A Forbidden Passion. Kelly Hunter

years when she’d heard him described as Olief’s estranged son she’d blamed Nic. Nic was the one who showed up at Olief’s invitation like he was doing Olief a favor. Nic was the one who never left so much as a spare toothbrush in the rooms set aside for him. Nic was the one who took off for hours in his black roadster, never saying where he was going or when he’d be back.

      Olief had so much to answer for.

      Rowan was angry with him. Furious. He’d broken something in Nic. The boy had needed his real father to step up when his supposed one had rejected him. Instead Olief’s disregard had made Nic incapable of trusting in human relationships. How could Olief have done it? Why?

      With a pang, she faced that she’d never know—although she wouldn’t be surprised if it had something to do with the harsh mental toll Nic had mentioned with regard to being a foreign correspondent. Olief had been doing that sort of work then. Perhaps Olief simply hadn’t had anything to offer his son.

      It still made Rowan ache to reach out to Nic and heal him in some way—not that she imagined he’d let her. If anything, he probably resented letting her draw so much out of him. That was why he’d locked himself in his office again.

      Drying herself off, she brushed out her hair and wondered if she should go to him, not sure she could face being rebuffed if he shut her out.

      With a yawn, she counted the hours of sleep she’d got last night—not many, as she’d tried to work out ways to talk Nic around to her views on Rosedale. She’d slept after their vigorous hours in bed, but not for long. Once she’d woken to find him gone she’d risen and started work in the kitchen. Now her soak in the tub had filled her with lethargy.

      She set her head on her pillow for a moment and picked up her feet. She was a master at catnaps….

      Nic nudged open the bedroom door and took in Sleeping Beauty, one hand tucked beneath her folded knees, the other curled under her chin like a child. Her hair was a tumbled mass, her lips a red bow, her face free of makeup and her breath soft. She was as innocent as they made them.

      While he’d finally given in to the guilty tension swirling like a murky cloud through him and come searching for release. Base, masculine, primordial forgetfulness. His flesh responded to the nearness of hers with a predictable rush of readiness, blood flooding into his crotch so fast it hurt.

      Her being asleep was a gift, he acknowledged with sour irony. He hated being so weak as to be unable to resist her. If her eyes opened and flashed at him he’d be lost. If she woke and rolled onto her back—

      He bit back a groan and reached for the coverlet, folding it from the far side of the bed until it wafted gently over her. This was better. She was getting too far under his skin with her fancy meals and empathetic speeches. This was supposed to be about sex. That was how he’d rationalized it and it was the only way they could come together.

      Rowan’s shock this evening perturbed him. She had ideals about family that were completely at odds with his own experience. It worried him, made him think that at some point she’d look to him to reflect some of those values and he simply didn’t have them.

      Uncurling his tense fists, he moved stiffly to the door, reminding himself that he might want to relieve sexual frustration with Rowan, but he didn’t need to. He didn’t need her.

      He was on the beach, cold waves lapping at his knees, before he could draw a breath and begin to think clearly again.

      Rowan’s confusion at waking with the coverlet dragged across her was too sensitive a topic to pick apart first thing in the morning—especially when a nameless agitation made her feel so aware, like her skin had been stroked by a velvet breeze all evening and then it had been too hot to sleep.

      Yet it was another windy day of scudding clouds and intermittent rain.

      Nic was locked in his office down the hall, not looking for her. Or rather he had come looking and then left without touching her, leaving her heart as skinned as her knee, tight and tender and itchy. Which was juvenile.

      The only way to suffocate her sense of irrelevance was to face up to another heartache of equal anguish. She went into the master bedroom and spent a long time with a sleeve held to her cheek, a collar to her nose, whole gowns clutched to her chest.

      “You’re a little old for dress-up, aren’t you?” Nic’s voice, rich and cool as ice cream, broke the silence an hour later, prompting a shiver of guilt and pleasure.

      Rowan’s first instinct was to toss aside the scarf she was tying over her hair and throw herself at him. She made herself finish knotting it in the famed Cassandra O’Brien style, then faced him. “People always tell me I look like Mum and I say thank you. But is it a compliment?”

      “She was very beautiful, and so are you—but not because you resemble her.”

      Rowan blushed, but more because the admiration in his gaze was unabashedly sexual. She swallowed back the silly excited lump rising in her throat, trying to hold her wobbly smile steady as she loosened the scarf.

      “What did you come in here for, full of such extravagant compliments? Keep that up and you’ll see how much I resemble her when it comes to …” she tilted him her mother’s infamous man-eater smile “… encouraging male admiration.”

      Something fierce and dangerous flashed in his Nordic blue eyes before he strolled forward on predatory feet. “I’m quite aware of how much you encourage it. I’ve seen you lay on the charm time and again. Why? Are you really as insecure as she was?”

      His disparagement didn’t allow her for one minute to think his attitude stemmed from jealousy or possessiveness.

      Yanking the scarf off her neck with a burn of her nape and a cloud of painfully familiar sandalwood, Rowan replaced it on the hook beside the mirror. “How am I supposed to know what I am when I’ve always been told who to speak to, where to go and how to act?”

      She moved away from him, angry and hurt that he was judging her and, yes, insecure. How could she develop an identity if her ability to make decisions had so rarely been tested?

      “When Mum sent me to Paris I thought I’d finally be able to make more of my own choices, but it didn’t work out that way. That was partly my fault, of course. The more I put into dance, the more I wanted to succeed to prove to myself I could. It’s not easy to walk away from that much investment. It’s like gambling. I kept thinking the next production would be the one that put me on the front of the stage, not the back. Mum would finally be happy and I’d be free to strike out then.” She hitched her shoulder, lashed by how nascent and unrealistic that dream had been.

      “And when you finally did have the chance you drank your face off and scared yourself,” he said, from where he’d stayed behind her.

      “I did,” she agreed with a chuckle of defeated acknowledgment, elbows sharp in her palms and shoulder blades aching with tension. “The grief and guilt didn’t help with that.” She sighed, still ashamed of the way she’d behaved, but she had to move past it. She was determined to.

      She pivoted to offer him a laissez-faire smile.

      “So now I’m back at ground zero—the only place where I sometimes had moments of feeling like I knew who I was and what I wanted. I’m hoping for inspiration, but it eludes me. You’re a worldly man. Give me advice on what to do with my life.”

      Rowan’s expansion on the picture of a life hemmed in by her mother’s dominating personality disturbed Nic. It was such a different upbringing from the fortunate one he’d judged it to be. To keep from dwelling on the struggles that pulled far more empathy out of him than he was comfortable with, he focused on her oblique request, touring his father’s suite to see if his idea was feasible.

      The rooms sprawling from the southwestern turret of the house were befitting of a billionaire media mogul—expansive and masculine, yet with enough womanly touches to prove one had lived here with him. Nic briefly glanced in the walk-in closet, approving of its size, reassured by contents that