walls were grey—the subtle colour of an oyster shell—and it provided the perfect backdrop for many paintings which hung there. Amber blinked as she looked around. It was like being in an art gallery. He was obviously into modern art and he had a superb eye, she conceded reluctantly. His curved desk looked like a work of art itself and in one corner of the room was a modern sculpture of a naked woman made out of some sort of resin. Amber glanced over at it before quickly looking away, because there was something uncomfortably sensual about the woman’s stance and the way she was cupping her breast with lazy fingers.
She looked up to find Conall watching her, his midnight eyes shuttered as he indicated the chair in front of his desk, but Amber was much too wired to be able to sit still while facing him. Something told her that being subjected to that mocking stare would be unendurable.
So start clawing some power back, she told herself fiercely. Be sweet. Make him want to help you.
He was rich enough to give her a temporary stay of execution until her father got back from his ashram and everything could be cleared up. She walked over to one of the windows and stared down onto the street as two teenage girls strolled past, chewing gum and giggling—and she felt a momentary pang of wistfulness for the apparent ease of their lives and a sense of being carefree which had always eluded her.
‘I haven’t got all day,’ he warned. ‘So let’s cut to the chase. And before you start fluttering those long eyelashes at me, or trying to work the convent-schoolgirl look—which, let me tell you, isn’t doing it for me—let me spell out a few things. I’m not giving you money without something in return and I’m not letting you have an apartment which is way too big for you. So if the sole purpose of this unscheduled visit is to throw yourself on my mercy asking for funds—then you’re wasting your time.’
For a moment Amber was struck dumb because she couldn’t ever remember anyone speaking to her like that. Up until the age of four she’d been a princess living in a palace, and then she’d been catapulted straight into a nightmare when her parents had split up. The next ten years had been several degrees of horrible and she hadn’t known which way to turn. And when she’d been brought back to live in her father’s house after her mother’s accident—seriously cramping his style with wife number whatever it had been—everyone had tiptoed round her.
Nobody had known how to deal with a grieving and angry teenager and neither had she. Her confidence had been completely punctured and so had her self-esteem. Her moods had been wild and unpredictable and she’d quickly realised that she could get people to do what she wanted them to do. Amber had learnt that if her lips wobbled in a certain way, then people fell over themselves to help her. She’d also realised that rubbing your toe rather obsessively over the carpet and staring at it as if it contained the secret of the universe was pretty effective, too, because it made people want to draw you out of yourself.
But there was something about Conall Devlin which made her realise he would see right through any play-acting or attempts at manipulation. His eyes were much too keen and bright and intelligent. They were fixed on her now in question so that, for one bizarre moment, she felt as if he might actually be able to read her thoughts, and that he certainly wouldn’t like them if he could.
‘Then how am I expected to survive?’ she questioned. Defiantly she held up her wrist so that her diamond watch glittered, like bright sunlight on water. ‘Do you want me to start pawning the few valuable items I have?’
His eyes gleamed as he plucked an imaginary violin from the empty air and proceeded to play it, but then he put his big hands down on the surface of his desk and stared at her, his face sombre.
‘Why don’t you spare me the sob story, Amber?’ he said. ‘And start explaining some of these.’
Suddenly he upended a large manila envelope and spread the contents out over his desk and Amber stared at the collection of photos and magazine clippings with a feeling of trepidation.
‘Where did you get these?’
He made an expression of distaste, as if they were harbouring some form of contamination. ‘Your father gave them to me.’
Amber knew she’d made it into various gossip columns and some of those ‘celebrity’ magazines which adorned the shelves of supermarket checkouts. Some of the articles she’d seen and some she hadn’t—but she’d never seen them all together like this, like a pictorial history of her life. Fanned across his desk like a giant pack of cards, there were countless pictures of her. Pictures of her leaving nightclubs and pictures of her attending gallery and restaurant openings. In every single shot her dress looked too short and her expression seemed wild. But then the flash of the camera was something that she loved and loathed in equal measure. Wasn’t she stupidly grateful that someone cared enough to want to take her photo—as if to reassure her that she wasn’t invisible? Yet the downside was that it always made her feel like a butterfly who had fluttered into the collector’s room by mistake—who’d had her fragile wings pierced by the sharp pins which then fettered her to a piece of card...
She looked up from the photos and straight into his eyes and nobody could have failed to see the condemnation in their midnight depths. Don’t let him see the chink in your armour, she told herself fiercely. Don’t give him that power.
‘Quite good, aren’t they?’ she said carelessly as she pulled out the chair and sat down at last.
At that point, Conall could have slammed his fist onto the desk in sheer frustration, because she was shameless. Completely shameless. Worse even than he’d imagined. Did she think he was stupid—or was the effect of her dressing up today like some off-duty nun supposed to have him eating out of her hand?
But the crazy thing was that—no matter how contrived it was—on some subliminal level, the look actually worked. No matter what he’d said and no matter how much he tried to convince himself otherwise, he couldn’t seem to take his eyes off her. With her thick black hair scraped back from her face like that, you could see the perfect oval of her face and get the full impact of those long-lashed emerald eyes. Was she aware that she had the kind of looks which would make men want to fight wars for her? Conall’s mouth twisted. Of course she was. And she had been manipulating that beauty, probably since she first hit puberty.
He remembered his reaction when Ambrose had asked him for his help and then shown him all the photos. There had been a moment of stunned silence as Conall had looked at them and felt a powerful hit of lust which had been almost visceral. It had been like a punch to the guts. Or the groin. There had been one in particular of her wearing some wispy little white dress, managing to look both intensely pure and intensely provocative at the same time. Guilt had rushed through him as he’d stared at her father and shaken his head.
‘Get someone else to do the job,’ he’d said gruffly.
‘I can’t think of anyone else who would be capable of handling her,’ had been Ambrose’s candid reply. ‘Nor anyone I would trust as much as I do you.’
And wasn’t that the worst thing of all? That Ambrose trusted him to do right by his daughter? So that, not only had Conall agreed, but he was now bound by a deep sense of honour to do the decent thing by the man who had saved him from a life of crime.
It would have been easier if he could just have signed her a cheque and told her to go away and sort herself out, but Ambrose had been adamant that she needed grounding, and he knew the old man’s determination of old.
‘She needs to discover how to live a decent life and to stop sponging off other people,’ he said. ‘And you are going to help her, Conall.’
And
