A Solitary Heart Read online

  When sibling rivalry goes too far, hearts are at risk.

  When the overbearingly bossy Matt Severn accuses Sian of taking advantage of his younger brother, she is outraged. How dare he dictate her behavior with a good friend?

  To get even with Matt, Sian concocts a fake engagement and throws herself wholeheartedly into the deception. But as they grow to know each other better, Matt and Sian realize that first impressions aren’t always correct, and that sometimes love can be found in the strangest of circumstances.

  This Retro Romance reprint was published in March 1993 by Mills & Boon.

  A Solitary Heart

  Amanda Carpenter

  Chapter One

  Who was he?

  The question, intimate as only a thought that would never be divulged could be, ran through her mind as she surreptitiously watched the man who had just appeared on the back porch.

  His presence had certainly made a forceful impact, and not just on her. People looked. They, like Sian, couldn’t help themselves, for the man was hard angles and sheathed intent, white-shirted and haloed in golden sunshine and quite staggeringly beautiful for a man, beautiful in the way of a lean, hungry cat. In one hand he held a sweating beer can, powerful fingers negligently gentle on the aluminum, and with the other he pushed back the tawny hair from his forehead.

  Sian took a sip of her chilled wine, smiling to herself as loud guffaws burst from a nearby group. She had taken a moment from socialising to lean against a tree-trunk, grateful for the shade in the heat of the day.

  She and her room-mate, Jane, were born just a week apart, and were having a combined birthday, Memorial Day and graduation celebration. They had just completed their senior year of final exams at Notre Dame University, and all their university friends, families and friends of the families had been invited to the party.

  The idea had been a simple one a few months ago, but somewhere along in the planning it had grown into monstrous proportions, until Sian felt it wise to invite all their neighbours as well. Best to make allies from potential opposition, then nobody could complain about the noise. More than a hundred people milled about the ground-floor apartment and spilled out on to the wide back lawn. It was a crushing, noisy crowd in eighty-five-degree weather. Guests had started to arrive at noon that Sunday, and at four o’clock everyone was relaxed and convivial.

  The man stepped off the porch, and his torso was framed in light, from the tight hips to the tough broad shoulders.

  Sian wasn’t surprised that she didn’t know him. She was only acquainted with about a third of the people at the party. His connection was probably tenuous at best: a friend of a friend, a second cousin of a neighbour. If he could be anything as mundane as that.

  One sweep from a dark gaze spanned the group, and he began to prowl.

  The raw grace of his body made her mouth grow dry. He was masculinity in expression, fluidity in aggressive motion, a predator lazily casing the herd.

  How many men at the party? How many men had she met throughout her life, of all shapes and ages and sizes? They were a parade of pale imitations to this luminous reality. Once she had thought differently, but now she knew that she had never known the definition of a man before. Sian struggled to hide her crazy heartbeat and trembling hands under her customary cool poise.

  His eyes locked with hers.

  He strode towards her.

  Sian jerked her gaze away, a tell-tale reaction eloquent with rejection. It was a delusion. It had to be. The stranger was a devil to climb inside her head so, but he couldn’t possibly live up to the promise of his first impression. He would open his mouth and utter something banal, and the spell would be shattered. In a moment she would breathe normally, and her world would be sane again. The roaring silence that filled her mind would resolve into babble, loud music and the civilised enjoyment of good friends sharing a moment of triumph together. This wild thing invading her would pass unnoticed into oblivion.

  Then Lucifer, morning star, the brightest and the most beautiful of all the archangels, appeared slowly through the smoky swirl blown off the barbecue, and halted in front of her.

  She could not ignore him, and must not pretend to. Her heavy green eyes lifted from contemplating her glass of wine. The stranger’s face was hard, uncompromising, his sardonic hazel eyes two quartz chips honed to razor-sharpness.

  Here it comes. Something trite and meaningless, she prayed. What’s a nice girl like you…?

  “Sian Riley?”

