to make as she slept, had woken up in a sweat more than once after imagining her there beside him, only to know the agonising disappointment of pent up desire when he found he was once again alone, that Shay now shared his brother Ricky’s bed, giving him all the passion she had once so freely given him.
He had never forgotten the look on Ricky’s face when he had first been introduced to Shay; his younger brother had looked as if it were Christmas and New Year all rolled into one, with Shay the glittering angel on top of the tree. To her credit Shay hadn’t looked at him the same way for several months, but finally it had come. Lyon could still feel the pain in his gut at knowing she was no longer his.
‘Lyon?’
He turned sharply, scowling. ‘What is it, Jenny?’ he asked tersely.
She smiled engagingly. ‘I wondered if there were anything I could do for you?’
He remembered other times he had received completely different offers from this beautiful woman, occasions when he hadn’t been averse to her providing him with the physical relief he needed, even on the bed in the adjoining room once. ‘A whisky,’ he requested harshly, ignoring how hurt she looked at his coldness. ‘And just keep them coming until we land.’ He was going to need to be numb from the feet up to cope with knowing Shay was only feet away from him after imagining every woman in his bed was her for the last five years.
‘And Mrs Falconer, can I get her anything?’ Jenny recovered quickly from his snub.
‘Nothing,’ he bit out, staring broodingly at the closed door to the bedroom.
He was still staring broodingly at the door, Shay on the other side of it, when they touched down at Heathrow Airport hours later.
HE HAD been drinking. She had known it the moment she came out of the bedroom to join him to leave the plane. Lyon wasn’t offensive, didn’t look or act drunk, but she knew he was one of those people who became more controlled after consuming alcohol, the tawny eyes narrowed, his mouth a compressed line of tension.
She spared him only a brief glance before turning to the mirror to put the hat back on her recently brushed hair, several tendrils having escaped as she lay sleepless on the bed. She had known she wouldn’t really be able to sleep, hadn’t slept without medical help since Ricky disappeared, but the thought of spending all that time alone with Lyon was abhorrent to her. But as she lay on the bed she had almost been able to feel his eyes burning her flesh through the closed door, and she clung to the sanctuary of the bedroom, preferring to save her energy—and emotional strength—for the ordeal of returning to Falconer House.
‘We can leave now, if you’re ready.’ Lyon watched her gloweringly.
She pulled the black lace of her hat down over her face before turning to look at him, knowing by the scowl on his face that he disliked this partial shield to her emotions. The time when she gave a damn what Lyon liked or disliked was long gone!
She gave a haughty inclination of her head, as coolly composed as when they had faced each other in Los Angeles all those hours ago, ignoring the hand he put out to guide her down the steps to the waiting airport cars, one for them, the other for the coffin containing Ricky’s lifeless body, the law deeming the funeral director with the car should take over now.
She bore the tedium of Lyon’s dealing with the passport officials with a bored look on her face, secretly wondering how much longer she could keep up this cool façade as the man seemed to linger over clearing them. It was true that the shock of losing Ricky had numbed her, that her independent career from the Falconer empire had given her a confidence she had hitherto lacked, but this act of cool emotionalism was causing more of a strain than she felt able to cope with. But not for anything would she admit to Lyon how all this was affecting her.
‘Could we hurry this up, please?’ Lyon suddenly pressed as the man continued to linger over checking their passports. ‘As I’m sure you can imagine, my sister-in-law is under severe strain.’
The man glanced sympathetically at Shay, receiving a wan smile in return, miraculously seeming to find no further delay with their documents.
Once out in the general flow of people at the airport, Shay felt her panic rising, flinching from the cameras as they clicked practically in her face as each newspaper representative tried to get the best picture of Richard Falconer’s widow, questions coming at them from all directions, the hand that grasped her arm making her pull away.
‘It’s me, you little fool,’ Lyon rasped, pushing his way through the reporters, pulling her along with him. ‘Where the hell is the damned car?’ he swore roughly as they emerged out into the English summer sunshine.
‘Mr Falconer—’
‘Thank God.’ He turned to the chauffeur gratefully, guiding Shay to the waiting limousine, the windows discreetly darkened for privacy.
‘I’m sorry about this, Mr Falconer.’ The man preceded them. ‘But there’s been a bomb scare, and the police are—’
‘Yes, yes,’ Lyon dismissed tersely, still running the gauntlet of the press. ‘Let’s just get out of here.’
‘Thank you, Jeffrey.’ Shay smiled at the man as he opened the back door for her, sliding inside and across the seat as Lyon climbed in next to her, cameras still clicking, the questions still coming until Jeffrey firmly closed the door, enclosing them in cool, silent peace.
‘I’d like to know how they found out when we were arriving,’ Lyon scowled heavily.
Shay had a more resigned view, knew that the press were always able to find out what they wanted to know. She had been badgered by the worldwide media as soon as Ricky’s plane went down, the last weeks a nightmare of trying to escape them, finally having to move from the apartment she had shared with Ricky the last three years and move into a hotel, security guards placed outside her room to protect her privacy and grief.
‘Does it matter?’ she sighed, the incident just another horror in the nightmare her life had become since Ricky’s crash.
‘Yes, it—No,’ Lyon amended with controlled violence as he saw the unconscious vulnerability in deep purple eyes, the pale skin beneath those fathomless depths looking bruised and translucent. ‘No,’ he sighed heavily. ‘I don’t suppose it does.’
Shay didn’t even question the way Lyon had stepped down from his undoubted anger at their arrangements being known by the press, shut him out of her mind completely as they began the drive to the house, grateful for the self-discipline she had learnt from her writing, needing mental as well as physical control to maintain the daily schedule of work she set for herself in order to meet her deadlines. It would have been so easy to have sat back and lived on Ricky’s wealth, to have treated her writing as a mere hobby to keep herself amused. But she hadn’t wanted that, had made it into a career. She felt an inner peace now that she had.
God, why was she wandering in this way! They would be at Falconer House soon, the scene of her greatest happiness, greatest humiliation, and finally her greatest pain.
It was a huge house, big enough for several families to live in comfortably, but she still didn’t know how she had managed to live there for two years after her marriage to Ricky, didn’t know how she was going to visit there now. Because visiting was all she intended doing. She couldn’t stay on there, not even if Lyon asked her to do so. And she knew that he was going to ask her to do just that, that it probably wouldn’t even be a request but an order. It was
