The Hired Husband

Patting her cheeks lightly, in an attempt to bring some blood to the surface of her skin in order to make its ivory tones look a little healthier, she turned back to Keir. Meeting his darkly watchful gaze, she switched on what she hoped was a convincing smile, supremely conscious of the fact that it was distinctly ragged round the edges.

‘Ready?’ he asked, and held out his hand to her.

Sienna could only manage an inarticulate murmur that might have been agreement as she smoothed down her long skirt with uncertain fingers. Made of the finest lace over a delicate silk lining, the dress had originally been her grandmother’s, worn on her wedding day almost fifty-five years before. Carefully preserved, wrapped in tissue paper to protect it from the yellowing effects of the light, it had been handed down from mother to daughter in the hope that wearing it as a bride would pass on something of the love that had made the older woman’s marriage such a happy one.

But for Sienna’s mother, Caroline, there had been no such happy ending. There hadn’t even been a wedding ceremony, her daughter reflected bitterly. Her father had already been married. He had had no intention of leaving his wife for the naïve twenty-two-year-old who had been foolish enough to let herself get pregnant as the result of what had, to him at least, been just a pleasant holiday dalliance, with no commitment whatsoever.

‘Sienna…’ A note of reproof sharpened the edge of Keir’s voice, dragging her from her reverie. ‘Our guests are waiting.’

The hand he held out moved imperiously, the gesture demanding her instant obedience. For a brief moment the idea of rebellion flared in her mind, but almost immediately she dismissed it.

For now she had to observe all the conventions, play up to everyone’s belief that this was the love match of the century. Keir and Sienna, second only to Antony and Cleopatra, or Cathy and Heathcliff in the lists of the all-time great love stories.

Out there, in the elegant dining room beyond the great double doors, was Francis Nash, her late father’s brother and only surviving relative. If he was not convinced by their marriage and the whirlwind romance that had apparently preceded it, then the game was well and truly up. One false move and her chance of making sure that her mother spent the rest of her days in the comfort and security she so needed would be ruined.

And so she forced herself to smile again, with rather more success this time, drawing herself up to her full five foot nine as she placed her hand in Keir’s.

‘I’m ready,’ she declared. ‘Let’s go.’

Hard fingers closed tightly over hers, though whether in encouragement or warning not to take any more risks she couldn’t be sure.

‘Come on, then,’ Keir said, his voice unexpectedly roughened and tight. ‘Let’s get this show on the road.’

Not giving her time to think, he swung her round and, with her hand held high between them, marched her forcibly across the room, leaving her with no option but to follow him. It was either that or be dragged embarrassingly in his arrogant wake.

In the doorway Keir stopped suddenly, dark head held high, deep brown eyes scanning the elegantly dressed crowd before him as a murmur of interest greeted their appearance. Surprised by his unexpected stillness, it was all Sienna could do to avoid cannoning into the broad, straight line of his back.

Automatically her free hand came out to balance herself, closing over the tight muscles in his arm as she came to an uncertain halt at his side.

‘Perfect,’ Keir murmured softly, threading the word through with a dark cynicism that she had never heard from him before. ‘Now we look just like the model bride and groom on the top of that ridiculously over-decorated cake you insisted on.’

‘I…’ Sienna began but her muffled protest was ignored as Keir, having caught the eye of the waiting maître d’, gave a swift, curt nod as a signal to proceed with the reception.

‘Ladies and gentlemen…may I present to you Mr and Mrs Keir Alexander?’

But that was too much. Sienna’s head came up sharply, turquoise eyes flashing repudiation of the announcement.

‘Mr Keir Alexander and Sienna Rushford!’ she pronounced, against the flurry of applause that had greeted the announcement. ‘I—’

But the rest of her words were silenced, forced back down her throat, as, with a muttered expletive, Keir caught her in his arms, hauling her up against him as his dark head lowered, his mouth coming down hard on hers.

‘Keir!’

His name was a spluttered sound of protest against his lips. It was all she could manage before he kissed her again, with even more ruthless determination.

‘Looks like Keir’s got a tiger by the tail, all right.’