  The fluid voice that would be velvet in tenderness now grated on her hypersensitive hearing.

  Her expression was closed to the observer, the lovely features locked as tight as a treasure vault. “Yes?” she replied, amazed at the calm in her reply. “What can I do for you?”

  His predator’s eyes raked her, claws naked and judgemental. He said, soft and tight and ungentle, “Just one thing, Ms Riley. My name is Matthew Severn, and I want you to stay away from my brother Joshua.”

  “What?” Sian gasped, any possible comprehension of their meeting blown to smithereens by those gunshot words. She leaned more heavily against the tree-trunk, her incredulous gaze telling the man confronting her that he was a madman.

  “You heard what I said.” The stranger lifted his hand, and for one awful moment, as her shocked eyes watched it come towards her face, Sian thought he meant to slap her.

  She couldn’t move. The strong, graceful hand went to the tree-trunk behind her head, and he leaned the weight of his body into his powerful outstretched arm. Corded muscle in his bicep flexed with tension, a small shift under the sleeve of the white shirt, as he trapped her into intimate confrontation with his body and his undiluted antagonism.

  “Joshua Severn,” he growled very quietly. “My brother. Your fiancé. Stay away from him, Ms Riley. This is the only warning you’ll get. You’re not his kind.”

  Somewhere Sian had stepped, all unsuspecting, through some invisible barrier into an incomprehensible nightmare. Her green eyes seemed to collect jagged shards of illumination into coalesced rage.

  “How dare you?” she said from the back of her throat, still reeling internally from the unexpected assault. The stranger’s proximity was an intimidation she refused to knuckle under. She leaned forward from the waist and glared up at him. “Just who the hell do you think you are?”

  “As trustee in control of Josh’s inheritance, I’m a man in a position of some authority,” Matthew Severn replied silkenly. “And I assure you, I shall exercise that authority to the limit. You’re not acceptable partnership material and, whatever advantages you might think to acquire from marrying Joshua, you can forget it. I’ll make sure he doesn’t see a cent before his thirtieth birthday. You’ll both face years of struggle to get through graduate school, so wise up now. This isn’t Easy Street.”

  “No,” Sian agreed in a snarl, transformed from the porcelain grace of her former repose into a tempestuous, vitalising fury. “This isn’t Easy Street. This is my home, and you’ve just violated all the rules of courteous conduct by your boorish intrusive manner and your insane allegations! I want you to get out now!”

  “How convenient that would make things for you, wouldn’t it? Well, I have no intention of leaving until this is resolved!” Matthew snapped, then ran his gaze down the length of her body compulsively. “Look at you—butter wouldn’t melt in your mouth until somebody crosses you, then all hell breaks loose. What’s the matter, darling, your control of the situation slipping?”

  “Get out!” she snarled, for he was quite right. Her rage was out of control.

  He brought his face down to hers and, nose to nose, shaped his
throaty words with a white flash of hard teeth and a ruthless mouth. “Make me.”

  Sian felt a flicker of insight and clutched at it. He was too taunting, too provocative. How he would love for her to cause a scene in front of everyone. Her green eyes narrowed, the raven slant of her sleek brows pronounced. “Oh, no,” she said gently, and gave him a malicious smile. “You haven’t got what it takes to drive me that far out of control.”

  “Young lady,” he purred, the angles of his face taut and breathtaking, those hazel eyes fierce, “that sounds remarkably like a challenge.”

  Sian’s whole being was a weapon, as she replied breathily, “What a concept! Who could presume to challenge the opinions of one such as you? By his own account, a man in a position of some authority!”

  “Who indeed?” he agreed, in that soft, velvet and steel voice. “One would think only pyromaniacs would be so foolish.”

  “While only insecure little men feel the need to prove themselves,” she shot back, quick as a striking snake. If anything his hot gaze grew even hotter, and his tiny smile should have warned her.

  “Prove themselves in what area, Sian Riley?” he murmured mockingly. Those hot eyes dropped, to the racing pulsemark in her creamy throat, to her breasts. “Prove themselves how many times, and in what—position?”

