Forgotten Sins. Robyn Donald
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His amused tone further unsettled her.
However, when she heard the soft sounds of him settling into a chair close by she relaxed her taut body, turning her head to look at the little bay. Miles away, over a waste of sea that trembled in the starshine, a faint glow outlined a high hill.
Out of the darkness Jake asked casually, ‘So did you follow your father into the business?’
‘No.’
Silence stretched between them until he prompted, ‘What happened?’
‘My sister and mother were killed in a car accident.’ Aline looked down at her lap and carefully untangled her knotted fingers. ‘My father sold the business and used the money to set up a foundation in their memory.’ She paused, before finishing evenly, ‘And then he killed himself.’
Because she kept her eyes fixed onto the scene outside, she neither heard Jake move nor saw him. As moonlight rimmed the horizon in silver she felt the sofa cushions give beside her. Her skin burned with primitive awareness and she had to concentrate on her breathing.
‘A cruel and cowardly thing to do.’ His voice was corrosively contemptuous.
‘It’s all right,’ she said calmly, holding herself upright to fight an abject weakness that craved the warmth and the solid support of his powerful body. ‘I understood. He loved them very much.’
Jake’s silence had a forbidding undercurrent. She finished, ‘It was almost six years ago; I’ve got over it.’
‘So well that you have to gird yourself up when you speak of it?’ he asked coolly. He ran a swift, unsparing hand the length of her spine from her shoulder to her waist. ‘Pure steel,’ he said thoughtfully. ‘Did you cry for them?’
‘I’m not a freak! Of course I cried for them.’ Aline fought back the spurt of anger to add more temperately, ‘But you can’t cry for ever. Sooner or later you have to leave the past behind.’
‘Something your father was too cowardly to do, apparently.’ His scathing tone revealed his lack of sympathy for those who wallowed in grief. Instead of returning to his chair, he leaned back into the cushions.
Aline stole a swift sideways glance as she inched away from him until stopped by the arm of the sofa. The moon had risen, filling the night with a glowing, coppery radiance that turned in a breath to silver. Against the light Jake’s profile outlined power and force, controlled yet dangerous.
He said, ‘Tell me about your husband. What made him set up that trust?’
Even as he said the words he wondered savagely what the hell he thought he was doing. She’d had too many betrayals in her life and here he was contemplating the possibility of another.
Night-attuned eyes scanned the pale oval of her face, turned resolutely to the rising moon. With her shoulders squared at right angles to a wand-straight spine, her tilted chin, Aline’s whole body expressed a slender, indomitable refusal to surrender. He felt her resentment, knew that the large turquoise eyes would be flat and opaque.
That inconvenient protectiveness—more debilitating than the restless lust that stirred his groin—almost made him give up, but he’d made a promise.
Expecting a flat refusal, a curt suggestion to mind his own business, he was surprised when she answered. ‘Hope Carmichael reminds me a bit of Michael—partly it’s the colouring, so warm, as though the sun’s always shining on them. My sister and mother were like that too—they attracted people like magnets and wherever they went they brought laughter and empathy with them like gifts.’
Jake watched her unblinkingly. Buried deep beneath the cool, level tone was a resigned envy, as though her own talents were worth nothing; her father’s legacy, probably.
Jake found himself thoroughly disliking the man who’d convinced her she wasn’t worth staying alive for.
He enjoyed women, but none had intrigued him like Aline, hiding her passionate intensity beneath a guarded self-possession. He wanted that caged passion for himself.
Now, however, was not the time. Ruthlessly tamping down his familiar hunger, he observed, ‘And Michael Connor?’ She stayed stubbornly silent, so he remarked, ‘As well as a superb yachtsman, he was a brilliant photographer. I’ve seen his Oceans collection.’
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