Partners by Contract (4 page)

It had been a few days after Penny’s funeral when Connor had come across her curled up in a foetal ball on a sofa. The room had been dimly lit. She’d stopped crying just long enough to plead with him not to turn on the light.

If only I hadn’t kissed him!

A kiss—even an innocent, well-intentioned one—in those circumstances, when emotions were running high, when the people involved were both hurting like hell and feeling empty, was always going to be liable to go horribly wrong.

When you added the fact that one person, namely herself, had been nursing a forbidden passion for the other for some years then the odds on something going horribly wrong became a lot shorter. The horribly wrong part became almost inevitable when the person instigating the kiss happened to possess a face and body identical to the wife the grieving husband had just lost.

‘Sorry about that, Con,’ she’d said huskily when the storm of weeping had at last abated. She’d slipped out of his light, comforting embrace.

‘There’s no point keeping it locked in, Phoebe,’ Con had replied gently, levering himself onto the arm of the sofa and looking compassionately down into her tear-stained face. ‘And there’s no need to apologise for crying—not to me.’

The kindness in his voice had made the tears well afresh. ‘Oh, God!’ she gasped shakily, grabbing the loose hem of his blue denim Oxford shirt and mopping her face. ‘S-sorry.’

Connor had produced a tissue from somewhere on his person and Phoebe had blown her nose noisily on it.

‘Before, I couldn’t cry, now I can’t stop. How about you?’

‘Me?’

‘Have you cried, Con?’

He didn’t answer, she hadn’t really expected him to. Con wasn’t a sharing, caring, sort of bloke. Even in the semi-lit room where his features were reduced to a series of hard planes and complementary brooding shadows, she could tell his control had stepped up a notch, the tension emanating from his lean frame was almost tangible.

‘Let’s throw a bit of light on the subject, shall we?’ she said thickly, reaching for the table lamp.

Her painfully tear-swollen eyes narrowed against the sudden light.

‘We all have our own ways of coping, Phoebe.’

‘In other words, butt out and mind my own business.’ It was desperately hard to keep her tone light. The empty expression in his eyes made her want to cry all over again.

‘I wouldn’t be so rude...’

‘Yes, you would.’ She was comforted to see the faint amused quiver of his wide sensitive lips. The humour didn’t extend to his eyes, but it was a start.

‘I’m making allowances for your fragile emotional state, but—’

‘I think you’d be better off to make allowances for your
own
fragile emotional state,’ she told him bluntly. She could almost see him visibly withdrawing further from her. ‘All right.’ She held up her hands in a gesture of surrender. ‘I won’t mention empathy,’ she promised.

Dark eyes meshed with navy blue. The colour of Connor’s eyes always was a fair barometer of his mood—the more intense his feelings, the deeper the shade.

‘A deal,’ Connor agreed, extending his hand to her.

Phoebe’s fingers were enclosed in his as, still seated, he
hoisted her to her feet. ‘I just can’t believe she’s gone...’ The tears started flowing once more as the extent of her loss hit her—as it did many times a day—all over again.

‘I know...’

‘I know you know,’ she gulped with a watery smile.

His strong fingers tightened around hers so vigorously that she actually cried out.

‘Sorry,’ Connor said as she rubbed her crushed hand against her shoulder.

She brushed aside his concern with an impatient gesture. ‘It would have been better if it had been me. I wouldn’t have been missed nearly as much,’ she cried, bitterness quivering in her broken voice.

Connor was on his feet before the hissing sigh of anger had passed between his tightly clamped lips. Phoebe gave a startled bleat as she was grabbed unceremoniously by the shoulders. He just stopped short of shaking her, but it was obvious from the expression of blistering fury on his face that it had been a close thing.

‘If I ever hear any more of that self-pitying garbage, Phoebe, I’ll...’ The sound of disgust seemed to emerge from deep in his chest as he scanned her tear-stained features with controlled contempt. ‘You don’t really think that.’

Actually, she did. Penny had had so much more to live for than she did—a husband who loved her, a growing reputation as one of the most talented botanical artists in this, or any other, country, the prospect of a family at some point in the future. Penny had had it all, but as it seemed to matter so much to Connor she obligingly shook her head.

Abruptly the grip on her shoulders loosened and the fury drained from his face, leaving behind white-faced tension.