  Another woman might have recoiled from the sexual innuendo in distaste or confusion, but she saw that it was what he expected, and another wave of anger washed over her. She snapped nastily, “I would think you’re just the type to know all about untenable positions!”

  That had his roving gaze springing back to her angry expression in amazement, then, to her astonishment, he threw back his tawny head and laughed out loud. It came from his chest, free and infectiously generous. Sian was encased in ice, however, and was not tempted.

  “Darling,” he drawled in lazy amusement, “there’s nothing untenable about my positions.”

  “You would think so.” She matched him blow for blow, only her amusement was cold and pitying. “Personally, I’m unimpressed. I never did see the attraction of a legend in one’s own mind.”

  She would have slipped away then, but his other hand dropped the empty beer can and shot to hold her, and the shocking contact of his warm long fingers curling around her bare arm made her teeth clash together.

  “No,” he said, his face dark and satiric, “you prefer younger men who are easily influenced by all the wrong things. Tell me, does Joshua know what a temper you have? Has he ever borne the brunt of your sharp tongue?”

  This man was making her crazy. His confrontational, abrasive attitude, his accusations, his warm touch on her sensitive skin, his very presence—Sian felt goaded beyond endurance. She gritted, reactive and rash, “I guarantee that Joshua doesn’t find my tongue sharp at all.”

  She heard his breathing halt as suddenly as if she’d knifed him; over the noise and tumult of the party, she heard it. Or perhaps she had felt it, through the searing physical connection. Or perhaps she had imagined it, for his face was stone. She couldn’t endure being so close to him any more and tried to wrench away, but his fingers tightened convulsively.

  Matthew Severn said, with terrible simplicity and conviction, “My brother is not the man for you. Accept it, Sian.”

  Out of the corner of her eye, she saw two of her former class-mates coming towards them, their expressions insupportably cheerful, their eyes avidly curious. On Matthew, eating him alive. She stiffened, and said to him with cold courtesy, “Your reiteration is noted. I see you’ve finished your drink. Why don’t I get you another?”

  Even as she became the gracious hostess, Matthew saw the approaching pair, and his hold on her arm dropped away as he adopted the role of polite guest so smoothly that she stared in consternation. His charm was absolutely seamless, and deadly as the edge of a cliff. She hated him quite passionately.

  “Don’t bother, I can help myself,” he said, and gave her a remarkably beautiful public smile as he added privately, “This isn’t over.”

  “What a pretentious creature you are; of course it is,” murmured Sian in a fine show of contemptuous indifference as she stepped away.

  Matthew engaged the other two women in light conversation, ignoring her as if she didn’t exist. Trite and meaningless phrases, and they snapped it up.

  Sian’s expression was very dry. The heel of her narrow, elegant shoe knocked something and she looked down. After a moment, she bent and picked up the beer can. It was crushed almost beyond recognition.

  Sian held on to her composure by sheer force of will until she finally managed to escape to the study. She shut the door on any possible prying eyes, collapsed weakly into the chair pulled back from her desk and dropped her face into one unsteady hand. A flashback to the unpleasant little scene in the back garden made her jaw harden and her eyes blaze anew.

  How dared Matt Severn speak to her like that? How dared he look down his aquiline nose at her with such contempt? She’d seen that look before, on others who thought they were better than she because of her chequered past and disreputable family.

  Sian was proud of all the things she had seen and done as a child. Her mother had died when she was too young to really remember her, and so she had tagged along on Devin Riley’s travels and entered a carnival world of famous places and people. Regarded through a child’s innocent eyes, it had been a fabulous life. Rio de Janeiro, Monte Carlo, London, Rome, Las Vegas—Sian had seen them all before she was ten, and her father, heartwrenchingly handsome and charming as the sun was bright, with a computer brain and a gilded tongue, had seemed like a fairy-tale prince who walked a higher plane of existence from other mere mortals.

