The Marriage Demand. PENNY JORDAN
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against his own, all soft womanly curves, her mouth sweet and warm. He could feel the temptation to touch her, give in to her, weakening him. His whole purpose in being here was to see justice done, to make sure she was punished for the crime she had committed. He owed it to his godfather to do that much at least for him—and yet here he was instead—
As he felt Faith’s response to him Nash shuddered deeply, fighting to remind himself that the sweet, innocent girl he had so stupidly believed Faith was had never really existed, that the woman she was now knew exactly what she was doing and what effect she was having on him. But even telling himself that couldn’t stop him from answering the passion in her kiss, the invitation of her softly parted lips.
When Faith felt the hot fierce thrust of Nash’s tongue opening her lips, seeking the intimacy of her mouth, stroking sensually against her own tongue, she felt as though she was drowning in wave after wave of increasingly urgent desire. It filled her, stormed her, drew her down to a place of deep, dark, velvet sweetness, a place of hot, bold, dangerous, sensual savagery, a place where she and Nash…
She and Nash!
Faith suddenly realised what she was doing and immediately pulled herself free of Nash, her face flooding with the betraying colour of her distress and confusion, her eyes haunted and dark with the pain of it. She had kissed him as the girl she had been, loving the man he had been, Faith acknowledged as she tried to reconcile what she had just experienced in his arms with the reality of the enmity and distrust that now lay between them.
As she’d pulled away from him Nash had stepped back from her. Faith could see the way his chest was rising and falling with the harshness of his breathing, and she quailed beneath the bitter contemptuous look he was giving her.
‘You’re wasting your time trying those tactics on me, Faith,’ she heard him saying cynically to her. ‘They might work on other men, but I know what you’re really like…’
‘That’s not true. I wasn’t,’ Faith defended herself passionately. ‘You have no right—’
‘Where you and I are concerned, Faith,’ Nash cut across her warningly, ‘right doesn’t come into it.’ What the hell was he doing? Angrily Nash reminded himself of just what Faith was.
Faith bit her bottom lip.
‘My godfather had a right to have the trust he placed in you respected,’ he continued grimly. ‘And he also had a right to expect justice to be done—a right to have just payment made for his death.’
‘I wasn’t responsible for that,’ Faith protested shakily. ‘You can’t make me—’ You can’t make me admit to something I didn’t do, she had been about to say, but before she could do so Nash was interrupting her.
‘I can’t make you what, Faith?’ he asked her with soft venom. ‘I can’t make you pay? Oh, I think you’ll find that I can. You’ve already admitted that you lied by omission on your CV to the Ferndown Foundation. Given their much-publicised belief in old-fashioned moral standards, you must know as well as I do that there’s no way you would have got that job if they’d known the truth. Oh, I’m not trying to say that Ferndown himself wouldn’t have still taken you to bed, but I think we both know it would have been a very different kind of business arrangement he’d have offered.’
‘I was never convicted.’ Faith tried to defend herself helplessly. She felt as though she had strayed into a horrific waking nightmare. Never had she imagined anything like this might happen. She had always known how much Nash blamed and hated her, of course, but to discover that he was now bent on punishing her as he believed the law had failed to do threw her into a state of mind-numbing panic.
‘No, you weren’t, were you?’ Nash agreed, giving her an ugly look.
Faith swallowed against the torturous dryness of her aching throat. Someone had interceded on her behalf, pleaded for clemency for her and won the sympathy and compassion of the juvenile court so that all she had received was a suspended sentence. She’d never known who that person was, and no one would ever know just how heavy she found the burden of the guilt she had denied to Nash. No one—and most of all not the man now so cruelly confronting and threatening her.
‘You knew I was coming here,’ was all she could manage to say, her voice cracking painfully against the dryness of her throat.
‘Yes. I knew,’ Nash agreed coolly. ‘That was a cunning move of yours, to claim that you had no close family or friends to supply a character reference for you and to give the name of your university tutor—a man who only knew that part of your life that came after my godfather’s death.’
‘I did that because there wasn’t anyone else,’ Faith responded sharply. ‘It had nothing to do with being cunning. My mother was my only family, and she…she died.’ She stopped, unable to go on. Her mother had lost her long battle against her heart condition two days after Faith had heard the news of Philip Hatton’s death, which was why she had not been able to attend his funeral.
‘Well, it certainly seems that your tutor thought highly of you,’ Nash continued, giving her a thin-lipped, disparaging smile. ‘Did you offer yourself to him just like you did to me, Faith?’
‘No!’ Her voice rang with repugnance, her feelings too strong for her to conceal and too overwhelming for her to notice the glitter that touched Nash’s eyes before he turned away from her.
When Robert had been briefing her about the project he had told her that the house was being looked after by a skeleton staff whom the Foundation would keep on whilst it was being converted, and Faith tensed now, as the housekeeper walked into the study.
She wasn’t the same housekeeper Faith remembered from all those years ago, and, giving Faith a cold stare, she turned away from her to Nash and told him, ‘I’ve made up your usual room for you, Mr Nash, and I’ve put the young lady in the room you indicated. I’ve left a cold supper in the fridge, but if you want me to come in during the evening whilst you’re here…’
‘Thank you, Mrs Jenson.’ Nash smiled. ‘But that won’t be necessary.’
Faith stared at the housekeeper’s departing back, her heart sinking as she recognised the other woman’s antagonism towards her. But she had more important concerns to address right now—far more important! Swinging round to confront Nash, she whispered, white-faced, ‘You can’t stay here.’
The smile he gave her sent another burst of white-hot fear licking along her veins.
‘Oh, yes, I can,’ he told her softly. ‘I made it a condition of the hand-over, and naturally the Foundation’s board fully understood that I would want to oversee the conversion. Especially since it was being handled by such an inexperienced young architect.’
Faith looked blindly at him. ‘But I’m staying here—I have to—it’s all arranged. You can’t do this to me,’ she protested. ‘It’s…it’s harassment,’ she accused him wildly. ‘It’s…’
‘Justice,’ Nash supplied with soft deadliness.
CHAPTER TWO
‘I’VE instructed Mrs Jenson to put you in your old room.’
Her old room. Hugging her arms around herself for protection, Faith recalled the openly challenging way in which Nash had delivered that piece of information. It had been obvious to her that he was expecting some kind of hostile reaction, but she refused to allow him to manipulate either her actions or her emotions.
Her old room. Pensively she walked across to the small window and looked down at the elegant mini-patchwork of the gardens.
This room had once been part of the house’s original nursery, tucked away in the faux turret that formed such a distinctive part of the house’s architecture. It was an amusing piece of fantasy on the part of its designer, and at fifteen Faith had still been young enough to imagine herself as a fairy tale princess, enjoying the solitude of her private tower.
‘I expect