Partners by Contract (11 page)

‘Don’t panic. I hopped, and I hardly spilt any,’ he boasted, a hint of smug pride for this achievement in his voice.

If I don’t get hold of myself I won’t be able to make the same boast, she thought, accepting the cup into her tremulous hand. This seemed a good time to remind herself that Connor was Penny’s. And she couldn’t betray her, not again.

‘Thank you,’ she mumbled, without looking up at him. In the confined space her flaring nostrils could detect the faint warm male muskiness of his body. A wave of dizziness made her clutch with her free hand for support. The only available support happened to be his chest. She was conscious of the steely strength and warmth beneath her fingers before she lifted her hand with a startled yelp.

‘My pleasure.’

A stranger might have read all the wrong things into that gravelly drawl—but she wasn’t a stranger.

If a person wanted to hear something enough, they’d hear it, she told herself, keeping her eyes firmly fixed on the open top button of Connor’s casual blue cambric shirt. He had the single most sexy voice in the world. If he ever gave up on medicine, a fortune awaited him doing voice-over work! He could make the most prosaic statements sound like an indecent and highly attractive proposition.

Do you really think that pretending nothing is happening between you is going to make it go away? the voice in her head—the one that wouldn’t let up even when she wanted it to—demanded scornfully.

‘I thought you were in a hurry?’ Her stomach muscles were twanging like violin strings.

‘I am.’

‘Then hop off!’ she growled crossly.

She slumped down weakly onto the bed in relief when Connor unexpectedly did as she requested.

At least, she told herself, it was relief. It had to be. Only an irresponsible fool would feel a sense of disappointed anticlimax and she was no fool.

* * *

‘Which way do I go?’ she asked when they were both sitting in her car. It occurred to her that for a person who had decided to avoid all unnecessary contact with the man she had a funny way of going about it.

‘Back to my place.’

The troubled line between Phoebe’s brows deepened. His place had a worryingly intimate sound.

‘Have you forgotten the way?’

‘No,’ she snapped, starting the car, ‘I haven’t. I happen to have an excellent sense of direction. I was just wondering why you couldn’t have brought my gift with you.’

‘This way I get to have the pleasure of your company.’

Phoebe threw him an irritated look and he just grinned back. ‘I’ve a good mind to turn the car around,’ she grumbled.

About two minutes later she reached a minor crossroad and was in no condition to remember her name, let alone the right fork to take. She’d have taken a ten-mile detour in preference to asking directions from him. Besides, there was a fifty per cent chance she’d be right.

‘Good call,’ Connor drawled when she eventually turned left.

Phoebe pretended not to hear his amused taunt.

Connor didn’t need any help to get out of the car this time. He’d got a lot more adept with the despised crutches and, though his knee was obviously causing him some discomfort, his physical condition had much improved over the past few days.

‘This way.’

Phoebe was surprised when he didn’t lead her into the millhouse but through a big gate set in an arch around the side of the big stone building. The slate-slabbed pathway behind it led to the terraced slopes of the back garden, not that ‘back garden’ was an adequate description for what met her eyes as she rounded the corner.

The acre or so of carefully cultivated and attractively landscaped ground leading down to the river came as a total surprise. Phoebe caught her breath and stared admiringly. It was a delight.

A design as apparently artless as this had obviously taken a great deal of thought, and even at this time of year it was obvious that the grounds were remarkably well cared-for. Either Connor had a horticultural bent she knew nothing of or he had a very good gardener.

‘Both.’

Phoebe started. ‘Pardon...?’

‘I enjoy making things grow, and I have the services of a full-time gardener.’

‘How did...?’ She didn’t complete the question. Connor had always had an uncanny knack of knowing what she was thinking...at least he had before she’d had something to hide. ‘Where are you taking me?’

‘We’re here.’ He negotiated the shallow stone steps leading down to a sheltered area of square flower-beds filled with orderly rows of pruned rose trees, their branches winter bare. The beds in the natural hollow were bordered by a neat low-clipped box hedge.

Phoebe’s perplexed expression intensified. ‘Where is “here”?’

‘Look closer,’ Connor suggested. His back wedged supportively against the wall of the pretty summer-house beside them, he laid his crutches to one side.

