Page 15 of One Night in My Rival's Bed

A house in the country? Co-designed by Grayson and me? How would my sister cope without me? We had lived together all our lives. My whole life revolved around her and work. I wasn’t used to thinking only of myself. How would I fill the hours and days and weeks and months and years? And, more to the point, how would Niamh handle marriage to a man who needed so much help himself? The architectural project aside, if she married Ethan, Grayson would be her brother-in-law and it would not be so easy for me to avoid him. And I needed to avoid him, otherwise I was going to be in water deep enough to cloud my vision all over again.

Half an hour later, Grayson and I left the honeymoon suite and got back in the lift. The doors whooshed closed, and I met his gaze. ‘So, that was a bit unexpected.’

His eyes glinted with cynicism. ‘You think?’

I gave a shrug and toyed with the strap of my tote bag with my fingers. ‘Well, at least they’ve promised not to get married for a month. That’s a positive, right?’

One of his hands opened and closed, the other scraped a rough pathway through his thick hair. ‘I hope a month is long enough for them to see the stupidity of getting married at all. And as to a house in the country,’ he muttered a curse swear word and continued, ‘that’s even more preposterous.’

I cocked my head on one side and studied him for a beat or two. Unlike me, he didn’t seem too fazed by my unwavering scrutiny. ‘Are you worried about working with me on their house?’

A tiny muscle flickered near his mouth. ‘I’ve done collaborative work before.’

‘You didn’t answer my question.’

‘No, I’m not the least bit worried.’ He enunciated each word as if speaking to a child. ‘Are you?’

I twisted my mouth. ‘It depends.’

‘On what?’

‘Whether we can work together without arguing over every light switch placement.’

‘It won’t be a problem.’ His tone seemed to suggest otherwise, so too did the taut line of his mouth and the flicker of annoyance in his gaze.

‘Back there, you said marriage between the right people was okay.’ I raised my fingers in air quotes and said with a challenging note in my voice, ‘Define the right people.’

The lift doors opened on the foyer level and Grayson silently indicated for me to precede him. We walked along the marbled area for some distance before he spoke. ‘Marriage can work reasonably well between two mature adults who have insight into their own psychodynamics.’

‘You don’t think your brother is mature enough for marriage?’

He gave me a sideways glance. ‘Is your sister?’

My shoulders went down on a sigh. ‘In some ways, yes, in others, no.’ I stopped walking to look up at him. ‘There’s something I want to discuss with you. In private.’

He stopped in his tracks, his eyebrows lifting ever so slightly, and a glint came into his eyes. ‘Oh?’

‘It’s about the feud between your grandfather and my father.’

The glint hardened to flint, and he resumed walking. ‘It’s in the past, it’s best left there.’

I trotted to keep up with him and placed my hand on his muscled forearm to get him to stop. He stopped and glanced at my hand on his arm before meeting my gaze.

‘I thought we agreed not to touch?’ he said with a sardonic quirk of his lips that made me want to touch him even more.

I took my hand off his arm and let it drop by my side. ‘I want to know more about what happened between your grandfather and my father. There seems to be some discrepancy between what I’ve been told by my mother and what you understand to be true.’

‘Are you free for dinner tonight?’

The question utterly blindsided me. I stood there with my mouth hanging open, unable to get my voice to work. Finally, I managed to croak in an incredulous tone, ‘Dinner?’

‘You’re clearly not a fan of breakfast, so I thought dinner might be more suitable.’

So he had noticed my lack of appetite at breakfast. Interesting.

‘I normally love breakfast but...’ I chewed at my lower lip for a moment. ‘Dinner as in a...?’

‘It’s not a date.’ His tone was emphatic, annoyingly so. ‘Call it a history lesson if you like.’

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