Pen said it was her fault.’

An uncomprehending expression on her tear-ravaged features, Phoebe lifted her head.

‘It seems she suspected how things were between us early on, but she just convinced herself that you’d get over it.’

‘She went through with the marriage, knowing that I...?’

‘Were in love with me?’ Calmly he filled in the gaping blank she’d left.

Phoebe couldn’t let that pass. ‘That’s a bit of a leap, isn’t it? I’m not saying I didn’t...don’t find you attractive, but love is something else altogether.’

‘Thanks very much for the lecture, but I’m well aware of the distinction between love and sexual attraction, Phoebe.’ He watched her shake her head in futile denial and his expression hardened further. ‘Listen, Phoebe, I spent two years sharing a flat with the girl of my dreams. The only problem was that the girl acted like I was her brother.’

‘But I...you...’

‘Barring a couple of occasions,’ he continued in the same driven voice, as though she hadn’t spoken. It was a miracle he could speak at all. Her full mouth was quivering. Connor could never look at those luscious lips and think straight. ‘Which she chose to forget. Oh, I’m not talking your actual carnal relations here, nothing so crude. Just the brushing of a hand that resulted in the odd breathless moment of confusion. That ring any bells for you?’

His dark lashes lifted and she found herself pinned by those remarkable eyes. Phoebe hardly recognised the easygoing, emotionally in control, undemonstrative Connor she knew in the ferociously passionate man before her.

‘You remember. You know what I’m talking about, don’t you, Phoebe?’ he persisted softly.

Phoebe swallowed. She did. Tears began to seep from her misty eyes, flowing unchecked over her cheeks. She had a perfect recall of the occasions he spoke of. This was her fault for not wanting to complicate things by getting involved, she thought in horror. If only she hadn’t been such an emotional coward...

‘If I’d not been a nice guy,’ Connor observed, his thoughts obviously following a similar ‘if only’ track to her own, ‘I would have made a move on you and hoped for the best. But being a modern, enlightened individual, I smothered my basic instincts and took a lot of cold showers.’ A self-derisive sneer compressed his sensual mouth into a bitter line.

If she hadn’t been feeling so totally shattered, Phoebe might even have smiled at the irony of his biting comment. Anything less enlightened than the expression of rampant male savagery on Connor’s face would have been hard to imagine. A shiver that was equal parts trepidation and excitement trickled like hot ice down Phoebe’s spine.

‘Then suddenly,’ he continued in a raw voice that made wave upon wave of goose-bumps break out over her hot skin, ‘here is someone who looks identical to the dream girl, but excitingly different. She doesn’t look at me as if I’m a comfy pair of trainers. She wants me, and I had two years of wanting in me.’ With brutal economy he outlined the bare facts.

Dream girl... Phoebe couldn’t get her head around the fact Connor was talking about her.

‘So, you see, Phoebe,’ he rasped, pressing his thumbs to the angle of her jaw and allowing his fingers to trace a shaky line from her temple along the crest of each cheekbone
to the slight indentations either side of her mouth, ‘you’re not the only one eaten up with guilt. Maybe I have forfeited my right to happiness. Maybe you have, too. But the way I see it, where’s the point in us both suffering separately when we could suffer self-loathing and bitterness together?’

If Phoebe hadn’t been so blown away by his revelations she might have guessed what he intended to do next—the sexual messages his body language and voice were telegraphing were explicit enough—only she was extremely blown away! So when his head lowered and his mouth clamped onto hers, hard and hungry, she was quite unprepared for the searing contact.

Realistically, had she been given a month’s notice, this wasn’t the sort of kiss that Phoebe could have prepared for! Her lips parted meekly—no eagerly—at the first hint of persuasive hungry pressure, her better judgement disintegrating at the first masterfully smooth invasive thrust of his tongue.

Neither was there anything meek or half-hearted about the way her arms linked tenaciously around his neck. Phoebe was responding to a great need too long denied. She was responding to the intoxicating scent of his warm skin; she was responding to the taste of him.

Her mouth still fused to his, a series of inarticulate, muffled little mewling noises emerged from deep in her throat as she attempted to plaster herself to him like a second skin. With a muffled groan Connor responded with satisfactory fervour to these signs of encouragement.

When the kiss eventually ended they were both breathing like a couple of spent marathon runners. Phoebe slid weakly back to the floor. Resting on her heels she gazed wonderingly up at Connor.

The buttons of his shirt had come adrift halfway down his chest, suggesting the definition of well-developed pectorals. It would be easy to find out if his skin was as soft and silky as it looked. All she had to do was reach out and... An unexpected sliver of sanity prevented her from putting her theory to the test. It also wiped the hot glazed expression from her eyes.

‘We need to talk, Con.’ Sane or not, no matter how hard she tried, she couldn’t tear her eyes from the expanse of smooth warm flesh.

‘
Now
she wants to talk!’ he groaned.

She wondered what he’d do if she told him what she actually wanted to do... Don’t be naïve, Phoebe, she told herself scornfully. You know exactly what he’d do—well, you could make a pretty good educated guess anyway! And guessing was a pretty dangerous pastime just now when she was balanced very delicately on the brink of insanity.

