But there was something about Conall Devlin which made her realise he would see right through any play-acting or attempts at manipulation. His eyes were much too keen and bright and intelligent. They were fixed on her now in question so that, for one bizarre moment, she felt as if he might actually be able to read her thoughts, and that he certainly wouldn’t like them if he could.
‘Then how am I expected to survive?’ she questioned. Defiantly she held up her wrist so that her diamond watch glittered, like bright sunlight on water. ‘Do you want me to start pawning the few valuable items I have?’
His eyes gleamed as he plucked an imaginary violin from the empty air and proceeded to play it, but then he put his big hands down on the surface of his desk and stared at her, his face sombre.
‘Why don’t you spare me the sob story, Amber?’ he said. ‘And start explaining some of these.’
Suddenly he upended a large manila envelope and spread the contents out over his desk and Amber stared at the collection of photos and magazine clippings with a feeling of trepidation.
‘Where did you get these?’
He made an expression of distaste, as if they were harbouring some form of contamination. ‘Your father gave them to me.’
Amber knew she’d made it into various gossip columns and some of those ‘celebrity’ magazines which adorned the shelves of supermarket checkouts. Some of the articles she’d seen and some she hadn’t—but she’d never seen them all together like this, like a pictorial history of her life. Fanned across his desk like a giant pack of cards, there were countless pictures of her. Pictures of her leaving nightclubs and pictures of her attending gallery and restaurant openings. In every single shot her dress looked too short and her expression seemed wild. But then the flash of the camera was something that she loved and loathed in equal measure. Wasn’t she stupidly grateful that someone cared enough to want to take her photo—as if to reassure her that she wasn’t invisible? Yet the downside was that it always made her feel like a butterfly who had fluttered into the collector’s room by mistake—who’d had her fragile wings pierced by the sharp pins which then fettered her to a piece of card...
She looked up from the photos and straight into his eyes and nobody could have failed to see the condemnation in their midnight depths. Don’t let him see the chink in your armour, she told herself fiercely. Don’t give him that power.
‘Quite good, aren’t they?’ she said carelessly as she pulled out the chair and sat down at last.
At that point, Conall could have slammed his fist onto the desk in sheer frustration, because she was shameless. Completely shameless. Worse even than he’d imagined. Did she think he was stupid—or was the effect of her dressing up today like some off-duty nun supposed to have him eating out of her hand?
But the crazy thing was that—no matter how contrived it was—on some subliminal level, the look actually worked. No matter what he’d said and no matter how much he tried to convince himself otherwise, he couldn’t seem to take his eyes off her. With her thick black hair scraped back from her face like that, you could see the perfect oval of her face and get the full impact of those long-lashed emerald eyes. Was she aware that she had the kind of looks which would make men want to fight wars for her? Conall’s mouth twisted. Of course she was. And she had been manipulating that beauty, probably since she first hit puberty.
He remembered his reaction when Ambrose had asked him for his help and then shown him all the photos. There had been a moment of stunned silence as Conall had looked at them and felt a powerful hit of lust which had been almost visceral. It had been like a punch to the guts. Or the groin. There had been one in particular of her wearing some wispy little white dress, managing to look both intensely pure and intensely provocative at the same time. Guilt had rushed through him as he’d stared at her father and shaken his head.
‘Get someone else to do the job,’ he’d said gruffly.
‘I can’t think of anyone else who would be capable of handling her,’ had been Ambrose’s candid reply. ‘Nor anyone I would trust as much as I do you.’
And wasn’t that the worst thing of all? That Ambrose trusted him to do right by his daughter? So that, not only had Conall agreed, but he was now bound by a deep sense of honour to do the decent thing by the man who had saved him from a life of crime.
It would have been easier if he could just have signed her a cheque and told her to go away and sort herself out, but Ambrose had been adamant that she needed grounding, and he knew the old man’s determination of old.
‘She needs to discover how to live a decent life and to stop sponging off other people,’ he said. ‘And you are going to help her, Conall.’
And how the hell was he supposed to do that when all he could think about was what it would be like to unpin her hair and kiss her until she was gasping for breath? About what it would be like to cradle those hips within the palms of his hands as he drove into her until they were both crying out their pleasure?
He stared into the glitter of her eyes, unable to blot out the unmistakable acknowledgement that her defiance was turning him on even more, because women rarely defied him. So what was he going to do about it—give up or carry on? The question was academic really, because giving up had never been an option for him. Maybe he could turn this into an exercise in self-restraint. Unless his standards had really sunk so low that he could imagine being intimate with someone who stood for everything he most despised.
He thought back to the question she’d just asked and his gaze slid over the pile of photos—alighting on one where she was sitting astride a man’s shoulders, a champagne bottle held aloft while a silky green dress clung to her shapely thighs.
‘They’re good if you want to portray yourself as a vacuous airhead,’ he said slowly. ‘But then again, that’s not something which is going to look good on your CV.’
‘Your own CV being whiter than white, I suppose?’ she questioned acidly.
For a moment, Conall fixed her with an enquiring look. Had Ambrose told her about the dark blots on his own particular copybook? In which case she would realise that he knew what he was talking about. He’d had his own share of demons; his own wake-up call to deal with. But she said nothing—just continued to regard him with a look of foxy challenge which was making his blood boil.
‘This is supposed to be about you,’ he said. ‘Not me.’
‘So go on, then,’ she said sarcastically. ‘I’m all ears.’
‘That’s probably the first sensible thing you’ve said all day.’ He leaned back in his chair and studied her. ‘This is what I propose you do, Amber. Obviously, you need a job in order to pay the rent but, as you have yourself recognised, your CV makes you unemployable. So you had better come and work for me. Simple.’
Amber went very still because when he put it like that it actually sounded simple. She blinked at him as she felt the first faint stirring of hope. Cautiously, she looked around the beautifully proportioned room, with its windows which looked out onto the iconic London street. Outside the trees were frothing with pink blossom, as if someone had daubed them with candyfloss. There was a bunch of flowers on his desk—the tiny, highly scented blooms they called paper-whites, which sent a beguiling drift of perfume through the air. She wondered if the blonde in the minidress had put them there. Just as she wondered who had sent him that postcard of the Taj Mahal, or that little glass dish in the shape of a pair of lips, which was currently home to a gleaming pile of paperclips.
And suddenly she was hit by that feeling which always used to come over her at school, when she was invited to a friend’s house for the weekend and the friend’s parents were still together. The feeling that she was on the outside looking in at a perfectly ordered world where everything worked the way it was supposed to. She swallowed. Because Conall Devlin was offering her a—temporary—place in that sort of world, wasn’t he? Didn’t that count for something?
‘I’m