Partners by Contract (13 page)

Connor watched the pink tip flicker over the lush outline and wondered just how much damage she could do if she ever deliberately set out to tempt him. He cleared his throat before continuing, ‘Sure,’ he conceded when she didn’t respond, ‘you’ve seen things, terrible, ugly things. Things that have left a permanent mark...’ He dropped down beside her onto the sofa and lifted a hand to her pale cheek. His expression as his thumb traced the curve of her cheekbone suggested he was acting under a strong compulsion.

A shudder rippled through Phoebe as his hand fell away. She could still feel the tingling line his hand had traced.

‘Deep down you’re still my Phoebe.’

My
Phoebe.

Phoebe stilled, her hand halfway to her face, the wayward strand of hair in her eyes totally forgotten. There was no mistaking the strong possessive timbre in his deep voice for something less startling—something like the nostalgic warmth of an old friendship. That hadn’t been warmth she’d heard but a sharp blast of intense heat, the same sort of heat that now bathed her entire body.

No sound emerged from her numb lips as she moved them. Phoebe knew he couldn’t have failed to notice her reaction but he acted as if he hadn’t. The Con she knew
noticed everything, even—no, especially—when you didn’t want him to.

‘You enjoy working here, you fit in, everyone says so, and it’s important we have someone who can work as a member of the team. We’re expanding rapidly, and as a partner you’d have an opportunity to pursue your own special interests. Will tells me you’ve put forward a proposal for an asthma clinic.’

The switch from personal to business was again so rapid it made her wonder if what had gone before had been a figment of her fevered imagination.

‘Hardly a proposal...’ she protested faintly.

‘You won’t find a practice better equipped.’

‘It wouldn’t matter if you were offering me the chance to perform open heart surgery!’ Clutching her head in both hands, she interrupted him in mid persuasive flow. His persistence baffled her. Why the hard sell? Everything he said about the practice was true, which was why they’d have no trouble finding a partner much better qualified than she was. ‘I still couldn’t work with you...you know that.’

‘So we’re talking the guilt thing here, are we?’ he drawled in a tight-lipped, fed-up-to-the-back-teeth-with-the-subject way that really got up her nose.

‘Yes!’ she yelled, getting angrier with him by the second. ‘Sorry to bore you but, yes, it’s the guilt thing again,’ she confirmed grimly from between clenched teeth. ‘I betrayed my sister. It might not mean a hell of lot to you...’ His head lifted in a jerky movement and the stark expression on his face made the angry reproaches shrivel on her tongue.

‘Not mean a hell of lot?’ he growled, his blazing eyes hot enough to strip the flesh off her bones. His back braced against the stone wall, he took her by the shoulders.

Phoebe gasped as the contact made all the strength fade from her body. It was weird but not unpleasant, feeling pliant like Plasticine in his arms.

Connor’s eyes closed just before he brought his face right up close to hers until their noses touched, his warm fragrant breath feathering across her cheek. ‘It’s not the kiss, it’s the stuff that went before.’

Phoebe felt as if someone had just plunged her into icy water. If her body had belonged to her, if it hadn’t just been something for Connor to mould, she would have pulled back.

‘You had affairs...?’ she choked.

She felt rather than heard the self-derisive laugh that vibrated in Connor’s throat. ‘I suppose that depends on whether you consider it adultery if you only stray in your mind. What school of thought do you favour?’ He stopped abruptly, wondering why he’d ever started. Congenital insanity possibly?

Phoebe’s imagination went into overdrive. What had he done that could make him look like that? What could be that bad? It didn’t require great perception to see he’d said a lot more than he’d intended and was now regretting it like crazy.

‘After you what?’

‘Leave it alone, Phoebe,’ he pleaded dully, rising from the sofa and taking up his crutches.

Phoebe gaped indignantly as he turned away. He surely couldn’t imagine he could start to say something like that and walk away? Heavens, he did think it! Her mouth tightened. Well, he could think again. A militant light in her eyes, she sprang up and followed him.

‘Don’t walk away from me when I’m talking!’ she yelled, grabbing his shoulder. Inevitably he was too big, strong and solid for her to manhandle or manoeuvre. ‘If
the mountain won’t come...’ she muttered, taking a shortcut over an armchair to cut off his escape route.

