Enemies at the Altar (9 page)

He froze above her. ‘What’s wrong?’

‘Nothing,’ Sienna said, quickly averting her eyes from his. ‘It’s been a long time, that’s all.’

He captured her chin and made her look at him. ‘How long?’ he asked.

Sienna caught her bottom lip with her teeth. ‘A while …’

His frown deepened, making a criss-cross of lines over his forehead and between his eyes. ‘How long is a while?’ he asked.

She gave a little shrug, secretly holding her breath. ‘I can’t really remember.’

His eyes were narrowed in focus. ‘You mean it is a while since you slept with your husband?’ he said.

Sienna found it hard to lie to him when she was facing him eye to eye. ‘I never slept with Brian,’ she said.

His face blanched, his eyes shrinking back in their sockets as if she had struck him across the face. ‘What?’ he asked.

‘It was a marriage of convenience,’ she said. ‘Brian wanted a wife in name only. I wanted the respectability of marrying well. It was a mutually satisfying agreement.’

Andreas pulled away from her and got to his feet in an agitated manner. He zipped up his trousers and then snatched up his discarded shirt and handed it to her. ‘Here,’ he said in a gruff tone. ‘Put this on while I get your things.’

Sienna slipped her arms through the long sleeves and wrapped herself in his warmth and smell. His shirt didn’t offer the same dignity as her clothes would have done but at least it covered her nakedness.

She watched as he gathered up her clothes from the floor, his hands folding them with meticulous care when
only minutes ago he had been all but ripping them from her body. His brow was furrowed with a preoccupied frown as if he was having trouble processing what she had told him.

He came back over and handed the tidy pile to her, his eyes meshing with hers. ‘I hurt you,’ he said, his voice grave. ‘I’m sorry.’

‘You didn’t hurt me … not really,’ Sienna said.

‘Why didn’t you tell me?’ he asked, still frowning.

‘Tell you what?’ she said. ‘That I haven’t had sex in ages? You wouldn’t have believed me. The press make it pretty clear I’m up for it with anyone any time. Why would you take my word over theirs?’

‘Why do you let them write that stuff without defending yourself?’ he asked.

She gave an indifferent shrug. ‘I don’t care what people think. I know what’s true. That’s all that matters.’

‘Why didn’t you have a normal marriage with Brian Littlemore?’ he asked. ‘He paraded you about enough times. You were always at some gala event hanging off his arm like a trophy. Was it really all an act?’

Sienna wished she’d kept her mouth shut. What was
with
her tonight? Such honesty and openness was totally out of character. Before she knew it she’d be spilling the beans on Brian’s ‘mistress’, the male lover he had adored even before he had married his wife Ruth and fathered three children with her. It wasn’t her secret to tell. She had promised Brian on his deathbed she would honour his decision to protect his children from the knowledge of his true sexual orientation. But she realised she would have to be a little more careful around Andreas. He wasn’t the sort to be fobbed off and lied to. His sharp intelligent gaze saw too much as it was.

‘I’d rather not talk about it,’ she said, hugging her pile of clothes close to her body. ‘Brian was good to me. I don’t regret being married to him. He looked after me.’

Andreas screwed up his face. ‘He had a mistress, for God’s sake,’ he said. ‘How could you have so little self-respect to allow that to continue right under your nose?’

Sienna squeezed her clothes even tighter against her body. ‘I told you I don’t want to talk about it.’

He studied her for a long moment, his gaze narrowing slightly. ‘You married him soon after the sex tape scandal, didn’t you?’ he asked. ‘It was only a few weeks or so, wasn’t it?’

She kept her expression closed. ‘What of it?’

‘What happened that night?’ he asked. ‘What happened that made you suddenly run off and marry a man nearly forty years older than yourself?’

Sienna couldn’t hold his penetrating gaze. She stared at the middle of his chest instead. Her chest felt tight and heavy with all the regret she carried inside. She had made such a mess of her life and her sister’s. Maybe it was time to air some of her guilt. To confess how awful she felt about what had happened. Why she felt compelled to confess it to Andreas was something she would have to think about later.