‘Oh, Con!’ Phoebe instinctively reached up and pressed
her hands either side of his lean face. The stubble along his strong jaw rasped against her open palms as she gazed tearily up at him. ‘It’ll get better...won’t it?’ she appealed miserably to him. It had to, didn’t it?

‘I sure as hell hope so.’ His big hands came up to cover hers where they lay against his skin.

During the moment of total empathy their fingers interlocked. Without even thinking about what she was doing, Phoebe stretched up on tiptoe and pressed her lips to his. It seemed the most natural thing in the world to do.

They drew apart almost immediately, but were still close enough for her to feel the warmth of his quick shallow breaths against her cheek. She looked anywhere but into his eyes, terrified of revealing the shameful pulse of pure sexual longing which had surged through her body at the brief contact.

It was wrong—wrong time, wrong place and most definitely wrong person!

If Connor even suspected, he’d despise and loathe her for ever. She already despised and loathed herself.

She cleared her throat, hardly able to hear herself think beyond the heavy thud of her heart. ‘How about a nice cup of tea?’ Who needed therapy when they had tea...? She swallowed a bubble of hysteria that rose in her throat.

‘I don’t want tea, nice or otherwise. Phoebe...’

Her eyes were instantly drawn from the safe perspective of his left ear by the unfamiliar hoarse note in his voice. Don’t let him know, please, don’t let him know, she prayed, fearful that he’d picked up on her guilty lust.

‘What’s wrong, Con?’ Of all the inane... The man’s just lost his wife—will that do you? She was braced for his scorn but not what actually came.

His fair head inclined towards her too quickly for her
to focus on his face. Phoebe’s eyes stayed wide open and shocked all the way through the kiss.

They drew apart, but not as far apart as the first time. This close it was impossible to distinguish the individual sounds of their painfully rapid breaths. The pressure of his lips on hers had been just as restrained as hers on his, but something else was there that hadn’t been there before. The new dangerous element made her pulses run wild.

She finally managed to focus, and what she focused on made the muscles in her lower belly spasm. The very last thing she’d been prepared to see had been the blaze of raw sexual hunger in his half-closed, heavily lidded eyes. It sliced neatly through her defences like a hot knife through butter.

Without saying a word or taking his eyes off the trembling outline of her full lips, Connor cupped her face in his hands and pressed his mouth to hers with shuddering, blind desperation. She’d wondered so often what it would feel like—now she knew! All the muscles in her lower belly spasmed again and a febrile shudder coursed through her pliant body.

His hands moved down the flexible curve of her spine, before curving possessively over her taut curve of her buttocks and drawing her hard against him.

Reality and fantasy collided with a resounding crash that sent her spiralling out of control. The sense of unreality persisted as his body, his hard male body, continued to press up against her.

The next time his mouth descended she moaned his name and responded with all the passion she’d been forced to deny for so long. Her knees buckled and it was only the strength of his arms that controlled her fall onto the sofa.

He fell to his knees beside the sofa and his body curved
over her. He lifted the silky strands of hair that fanned out from her face and let them fall through his fingers.

His scorching glance moved hungrily over the soft contours of her face before dropping lower to where her breasts strained with each tortured breath against the thin fabric of her top.

‘I want to touch you.’

His hoarse announcement sent a sizzling surge of sexual excitement through her body. Expectation stretched every nerve in her body to breaking point. She ached for his touch, and told him as much in a voice that didn’t sound like her own.

His head moved, allowing his lips to brush against the hand she’d laid on his face, then abruptly he froze. ‘Dear God...Phoebe!’ He acted like a man who’d just woken up from a dream—or maybe a nightmare.

‘What the hell are we doing?’ he groaned, jackknifing to his feet. He continued to stagger backwards until his back hit the wall on the opposite side of the room. Grey-faced, he continued to gaze at her in a dazed kind of sick disgust. ‘You’re both so mixed up in my head I can’t... Just go away, will you? Go away and don’t come back!’

Phoebe took a deep breath and steadied herself. After all, she’d come a long way in the last four years. She turned a deliberately deaf ear to the small voice in her head that pointed out that all that progress had amounted to a fat nothing the instant she’d seen him again.

