Back in the Lion's Den. Elizabeth Power

taunts and his accusations with an eighteen month old toddler in tow. Three years since that tragic accident of Niall’s that had left her widowed and her child fatherless.

      It was clear from Conan’s disparaging manner that his opinion of her hadn’t changed. Now, alone with him, she felt less like the confident, self-sufficient woman she had become, and more like the emotionally dependent girl who had taken the lash of his tongue with no means of defending herself. Nothing that would explain her actions, why she had lied, her obvious guilt. Not without baring her very soul to him, and there was no way she was ever going to do that.

      Closing her mind against the bitter pain that threatened to well up inside of her, she murmured in a voice that was near to cracking, ‘For what reason could you possibly want to see me?’

      ‘Not you.’ Those incisive words cut across her with the precision of a scythe. ‘Daisy. I’m here to insist you let Daisy come back with me.’

      ‘What?’ Her stomach muscles tightened at painful echoes of the past. ‘I’d do everything in my power to take Daisy away from you.’ Yet her hackles were rising too, at the sheer arrogance of his statement, making her respond with, ‘Insist? You insist, Conan?’

      ‘She’s my brother’s child,’ he reminded her harshly. ‘She also has a grandmother she hasn’t seen.’

      ‘She also has a mother who wasn’t good enough for any of you—remember?’ It was a pointed little cry. Poignant, bitter and accusing.

      Conan’s black lashes swept down over the glittering green of his eyes—thick long lashes, she’d always thought, that most women would give their eye teeth to achieve. His face was lean and hard, high cheekbones stark against the proud nostrils that flared momentarily above his angular, darkly shadowed jaw, and the taut line of his wide, uncompromising mouth was compressed.

      ‘All right,’ he breathed heavily at length. ‘I know we’ve had our differences.’

      ‘Our differences?’ She almost laughed in his face. ‘Is that what you call them, Conan? Being accused of being an unfit mother and an unfaithful wife?’

      His penetrating eyes hardened like chips of green glass, but all he said was, ‘Yes, well …’ It was clear he didn’t want to discuss the accusations he had made. ‘That doesn’t alter the fact that you had no right to deprive Daisy of her family.’

      ‘I had every right!’ The star-shaped studs in her ears glinted as she brought her head up sharply, colour touching her cheeks at his glaring audacity. A confrontation with him was bad enough, but being so scantily dressed made her feel at even more of a disadvantage—especially since he was so big and so potently male. ‘Niall was all the family she had. Niall and me!’ That wasn’t strictly true, Sienna thought, because there were her parents, although she didn’t see them that often since their move to Spain.

      ‘Niall was my brother.’

      ‘Yes, well … a pity you didn’t remember that when he was alive!’

      She had hit a raw nerve. She could see it in the way that sensuous mouth of his hardened, and in the way his irises seemed to darken like woodland pools at dusk. Perhaps being reminded of how he, a self-made billionaire, had refused his own brother help when he’d been in desperate financial straits didn’t sit too comfortably on his conscience. With lethal softness, however, he said, ‘You still want to goad me with that?’

      Something warned her to be on her guard and not to antagonise him unnecessarily. Even so, the raw pain to which he had subjected her three years ago, with his implacable assumptions and his inexorably cruel accusations, had her uttering tautly, ‘I don’t want to do anything with you, Conan Ryder.’

      His gaze grazed over her shoulders, touching briefly on the swell of her small firm breasts. He was unpitying and unscrupulous and she didn’t like him, and yet she felt the sick stirrings of a ridiculous heat lick along her veins.

      ‘Did I ever ask you to?’ he enquired silkily, the cruel mockery that played around his mouth leaving her in no doubt as to what he meant.

      No, he hadn’t, she thought with an inexplicable little tingle along her spine, and she had never thought of him as anything other than her husband’s elder brother. Of course she’d been aware of his countless attributes during those two and a half years she had been married to Niall. What woman wouldn’t have been? she reasoned resentfully. He was good-looking, dynamic, and unbelievably wealthy. He was also a dark and silent entity she’d never quite been able to fathom out, although his ruthlessness and insensitivity had been all too apparent at the end. She would have had to be an android not to have noticed him, at least. But she’d loved Niall. Loved him with a passion that had nearly driven her insane …

      ‘If I remember correctly,’ he was saying icily now, ‘you were too busy breaking your marriage vows without any help from me—though I doubt it would have taken much more than a snap of my fingers, even with your lover in the picture.’

      ‘He wasn’t my lover! And you’re still as misguided as you ever were if you think I would ever have thought about setting my sights on a man like you!’ Memories of the last time she had stood and faced him like this clawed at her consciousness, the ugly scene forever etched on her memory. ‘For your information, Conan—’

      I loved your brother, she had been about to say, but broke off as the door to her gym class opened, enveloping them in a pounding rhythm.

      A young woman came out, her smile for Conan openly inviting before she crossed behind him to the women’s cloakroom, forcing him to move closer to Sienna.

      In her tight, revealing clothes she suddenly felt naked beside him, and the air left her lungs so that it felt difficult to breathe.

      This close to him she could smell the lemony fragrance of his cologne. It didn’t help either that he was so formally dressed, probably having just come from some high-flying meeting, she guessed grudgingly, where he’d made multi-million-pound decisions that would increase his global fortune tenfold! But his nearness was stifling, and Sienna took a step back—which was so obvious that he couldn’t have failed to realise why.

      Apart from the lift of an enquiring eyebrow, however, fortunately he made no comment.

      ‘My mother needs to see Daisy,’ he stated as the cloakroom door closed quietly behind him. ‘So do I.’ Sombre lines were etched around his mouth and jaw and a deep groove corrugated the healthily tanned skin of his forehead. ‘My mother hasn’t been herself lately …’ He couldn’t bring himself to tell her what was really wrong, how worried he was about Avril Ryder; he wasn’t going to beg. ‘And I feel she would benefit from a visit from her only grandchild. She hasn’t seen her since she was eighteen months old. Neither of us has.’

      ‘And you think you can just come here and take Daisy away? Just like that? That I’d even allow it?’ Fear rose in her again but she forced it back. ‘She doesn’t know you, Conan.’

      ‘And whose fault is that?’

      ‘She doesn’t know you,’ she reiterated, ignoring his censuring demand. ‘Neither of us does.’ Or did, she amended bitterly, reminded of his heartlessness, his lack of compassion—not just towards her, but towards his own brother.

      ‘I’m the child’s uncle, for Pete’s sake! Not that you’ve ever given her the chance to find out. There have been no photos. No contact. Do you know what that’s been like for Avril? Her grandmother? Don’t you think she’s had enough to contend with in losing Niall—without losing his baby daughter as well when you took her away?’

      ‘I was driven away,’ she breathed fiercely. ‘And you seem to forget … I lost something too.’ Her eyes were shielded, their lids heavy with the pain of remembering. ‘I lost a husband. And I had to contend with a lot of accusations and blame. Don’t you think I felt bad enough without being made to feel I was responsible for what had happened to him? That I was responsible for his drinking and getting into debt? I knew what you thought