had prayed that he might, so deeply in love with him by then that there had scarcely been any room in her thoughts or her emotions for anyone else but him. He had been her ideal, her hero, and as the girl in her had given way to the growing woman her longing for him had increased and intensified.
From hardly daring to look at his mouth, for fear of blushing because of her desire to feel its hard male strength against her own, she had found herself focusing boldly on it, the words she had known she must never speak pleading in silent longing inside her head.
Kiss me.
Well, today, ten years too late, he had kissed her, but not as she had longed for him, dreamed of him doing then, with love and tenderness, a look of bemused adoration in his eyes as he begged her for her love. Oh, no. The kiss he had given her today had been hard, angry, pulsing with the violence of his emotions and his antagonism towards her.
So why, then, had she responded to it with a passion that she had never given to any of the other men she had dated?
The sharp irritation of her inner voice unnerved her. She had responded to him because her memories had tricked her, that was all. She had thought…forgotten…She had believed that it was Nash as she had once imagined him to be that she was kissing. And as for those other men—well, they had just been casual dates, nothing serious, and she had kissed them more out of a sense of fair play than anything else. Kisses were all that she had wanted to share with them.
Only with Robert had she sensed that maybe…just maybe something deeper and stronger might eventually grow to life between them. But these days Faith was very protective of her emotions, very cautious about who she allowed into her life. These days a man like Nash Connaught would have no chance whatsoever of bedazzling her into making the same dangerous mistakes she had made at fifteen.
So far as Faith was concerned now, the most important cornerstone for a relationship was mutual trust. Without that…Without that there could be nothing—or nothing that she would want, that she would ever consider worth having, as she had good and bitter cause to know.
In her bleakest moments after the death of Philip and her mother the only thing that had kept her going had been the knowledge that Philip had trusted her—enough to make that wonderfully unexpected provision in his will for her.
When she had first learned that Philip had left money specially to finance her studies and her passage through university Faith had hardly been able to believe it. Prior to that she had told herself that the only way she had any hope whatsoever of qualifying as an architect would be to find herself a job and then study in her spare time, which she had known meant that her goal would be virtually impossible for her to reach.
But it hadn’t just been the discovery that Philip had left her the money that had meant so much to her. What had mattered even more was knowing that despite everything that had happened he had, after all, believed in her. There was, in Faith’s opinion, no price that could be put on that. It was a gift beyond price; a gift so precious that even now just to think about it filled her eyes with tears and an emotion she knew someone like Nash would never in a million lifetimes be able to understand.
Nash, to whom everything was black or white…Nash, who could condemn a person without allowing them to defend themselves…Nash, in whose eyes she was a thief and a murderer…
Angrily Nash headed towards the house. Just for a heartbeat then, seeing Faith standing at the window, the sunlight dancing on her hair, lingering on its stunning and unique mixture of differing shades of blonde, from purest silver to warmest gold, he had been inexorably swept back in time.
He had known right from the moment his godfather had announced that he intended to invite her to spend the summer at Hatton that she spelled trouble, but he hadn’t imagined then just how fatally accurate his prediction was going to be. The kind of trouble he had anticipated had had nothing to do with theft and…and murder.
His mouth hardened, the expression in his eyes bleak. Like his godfather, he had been totally taken in by Faith, believing her to be a naïve young girl, never imagining…Bitterness joined the bleakness in his eyes. Hell, he had even wanted to protect her, believing then that her advances to him were totally innocent and that she’d had no idea of what she was really inviting when she’d looked at him, her face burning hot with the thoughts he could see so plainly in those limpid dark blue eyes.
He had even derived a certain amount of painful amusement from the way she’d looked at his mouth, semi-boldly, semi-shyly, but wholly provocatively, wondering just what she would do if he actually responded to her invitation and gave in to the fierce heat of desire she was creating inside him.
But she had been fifteen, a child, as he had sternly and furiously reminded himself more times than he cared to count during that brief summer, and no matter how much his body might have reacted, telling him in increasingly urgent and physical terms just how it viewed her, his mind had known that to give in to what he was feeling would have been dishonourable and wrong.
She would not always be fifteen, he had told himself. One day she would be adult, and then…Then he would make her pay over and over again for every one of those naïvely tormenting looks she had given him, pay in kiss after kiss for all those kisses he had ached to steal from her but had known he must not.
How many nights had he lain awake, tormented by the heat of his own need, virtually unable to stop himself from groaning out aloud at the thought of how she would feel lying against him? Her skin silken soft, her mouth as perfect and perfumed as Gertrude Jekyll’s warmly scented roses, her eyes as blue as the campanula that grew amongst them. God, but he had wanted her, ached for her, longed for her. Hell, he had even been stupid enough to make plans for his future that had included her…for their future…
Initially not even to himself had he dared to acknowledge just how much he’d looked forward to seeing her waiting for him, standing at her turret window, a modern-day Rapunzel imprisoned away from him, not by her father but by her age and his own moral convictions.
It had left a residue of bitterness to be forced to recognise that the innocence he had striven so hard to protect from his own desire had been little more than a fiction created to conceal the real Faith. But his personal bitterness was nothing to the anguish and the anger he felt on behalf of his godfather. The anguish, the anger and the guilt. If he had not been so bemused by Faith, nor so wrapped up in the excitement of beginning the property empire that had now made him such a wealthy man, he might have seen more clearly what was happening and what Faith really was.
But there was no way he was going to fall into that same trap a second time.
The shock of discovering that she was working for the very foundation he had chosen to benefit from his godfather’s bequest had caused him to take the first flight from New York to London, despite the fact that he had been in the middle of lengthy discussions involving the sale of leases on some of his most expensive properties. His initial intention had been to warn Robert Ferndown of just what Faith was, but then he had heard Robert eulogising about her abilities, and Faith herself, and he had been caught up in a flood of savage anger against her.
It had been then that he had decided to punish her for the crime she had committed, to punish her not swiftly and immediately, with a clean, sharp cut, but to give her a taste of what his godfather had suffered…to keep her on a knife-edge of fear and dread, never knowing when the final blow was going to fall.
He let himself into the house and paused as he walked past the open study door. He could still taste Faith’s kiss on his lips, still almost feel her against his body, feel his own unwanted reaction to her. Angrily he turned on his heel. What
