‘You can relax.’
Shocked by the direction of her thoughts, Mari realised that was one thing she couldn’t do, not around this man with his powerful aura of masculinity.
‘My grandmother’s home is actually quite civilised, and she is a very young eighty-two. Obviously she doesn’t live here alone—a couple live in and there is a gardener and a couple of maids who come in from the village.’
‘Cosy set-up,’ she murmured, staring at the looming building and not really caring if he got her sarcasm or not, just glad he had no inkling of her previous thoughts. ‘I didn’t see any village on the way.’ Even with her having taken the precaution of turning her back to him, his nearness made the nape of her neck tingle.
‘There are two accesses to the place. We took the north road—the village is on the south side of the mountain.’
The geography of the area made little sense to Mari, and her thoughts turned to her brother. What if something had happened? He hadn’t replied to her last text.
She slipped her phone out of her pocket, but before she could begin to punch in Mark’s number it was snatched from her grasp by Seb before she had even registered his presence.
She turned, eyes blazing. ‘Give that back!’
Seb looked at the phone and tucked it into his own pocket. Mari, her hands clenched, watched him and went white with rage. ‘Does he always need you to hold his hand?’
Her chin lifted in reaction to the scorn in his voice while in the distance the owl called. ‘The support is mutual.’
A slug of anger that on one level Seb knew was irrational slipped past the cool objectivity he struggled to maintain whenever he thought of the man he had judged to be a selfish waste of space. Any sympathy he might have felt for the younger man’s present situation was negated by the cynical way he used his sister and played on her irrational guilt.
And you’re not...?
Cynical, or using her?
Both. The answer came a second before he closed down this line of internal dialogue.
The situations were not comparable; she was not losing out and this was a fair exchange. Eighteen months with him was preferable to a life spent looking after a brother for whom nothing she ever did would be enough—and that was what would happen if he didn’t fully recover.
Recognising a masterful piece of rationalisation when he heard one, he buried the knowledge beneath a layer of anger.
‘You’d like to believe that, wouldn’t you? But you’re really not that stupid, are you, Mari?’
Mari was grateful for the dark when his soft suggestion made her face flame. She compressed her lips over a defensive retort, resenting his insinuation while recognising there was more than a grain of truth in it. While she wasn’t blind to her twin’s faults, it was something else to hear another person criticise him.
‘Didn’t you read the literature on The Atler?’
Her face was just a blur, but he imagined her teeth gouging into the soft plump fullness of her lower lip. She’d done that several times on the plane. At one point there had been pinpricks of blood, and he had wondered what she would do if he’d dabbed them away with his tongue...
The question still remained, as did the frustrated ache.
She was grateful for the change of subject, but it took Mari a moment to react to the abrupt question, to connect the name with the clinic that specialised in the rehabilitation of injuries like Mark’s—the expensive clinic.
She felt resentment she was uncomfortable acknowledging stir. If she had told Mark what she was doing would he have discouraged her? Her resentment was directed not towards her brother but towards the man who had made her think about it.
‘I didn’t know there was an exam,’ she countered, unwilling to admit that she had read the first page half a dozen times before she had finally given up. She’d had other things on her mind at the time, such as getting married.
Seb, drawn by the scent of her perfume—or was it her shampoo?—fought the sudden strong impulse to lean in closer. Darkness had a dangerous way of bypassing inhibitions.
The air was heavy with an almost audible expectant hum that had little to do with the imminent storm and everything to do with the indiscriminate flare of hormones that escalated the dull ache in his groin.
Sex was always one of those things that defied logic, but not, he reminded himself, his control. He was justifiably proud of his ability to vanquish the primal urges.
‘They discourage visitors during the initial assessment period. The regime appears to be as much boot camp as high-tech.’
‘It does?’
‘When the going gets tough your brother will be begging you to get him out of there...and of course you’ll rush to do what he wants, even if that isn’t the best thing for him. If you’re here with me, you have a legitimate excuse to refuse to ride to the rescue.’
His superior dismissive tone hit a raw nerve. Mari caught his arm and felt the hard muscle under her fingers tense before he swung back his feet, kicking up a shower of gravel that hit her bare shins.
‘You don’t think a lot of him, do you?’
His response was not ambiguous. ‘No.’
‘Because he’s not been born with your advantages?’ she charged contemptuously. ‘Well, my brother has got pride, too, even if he doesn’t have the required patrician blood to meet your standards!’ She glared up at the shadowy outline of his face.
‘I thought pride was a bad and wicked thing. Or is that only when it comes attached to me?’
She was attached to him.
Mari’s dark-fringed eyelids fluttered in recognition of the contact; she pulled in a tense breath and felt her insides quiver. At some point her left hand had joined her right on his biceps; she was holding on as though her life depended on it. There was no give at all beneath her fingers. He was hard and lean, strong like steel but warm. She could feel the heat through her fingertips, sending pulses of a dark warmth thrumming through her body.
‘Your sort of pride comes from an arrogant belief that you are better simply because you are you. Well, he’ll prove you wrong.’ Forcing a drop of blood from a stone could not have required more strength than peeling back her strangely reluctant fingers; no matter how hard she tried they wouldn’t budge. In the darkness with the wind rustling through the trees her heart began to thud in slow, heavy, hard anticipation.
Of what, Mari?
Time seemed to stop. She struggled, feeling things inside her that had built up begin to dissolve like sand. Control was slipping through her fingers... Shaking her head in rejection, she managed to break the contact and the spell. Holding her hands across her chest in a protective gesture, Mari took a lurching step back onto an uneven cobble and in the process triggered a powerful security light.
Without warning, the area was lit up, revealing that they had entered a courtyard. She lifted a hand to shade her eyes. The scent she had been conscious of was more pronounced, and she saw it emanated from the wild thyme growing in the cracks of the cobbles. The illumination after the anonymity of darkness made her feel exposed and horribly vulnerable.
This was her first real glimpse of the building. Its ecclesiastical origins were obvious in the architecture but the severity was softened by ivy on the walls and massive stone troughs beneath enormous mullioned windows that spilled out their impressive floral displays.
But it was not the geraniums that caught her attention, it was the expression in his eyes. Then the first raindrop hit her face, then another and another.