‘Well?’ she cried, jumping out in front of him, her hands on her hips, her bosom heaving from her exertions. She glowered up at him.

The minimalist shrug was a dismissal. ‘Forget it.’

Phoebe stood her ground. Some sixth sense—or feminine intuition—told her she wouldn’t like what he had to say, but perversely she couldn’t let it drop.

‘Not likely,’ she responded grimly.

‘What are you—? For God’s sake, woman,’ he snarled as she deliberately removed his crutches and held them out of his reach.

Anger and frustration darkened his eyes. ‘This is childish.’

Phoebe just smiled provocatively back. The smile must have done it, she reflected at a much later date. The sound of his self-control snapping was almost audible.

‘You want to know what I did—fine!’ he flung, dropping down into a convenient chair with a grunt.

Even after all this time, he had perfect recall of turning in his aroused, half-awake state to the woman beside him in bed and reaching for her to continue the disturbed love-making of his dreams.

‘You want to know what I did? Then here it is—I called my wife Phoebe when we were making love!’

CHAPTER SEVEN

P
HOEBE
, her eyes still fixed on Connor’s slid slowly and gracefully down onto the floor.

Way to go, Con! An excellent choice of anecdotes for a man who was meant to be wearing down guilt complexes, not building up a fresh batch. His head tilted back, he stared at the distant ceiling and wondered if there was any possibility he’d come up with any similar gems in the near future. On present form it seemed a distinct possibility.

The way his eyes slid away evasively from hers confirmed the worse of Phoebe’s suspicions. No wonder he looked shifty. She choked. ‘That’s disgusting!’

Connor’s frustrated sigh hissed through his clenched teeth. He’d really blown it now.

Even though Phoebe was now sitting down, her legs folded in a neat half-lotus, the sensation of the floor rising up to meet her made her head spin violently. Of all the turbulent emotions jostling for supremacy in her head, sympathy for her sister and protective anger on her behalf was uppermost.

Nobody who hadn’t been born an identical twin could appreciate how infuriating it was to be treated as one half of an interchangeable duo, not an individual in your own right. Men were often the worse culprits.

It was one thing to laugh and reflect in a superior way on the shallowness of the male of the species in general when you discovered that the guy who had asked you out
for a date had taken out your sister the previous night. But this was Connor!

If she felt sick and disillusioned, imagine what Penny must have felt! She didn’t have to imagine—she knew! It was that same fear that had made her run away from Connor in the first place. It was that fear that had made her keep him at a distance since they’d met up again. The horror of having him touch her and think of her twin. Did irony get any darker than this?

‘Why the shock, Phoebe? Did you think you’re the only one entitled to private fantasies?’

Phoebe, her hand pressed to her forehead, lifted her dazed eyes to his. You wouldn’t know to look at him that he was a complete moral degenerate, she thought bleakly. Shock hardly covered the squirmy disillusionment crawling around in the pit of her stomach.

‘I think the insight into yours is quite enough for one day. Let’s leave my fantasies out of this,’ she told him coldly.

‘I think they’re very much part of it,’ he replied with a hard, humourless smile.

The callous laugh made Phoebe see red. Did he expect her to be amused, flattered or, even worse,
turned on
? She was as open-minded as the next person, but...

‘Pen and I met quite a few sleazes with some unsavoury notions about sleeping with identical twins, but it must have come as a bit of sickener for Pen to discover she’d married one!’ she choked in bitter condemnation.

For a moment Connor returned her tearful, reproachful glare blankly—then the penny dropped.
She thought...!

‘I may well be the total deviant you apparently consider me, Phoebe,’ he replied in a soft silky voice—a mad-as-hell voice. ‘But just to put the record straight, I wasn’t interested in compare and contrast then or now, and I feel
obliged to say that I’ve never, even subconsciously, flirted with the idea of threesomes—even with twins. I’m your boring one-on-one type of guy!’

He was very convincing. Her cheeks ignited with mortification...she’d jumped to about the most embarrassing conclusion humanly possible. But that left the problem of what he had meant.

A frown pleated her smooth brow. ‘But you said—’

‘I said I inadvertently spoke your name when I was making love to my wife. That’s because I couldn’t make love to my wife without you invading my thoughts,’ he clarified bluntly, with what even he had to admit owed more to belligerent defiance than good sense. And still he couldn’t keep quiet.

