Back in the Lion's Den. Elizabeth Power
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didn’t have to! It was there in every last criticism of everything I said—everything I did. Your mother could scarcely contain her shock at him marrying a barmaid! Albeit a temporary one, until I could get my career on track! But that was the crux of the matter, wasn’t it? You were determined not to like me from the start.’
‘I’m not responsible for my mother. As for me, I only acted on what I observed with my own eyes.’
‘And what was that? Besides my supposed infidelity, that is?’
Condemnation set his features in harsh lines, so that he looked like one of the warring Celts whose blood still pumped through his proud, pulsing veins. ‘You know very well. Niall was weak where money was concerned. He was living above his means and you did nothing but encourage him.’
Because she hadn’t known. Because she’d been too young to recognise the signs: his irritability, his drinking too much, his mood swings.
‘“Bled him dry”,’ she reminded him. ‘That was the phrase I believe you used.’
He didn’t negate or deny it. How could he? Sienna thought grimly. He wasn’t a man to pull his punches, or hide behind lies and subterfuge—as she had—whatever else he might have done.
‘I can’t talk about this now,’ she uttered quickly, hearing the last track on the album she’d selected earlier come to an abrupt end. ‘I’ve got to get back to my class.’ This meeting with Niall’s brother was more traumatic than she’d ever have imagined possible, and it was with aching relief that she pulled herself away.
‘You’ll do as I ask, Sienna.’
She stopped in her tracks, swinging round to face him again, her eyes wide with defiance and disbelief.
‘Oh, will I? And what do you intend to do to try and bully me into it? Concoct some tale about my being an unsuitable mother and get an injunction to try and take Daisy away from me, as you threatened before?’ Beneath her bravado was a sick anxiety that he might try to do just that—somehow use his power and influence to get even with her for how he believed she had treated Niall.
‘I didn’t come here for that.’
‘No. You just want me to hand her over without all the hassle. Well, I’m sorry, Conan, but the answer’s still no. Daisy’s not going anywhere without me, and I’m certainly not putting myself back into the lion’s den, thank you very much!’
‘Oh, I think you will, Sienna.’
‘And what makes you so sure?’
‘Conscience, sweetheart. If you have one.’
Her small chin came up as she said bitterly, ignoring the patronising way in which he had addressed her, ‘Like you, you mean?’
She didn’t wait to catch any sniping response.
Making sure Daisy was asleep, Sienna kissed the little girl’s soft cheek before extinguishing her bedside lamp, unable to resist stroking the silky chestnut hair that curled against the pillow.
Like Niall’s, she thought poignantly, pulling the duvet up over the chubby arm wrapped around her pink hippopotamus. Daisy had inherited her father’s colouring, not hers.
Going back downstairs, she opened the back door to let in a big bouncing bundle of white shaggy fur, filled a bowl with the dog’s supper, and then started the ironing—normal things she did every day, except tonight things felt anything but normal.
Meeting Conan again had opened up all the unhappiness of the past, forcing her to dwell on wounds she’d thought had healed, forcing her to think, to remember.
She had been just twenty when she had met Niall.
With her parents having sold their UK home to live abroad, Sienna had chosen to stay in England on her own. Her parents had always done their own thing. They liked sun, sea and sand, and Sienna had been happy for them, while relishing the prospect of occasional holidays in Spain.
She had been working as a receptionist at her local gym when she had met Niall. He had been a regular member there, and had often come into the bar where she had sometimes helped when it was short-staffed. She had instantly warmed to his wicked sense of humour. He’d been witty and charming, and just a little bit crazy, and she’d been swept off her feet before she had known what hit her.
Her parents had flown over for the wedding, which had been a short civil ceremony after a whirlwind romance. Faith and Barry Swann and Niall’s mother—a barrister’s widow—were poles apart, and while they’d tried to befriend her new mother-in-law it was clear that Avril Ryder hadn’t really warmed towards them. It had also been clear to Sienna from the start that the woman believed she had trapped her youngest son into marriage by getting pregnant, which was something over which Sienna had been silently smug, proving her wrong when Daisy had arrived exactly a year to the day that they had married.
Conan had been at the wedding, interrupting some important business conference he’d been attending in Europe, and the cool touch of his lips on her cheek as he’d wished her well after the ceremony had been as formal as it had been unsettling.
It had been clear, though, that Niall looked up to his brother, and Sienna had understood why. Already approaching his late twenties to his half-brother’s twenty-three, and spearheading a global telecommunications company, Conan Ryder had been a mind-blowing success—dynamic, wealthy and sophisticated. It had been apparent to Sienna from the start who Niall was trying to emulate in the way he spoke, in his image, even in that air of glacial composure that Conan exuded.
Niall had been a top sales executive working at Conan’s head office, though not before pulling himself out of university and destroying his mother’s hopes of him following his late father into the legal profession. Nevertheless, he had been good at his job, and determined that she would reap the benefits—from the clothes he had bought her to every conceivable luxury she had wanted in their modern four bedroom home, a house he had mortgaged only a few miles from his half-brother’s Surrey mansion.
But he’d played as hard as he worked. Often too hard, Sienna remembered painfully, as she ironed the back of one of Daisy’s little blouses for at least the third time. Because it had been that reckless sense of fun and that daredevil attitude towards almost everything that had killed him during those five days in Copenhagen at that stag party that had gone terribly wrong …
Pain and remorse pressed like twin bars against her chest, and she forced herself to breathe deeply to ease the anguish.
While he’d been alive he’d been driven: always trying to compete—almost obsessively so, she reflected—with his elder brother. But Niall hadn’t had Conan’s focus—or his ruthlessness, she thought bitterly. Because when Niall had got into dire financial straits and had asked his brother for help, just a couple of weeks before he’d died, Conan had refused. Niall had been devastated. It was only then that he’d told her how far they had been living above their means and just how much money they owed. She’d been too young and far too naive to realise it!
Both Conan and her mother-in-law had blamed her for her husband’s overspending, and for the worry she had caused, which had led to his drinking and his ultimate accident.
‘It wasn’t my fault!’ she’d shot back at Conan that last day, just a week after Niall’s funeral, hurting, agonised, reproaching herself for going along with everything Niall had expected of her—given her—even when her instincts had told her that he was wrong, or that it seemed he was being far too extravagant. ‘And if you’d helped him when he came to you for help perhaps he wouldn’t have got so drunk as not to know what he was doing!’ she had flung at him bitterly, too overcome by grief to care what she was saying.
She had wanted desperately to cry. To break down. To alleviate the pain pressing like a dead weight against her chest. But standing there in the sumptuous drawing room of Conan Ryder’s Regency home, where she’d come to return the last of Niall’s things, her tears wouldn’t come. She had felt only a numbing emptiness that