‘I’m not in the mood for a magical mystery tour, Con.’ Feeling more and more impatient with him for bringing her here, and with herself for coming, she bent lower and negligently turned a label attached to the nearest rose bush over in her hand. ‘Are you going to tell—? Oh!’ Her eyes misted over as she read the tag in her hand. Without speaking, she dropped down onto her knees and turned the next. It said the same thing...and the next.

‘You had a rose tree named after Penny?’ she whispered wonderingly as she looked down at the tribute in her hand. The typed label read, ‘Penny Miller’. Phoebe was deeply touched by the imaginative memorial.

Connor watched as a single tear slowly slid down her lovely cheek and her full lower lips quivered. The muscles in his throat worked before his angular jaw firmly tightened.

‘It seemed...appropriate,’ he confirmed huskily.

Phoebe was too enchanted by the discovery to register the strained, distant note in his voice. ‘What...?’ she began emotionally.

‘They’re blush pink tinged with white and they smell sweet, like a proper old-fashioned rose—I insisted on that. In the summer the beds are a blaze of colour and you can smell the scent of them from way up at the house.’ He glanced back towards the solid stone building. ‘I’ve got some pictures of them indoors, if you’d like to see them, and some pots planted up for you.’

‘I’ve nowhere to put them.’ She wasn’t aware of how forlorn and wistful she sounded.

‘Then I’ll keep them until you put down roots—whenever that might be...’

Phoebe nodded. The possibility she might never put down roots depressed her even further. Hit by a tidal wave of self-pity, she pictured herself doomed to drift from one locum post to another, never quite belonging anywhere—or with anyone.

‘Why didn’t you tell me that you’ve been working for an aid agency, Phoebe?’

The quiet question startled her out of her moody introspection. ‘Oh, didn’t I mention it?’ she murmured vaguely.

‘I expect it just slipped your mind,’ Connor drawled back, his saccharine-sweet comment laden with sarcasm.

Phoebe’s mouth settled into a mutinous line. ‘It’s not the sort of thing that comes up in conversation,’ she asserted calmly.

‘Actually, it did,’ he annoyingly pointed out.

Phoebe’s lips tightened. ‘And before you say anything, it wasn’t some sort of penance. I got a great deal from the experience and I don’t regret it for a minute.’

‘Leaving the job-satisfaction factor aside for the moment, you still haven’t explained why you didn’t tell me.
You had plenty of opportunities—I seem to recall asking you pretty pointedly what you’d been doing with your life for the last few years. I don’t recall you coughing up any details.’

‘Perhaps I didn’t want to ruin your carefully crafted psychological profile.’ She watched his face darken angrily. ‘I had sort of assumed you would have read my CV before offering me a partnership.’

‘I might have if I’d thought I needed a character reference. What made you be so evasive?’

Fair question. Unfortunately, she had no appropriate response to explain away her reticence. She could hardly say, I need to keep you at a distance, Con. Could she?

‘I had to learn about it from Will.’ The seething resentment in his clipped voice was unmistakable.

She shrugged. ‘I didn’t think you’d be interested.’

Several feet separated them but she could hear the fractured rasp of his angry gasp from where she was crouched.

‘I’m interested in everything about you...’

When her wide, startled gaze flickered upwards she discovered that the expression on his rigid countenance was every bit as raw and needy as his forceful tone had been. Her stomach muscles went into instant spasm.

‘You could have been killed out there and I wouldn’t have been any the wiser.’ The blaze in his cerulean eyes intensified as he mentally contemplated this grim scenario.

‘Don’t be silly, Con, I was perfectly safe.’ Most of the time, she added silently, recalling some of the hairier moments of her time with the aid agency, like the time the lorry in front of hers in the convoy she’d been travelling with had been blown up by a land-mine.

‘Like hell you were!’ he blasted back. ‘Pick up any newspaper and there’s always some story of aid workers being killed, maimed or kidnapped.’

‘Well, I wasn’t, so there’s no need to get so worked up,’ she replied, trying to inject a little calm in the face of his increasingly hostile attitude. Her attempts to downplay things backfired fairly dramatically.

‘I am not worked up!’ Connor bellowed.

‘We were always encouraged to take precautions.’

‘What precautions did they advise when dealing with heavily armed rebel soldiers?’