A sensible man knew when to keep his mouth shut. There had been a time not so long ago when that term could have accurately been ascribed to me, he recalled nostalgically.

‘I only ever wanted one twin in my bed and it was you. I didn’t love Penny. I loved you.’

Connor saw the shocked realisation creep gradually into Phoebe’s eyes. It was almost a relief to have it out in the open at last.

‘Oh, my god!’ she gasped. Phoebe felt dizzy as the implications of this extraordinary statement continued to snowball in her head, gathering momentum by the second.

‘Your marriage was a success, you were happy...’ She was suddenly desperate not to relinquish the image enshrined in her memory of her sister’s happy marriage. Hadn’t she’d made her own sacrifices to ensure it stayed that way?

‘For about five minutes.’ Well, it was a bit late to adopt the softly-softly approach, he reasoned when Phoebe
flinched. ‘And you were about the only person who didn’t realise it.’

‘People were always getting us mixed us up. Perhaps...’ She was clutching a little wildly at straws.

‘In bed?’
The last remnants of colour fled from Phoebe’s face as he disposed brutally of her desperate protest.

‘Are you trying to tell me that...that...?’ Ambivalent didn’t half cover her conflicting emotions as she tensely awaited his reply. She fixed her eyes on the floor, unable to look at him.

‘That I married the wrong sister? I thought I already had.’

She looked up then and away just as quickly. ‘Don’t say that!’ she pleaded, pressing her hands over her ears. ‘La, la, la...!’ she sang loudly and tunelessly in a fruitless effort to blank out what he was saying.

‘Why not? It’s the truth!’ Connor leaned forward and, with his hands under her arms, slid her a couple of feet along the polished surface until she sat curled up into a hunched ball of denial at his feet.

‘Stop that!’ he snarled, wrenching her hands away. She was going to hear what he had to say whether she liked it or not!

Reluctantly Phoebe did as he bade, not from any desire to oblige him but because she suddenly realised how stupid and childish she must look. She sniffed and looked pointedly at her hands.

‘Do you mind?’ she asked frigidly.

Connor let her go and held up his hands. Their eyes met and her lower lip began to quiver.

‘How could you?’ she quavered.

‘I didn’t do it on purpose!’ How the hell did a man defend the indefensible? He decided it was better not to
try. ‘It didn’t help at all, knowing that you felt the same way,’ he recollected darkly.

‘I did not!’

Her outraged yelp cut no ice with him. ‘No? Then it’s just coincidence that you left a room whenever I entered, with some lame excuse or other, that you never looked me directly in the eye? That you arranged it so that we were never alone together? I suppose I imagined that, too?’

‘Considering what happened when we were left alone, I’d say I showed pretty good judgement!’ she snapped.

‘Nothing happened,’ he retorted with provoking accuracy, ‘that we both didn’t want—want badly. I’m not ashamed of the way I felt, Phoebe.’

‘Which was why you told me to go away, I suppose.’ She didn’t have to close her eyes to recall the expression of disgust on his face that day.

Connor winced. ‘It was bad timing, not... I hadn’t had time to sort out the way I was...’ he began.

But Phoebe wasn’t listening. She was shaking her head from side to side in distress. ‘I am! I’m ashamed of the way I feel...felt. I didn’t want Penny to guess. Can you imagine how betrayed how miserable she’d have felt?’ She could at least gain some crumbs of comfort from the fact Penny had been spared knowing her twin lusted after her husband.

‘Am I supposed to applaud your self-sacrifice?’ he sneered nastily.

The unfairness of his scathing retort made her want to slap him. ‘I wouldn’t expect you to understand,’ she retorted.

‘Because I don’t have your noble nature? You know something?’ he continued, brushing aside Phoebe’s indignant disclaimer. ‘I never realised what a victim mentality you have. You positively wallow in it.’

‘The only thing I’ve been guilty of is bad taste’ she responded furiously. ‘I can’t imagine what I ever saw in you. Of the callous, self-centred, selfish... At least Penny never knew what an idiot I was.’

‘She did know.’

‘Pardon?’

‘It was Penny who told me how you felt.’ For that matter, she’d told him how he felt.

He watched compassionately as the colour ebbed and flowed in Phoebe’s face until it resolved into pearly pale, her wide eyes providing the only colour in her horrified face.