A Forbidden Passion. Kelly Hunter

like you owned them.”

      “Who else could be trusted?” he shot back. “The board wanted to sell off pieces for their personal gain. I kept it intact so Olief would have something to come back to.”

      She’d been aware in those early weeks of him warring with Olief’s top investors, but she’d had her own struggles with rehabilitating her leg. The corporation had been the last thing on her mind.

      “I’ve looked for them even while sitting at his desk,” Nic continued. “I paid searchers long after the authorities gave up. What did you do?” he challenged. “Keep your mother’s fan club rabid and frenzied?”

      Rowan curled her toes in the tight leather of her boots, stabbed with inadequacy and affront. “My leg was broken. I couldn’t get out in a boat to look for them. And doing all those interviews wasn’t a cakewalk!”

      He snorted. “Blinking back manufactured tears was difficult, was it?”

      Manufactured? She always fought back tears when she couldn’t avoid facing the reality of that lost plane. Snapping her head to the side, she refused to let him see how talking about the disappearance upset her. He obviously didn’t see her reaction as sincere and she wasn’t about to beg him to believe her.

      Especially when she had very mixed feelings—some that scared her. Guilt turned in her like a spool of barbed wire as she thought of the many times she had wished she could be out from under her mother’s controlling thumb. Since turning nineteen she had been waffling constantly between outright defiance that would have cut all ties to Cassandra O’Brien and a desire to stay close to Olief, Rosedale—and, she admitted silently, with a suffocating squeeze of mortification, within the sphere of Olief’s black sheep son.

      But she hadn’t wished Cassandra O’Brien would die.

      She couldn’t declare her mother dead. It was sick. Wrong. Rowan swiped her clammy palms over the seat of her jeans before running water into the kettle. She wouldn’t do it.

      “If you want to run Olief’s enterprise, fill your boots,” she said shakily. “But if all you want is more control over it, and by extension me, don’t expect me to help you.” She set the kettle to boil, then risked a glance at him.

      He wore the most painfully supercilious smirk. “I’m willing to forgive your debts to gain your cooperation,” he levied.

      “My debts?” she repeated laughingly. “A few months of credit card bills?” She and her mother had been in worse shape dozens of times. “We’re in dire straits, love. Be a good girl and dance us out.” Appearance fees were a sordid last resort, but Rowan wasn’t above it. “You’ll have to do better than that,” she said coldly.

      He leaned a well-muscled arm on the refrigerator. His laconic stance and wide chest, so unashamedly male, made her mouth go dry.

      “Name your price, then.”

      His confidence was as compelling as his physique, and all the more aggravating because she didn’t possess any immunity to it. She wanted to put a crack in his composure.

      “Rosedale,” she tossed out. It was a defiant challenge, but earnest want crept into her tone. This was her home. This was where Olief would return … if he could.

      “Rosedale?” Nic repeated.

      His frigid stare gave her a shiver of apprehension before she reminded herself she was being crass because he was.

      She tensed her sooty lashes into protective slits as she held his intimidating gaze. “Why not?” she challenged. “You don’t want it.”

      “Not true. I don’t like the house,” he corrected, shifting his big body into an uncompromising stance, shoulders pinned back, arms folded in refusal. “The location is perfect, though. I intend to tear down this monstrosity as soon as it’s emptied and build something that suits me better. So, no, you may not have Rosedale.”

      “Tear it down?” The words hissed in her throat like the steam off the kettle. “Why would you even threaten such a thing? Just to hurt me?”

      “Hurt you?” He frowned briefly. Any hint of softening was dismissed in a blink. “Don’t try to manipulate me with your acts of melodrama, Rowan. No, I’m not doing anything to you. You’re not on my radar enough for me to be that personal.”

      Of course not. And she shouldn’t let him so far into her psyche that she was scorched by that. But there he was, making her burn with humiliation and hurt.

      “Unlike you, I don’t play games,” he continued. “That wasn’t a threat. It’s the truth. The house is completely impractical. If I’m going to live here I want open rooms, more access to the outdoors, fewer stairs.”

      “Then don’t live here!”

      “Athens has been my base most of my life. It’s a short helicopter or boat trip from here to there. The island’s vineyard is profitable in its own right, which I’m sure is the real reason you want your hands on the place, but I’m not going to hand you a property worth multi-millions because your mother slept her way into having a ridiculous house built on it. What I will do is allow you to take whatever Cassandra left here—if you do it in a timely manner.”

      Rowan could only stare into his emotionless blue eyes. His gall left her speechless. Her mind could barely comprehend all he was saying. Rosedale gone? Pick over her mother’s things like she was snatching bargains at a yard sale? Give up hope?

      A stabbing pain drove through her, spreading an ache like poison across her chest and lifting a sting into her throat and behind her eyes.

      “I don’t want things, Nic. I want my home and my family!”

      She was going to cry, and it was the last thing she could bear to do in front of this glacier-veined man. It was more like her to go toe-to-toe than run from a fight, but for the second time in half an hour she had to walk out on him.

      After hiking the length of the island in heels, her feet refused a visit to all her favored haunts, so Rowan went as far as the sandy shoreline and kicked off her boots. The water was higher than she’d ever seen it, but she usually only swam in summer, rarely came to the beach in winter, and she hadn’t been looking at the water when she’d followed Nic down here two years ago.

      Wincing, she turned her mind from that debacle—only to become conscious of how grim a place the beach was to visit since her mother and Olief had likely drowned somewhere out there in the Mediterranean. One year ago.

      She was starting to hate this time of year.

      Starting up the beach, she tried to escape the hitch of guilt catching in her, not wanting to dwell on how she’d asked them to come for her when she’d broken her leg. She hadn’t been able to go to them—not physically and, more significantly, because she had feared running into Nic.

      Oh, that hateful man! She hated him all the more for having a point. He wasn’t right, but she had to acknowledge he wasn’t completely wrong. She hadn’t expected to find her mother and Olief in residence, but she’d wanted to feel close to them as she faced the anniversary of their disappearance and accepted what he’d come out and said: it was very unlikely they would ever come back and tell her what to do.

      The rest of her life stretched before her like the water, endless and formless. Until the dance school had kicked her out she’d never faced anything like this. Logically she knew she ought to celebrate this freedom and opportunity, but it looked so empty.

      Her life was empty. She had no one.

      Rowan drank salt-scented air as she inhaled, trying to ease the constriction in her lungs. Not yet. She didn’t have to face all that until the year was officially up. Nic could go to hell with his court documents and demands that she face reality.

      As she contemplated dealing with his threats against Rosedale a moment of self-pity threatened. Why did he dislike her so much?