‘I was out drinking with friends,’ she said. ‘The girls I hung around with were regular binge drinkers but I never let myself get totally wasted. But that night … I must have had more than I realised or not drunk enough water or something. I don’t remember much other than waking up in some guy’s hotel room. I didn’t know who he was. He was naked. I was naked. I was so ashamed of myself. For the first time I started to feel like the slut the press had always painted me. Before, I used to
laugh it off when they wrote something about me being a bed-hopper because I’d only had sex twice.’ She gave a little humourless laugh. ‘By today’s standards, I’m practically still a virgin. But after that night I felt like I deserved it for not taking responsibility for my actions.’

‘Did you ever consider you might have been the victim of a drink spike?’ Andreas asked, frowning.

Sienna tried to shrug it off. ‘I did wonder about that but, even so, it was still my fault for being so careless,’ she said. ‘I should’ve chosen my friends a little more carefully. I think they enjoyed seeing me pulled down a peg or two. I was always the one who kept her head. That night certainly put an end to that.’

‘Sienna,’ he said heavily, ‘you were a victim of a crime. Why didn’t you report it to the police?’

‘Who would have believed me?’ she asked. ‘Like mother, like daughter, everyone would’ve said. Anyway, I didn’t know if a crime
had
been committed. The tape showed me kissing that guy and him kissing me and his arms and hands all over me, but there was no way of knowing if anything else had happened.’

Andreas let out a stiff curse, his hand dragging over his face again. ‘I can’t get my head around this,’ he said. ‘Why didn’t you say something when the press named your sister as the woman in that tape?’

Sienna shifted her gaze from his. ‘I didn’t know about any of that,’ she said. ‘As soon as I woke up in that hotel room I caught the next flight out of the country. I wanted to get as far away from it as I could. That’s when Brian stepped in. I rang him in a bit of a state from the airport. We’d met at a function a few years before and really hit it off in a friends-only way. He was like a father to me, the father I’d never had. He offered me
a safe haven. I didn’t think twice when he suggested we marry as soon as possible. I wanted the respectability. I wanted to feel safe.’

Andreas lifted her chin up so her gaze met his. ‘Why have you let everyone believe such scurrilous lies about you?’ he asked.

Sienna could feel her carefully constructed composure cracking. She was used to acting all tough and resilient but it was hard to keep that façade in place when Andreas seemed so tender and concerned. ‘Can we drop this topic?’ she said. ‘It’s in the past. I’d like to leave it there.’

‘Sienna, you can’t just brush something like this aside,’ he said. ‘You’ve let everyone—including me—believe you’re a gold-digging slut when you’re no such thing.’

She raised her chin away from the pressure of his fingertip. ‘I might not be a slut but I still want the money,’ she said. ‘That makes me a gold-digger, doesn’t it?’

He stared her down. ‘That’s what you want everyone to believe,’ he said. ‘Why do you do that? What do you hope to achieve by making everyone hate you?’

‘People hate a lot more easily than they love,’ she said. ‘It’s just the way things are. I do it too. I’m good at it. Look at just now, for example. I was prepared to sleep with you, even though I hate your guts.’

He continued to look at her for a lengthy moment, those hazel eyes searching hers until her heart jumped and thumped behind the wall of her chest. He touched her cheek with his fingertip; it was hardly more than a brushstroke but it made every pore of her skin reach up on tiptoe to feel more of his touch. ‘If you didn’t hate
me before, then you surely do so now,’ he said with a touch of ruefulness. ‘I was rough with you.’

Sienna swallowed a tight tangled knot inside her throat. ‘It wasn’t that bad,’ she said, affecting what she hoped was a casual tone. ‘Anyway, I probably should’ve said something.’

He gave a self-deprecating grunt. ‘Do you think I would’ve believed you?’

She acknowledged that with a wry on-off smile. ‘Probably not.’

‘Do you know the man’s name?’ Andreas asked.

Sienna felt a ripple of panic roll through her. ‘Leave it, Andreas, please. I don’t want Gisele to be reminded of it all again. She’s about to get married. I know what the press would do if you went looking for justice on my behalf. There’s enough CCTV footage of me coming in and out of nightclubs to make me look like the biggest lush out. You know how lawyers can twist things to build a case for the defence. I just want to forget about it.’

‘You can’t keep running away from unpleasant stuff, Sienna,’ he said.

She hoisted her chin. ‘I’m not running away,’ she said. ‘I’m moving forward, for my sake as well as Gisele’s.’