  It was only when she was old enough to be sent away to boarding school that Sian grew to realise just how flamboyant and bizarre her childhood had really been. Before the whispers and the gossip that had interrupted many a budding friendship, she had merely accepted the lifestyle as normal. That was how Devin lived. He loved her, but men with his particular glamour and genius couldn’t be expected to settle down in one place just for a little girl who missed her daddy when he left her all alone in a strange place.

  Sian smiled that wry twist of the mouth that so characterised her pensive turn of thought. She was indeed her father’s daughter. After the first year or so of loneliness and bewilderment, she had got the measure of all those whispering gossips and proceeded to charm them one by one, those songbirds in the bushes, until they were eating out of her hand. Her school years had been, in the main, positive after that and, during the holidays when she was not travelling with her father, she was visiting at the homes of her friends.

  She had been happy—oh, yes—and she wouldn’t trade her colourful memories for anything. Her father Devin could still steal the heart of the devil, who would thank him for the pleasure, and she loved to see him when he made the rare visit.

  But something had happened to the little girl who’d begged for more champagne with her breakfast. Either the schools had taught her otherwise, or Sian had grown up to realise it for herself. Whatever the reason, however the cause, she had a deep, abiding yearning for a solid, secure life.

  Sian had a middle-class mentality. She wanted a home, family, a steady job, the same circle of friends that she could relate to and grow older with. She wanted to belong, somewhere, somehow. If anyone had asked her what her goals were, that would be her first reply. She wouldn’t even think to wonder, in that first instant of reaction, if they might have been asking about something so obvious as a choice of career.

  And if it was one thing guaranteed to drive her absolutely wild, beyond any hope or shade of reason, it was to come up against narrow-minded bigots like Matt Severn! One sneer got past all her guards; one judgemental opinion breached all her defences. He, a total stranger, had hurt her today, as she stood marble-faced and icy, then hot with eruptive anger by turns before him, and it wasn’t any use to re
alise afterwards just how ridiculous his behaviour had been. He had got right inside, and Sian did not forgive easily.

  Sian swivelled in her chair and reached automatically into the top drawer of the desk.

  The door to the study opened some ten minutes later, and she looked up. Her roommate Jane slid inside and shut the door behind her. Noise from the party blared loudly, then resumed the muted musical beat that carried through the floorboards and pounded in the walls.

  “Hey, Solitaire,” said her bubbly friend. “What are you doing in here all by yourself? We’ve food and drink and a whole army to feed off it outside!”

  Sian smiled at Jane. “I’m just catching a moment of peace and relative quiet.”

  “Right,” said Jane, as she settled like a fluffy cat on one corner of the desk they’d shared for four years, “speak to me, woman. You’re young, gorgeous, and supremely talented as a budding dress designer, and you’ve just sailed through your undergraduate finals. What’s more, you’ve got hunky Joshua Severn panting like a lovesick puppy at your heels. So what gives?”

  Sian had smiled reluctantly at Jane’s brisk, no-nonsense recital of her worldly assets, but at the mention of Joshua’s name her expression had darkened. She puckered her mouth into a delicate peach rosebud and prevaricated, “Why does anything have to ‘give’? Can’t I want to be by myself for a few moments?”

  “Sian, you’re my best friend and I quite love you to distraction,” replied Jane in a light tone that belied her shrewd gaze, “and I do mean distraction. You always play solitaire when you’re troubled. Always. Obsessively. Game after game after game, so don’t try to pull the wool over my eyes! I want to know what’s going on and why you’re sitting alone in a shadowed room on a beautiful sunny day.”

  Sian sighed and immediately wished it hadn’t come out sounding quite so heavy, and she busied herself with sweeping the cards expertly into one hand. Then, as if her shapely fingers had acquired a mind of their own, they commenced shuffling and reshuffling the pack. Jane watched with admiration the manoeuvres that were as slick and polished as a professional croupier’s, another legacy from Sian’s father.