Phoebe’s lips tightened at this snide interruption. ‘And had anything...unforeseen happened to me,’ she continued on a practical note, ‘my mother would have been informed.’

The nerve in Connor’s lean cheek went haywire. ‘That’s all right, then,’ he sneered contemptuously.

Phoebe, who was feeling increasingly angry at being forced onto the defensive, glared up at him. ‘Don’t take that tone with me, Connor Carlyle!’

‘It’s about time someone did!’ he retorted belligerently. ‘I can’t think what Magda thought she was doing, letting you go!’ he fumed.

Phoebe’s chin came up in a reflexive response to his patronising attitude. She couldn’t let that pass unchallenged.

‘It’s a long time since I needed permission from my mother or, for that matter, from anyone else,’ she said with a pointed glare in the appropriate direction—just in case he’d missed the point she was making. ‘And we both know that Mum doesn’t give a damn what I do.’

‘Well, I do!’

‘Nobody asked you to!’

Their eyes met in an explosive fusion of confused amber with sizzling blue. Anger was quickly swamped by less easily definable emotions—or maybe she just didn’t want to put a name to them.

Phoebe, unable to deal with what she was feeling, closed her own eyes. Deal with it—it scared her witless! She averted her head and deliberately inhaled, imagining the scent rising from rows upon rows of delicate pink blooms. It was no good. No matter how hard she tried, serenity eluded her.

‘Are you all right?’

Oblivious to the havoc it played with her smooth hairstyle, Phoebe ran her fingertips roughly over her scalp. ‘As all right as anyone can be when they’re having a conversation with someone with terminal tunnel vision.’

Briskly shaking back her hair, she tilted her head back and gave a resolute little sigh before opening her eyes. ‘Someone has to do the job, Connor!’ she pointed out. ‘Who do you suggest they send? Or is it just women in potentially hazardous positions you object to?’

‘I don’t give a damn who does the job so long as it isn’t you,’ he admitted with engaging frankness.

A startled laugh was wrenched from her throat. There hadn’t been even a hint of apology about his outrageous stance. ‘You’re hopeless!’ she exclaimed. Her soft laughter became a sharp sigh of pain as a thorn on the bare brown stem her fingers were curled around penetrated the soft flesh of her thumb.

Automatically she raised her thumb to her lips.

‘Be careful!’ Connor admonished sharply.

Phoebe’s damp, sooty lashes lifted. Connor caught his breath. He couldn’t take his eyes off her. Her glorious golden eyes were swimming with tears.

His glance made Phoebe conscious of her thumb still pressed between her lips and with a self-conscious grimace she withdrew it.

‘Too late for caution,’ she explained, holding up her thumb—in more ways than one, she thought dully. She
despised the deep-seated need to retreat to the illusionary safety of his arms. The tears welled up out of nowhere, taking them both by surprise.

‘I think it’s the birthday thing,’ she gulped between sobs. ‘We...Pen and I...we...always...’

‘I know.’

Phoebe wasn’t sure what sequence of events got her there, but seconds later she was standing in the circle of Connor’s arms, her head against his chest, his strong arms tight around her trembling body. For long self-indulgent moments she wept, not quietly but with great gulping cathartic sobs of misery that shook her slender frame.

She’d stopped crying long before Connor stopped soothing—he was good at soothing. The gentle sweeps of his strong hand up and down the curve of her spine continued, as did the massaging movements of his long lean fingers against her scalp.

It took some time but finally she managed to gather the weak shreds of her will-power and pull free of his comforting embrace. She knew all about the way comfort could turn to other things!

‘Sorry about that,’ she said, avoiding looking at him. A flurry of cold wind caught the hank of hair clinging damply to her face and sent it flying back from her pale skin. ‘What an idiot I am,’ she sniffed, fumbling in her pocket for a tissue.

Connor stood there silently as she prosaically blew her pink-tipped nose.

‘You’ll have no argument from me.’

Phoebe’s head came up with an indignant snap. ‘Your candour does you credit, I’m sure,’ she announced insincerely. Her weak scowl faltered and died when it encountered the warm humour in his eyes.

‘It’s a lovely birthday present. Thank you, Con,’ she said huskily.

‘Plant it here.’

Phoebe’s eyes automatically followed his forefinger as he brought it up to touch the side of his lean cheek.