‘I suppose there’s a moral somewhere in what happened...’ she suggested lightly.

‘And that would be?’

‘If you’re going to have mindless sex to forget your troubles, do it with a total stranger—there are fewer repercussions.’

‘Is that the sort of advice you give your patients?’

‘I wasn’t speaking literally...’

‘No, just stupidly,’ he snarled.

‘We didn’t have sex. And don’t worry, Con, I forgave myself some time ago.’ This was only partially true, but it made her sound suitably rehabilitated. She didn’t expect his forgiveness. Carefully she manoeuvred the car through the awkwardly angled Marlow farm gate.

‘And did you ever get around to forgiving me?’

His brooding tone was filled with a depth of self-loathing she recognised extremely well. Phoebe had got so used to blaming herself that the fact that it was possible he might have shouldered the responsibility had got lost somewhere along the way.

‘Forgive...me...you...?’ Fortunately there were no obstacles in the way as her hands left the steering-wheel for several startled moments. ‘I keep telling you, you didn’t do anything!’ She had to establish once and for all that he’d been the innocent party in all this.

Connor reached across and with a judicious touch on the steering-wheel saved the lazy farm cat sprawled in a patch of winter sun from being crushed. Phoebe took control, of the car at least, and parked it behind a tractor.

‘No forgiveness required,’ she insisted in a calmer voice as she fiddled with the clasp on her case. She didn’t look at him—she was working up to that. ‘We both needed...comfort, that’s all.’

‘And you were completely untraumatised by the entire comfort thing? So much so, in fact, that you couldn’t risk coming within a hundred miles of me!’

‘If you’re implying that I was worried you’d... you’d...kiss me again, you couldn’t be more wrong!’ She laughed to demonstrate how crazy the idea was. ‘If there’s been any hint of...attraction between us,’ she gulped, ‘I think it would have showed up when we lived together.
You were hurting like hell, missing Penny. I was there...’ She swallowed and smiled through the pain. ‘I look like Penny,’ she added simply.

‘It’s taken you four years to come up with that explanation?’ he grated incredulously.

‘No, five minutes.’

‘That covers my lustful advances.’ And his violent disgust, she thought dully. ‘What about you?’

Phoebe’s eyes widened fearfully. ‘What about me?’

‘Who were you closing your eyes and thinking of when you kissed me?’

‘Nobody!’ she exclaimed. An alert expression flickered into his eyes and she continued more cautiously. ‘That is, I wasn’t thinking,’ she clarified hastily. ‘I was hurting, too. I suppose I just needed someone to hold me...’ His arms were about perfect for that job, she recalled wistfully.

Connor’s strong jaw clenched, drawing his lightly tanned skin even tighter across his prominent cheekbones. ‘And I was a convenient body,’ he suggested flatly.

Guiltily Phoebe nodded.

‘This all sounds perfectly plausible.’

Phoebe’s spirits plummeted. Suddenly she was getting the distinct impression that he hadn’t swallowed a word she’d said.

‘There’s just one difficulty. If you had no problem with what happened, why refuse to open my letters? Why disappear off the face of the earth?’

It was so obvious she couldn’t believe Con hadn’t worked that one out for himself.

‘How could you get over Penny with me around as a constant reminder?’ She lifted a hand to her face. Had Penny lived, it would have been her face, too.

The taunting smile faded abruptly from Connor’s face.
He looked horrified. ‘You went away to spare me heartache?’

Warily Phoebe nodded. He was partially right at least.

He closed his eyes and let his head fall back against the head restraint. The irony of it was so acute he couldn’t help but laugh, but when he lifted his head he wasn’t laughing.

‘Has it ever occurred to you that I was out of my skull with worry?’ She recoiled from the blue blaze of fury in his eyes. ‘I thought I’d wait a few weeks, let the dust die down, only by then you’d gone...left the country. I got that much out of Magda.’

Phoebe nodded. She had sworn her mother to silence. Phoebe suspected that Magda’s co-operation had had a lot to do with her dislike of Connor, who had never really succeeded in hiding his disapproval of a woman who had walked out on her husband and six-month-old baby daughters.

‘You don’t think I’m capable of seeing the person beyond the face? You think I’m that superficial?’ The thought seemed to whip his temper to greater heights. ‘You’re nothing like Penny!’