On the borders of her awareness Sienna heard one of Keir’s adolescent stepbrothers make the comment in an aside that was obviously meant to be heard, pitched as it was in a tone that carried clearly in spite of its apparent restraint. The malicious amusement in his voice was impossible to miss.

‘Let’s hope he’s not bitten off more than he can chew.’

Against her slender length Sienna felt the tension that stiffened Keir’s hard frame, tightening every muscle into an unyielding wall that seemed to bruise her just to be pressed close to it. So it was almost impossible to equate what all her senses were telling her with the apparently sensual indolence with which he slid his mouth away from hers, trailing it softly over her cheek until his warm breath teased the delicate curves of her ear.

‘Do you want this to work or not?’ he whispered silkily, his words meant for her hearing alone.

‘Of course…’

‘Then kiss me!’

‘Keir…?’ Confusion clouded her eyes, made her voice just a shaken thread of sound.

‘Kiss me!’

With a raw, uncontrolled sound in his throat, he closed hard fingers over her chin, wrenching her face up to his once more. But this time when his mouth touched hers it was with an unexpected, beguiling gentleness, a voluptuous tenderness that made her senses swim, her heartbeat slow to a heavy, languorous thud.

Against her back, the strength of his arm was all that held her upright. Without its support she felt that she would melt away completely, sliding into a warm, honeyed pool at his feet. Her whole body glowed, heating the blood in her veins until she felt as if she was flooded with molten gold, a burning spiral of very primitive need uncoiling deep inside her. She wanted to feel Keir’s mouth all over her skin, not just on her mouth; she longed for the caress of his hands on parts of her body too intimate to be appropriate on this public occasion.

It had been like this from the start, she acknowledged hazily with the little rational thought that was left to her. With Keir she no longer knew herself. She became a stranger even in her own eyes. In her place was a woman who had her own slender height, delicate oval face and thick fall of long dark brown hair, but who acted in ways she had never seen before.

That Sienna rushed into situations that only months before she would have fled from, screaming in panic. Situations like this travesty of a marriage that was only for show, with no real foundation in fact.

It was several long drawn-out seconds before the realisation that what she had believed to be distant thunder, or even the crazed pounding of her heart echoing inside her head, was in fact another, louder round of appreciative applause from their audience. A couple of the younger guests even added enthusiastic wolf whistles to the chorus of approval.

With carefully feigned reluctance, Keir broke the embrace and turned a slightly rueful smile on her heated face. To the onlookers, it must have appeared quite genuine, but Sienna had sensed the careful judgement that had had him ending the kiss the full space of several heartbeats before he’d lifted his head. She had seen the calculating look he had directed into her glazed eyes, the triumphant twist to that wide mouth as it had abandoned hers, leaving her aching for more.

Straightening fully, Keir slung a possessive arm around her waist as he turned to face the assembly of friends and relations.

‘I’m afraid my wife—’ a chorus of cheers greeted his use of the word for the first time since the completion of the marriage ceremony ‘—has strong feminist views that mean she insists on using her own name instead of adopting mine. Some of you may find that rather unromantic, but personally I have no problem with it. After all, when she indulges my every whim in everything apart from this…’

A careful emphasis on the words ‘my every whim’ left no room for doubt as to exactly what other things he had in mind.

‘Who am I to deny her this one wish for independence if it means so much to her?’

Milking the situation for all it was worth, he smiled down into Sienna’s flushed face, his appearance to all intents and purposes every inch that of the doting husband.

‘Don’t be embarrassed, darling,’ he reproved softly. ‘You’re amongst friends here. Everyone knows how we feel about each other.’

Struggling against a crazy desire to kick him hard on the ankle, in order to let him know exactly how she felt about the charade he was acting out, Sienna forced herself to swallow down the anger she couldn’t afford to reveal. Painfully conscious of Francis Nash, standing just a few feet away from her, watching Keir’s fooling with an intently speculative air, she managed a rather sickly smile.

But she knew that the curve of her lips wasn’t matched by the look in her eyes, which were flashing furious reproof and a warning of later retribution into Keir’s mocking face. He really was taking things way too far. Nothing like this had been mentioned in their agreement.

