The morning was already hot, and he could see a bead of sweat trickle down her collarbone. "Are we fencing or sword fighting, Rache?"

"Does it matter?" She tossed back her head. "Either way, you're going to lose the match."

They walked a slow circle. No flowery scent dripped from Rachel, he realized as he inhaled a trace of cinnamon off her hair. "I wouldn't want to end your hopes so quickly."

"I've noticed that about you. You're all heart and soul."

"Interesting that I look at you and think the same thing," he said, admiring the way her hips filled out her breeches. "Single-minded and mercenary as well. And I don't mean that as a compliment."

"What do you know about what it takes to survive, Ryan," she snapped, mounting a renewed attack. "It galls me that I have no recourse but to come to you."

He slapped down her foil. "At the ball, it didn't seem to gall you. Indeed, you appeared quite willing."

"Consider my offer retracted."

"I never considered it at all."

"Damn you, Ryan Donally." She slashed out at his foil.

"For someone who has been an intellectual snob her whole life, you're using a lot of profanity, Rache." He tsked.

It was one of his most prized attributes that he should be able to goad her into losing her dignity. She struck with force. Only this time he was prepared. He parried with a single swift blow. So far, all he had done was tease her. Some part of his mind remained impressed with her grit and will, even as she tried to defeat him, her pride roaring around her with all the vibrant colors of life that had always separated her from him. She crossed over with her foil and might have scored the victorious point had he not recognized the move. When they broke apart this time, their lungs heaved with the exertion.

Butterflies flitted over the neatly manicured flower beds. Behind his mask, Ryan's attention moved lower down her body. He was conscious of a growing burn of sexual awareness between them, like a shot of whiskey running in his veins that had not yet reached his head.

He had not had a mistress in nearly five months, and he recognized that the heat from his bout of abstinence had thrust him into territory he had no intention of traveling. Not now. Not in the future. He had no time to be preoccupied and no desire for the entanglement Rachel's appearance back in his life presented. Hell, he didn't even want her there, but by every indication, this match wasn't going to end until she dropped.

"You ask the impossible, Rache," he said. "You want professional recognition in an industry that would never honor you publicly as an engineer. I can't toe the line and risk the reputation of the company by putting you in charge of any project."

"Naturally, you would say that, Ryan. When you think I'm going to beat you."

"Hell, Rache, you couldn't beat me on your best day. You could try for the rest of your life, and you still wouldn't come close."

"No wonder I hated you so much growing up!" She attacked.

"You're a liar." He lunged, and she evaded. "You hated me so much you followed me everywhere. I'd look around, and there'd you be, like a sticky shadow that clung to my every movement. You couldn't be one of the boys then. You can't be one now."

"I did not follow you anywhere."

"What is this fight really about, Rache?"

Their eyes remained locked, flaring with the collision between past and present.

"You've forgotten what it's like to have to work for something, Ryan."

"Do not tell me that, Rachel." She countered his riposte, but Ryan was finished worrying about hurting her. He was finished with this fight. "I have bloody worked for everything in my life. I've been bullied and bloodied by people who would as soon knock out my teeth as acknowledge my existence. Not anymore, Rache."

"And I do not feel sorry for you in the least." She leaped atop a rock, and he followed her retreat. "You' re like this huge forest fire, Ryan." Her foil swung up, and she met his lunge. "You suck up everything in your path with this enormous energy that surrounds you. You dominate and absorb without looking at what it is you just conquered. You sweep into a room, and people notice. My entire life, I've never been able to compete with that."

"Compete, Rachel?" He slammed his foil across hers. "When have you given me anything but your contempt?" He backed her into the garden. "When have I ever looked at you and not seen another man in your eyes? Tell me, Rachel."

"When was the last time you looked into my eyes?" She tore off her mask. "When?" Her eyes held to his. She made him look now. "There is no other man there, Ryan. If you had just looked a little harder all those years ago."

He tore off his mask, his eyes furious. Silence fell between them, an awful pause. Rachel's heart beat against her ribs.

"If I had looked harder? You were in love with my fooking brother. There was never any us." He advanced on her. "Never any you and me. You made that clear."

"You kissed me, Ryan." Rachel surrendered no ground. "Then you went off to Edinburgh, never once writing to me."

It was shocking how childhood fantasies could catapult one's reason to the moon.

