The Hired Husband. Kate Walker

abandoned her mother before Sienna had even been born, had had a belated attack of conscience and decided to acknowledge her as his daughter. As his wife had died some years before, and he had had no other children, he had left her everything he owned in his will. But there was a catch.

      ‘If my—if Andrew Nash hadn’t left me all that money, I don’t know what I’d have done. And if he hadn’t put in the condition, then I wouldn’t be forced to involve you in this.’

      At last she turned to face Keir, her heart quailing as she saw the heavy lids that hooded his eyes, hiding his thoughts from her. His hands were pushed deep into the pockets of his dark trousers, his shoulders stiff, his very stance declaring hostility and opposition to everything she said.

      ‘The condition being that you have to be married, I presume?’

      ‘That’s right. In his letter he said that he’d lived his life wishing he’d chosen differently all those years ago. That he’d realised too late that the love my mother and I could have brought him as a family was more important than the wealth he kept by staying with his wife. And so he made it a prerequisite of my inheritance that I had to be married—happily married—before I could inherit.’

      ‘Happily married,’ Keir echoed cynically. ‘And who’s to be the judge of that?’

      ‘My…’

      Sienna couldn’t get her tongue round the word ‘uncle’. After twenty-five years of believing she had no family at all, it was too much to accept that she now had an uncle, particularly one who held her future so securely in his hands.

      ‘His brother, Francis Nash, is to have the final say in seeing that his wishes are carried out. But he knows nothing about me. He’s never even seen me. It shouldn’t be too hard to—to convince him that…that…’

      ‘That you and I are madly in love and desperate to get married?’ Keir finished for her when she couldn’t complete the sentence.

      ‘That’s right.’ It was barely more than a whisper and once more her eyes skittered away from the coldly assessing stare that fixed her like a specimen on a laboratory slide, awaiting analysis. ’W-would you like a drink? There’s wine…’

      ‘I think I’d better keep a clear head for this,’ Keir returned dismissively. ‘I wouldn’t want anything to muddle my thinking.’

      Did that mean he was actually considering the idea? Sienna didn’t dare to allow the thought to enter her mind.

      ‘So you want me to play the devoted groom?’

      He made it sound like the most repellent task possible. As if he would rather put a gun to his head—anything other than what she had asked of him.

      ‘To lie? Don’t you know that lies have a nasty habit of breeding more lies? Before you’ve time to think you’re tangled up in them so tightly that you can’t get free and they’re dragging you down…’

      ‘But we’re not going to lie! Not really. People already know us as a couple. We’ve been seen out together often enough. It wouldn’t be all that different from what we have now. It wouldn’t!’ she declared vehemently when he expressed his disagreement in a harsh sound of disbelief. ‘You’re here almost every night as it is. What if I’d asked you to move in with me?’

      ‘I’d think you were taking a lot for granted, lady.’

      ‘Keir, it’s only supposition!’ Desperately Sienna tried to make up the ground she realised she’d lost. ‘We both know that our relationship isn’t on that sort of footing—that it will probably never be. But we’re the only ones who know that. And what we do have is good, isn’t it?’

      Keir’s stony face gave her no encouragement and it was all that she could do not to give up in despair.

      ‘If we decided to say, after a year, that we knew it wasn’t working, then we could split—both go our own ways—and it wouldn’t matter. There’d be no frayed ends, no regrets, no complications.’

      ‘But this arrangement comes weighed down with complications,’ Keir pointed out with cold reason. ‘It can’t not do that. A marriage certificate complicates things, darling.’

      ‘But it’s only a temporary solution, you must see that!’ she pleaded with him. ‘It won’t mean anything to either of us, so you needn’t worry about getting trapped in something you don’t want! There’ll be no commitment beyond that one year—just a twelve month period and then we’ll go our separate ways.’

      ‘You make it sound so simple…’

      ‘It is simple! It couldn’t be anything else. After all, it’s not as if you’re madly in love with me, or vice versa. And…’

      Her voice faded into silence as Keir snatched his hand away from her and moved to stare out of the window, affecting an intent interest in the cars going by in the street.

      ‘It might work,’ he said slowly.

      Was it possible that he was going to agree? Sienna was past knowing whether she hoped for his agreement or feared it dreadfully. She was so caught up in her own disturbed thoughts at the prospect that she jumped like a startled cat when he suddenly whirled round to face her.

      ‘And what, exactly, would I get out of the deal? Because I presume you were going to offer me something—some remuneration for my co-operation, some compensation for the loss of my freedom by entering into this agreement.’

      ‘Of course.’

      Sienna swallowed hard. She had expected this. Had known it must come inevitably. But she hadn’t thought he would be quite so cold-blooded about it.

      You fool! her heart reproached her. What had she expected? That he would declare that of course he would do it, that he would do whatever she wanted and not expect anything in return?

      Of course not. She had known she would have to offer Keir something in exchange for his agreement to help her out. It was just that she hadn’t been prepared for the way his demand made her feel that it was that compensation that mattered and not her.

      ‘So?’ Keir prompted harshly when she couldn’t find the voice to answer him.

      ‘You—you remember what you told me about the shares in Alexander’s?’

      She had been frankly surprised that he had opened up about so much of his life to her. Keir was the sort of man who kept things very much to himself, limiting the conversation only to uncomplicated, unemotional topics that didn’t call for much involvement on either part.

      But just three nights earlier he had revealed something of the problems he had been having with the haulage and transportation company of which he was part owner and managing director. Problems that had been caused by his stepmother, his late father’s second wife.

      Alexander’s was a family firm. Originally owned by Keir’s father, Don, it had been an ailing, small-scale enterprise when, at twenty-one and fresh from university, Keir had taken it by the scruff of the neck and dragged it forcibly into the late twentieth century. In the following twelve years he had turned it into a huge international success. It was now impossible to travel anywhere in Europe or beyond without seeing one of Alexander’s distinctive red and green vehicles somewhere en route.

      ‘Did you manage to raise the amount you needed to buy your stepmother out?’

      Keir’s expression gave her the answer before he spoke, a dark cloud of anger shadowing his face.

      ‘I raised it, but then she upped the stakes again. She says she has another potential buyer in the offing. If that sale goes through then Alexander’s as a family firm will cease to exist.’

      ‘And that’s so important to you?’

      The look her turned on her scorched her from head to toe with its impatient contempt for the stupidity of her question.

      ‘Alexander’s is