But Keir appeared totally unmoved by the silent rage in her eyes. Instead, taking advantage of the fact that a waiter carrying a tray full of glasses of champagne had just come within reach, he appropriated one of the crystal flutes and held it aloft, dark eyes smiling knowingly down into hers all the time.

‘If you’ll indulge me,’ he declared to the surrounding audience, ‘I’d like to propose a toast. To Sienna—my beautiful bride, and the woman who has made me the happiest man in the world by becoming my wife today.’

The man really was incorrigible! In spite of herself Sienna found it impossible to hold back a disturbed squawk of protest at this blatant lie. If Keir didn’t stop, someone was going to see right through his over-the-top performance and so start to wonder what the real truth was.

‘Keir!’ she protested softly, knowing that any further show of anger or impatience would only make him worse, drive him to even more dangerous extremes. ‘You’re embarrassing me.’

Immediately he was apparently all repentance.

‘I’m sorry, darling. You’re right. There’s a time and a place for this, and that’s not here and now. We’ll finish later…’ Deliberately he let his voice drop a couple of octaves, so that it became a husky purr, rich with sensual promise. ‘When we’re alone.’

Which earned him yet another cheer of enthusiastic appreciation from the spectators, all of whom completely misunderstood the reasons behind the burning colour that suddenly flooded the bride’s face.

‘I’ll look forward to that,’ she shot back in swift retaliation. ‘But for now we have our guests to see to. Please, everyone—help yourselves to drinks. I’m sure you’re ready for them. Lunch will be served in half an hour. In the meantime…’

She directed her attention back to Keir, her voice and her expression hardening as she did so.

‘I think you and I had better circulate—talk to a few people… I’ll take this half of the room…’

She had nerved herself for further play-acting on his part, perhaps even a downright refusal to do as she asked, but surprisingly it didn’t come. Instead Keir simply lifted his glass in a silent, mocking toast before turning and strolling off in the opposite direction from the one she had indicated.

Silently Sienna watched him go, small white teeth worrying at the fullness of her lower lip as she did so. It would all have been so much easier if she could have been in love with Keir, even just a little. After all, that shouldn’t have been too hard. He was the sort of man almost any woman with red blood in her veins would have fallen head over heels for. Tall, strong, impossibly good-looking, with the sort of potent hardcore sexuality that turned susceptible female brains to jelly, leaving them incapable of thought.

He was successful too. A self-made man. A man she could be proud to have at her side, proud to call her husband even for such a strictly limited time. But he would never have her heart. That wasn’t hers to give. She had already lost it to someone who had proved every bit as unworthy of her love as her father had been of her mother’s lifelong devotion.

No, she mustn’t think about Dean. Sienna’s teeth dug in harder as she fought against the tears that burned in her eyes. She had thrown in her lot with Keir, and that was the way her future lay—at least for the term of their contract together. It was an arrangement that she had been convinced could work so well for both of them. But today Keir had behaved in a way she’d never seen before.

Sienna’s sea-coloured eyes went to where Keir stood, his dark head thrown back, his face alight with laughter at something his companion had said to him. Suddenly she was brought up hard against the truth of just how very little she actually knew about this man who was now her husband.

If looks could kill, Keir thought wryly, catching that turquoise glare from the opposite side of the room, then he would surely have fallen down dead right on the spot, shrivelled into ashes by the force of Sienna’s anger. She hadn’t liked his teasing earlier, and clearly the thought of it still rankled. He hadn’t realised just how volatile his new wife’s temper could be.

His wife. Carefully he tested the word inside his mind, not yet sure exactly how he felt about it.

‘Keir!’ A powerful handshake was accompanied by a hearty slap on the back from a tall man with a bushy dark beard and laughing hazel eyes. ‘Congratulations, mate! I never thought I’d see the day that you joined the ranks of married men. This Sienna really must be some woman.’

‘Believe me, she is.’