She knew all six of the Donallys, had grown up with Brianna and Ryan, the two youngest. But Rachel had always had a crush on Ryan's oldest brother, Christopher. He'd been eleven years her senior, and she'd fallen quite madly in love with him the first time he'd ridden into the yard of his house wearing his military uniform. All the girls had. Some men just naturally wore scarlet well.

To her, Ryan had always been the unruly Donally son who taunted her, flaunted the rules in her face, daring her to follow, who would sneak out at night and visit the vicar's twin daughters. When she and Kathleen weren't spying on him, they were shadowing him everywhere. Then Ryan had gone off to school.

"You married my best friend!" Her blade shattered Ryan's near the handle.

For a moment, both were too stunned to move.

Then Rachel lunged with her foil to finish the fight. He stepped aside, grabbed her wrist, and spun her against his chest, wrapping a forearm beneath her breasts. Her heart pounded. Spooned against him, she couldn't attack him, but before he could regain any momentum, she grabbed his arms, bent, and sent him over her head. He landed squarely on his back at her feet. The wind slammed out of him.

"Ryan!"

Staring up at the flawlessly blue sky, he remained unmoving. She dropped the foil and fell on her knees beside him. "Are you all right?"

"Jaysus," he rasped out. "Where did you learn that?"

"I don't know."

"Next time bloody warn me."

"So you can win?"

The fight still was not over. They both saw her foil lying in the grass at the same time. She dove for the hilt. He managed to grab her ankle and reel her in beneath him. "Get off me!"

Straddling her squirming hips, he laughed. "It looks like no one wins."

"You'd like that, wouldn't you?" She bucked against him.

His weight bore down upon her, one muscled thigh between her legs as he grabbed her flailing hands and pressed them into the soft cushion of grass. She lay pinned by her hair beneath her shoulders. Ryan had stilled, his heartbeat thumping against her chest so hard she could feel it even beneath the leather vest she wore. The fight they waged now had shifted-or maybe it had merely settled into what it had always been between them. She didn't know. His expression had become dangerous and ablaze with tension. She swirled in the dark, liquid splendor of it. Dizzy.

"Maybe I should scream," she rasped.

"Maybe you should." Their breaths, ragged and broken, mingled and blended. "At this moment, I don't know which one of us needs to be rescued more."

She became acutely aware of his body, aware of the thickness of him between her legs. The heat of him, his smell, and taste, everything amplified by the pillow of grass at her back. His eyes touched her lips, then slowly returned to rake her gaze. Energy as hot as lightning flared between them. She did not think to shrink from the look in his eyes as she lay beneath him, barely daring to breathe.

He threaded his fingers into her hair, tilted her head back, and slowly lowered his lips to hers. Haltingly at first.

A whisper. A taste. Her hands came to rest on his shoulder, and paused, the uncertainty of his actions overpowering. The musk of him filled her senses with an earthy, pagan sensuality. There was danger in surrender, yet he'd yielded a groan to her mouth. Then his tongue dipped between her lips. Liquid heat roared through her veins and brought an echoing sound to her throat. He took still more and more of her mouth, the kiss no less than a primal act of possession. A long luxurious kiss that made her body throb with pent-up longing and the memory of another hot kiss so long ago. His face abraded hers. She wrapped her arms around his neck. Pleasure coiled and built in her belly and between her legs where he lay. He slid his fingers into her hair, bracing her face between his palms. He continued to kiss her deeply, taking and giving air as she sought to breathe him into her soul, helplessly affected by the husky timbre of her name on his lips.

"Jaysus, Rachel..."

While she was still lost in the silky cloud of languor, he had pulled away, opened his eyes, and looked

down on her. She felt his breath upon her lips. Her lashes raised. Storm clouds were a safer refuge than what she saw in his eyes. "What are we doing?"

Startled, she awakened. "Get off me." She shoved against his chest. "Please."

With that, he pushed himself to his feet and braced his palms on his knees as if pained by his ribs. A lock

of damp hair screened his eyes. He stared at her, started to say something, then looked up as his daughter hailed him from the direction of the pagoda. "Mary Elizabeth is coming. I don't want her to get the impression we are trying to kill each other," he said as he bent and swept up the two foils, broken hilt and all. "Your clothes should be ready when you return inside. I'll order the carriage."

Watching him, she knew he was also aware that something terribly momentous had just occurred.

Something...