He held her gaze for a moment before he tucked a strand of her hair behind her ear, as one would do to a small child. Sienna didn’t feel like a child, however. His touch against the sensitive skin of her ear made her shiver with womanly want and need. She felt him inside her still, a tender ache where her flesh had been stretched by his hot, hard presence.

What would it feel like to have him totally possess
her? To have him move inside her in the throes of passion? To have him lose control in the soft, moist cocoon of her body? To feel her own body respond to his in a rhythm as old as time?

The silence throbbed with the erotic tension Sienna could feel in her body. She saw it in the dark heat of his eyes. It smouldered there in the black ink spill pools of his pupils. She felt the slow burn of his gaze move over her face like a lighted taper, scorching her like a blowtorch when it came to rest for a tantalising moment on her mouth.

Her heart gave a swift hard kick against her ribcage. Her tongue came out to moisten the arid landscape of her lips. Her stomach lifted and fell a thousand feet as he brushed that same gentle fingertip he had used on her cheek over the surface of her lips, a faint movement that sent every nerve into a frenzy of want.

His hand suddenly dropped from her face and just as swiftly a shutter came down on his features. ‘I think it’s best for the time being if we keep our distance from each other,’ he said. ‘I’ll sleep in one of the spare rooms.’

Sienna hid behind the screen of her sarcasm. ‘Frightened you might get too attached now I’m not the bed-hopping harlot you once thought I was?’ she asked.

He held her look with cool but implacable determination. ‘I want this chateau, Sienna,’ he said. ‘I am prepared to do whatever is required to obtain it. Neither of us needs the complication of a relationship that to all intents and purposes has been thrust upon us for reasons as yet unclear. If it hadn’t been for my father’s will, I would never have considered you as a temporary partner, let alone a life one. I suspect you would not have considered me either.’

‘You’re spot on there,’ she said. ‘You’re the last person I would consider spending the rest of my life with. Can you imagine the fights we’d have? You’re so anal you get antsy when the tea towels aren’t aligned.’

‘And you’re so chaotic you’re like a whirlwind,’ he said, but he softened it with a wry smile. ‘I still find it hard to believe you came from the womb of a woman who made a living out of being tidy.’

‘Yeah, well, she might have been good at tidying up other people’s messes, but she wasn’t so crash hot at sorting out her own,’ Sienna said with a little slump of her shoulders. ‘I spent most of my childhood wondering where we’d be living the next week. Mum would say or do something she shouldn’t and the next thing I’d be packing all my things. I lost count of how many schools I attended over the years. The time with your family was the longest we’d stayed anywhere. I didn’t want it to end.’

Andreas took one of her hands in his, toying with her fingers, one by one. ‘I had no idea things were so difficult for you,’ he said. ‘I always thought you were a bit of a brat, but now I can see why you flounced around with such an attitude all the time. You felt terribly insecure.’

‘I shouldn’t complain,’ Sienna said, trying to ignore the sensations firing up her arms from the warm stroke of his fingers against hers. ‘Plenty of people have it so much worse.’

He brought her hand up to his mouth and gently kissed her bent knuckles. ‘I should let you get to bed,’ he said, giving her hand one last gentle squeeze before releasing it. ‘Is there anything I can get or do for you? Perhaps run a hot bath for you?’

Sienna could see the concern in his eyes. It made
her feel delicate and feminine, a startling and somewhat unsettling change from having to act tough and streetwise around him. ‘No, I think I can manage to turn on the taps for myself,’ she said with a crooked smile. ‘Thanks all the same.’

He continued to study her for a long pulsing moment. Sienna suspected those green and brown-flecked eyes could see right through her shabbily erected façade. That brief moment of physical intimacy had changed the dynamic between them and she wasn’t sure how it could be changed back. The air was thick with the sensual energy their brief but passionate encounter had unleashed. It swirled like a current, a wild vortex that could so easily carry her way out of her depth if she wasn’t careful.

‘What happened here tonight …’ He frowned as if searching for the right words. ‘I don’t know how to make it up to you. I’ve misjudged you, misunderstood you and insulted you. I hope you will find it in your heart to forgive me.’

‘Wow, I really like this nice guy thing you’ve got going,’ Sienna said. ‘Maybe I won’t hate you quite so much if you keep that up for the next six months.’

His eyes pulsed with something dark and intense as they held hers. ‘You don’t hate me,
ma petite
,’ he said. ‘In fact, I have a feeling you have never hated me.’