No Longer Forbidden(38)

Yet it was another windy day of scudding clouds and intermittent rain.

Nic was locked in his office down the hall, not looking for her. Or rather he had come looking and then left without touching her, leaving her heart as skinned as her knee, tight and tender and itchy. Which was juvenile.

The only way to suffocate her sense of irrelevance was to face up to another heartache of equal anguish. She went into the master bedroom and spent a long time with a sleeve held to her cheek, a collar to her nose, whole gowns clutched to her chest.

“You’re a little old for dress-up, aren’t you?” Nic’s voice, rich and cool as ice cream, broke the silence an hour later, prompting a shiver of guilt and pleasure.

Rowan’s first instinct was to toss aside the scarf she was tying over her hair and throw herself at him. She made herself finish knotting it in the famed Cassandra O’Brien style, then faced him. “People always tell me I look like Mum and I say thank you. But is it a compliment?”

“She was very beautiful, and so are you—but not because you resemble her.”

Rowan blushed, but more because the admiration in his gaze was unabashedly sexual. She swallowed back the silly excited lump rising in her throat, trying to hold her wobbly smile steady as she loosened the scarf.

“What did you come in here for, full of such extravagant compliments? Keep that up and you’ll see how much I resemble her when it comes to …” she tilted him her mother’s infamous man-eater smile “… encouraging male admiration.”

Something fierce and dangerous flashed in his Nordic blue eyes before he strolled forward on predatory feet. “I’m quite aware of how much you encourage it. I’ve seen you lay on the charm time and again. Why? Are you really as insecure as she was?”

His disparagement didn’t allow her for one minute to think his attitude stemmed from jealousy or possessiveness.

Yanking the scarf off her neck with a burn of her nape and a cloud of painfully familiar sandalwood, Rowan replaced it on the hook beside the mirror. “How am I supposed to know what I am when I’ve always been told who to speak to, where to go and how to act?”

She moved away from him, angry and hurt that he was judging her and, yes, insecure. How could she develop an identity if her ability to make decisions had so rarely been tested?

“When Mum sent me to Paris I thought I’d finally be able to make more of my own choices, but it didn’t work out that way. That was partly my fault, of course. The more I put into dance, the more I wanted to succeed to prove to myself I could. It’s not easy to walk away from that much investment. It’s like gambling. I kept thinking the next production would be the one that put me on the front of the stage, not the back. Mum would finally be happy and I’d be free to strike out then.” She hitched her shoulder, lashed by how nascent and unrealistic that dream had been.

“And when you finally did have the chance you drank your face off and scared yourself,” he said, from where he’d stayed behind her.

“I did,” she agreed with a chuckle of defeated acknowledgment, elbows sharp in her palms and shoulder blades aching with tension. “The grief and guilt didn’t help with that.” She sighed, still ashamed of the way she’d behaved, but she had to move past it. She was determined to.

She pivoted to offer him a laissez-faire smile.

“So now I’m back at ground zero—the only place where I sometimes had moments of feeling like I knew who I was and what I wanted. I’m hoping for inspiration, but it eludes me. You’re a worldly man. Give me advice on what to do with my life.”

Rowan’s expansion on the picture of a life hemmed in by her mother’s dominating personality disturbed Nic. It was such a different upbringing from the fortunate one he’d judged it to be. To keep from dwelling on the struggles that pulled far more empathy out of him than he was comfortable with, he focused on her oblique request, touring his father’s suite to see if his idea was feasible.

The rooms sprawling from the southwestern turret of the house were befitting of a billionaire media mogul—expansive and masculine, yet with enough womanly touches to prove one had lived here with him. Nic briefly glanced in the walk-in closet, approving of its size, reassured by contents that were even more extravagant than he’d expected. He detoured out of interest to the well-appointed lounge, with its balcony overlooking the sea, noted the his and hers bathrooms and acknowledged the bed—big as the Titanic.

Rowan watched him with an inquisitive frown. “Have you never been in here before?”

“Never. You?”