Keir could only pray that his words didn’t sound as insincere spoken out loud as they did inside his head. Richard Parry had been his friend for over twenty years now, ever since they had first met up at secondary school, and if anyone was likely to smell a rat at his sudden decision to marry then Rick was that person.

‘She has to be. I was really beginning to wonder if you were married to that company of yours. You seemed to spend every waking hour of your life in the office.’

‘There have been some problems.’ The muscles in Keir’s jaw tightened, making his reply sound clipped and distant. ‘My father’s death was so unexpected that it left a lot of things unresolved…’

‘But that was—what?—eighteen months ago? Surely you’ve sorted things out now?’

‘Just about.’ Keir nodded slowly, his eyes darker than ever as he thought back over the past year and a half. ‘There’s one last complication I have to deal with, and then everything will be just how I want it.’

In his business world at least. His personal affairs were quite a different matter. But right now all he could think of was the relief that that one ‘complication’ had been lifted from his shoulders. It had been the bane of his life for ten years, and he hadn’t been able to wait to see the back of it. Only now did he feel free to turn his attention fully to the vexed question of his reckless marriage.

‘And when can we expect to hear of a whole new generation of Alexanders?’ It was Richard’s wife who spoke, her voice soft and gentle as her nature, bringing her husband’s head round to her at once.

‘Give the poor lad a break, Jo! He’s barely put the ring on her finger! Let him at least enjoy the honeymoon before you wish the joys of parenthood on him. Not everyone wants to be plagued with the sort of brood we’ve got.’

The laughter in Richard’s voice was belied by the way his eyes lingered on the swell of his wife’s stomach, evidence of how close he was to becoming a father for the fourth time.

‘But you always said you wanted children, didn’t you, Keir? And I think you’d make a wonderful father—if the way you get on with Sam, William and Hannah is anything to go by.’

‘Your children are like their mother, Joanna.’ Keir smiled. ’They’d get on with anyone at all without any trouble. But I don’t think you should look for the chance of a couple of playmates for your gang at any time in the near future. Sienna and I haven’t even talked about having kids…’

What would be the point when this charade of a marriage they had embarked on wasn’t meant to last much longer than a full-term pregnancy anyway? But he couldn’t admit that to Rick and Joanna, who were so blissfully happy in their own union that they would find it hard to understand the convoluted reasoning that had led to his taking Sienna as his bride.

‘Now if you’ll excuse me…I’d better rejoin my wife.’

Coward! Keir reproved himself as he turned away and began to weave a path through the crowd to where Sienna stood on the opposite side of the room, pausing occasionally to shake a hand, acknowledge congratulations and good wishes. But his mind wasn’t on what he was doing. He knew he couldn’t have faced any more of Joanna’s gentle questioning without blurting out something that might have given the game away completely.

The trouble was that Rick and his wife had known him for too long. They had been there all those years before when, under the influence of rather more wine than had been wise, he had declared with impassioned certainty that he would never marry unless he knew it was for ever. That only the conviction that the relationship would last for a lifetime, nothing less, would get him up the aisle and put a ring on his finger.

So how had he ended up doing just that, in the certain knowledge that what he had entered into was just a temporary contract? Stopping dead abruptly, Keir looked down at the thick gold band now encircling his wedding finger, twisting it round and round in an uneasy movement. How come he had compromised all his ideals in this way?

Because he was so much older now—and he would say wiser. He knew that such ideals were nothing but fantasies, impossible to achieve. He had been hit over the head with a strong dose of reality that had driven all the dreams from his mind. These days he was realist enough to know that sometimes a pragmatic compromise was the best you could come away with.

‘Keir, darling, I’m so glad to see you…’

This time the hand on his arm was much smaller, finer, totally feminine. Adorned with an extravagant display of gold and diamonds, the slender fingers were tipped with long, pointed nails painted in a violent shade of red. As Keir stiffened instinctively a wave of some heavy, musky perfume assailed his nostrils, turning his stomach.

He would recognise that overpowering perfume anywhere, just as he would recognise the sound of her voice and that false-toned ‘darling’ that they both knew she didn’t mean in the slightest. She only used it for the benefit of everyone else around, in order to maintain the illusion—in reality they had never felt anything other than total hatred for each other.

