Already approaching his late twenties to his half-brother’s twenty-three, and spearheading a global telecommunications company, Conan Ryder had been a mind-blowing success—dynamic, wealthy and sophisticated. It had been apparent to Sienna from the start who Niall was trying to emulate in the way he spoke, in his image, even in that air of glacial composure that Conan exuded.
Niall had been a top sales executive working at Conan’s head office, though not before pulling himself out of university and destroying his mother’s hopes of him following his late father into the legal profession. Nevertheless, he had been good at his job, and determined that she would reap the benefits—from the clothes he had bought her to every conceivable luxury she had wanted in their modern four bedroom home, a house he had mortgaged only a few miles from his half-brother’s Surrey mansion.
But he’d played as hard as he worked. Often too hard, Sienna remembered painfully, as she ironed the back of one of Daisy’s little blouses for at least the third time. Because it had been that reckless sense of fun and that daredevil attitude towards almost everything that had killed him during those five days in Copenhagen at that stag party that had gone terribly wrong …
Pain and remorse pressed like twin bars against her chest, and she forced herself to breathe deeply to ease the anguish.
While he’d been alive he’d been driven: always trying to compete—almost obsessively so, she reflected—with his elder brother. But Niall hadn’t had Conan’s focus—or his ruthlessness, she thought bitterly. Because when Niall had got into dire financial straits and had asked his brother for help, just a couple of weeks before he’d died, Conan had refused. Niall had been devastated. It was only then that he’d told her how far they had been living above their means and just how much money they owed. She’d been too young and far too naive to realise it!
Both Conan and her mother-in-law had blamed her for her husband’s overspending, and for the worry she had caused, which had led to his drinking and his ultimate accident.
‘It wasn’t my fault!’ she’d shot back at Conan that last day, just a week after Niall’s funeral, hurting, agonised, reproaching herself for going along with everything Niall had expected of her—given her—even when her instincts had told her that he was wrong, or that it seemed he was being far too extravagant. ‘And if you’d helped him when he came to you for help perhaps he wouldn’t have got so drunk as not to know what he was doing!’ she had flung at him bitterly, too overcome by grief to care what she was saying.
She had wanted desperately to cry. To break down. To alleviate the pain pressing like a dead weight against her chest. But standing there in the sumptuous drawing room of Conan Ryder’s Regency home, where she’d come to return the last of Niall’s things, her tears wouldn’t come. She had felt only a numbing emptiness that had given her an air of spurious indifference—which had only cemented her guilt in his brother’s eyes, promoting what he’d decided he already knew: that she’d been cheating on his brother.
‘My brother was in trouble and you weren’t even aware of it—too wrapped up in your spending and your … boyfriend to notice.’
‘Oh, I noticed all right!’ It was a bitter little cry, torn from beneath the veneer of icy detachment she was feeling.
‘And you did nothing to help him.’
‘I was his wife—not his nursemaid!’ She realised how cold and brutal that sounded. She was trying to defend herself and failing miserably, wanting to scream at Niall for leaving her to face his family like this—alone. Hurt, angry, reproaching herself …
‘My mother has expressed concerns that you aren’t mature or responsible enough to look after a child—and quite frankly I agree with her. I want my brother’s offspring to grow up as a Ryder, under this family’s roof. Not in some other man’s home, bearing some other man’s name.’
‘She’ll grow up as I consider fit,’ she assured him, stung by the things her mother-in-law had said. But then Avril Ryder—whom, she noted, hadn’t emerged from her own wing of her eldest son’s exclusive residence—had never made any attempt to conceal her disapproval of her other son’s match. There was no way, though, that Sienna ever intended changing her child’s name—even if she did end up with another man in the far distant future. ‘You’re not her father, Conan,’ she reminded him coolly. ‘Even if you’d like to think you are.’
‘No.’ Derision curved his uncompromising mouth at that. ‘Fortunately I can’t claim to be among those to have had the pleasure.’
Her hand clenched with the almost uncontrollable urge to lash out at him, to feel the sting of her palm as it met the hardness of his cheek which might shake her out of this numbing misery. But she’d decided that enough damage had been done already.
‘I don’t have to stay here and take this from you,’ she responded quietly, hating herself for the tingle of awareness that had run through her at his blatant innuendo a moment ago. ‘But if you’re trying to make me feel cheap, then go ahead. I was never good enough for you, was I? Either of you,’ she’d added accusingly. ‘Is that why Niall made such a mess of things? Because he was made to feel he wasn’t good enough either? Because he felt so overshadowed by his much smarter, richer and generally more favoured elder brother?’
If he’d looked angry before, he’d looked livid then, his proud nostrils flaring, the skin above his upper lip white with rage. ‘You don’t know what you’re talking about,’ he’d rasped.
‘Don’t I?’ She went on goading him, unable to help herself, needing something—anything—to ease the burden of confusing emotions that were ravaging her. ‘I know you did next to nothing to support him—in anything—and that when he came to you for help you refused him any financial backing! Well, don’t worry! We’ll be leaving tomorrow. You won’t have to put up with me soiling this family’s precious pedigree any more!’
‘You take Daisy away from here and you’ll have me to answer to. Is that clear?’
‘As crystal! What do you propose to do?’ she taunted. ‘Sue for custody?’
‘If it comes to it.’
‘On what grounds?’ she challenged, suddenly wary. ‘That I’m an unfit mother?’ Painfully she remembered the instances that had helped tar her with that particular brush—the circumstances that she couldn’t explain even if she wanted to.
‘If I find you wanting in that regard, I won’t hesitate in applying for Daisy to be made a ward of court, most certainly.’
From anyone else she would have considered it an idle threat. From Conan it merely struck the deepest fear into her heart.
He was rich and powerful enough to make any court take notice of charges he made against her. And though she doubted that the Ryders would ever be allowed full custody of her daughter, she still feared what he might try to do with his staggering influence and his money.
‘Well, perhaps I should marry my boyfriend!’ she threw back desperately, pandering to his previous accusation. ‘And then you wouldn’t be able to do a thing! Stay away from me, Conan!’
She’d stormed out of the house and their lives without another glance back, paying off her debts and setting up home in the little terraced house she’d managed to mortgage with the small amount of capital left over from the sale of the house she had shared with Niall.
But now Conan had turned up again, still as judgmental
