how had he ended up doing just that, in the certain knowledge that what he had entered into was just a temporary contract? Stopping dead abruptly, Keir looked down at the thick gold band now encircling his wedding finger, twisting it round and round in an uneasy movement. How come he had compromised all his ideals in this way?
Because he was so much older now—and he would say wiser. He knew that such ideals were nothing but fantasies, impossible to achieve. He had been hit over the head with a strong dose of reality that had driven all the dreams from his mind. These days he was realist enough to know that sometimes a pragmatic compromise was the best you could come away with.
‘Keir, darling, I’m so glad to see you…’
This time the hand on his arm was much smaller, finer, totally feminine. Adorned with an extravagant display of gold and diamonds, the slender fingers were tipped with long, pointed nails painted in a violent shade of red. As Keir stiffened instinctively a wave of some heavy, musky perfume assailed his nostrils, turning his stomach.
He would recognise that overpowering perfume anywhere, just as he would recognise the sound of her voice and that false-toned ‘darling’ that they both knew she didn’t mean in the slightest. She only used it for the benefit of everyone else around, in order to maintain the illusion—in reality they had never felt anything other than total hatred for each other.
‘Lucille.’ He bit the word out, her name leaving a foul, bitter taste in his mouth.
Lucille Alexander. The stepmother from hell and his own personal demon. The woman he had described with deliberate understatement as the one last ‘complication’ he’d had left to deal with in order to be free of all the problems that had been weighing him down over the past ten years. The woman whose greedy demands had forced him into this marriage that was not a marriage but a purely business arrangement.
And as he turned slowly to face her the wave of revulsion he couldn’t control left him in no doubt that the prospect of getting her out of his life once and for all made the pretence and subterfuge totally worthwhile.
CHAPTER THREE
‘IS SOMETHING wrong?’
‘Wrong?’
Keir’s voice was distracted, his attention obviously elsewhere, and the dark-eyed gaze he turned in his wife’s direction was hooded, shaded with hidden thoughts that she couldn’t begin to understand.
‘Why should anything be wrong? After all, we’re both now going to get exactly what we want.’
What had put that cynical note into his voice, roughening it until it scraped her already over-sensitive nerves raw? But the truth was that ever since Keir had come back to her side at the start of the formal wedding lunch it had been clear that his mood had changed dramatically. The playful teasing that had so disturbed her had vanished, replaced instead by a darker, brooding distance.
‘Well, you could at least act as if you were just the slightest bit pleased to be married to me,’ Sienna hissed in the whisper necessitated by her determination not to be heard by her mother at her side and Keir’s best man at his. ‘If you continue to stare at your plate as if it was poisoned, and push the food around without tasting any of it, people will begin to wonder just what’s wrong with you!’
Especially those who had just witnessed his Oscar-winning performance as the most lovelorn and devoted husband of the century.
‘Right now you look more like the condemned man who can’t even bring himself to eat his last meal…’
No, anger was the wrong approach entirely, drawing a disturbing response from him. Seeing the rejection that flared in his eyes, the way that one long-fingered hand clenched over the starched white damask of his napkin, Sienna hastily adjusted her tone and expression in the hope of appeasing him.
‘It won’t be long before this is all over,’ she tried soothingly. ‘There’s just the traditional speeches and cutting the cake and then we can call it a day.’
Thankfully, she hadn’t given in to the urgings of her friends and planned an evening party to round off the celebrations. She had been unable to square the idea with her already uncomfortable conscience, seeing it as taking hypocrisy way too far. And with Keir in this mood it would have been more like a wake than any sort of revelry.
‘We’ll soon be able to be on our own again.’
‘And that will be so much better, will it?’ Keir snapped coldly. ‘Mr and Mrs Keir Alexander—oh, I’m sorry, I forgot. You want this marriage so little that you don’t even think it’s worth changing your name. So I see very little reason why you should be looking forward to our being alone…’
Sienna was astonished at how much his words stung. They were largely the truth, after all, so there was no reason for the sudden twist of pain she was experiencing.
With a sensation like the slow trickle of icy water creeping down her back, she found herself once more in the grip of the appalling unease of earlier that afternoon. It was as if some alien had moved in, taking over the shell of the person she had thought was Keir and replacing him with a total stranger.
But he was a stranger she was now legally tied to. For better for worse. For richer for poorer—in their case, definitely for richer, unless something went terribly wrong. Which it might do if she couldn’t jolt him out of this black mood. Already interested eyes were turning their way, obviously made curious by their absorbed concentration on each other, the muttered conversation that was so clearly not made up of words of love.
There was just one way she knew to get through to him.
‘Keir…’ Deliberately she gentled her voice, making it softly sensual. ‘Darling, don’t be like this…’
She wasn’t sure which startled him the most. The murmured endearment or the gentle hand she laid on his. But she couldn’t be unaware of his reaction, seeing it in the sudden widening of his dark eyes. It was there under her fingertips too, in the tension that stiffened his muscles against her, the threat of rejection that he only just controlled in time. She knew how tempted he was to repulse her gesture in a response that would be totally inappropriate to the impression they were trying to create, and she knew just as surely exactly when he decided not to use it.
‘I’m sorry.’ It was a low, deep sigh. ‘I’m just a bear with a sore head today.’
‘A sore head!’
It was Sienna’s mother who had caught the comment, her laughter-warmed tones lightening the atmosphere dramatically as she echoed his words, leaning forward to smile into Keir’s dark, shuttered face.
‘Would that be the result of rather too exuberant a stag night last night, son-in-law?’ she asked teasingly. ‘I would have thought you and your friends’d have more sense…’
‘Now don’t blame me!’ James, the best man, joined in on a note of amused protest. ‘Whatever Keir got up to last night, he did it on his own! And as for a stag night, all we had was a very sedate meal together at the beginning of the week, so you can’t hold me responsible for the way he’s feeling today. Unless you had some sort of debauched evening that you didn’t invite me along to, you rogue,’ he added, with a none too subtle dig of his elbow into Keir’s ribs.
‘Nothing of the sort,’ his friend returned, switching