‘Lucille.’ He bit the word out, her name leaving a foul, bitter taste in his mouth.

Lucille Alexander. The stepmother from hell and his own personal demon. The woman he had described with deliberate understatement as the one last ‘complication’ he’d had left to deal with in order to be free of all the problems that had been weighing him down over the past ten years. The woman whose greedy demands had forced him into this marriage that was not a marriage but a purely business arrangement.

And as he turned slowly to face her the wave of revulsion he couldn’t control left him in no doubt that the prospect of getting her out of his life once and for all made the pretence and subterfuge totally worthwhile.

CHAPTER THREE

‘IS SOMETHING wrong?’

‘Wrong?’

Keir’s voice was distracted, his attention obviously elsewhere, and the dark-eyed gaze he turned in his wife’s direction was hooded, shaded with hidden thoughts that she couldn’t begin to understand.

‘Why should anything be wrong? After all, we’re both now going to get exactly what we want.’

What had put that cynical note into his voice, roughening it until it scraped her already over-sensitive nerves raw? But the truth was that ever since Keir had come back to her side at the start of the formal wedding lunch it had been clear that his mood had changed dramatically. The playful teasing that had so disturbed her had vanished, replaced instead by a darker, brooding distance.

‘Well, you could at least act as if you were just the slightest bit pleased to be married to me,’ Sienna hissed in the whisper necessitated by her determination not to be heard by her mother at her side and Keir’s best man at his. ‘If you continue to stare at your plate as if it was poisoned, and push the food around without tasting any of it, people will begin to wonder just what’s wrong with you!’

Especially those who had just witnessed his Oscar-winning performance as the most lovelorn and devoted husband of the century.

‘Right now you look more like the condemned man who can’t even bring himself to eat his last meal…’

No, anger was the wrong approach entirely, drawing a disturbing response from him. Seeing the rejection that flared in his eyes, the way that one long-fingered hand clenched over the starched white damask of his napkin, Sienna hastily adjusted her tone and expression in the hope of appeasing him.

‘It won’t be long before this is all over,’ she tried soothingly. ‘There’s just the traditional speeches and cutting the cake and then we can call it a day.’

Thankfully, she hadn’t given in to the urgings of her friends and planned an evening party to round off the celebrations. She had been unable to square the idea with her already uncomfortable conscience, seeing it as taking hypocrisy way too far. And with Keir in this mood it would have been more like a wake than any sort of revelry.

‘We’ll soon be able to be on our own again.’

‘And that will be so much better, will it?’ Keir snapped coldly. ‘Mr and Mrs Keir Alexander—oh, I’m sorry, I forgot. You want this marriage so little that you don’t even think it’s worth changing your name. So I see very little reason why you should be looking forward to our being alone…’

Sienna was astonished at how much his words stung. They were largely the truth, after all, so there was no reason for the sudden twist of pain she was experiencing.

With a sensation like the slow trickle of icy water creeping down her back, she found herself once more in the grip of the appalling unease of earlier that afternoon. It was as if some alien had moved in, taking over the shell of the person she had thought was Keir and replacing him with a total stranger.

But he was a stranger she was now legally tied to. For better for worse. For richer for poorer—in their case, definitely for richer, unless something went terribly wrong. Which it might do if she couldn’t jolt him out of this black mood. Already interested eyes were turning their way, obviously made curious by their absorbed concentration on each other, the muttered conversation that was so clearly not made up of words of love.

There was just one way she knew to get through to him.

‘Keir…’ Deliberately she gentled her voice, making it softly sensual. ‘Darling, don’t be like this…’

She wasn’t sure which startled him the most. The murmured endearment or the gentle hand she laid on his. But she couldn’t be unaware of his reaction, seeing it in the sudden widening of his dark eyes. It was there under her fingertips too, in the tension that stiffened his muscles against her, the threat of rejection that he only just controlled in time. She knew how tempted he was to repulse her gesture in a response that would be totally inappropriate to the impression they were trying to create, and she knew just as surely exactly when he decided not to use it.