He reached down and slid an arm under her shoulders, drawing her limp unresisting body up towards him until she was on her knees once more at his feet, swaying towards him.

‘Too late, Phoebe. I want you and you want me.’ His mesmeric eyes dared her to deny it—deny him.

Phoebe, who was trying hard to resist her baser instincts, resented his simplistic approach.

‘Does what I want come into this? What is this, Con?’ she croaked. ‘Might as well be hung for a sheep as a lamb?’ She dizzily noted that there was nothing of either animal about Connor. Now, a sleek, hungry big cat—Phoebe leaned towards something leonine—that was another matter entirely.

‘I do feel as if I’ve been serving a sentence for something I never got to do. The punishment without the pleasure,’
he mused recklessly, the shadow in his beautiful eyes deepening perceptibly as he dwelt on the punishment aspect. ‘I think we’re both due a bit of the latter.’

Thinking Connor and pleasure in one sentence turned Phoebe’s insides molten. ‘Speak for yourself. I’ve had oodles of pleasure,’ she countered aggressively.

The tension in his lean frame tightened another impossible notch—he was an explosion waiting to happen.

‘Spare me the details of your lovers.’

Lover in the singular. Thierry had been her first and only lover and they’d been drawn together more from mutual loneliness than mad, uncontrollable passion. Under other, less fraught circumstances, Connor’s comment might have caused her to laugh, she might even have shared the irony with him, but the time was long past when she could share a cosy joke with Connor. She felt a surge of sad nostalgia for those long-gone days which, it now transpired, hadn’t been as cosy for him as she’d thought.

Had Con lain in his bed with only a thin partition wall between them, thinking about her lying on the other side of that partition? She could have wept for opportunities ignored and lost for ever because it was obviously impossible to build a future when you had the sort of baggage they did—it was doomed to disaster.

‘What are you doing, Con?’

‘What does it look like?’

‘I don’t know.’

Connor lifted his eyes from his self-appointed task, his set expression lightened by the faintest of smiles as he absorbed the sight of her tightly closed eyes.

‘Open your eyes and make a wild guess.’ Connor only waited long enough to see her do as he suggested before he continued.

‘This is a very bad idea, Con.’ Someone had to be sensible.
Heavens, but he had beautiful hands—strong but sensitive. ‘An extremely bad idea,’ she added hoarsely, trying to remember why. ‘Watch your knee,’ she cried as with a grunt he lifted her bodily until she sat on his lap.

‘I’d prefer to watch you,’ he growled throatily.

‘You can’t turn the clock back.’

Con sent her an impatient look and tore an unsteady hand through his thick hair. ‘I’m not trying to turn the clock back, far from it. I’m trying to kick-start it. Can’t you see how unhealthy this living-in-the-past thing is?’

‘But don’t you see?’ she responded wistfully. ‘I couldn’t build my happiness on Penny’s misery.’

‘If it makes you feel any better,’ he promised, ‘I’ll do my level best to make you as miserable as hell.’ So saying, he possessed her mouth so completely that all she could do was shudder with pleasure, deep drowning pleasure.

It was only a kiss, she soothed her inner conscience. After all, she could stop it any time she liked.

The stinging pleasure outlived the kiss. It pulsed through her body, touching every individual nerve fibre. All thoughts of stopping anything had long since vanished from her head. She had been resisting her feelings for so long that it was blissful to willingly embrace the sweet intoxicating sensations that ran hotly through her veins.

‘Oh, heavens...! Con...?’ With difficulty she lifted her eyelids. They felt heavy, as if weighted down with something hot.

He was looking at her in a predatory un-Con sort of way, his eyes unfocused, his skin glistening.

‘We shouldn’t be doing this,’ she whispered in a voice that invited—no, demanded—contradiction.

‘But we will anyway.’

Phoebe gave a sigh of relief and nodded her head in frantic agreement.

In the grip of a strange sense of detachment she watched through half-closed eyes as Connor began once more to skilfully unfasten the buttons on her shirt and expose the lacy bra she wore underneath.

Her breasts swelled and tingled as his fingers lightly grazed them. His surgeon’s fingers were cool, his eyes were hot—they were the hottest thing she’d ever seen. The heat thing was contagious. She felt hot, too, and the heat wasn’t restricted to her skin. Inside she was on fire and nothing mattered but the primitive need to take and give at the most basic but profound level.

Connor experimentally touched the front fastening clip of her bra in what proved to be exactly the right spot.

Luck or experience...? her drowsy brain puzzled as the insubstantial garment pinged apart, leaving her straining pink-tipped breasts to spill out. She heard the sibilant hiss of his intake of breath.

He didn’t move. From where she lay Phoebe wasn’t in a position to see his face properly, but she could see his profile and the hot tide of blood rose rapidly up his neck. In the tense silence Phoebe could hear him breathing hard.

‘Do I really want this?’

‘Yes.’

Phoebe, unaware she had spoken her thoughts aloud, started at the sound of his reply, the sound jerking her clear of her almost stuporous condition. The intimacy and strangeness of her position came rushing in.