"Will you be departing for your London residence tonight?" she asked, without looking at him.

She had received his itinerary from Stewart before leaving D&B.

"I'm engaged tomorrow, Rache."

His shadow blocked the sunlight. "Fox hunting, I suppose, with your new friends?"

"Nothing quite so invigorating. But then I've caught the only fox worth chasing in England."Rachel knew he was referring to Lord Devonshire's beautiful niece. Looking away, she expected acultured "cheerio" to lighten the slight Irish brogue he'd worked so hard to rid himself of through theyears.

"I have meetings to attend Tuesday and Wednesday as well."

"Then I will attend them with you."

"Would you believe me if I told you my business has nothing to do with D&B?"

She wrapped her arms around her ribs. "Only if I trusted you."

He turned away.

Then on an oath, faced her again and offered his hand. She didn't understand her desire for him, didn't understand her wanton actions in the middle of his garden, where anyone could see them. She raised her gaze past his outstretched palm. He was contemplating her, his eyes no longer hooded, finally retracting his hand when he realized that she wasn't going to accept his help.

"Suit yourself, Rache."

He bowed with courtly gallantry, then left her sitting beside the petunias, her emotions still tangled and feeling like a dismissed kitchen maid.

Chapter 5.

"M iss Bailey?" Light spilled onto the porch as the door opened wider and a gray-haired man stepped outside. "Whatever are you doing out in weather like this?"

Water poured from the eaves behind her and splattered across the walkway. Rachel stood with her cloak clasped to her, her black skirt visible beneath. The scent of lemon wax emanated from the warmth inside the house. "I'm sorry to bother you, Mr. Williams," she said from within the hood of her cloak. "But I must speak to you."

He peered over his spectacles, a broadsheet tucked beneath his arm. Holding the door open, he stood aside. "Would you care for coffee or tea?"

"No, that isn't necessary." She smiled a brief greeting to the young maid standing in the corridor as she handed over her dripping cloak. "I won't be here long." Her glance took in the puddle on the waxed floor. "I apologize-"

"Nonsense, Miss Bailey. Please come inside and get warm."

Mr. Williams closed the door; then she followed him into his cluttered library. He had been her father's solicitor and her man of affairs in London for ten years. He handled her business with efficiency. She'd trusted him. She trusted that her questions, concerns, and interactions would always stay between them.

"Won't you sit?" he asked.

Rachel sat in the proffered chair. The room smelled of musty tomes and cigar smoke. It was a masculine room, similar to her father's study. Her skirts whispered with her movement. Williams settled behind his desk and waited for her to speak.

Her hands tightened on her reticule. She had returned from the country Sunday and spent most of her hours since at her desk tabulating figures, deciding how much longer she could float the project in Rathdrum before the contracts were paid. She wasn't going to ask Ryan for anything else. She had to solve this problem herself, or her credibility as a leader would be forever tainted. No one would ever believe her capable of pulling together a job if she allowed the Rathdrum project to fail. Ryan would close down the Irish division for good.

"Mr. Williams." Clearing her throat, she forced her fingers to relax and withdrew the sheet of paper she'd been working on. Behind him, a wagtail clock ticked away the minutes until noon. "I wish to sell off the last of my inheritance. It isn't much, but it will give me what I need."

He contemplated her. His arm reached across the desk, and he took the paper.

"I have an estate in Carlisle that will fetch a goodly sum. I wish to sell the house and the land. I haven't been there in years, so it really doesn't matter." She slid another sheet of paper across the desk. "These are the names of a few people over the years who have contacted me about a possible sale. Perhaps they are still interested."

The last of her ties with England would finally be cut.

"But that is your childhood home, Miss Bailey. Your father built that house."

"My home is in Ireland now. That estate is the only valuable asset I have left. It's an unfortunate circumstance that I need the money."

"You have Donally & Bailey."

She suddenly thought of Ryan. Mr. Shark of London Town, wealthy industrialist and personality of the moment, who wielded so much control over her life.

"I want to understand the business side of this partnership I have with Ryan and Johnny. What would it take to buy up controlling interest in D&B stock?" she asked.

"Unfortunately, a prohibitive cost, Miss Bailey." Williams sat back in his chair and folded his hands over his stomach. "You neither have the capital nor the means."

Folding her hands tightly in her lap, she looked away. "How is it that Ryan does not own this company outright? He has bought up most of his family's shares."