have to spend the next few days pretending to be someone she wasn’t. If she had known what this so-called arrangement would have entailed, would she have embarked on it in the first place? Regrettably, yes, but knowing that didn’t stop her feeling like a sacrificial lamb as the powerful car roared down the motorway, eating up the miles and removing her further and further from her comfort zone.
While Phillipa was taking time out in Ibiza, doing very little in a tapas restaurant and no doubt enjoying the attention of all the locals as she wafted around in sarongs and summer dresses, here she was, sinking deeper and deeper into a situation that felt like quicksand, all so that her sister could carry on enjoying life without having to pay for the mistakes she had made.
‘Maybe she should have had her stint in prison,’ Violet said, apropos of nothing, and Damien shot her a sideways glance.
Locked in to doing exactly what he required of her, he could sense the strain in the rigid tension of her body. She would rather be anywhere else on earth than sitting here in this car with him. Naturally, he could understand that. More or less. After all, who wanted to be held hostage to a situation they hadn’t courted, paying for a crime they hadn’t committed? Yet was his company so loathsome that she literally found it impossible to make the best of a bad job? She was pressed so tightly against the passenger door that he feared she might fall out were it not for the fact that the doors were locked and she was wearing a seat belt.
There had been times over the past week and a half when some of her resentment had fallen away and she had chatted normally to him. There had also been times when, in the presence of his mother, he had touched her and his keenly attuned antenna had picked up something—something as fleeting as a shadow and yet as substantial as jolt of electricity. Something that had communicated itself to him, travelling down unseen pathways, announcing a response in her that she might not even have been aware of.
‘You don’t mean that,’ he said calmly.
‘Don’t tell me what I mean! If it weren’t for Phillipa I wouldn’t be here now.’
‘But you are and there’s no point dwelling on what ifs. And stop acting as though you’re being escorted to a torture chamber. You’re not. You’ll find my mother’s estate a very relaxing place to spend a few days.’
‘It’s hardly going to be a relaxing situation, is it? I don’t feel relaxed when I’m around you.’ When she thought about seeing him for hours on end, having meals in his company, being submerged in his presence without any respite except when she went to bed, she got a panicky, fluttery feeling in the depths of her stomach.
Without warning, Damien swerved his powerful car off the small road. They were only a matter of half an hour away from the house and the roads had become more deserted the closer they had approached the estate.
‘What are you doing?’ Violet asked warily as he killed the engine and proceeded to lean back at an angle so that he was looking directly at her. In the semi-darkness of the car, with night rapidly settling in around them, she felt the breath catch painfully in her throat. Apprehension jostled with something else—something dark and scary, the same dark, scary thing that had been nibbling away at the edges of her self-control ever since he had told her about Devon.
‘So you don’t feel relaxed around me. Tell me why. Get it off your chest before we reach the house. Okay, you’re not here of your own free will, but there’s no point lamenting that and covering old ground. It is as it is. Have you never been in a position where you had to grit your teeth and get through it?’
‘Of course I have!’
‘Then tell me what the difference is between then and now.’
‘You’re scary, Damien. You’re not like other people. You don’t feel. You’re so...so...cold...’
‘Funny. Cold is not a word that any woman has ever used to describe me...’
Violet felt her heart begin to race and her mouth went dry. ‘I’m not talking about...what you’re like in bed with women...’
‘Would you like to?’
‘No!’
‘Then how would you like me to try and relax you?’
Violet couldn’t detect anything in his voice and yet those words, innocuous as they were, sent a shiver of awareness rippling up and down her spine. She had a vivid, graphic image of him relaxing her, touching her, making her whole body melt until she was nothing more than a rag doll. Was this the real reason why she was so apprehensive? Terrified even? At the back of her mind, was she more scared of just being alone with him than she was of playing a game and acting out a part in a place with which she was unfamiliar? Did her own responses to him, which she constantly tried to squash, frighten her more than he did?
It didn’t seem to matter than he was cold, distant, emotionally absent. On some level, a part of her responded to him in ways that were shocking and unfamiliar.
She could feel the lazy perusal of his eyes on her and she wished she hadn’t embarked on a conversation which now seemed to be unravelling.
‘I’m just nervous,’ she muttered in a valiant struggle to regain her self-composure. ‘I’ll be fine once we get there. I guess.’
‘Try a little harder and you might start to convince me. You get along well with my mother. Is it Dominic?’ The question had to be asked. He hadn’t been in this position for a very long time. He had brought no one to Devon. He had vowed to never again put himself in the position of ever having to witness a negative reaction to his brother. However, this was an unavoidable circumstance and he felt the protective machinery of his defences seal around him like a wall of iron.
‘What are you talking about?’ Violet was genuinely puzzled.
‘Some people feel uncomfortable around the disabled. Is that why you’re so strung out?’ It had taken Annalise to wake him up to that fact, to the truth that there were people who shied away from what they didn’t know or understand, who felt that the disabled were to be laughed at or rigorously avoided. The ripple effect of those reactions were not contained, they always spread outwards to the people who cared. It was good to bring this up now.
‘No!’
‘Sure about that, Violet? Because you know me, you know my mother...the only unknown quantity in the equation is Dominic...’
‘I’m looking forward to meeting your brother, Damien. The only person who makes me feel uncomfortable is you!’ This was the first time she had come near to openly admitting the effect he had on her. She glared at him defensively, feeling at once angry and vulnerable at the admission and collided with eyes that were dark and impenetrable and sent her frayed pulses into overdrive.
All at once and on some deep, unspoken level, Damien could feel the sudden sexual tension in the air. Her words might say one thing but her breathlessness, the way her eyes were huge and fixed on him, the clenching and unclenching of her small fists...a different story.
He smiled, a slow, curving, triumphant smile. Whilst he had privately acknowledged the unexpected appeal she had for him, whilst he had been honest about the charge he got from a woman who was so different in every possible way to the type of women he had become used to, he had pretty much decided that a Hands Off stance was necessary in her case.
But they were going to be together in Devon and, like an expert predator, he could smell the aroma of her unwelcome but decidedly strong sexual attraction towards him. She was as skittish as a kitten and it wasn’t because she was nervous about spending a week in the company of his mother. Nor was she hesitant about his brother. He had detected the sincerity in her voice when he had suggested that she might be.
He took his time looking at her before turning away with a casual shrug and turning the key in the ignition. Her presence next to him for the remainder of the very short drive felt like an aphrodisiac. Potent, heady and very much not in the plan.
The drive up to the grand house was tree-lined, through wrought-iron gates which he could never