in—or he’ll have me to answer to,’ she chuckled up at the man easing her to her feet.
‘You’ll have me quaking in my breeches if I don’t,’ he teased affectionately, slipping his arm around her as she leaned heavily on her stick.
‘And that’s another thing,’ chided Hester, as they made their laborious way across the huge room. ‘I’m not having you appear at the dinner table in your riding breeches—do you hear? Whatever will young Ros think of us?’
Their sparring remarks liberally interspersed with loving laughter, they made their slow progress towards the door—the stooped and fragile old lady and the tall, powerfully built, yet gracefully slender man against whose arm she leant.
They were part of her family—the family she had dreamed since childhood that she would one day find, thought Rosanne, the memory an ache within her that mirrored itself in the eyes that followed them.
But the Cranleighs had made certain she would find no one, she reminded herself bitterly. Paul and Faith Addison were the names entered as her parents on her birth certificate. She closed her eyes, reliving the rage of anguish that had been her grandfather’s when he had seen that document.
‘My God, not only was Cranleigh heartless, he also criminally falsified the records!’ he had raged. ‘Addison was your grandmother’s maiden name—we gave it to Paul as his middle name. Dear God, how could anyone cut off an innocent child from her roots so brutally?’
It had always been George against whom Grandpa Ted’s helpless rage had been directed...but he was a chivalrous old gentleman who would never speak ill of a woman, no matter what he might think of her. Yet now Rosanne found herself wondering if that really was the case. Her every instinct recoiled from the idea of Hester Cranleigh being involved in such cruel deception.
Wishful thinking would change nothing, she told herself harshly, her eyes opening to gaze down at the hands clenching and unclenching agitatedly in her lap. She was a Bryant and needed nothing from the Cranleighs, she reminded herself in an attempt to lessen the black despair engulfing her; she had had all the love, and more, she could ever have asked for from her darling grandfather.
‘Hester won’t be coming down for dinner this evening,’ announced Damian, his face like a thunder-cloud as he strode across the room towards Rosanne. ‘And that harrowing little orphan-Annie scenario to which you subjected her probably set her back months. Just what the hell do you think you’re playing at?’
Rosanne leapt to her feet, her reason deserting her.
‘How dare you speak to me like that?’ she demanded hoarsely, resentment and loathing burning in her eyes. ‘You know absolutely nothing about—’ She broke off, her lips clamping tight with the horrified realisation of what she had been about to hurl at him in thoughtless rage.
‘What is it I know nothing about?’ he demanded, scowling down accusingly at her.
‘Nothing—just forget it,’ she muttered defeatedly. ‘I came here to do a job, not to be harassed and shouted at by you—so just leave me alone!’
‘One thing I have no intention of doing is leaving you alone, my unwelcome Ros,’ he retorted with a grim travesty of a smile. ‘Hester Cranleigh happens to be one of those exceptionally rare creatures among mankind—a generous, warm-hearted and indiscriminately loving person who would never knowingly do even her worst enemy harm. I’d move heaven and earth to ensure her last days are spent in relative peace—and the chances are I’ll end up having to move both, given the memories this work on her husband’s biography will inevitably resurrect. But what she doesn’t need is harrowing tales of your ghastly childhood to—’
‘I never said anything about having had a ghastly childhood,’ cut in Rosanne indignantly. ‘And I certainly don’t go round telling harrowing tales about myself!’
‘Well, they’re harrowing to a woman who’s been forced to relive her past and who could well have had a grandchild around your age, had her daughter not lost the baby. You prattling on about how wonderful your relationship was with your grandfather—how the hell do you think that must have made her feel?’
‘And how was I supposed to know any of that?’ demanded Rosanne, trembling with rage and disbelief. If only he knew, she kept asking herself, what would his reaction be?
‘Well, you know now,’ he snapped, his eyes dark and unyielding as they glared down into hers.
‘What I do know is that you seem to have an extremely fertile imagination,’ she informed him coldly. ‘But you needn’t worry because, as I tried to make clear earlier, I’m not given to talking about my private life to strangers, so Mrs Cranleigh won’t be subjected to any voluntary disclosures from me that are likely to upset her.’
‘And they sure as hell wouldn’t be involuntary, would they, Ros?’ he demanded harshly. ‘It’s only when you lose that so-called Irish temper of yours that you ever let anything slip, isn’t that so?’
Rosanne tried to take a step back from the man towering accusingly above her and found her legs wedged against the edge of the chair.
‘Yet when you’re in control of yourself,’ he continued ruthlessly, ‘I get the feeling that not a single word passes those delightfully tempting lips of yours without having first been coldly weighed up and calculated.’
‘As I said before—you have an extremely fertile imagination,’ said Rosanne hoarsely. She had been here scant hours, she thought dazedly, and already she had been subjected to far more than she had ever dreamed she could take—and the vast majority of it from someone she had never even considered as a potential threat.
‘Ah, so you deny you feel the world owes you something, do you?’ he challenged softly.
‘Why on earth do you think I feel that?’ she protested, aghast.
‘Because it’s written all over you,’ he replied. ‘And I must say I find the idea of your becoming an embittered, shrivelled-up harridan most disturbing,’ he added, placing his hands on her shoulders and drawing her towards him with a casual ease that stunned her into immobility.
‘You do?’ she croaked dazedly.
‘Oh, I most certainly do, darling,’ he chuckled, his hands sliding lightly down her arms. ‘That’s why I feel almost duty-bound to light that fire just begging to be lit inside you—and to do so before it’s too late.’
‘You mean before I become that shrivelled-up harridan you’re so worried I’ll turn into?’ asked Rosanne, the scepticism she had intended not manifesting itself the least satisfactorily in her tone. He was being outrageous and they both knew it, but she desperately hoped that the disturbingly sensuous effect that his nearness and the teasing lightness of his touch were having on her was something of which she alone was aware.
‘I was right—you do have a brain,’ he murmured with an exaggerated sigh of contentment, then suddenly pulled her against the length of him.
‘Well, you can’t have much of a brain if you think I’m going to fall for a line as blatant as that,’ she said, but her intended laugh deteriorated into a choked gasp as she quickly turned her head to avoid the confidently smiling mouth descending towards hers.
‘You’d be surprised, the number of women who respond to that sort of drivel,’ he murmured unabashedly, his lips sending disconcertingly sharp shocks of pleasure through her as they played against her cheek. ‘And frankly, if I were a woman, I’d be inclined to use my fists on the likes of me,’ he added with a chuckle, while his arms slid slowly around her.
‘A thought something along those lines had just crossed my mind,’ said Rosanne, appalled to hear breathless excitement instead of dismissive lightness in her tone. She was almost immediately distracted from that problem by yet another—the fact not so much that his mouth seemed to be making rapid progress towards hers, but that her every instinct now was to turn her head that fraction that would unite their mouths.
‘You