Surrender to the Past

The colour rose in Mia’s cheeks as she was reminded of just how well she had once known this man. ‘Just leave, will you, Ethan?’

He gave a mocking inclination of his head. ‘For the moment.’

Mia watched in frustration as Ethan turned on one leather-shod heel and walked confidently over to the door, turning briefly so his glittering silver gaze met Mia’s across the room once more in challenge, before he stepped outside and closed the door quietly behind him.

At which point all of Mia’s outward bravado left her like the air from a deflating balloon and she began to hyperventilate. She had to rest her hands supportively on the table-top as her knees began to shake …

‘Are you feeling all right, Mia?’ Dee, the nineteen-year-old Mia employed to help out with the serving, gave her a concerned glance as she cleared the neighbouring booth.

Was Mia feeling all right? No, came back the definitive answer. The last thing Mia was feeling was all right!

It had been five long years, damn it! And Ethan had just walked back into her life as if he had never left it. Worse—that last threat confirmed that he had no intention of leaving it again until he had said what he wanted to say to her.

‘I think I need to go outside for some air.’ She gave Dee a wobbly smile. ‘Can you and Matt manage here for a while longer?’

‘No problem,’ Dee assured her readily.

Mia stood up to move quickly through the coffee shop and out to the kitchen, grabbing up her short leather jacket and hurrying out through the back door to breathe in large gulps of the fresh September air before moving away from the coffee shop as if rabid dogs were at her heels. Or Ethan Black …

Ethan.

The man Mia had fantasised about for years until he had finally asked her out and every one of those fantasies had become reality.

The man she had once believed herself to be deeply in love with.

The same man Mia had just discovered was still capable of making her aware of every disturbing thing about him just by being in the same room with her!

CHAPTER TWO

‘I THOUGHT you were in a hurry to get back to work?’

Mia hadn’t even realised she was being followed as she hurried into the park at the end of the street, but she now came to an abrupt halt on the gravel pathway, eyes closing tightly, shoulders stiff, her jaw clenched, hands fisted at her sides, as Ethan spoke softly from just behind her.

All those years of silence. Of peace. And now she was being hounded by one of the very people she had so desperately needed to get away from. To the extent that Mia knew she would never be able to come to this park again without recalling Ethan’s presence here, too.

‘Mia …?’

She drew in a deeply controlling breath, smoothing her expression into one of mild uninterest before slowly turning to face Ethan.

‘I could add harassment to that list of charges.’ She eyed him defiantly.

To Ethan she had looked so very different inside the coffee shop. Not only looked different but acted differently too—like a distant stranger. But he could see traces of the old Mia in her now—in the depths of her eyes, the soft curve of her mouth, and the vulnerable tilt of her chin.

‘I’m sure the police would have no interest in a stepbrother visiting his long-lost stepsister.’ Ethan knew before he had finished speaking that it had been the wrong thing to say. Her eyes chilled over with obvious distaste at that connection between the two of them.

‘You aren’t my stepbrother, Ethan, because I disowned what was left of my family before your mother married my father four and a half years ago! And I wasn’t lost—I just didn’t want to be found. I still don’t,’ she added flatly.

‘Too late!’

‘Obviously.’ She continued to eye him coldly.

Ethan knew that it was going to be up to him to stop baiting her in this way if this wasn’t to develop into nothing more than a slanging match. Mia’s resentment about the past was still such that it wasn’t just going to evaporate during the course of one conversation. One conversation badly handled on his part, he acknowledged heavily.

He had been thrown slightly off-balance earlier, when he’d walked into the coffee shop and recognised Mia sitting in a booth at the back of the room reading a magazine. A Mia so changed, but at the same time so confident in the world she had created for herself, that for one heart-stopping moment Ethan had almost hesitated about disturbing her obvious contentment. Almost …

He gave a grimace. ‘Could we start again, do you think …?’

‘Where would you like to start from?’ Her eyes glittered like emeralds in the pallor of her face. ‘Perhaps when I first became a sixth-form pupil at the boarding school of which your widowed mother was headmistress? Or after your mother’s affair with my father, perhaps? Or when you conveniently got a job working for Burton Industries—my father’s firm—once you’d left LSE with your first-class master’s degree and a PhD? With hindsight you have to have realised the significance of that …?’

‘The possibility I was only employed at Burton Industries because of my mother’s … connection to your father?’ Ethan drawled dryly. ‘It crossed my mind, of course—’

‘I’m sure it did!’

‘And was as quickly dismissed,’ he bit out harshly. ‘I’m going to say this only once more, Mia—my mother wasn’t involved with your father before you went to Southlands School. Nor did their later friendship have anything to do with my getting a job at Burton Industries.’

She smiled humourlessly. ‘And “once more” I’m going to choose not to believe you!’

‘Why am I not surprised?’

‘Perhaps because to you at least I was always so predictable!’

He gave an impatient sigh. ‘I was head-hunted by dozens of companies when I left university, Mia. Burton Industries were lucky to have me.’

They probably were, Mia conceded grudgingly; Ethan’s qualifications had never been in question. Or his ambition. It was only the lengths he was willing to go to in order to achieve those ambitions that had become so glaringly questionable. Lengths which involved the once innocent and naively trusting Mia.

She had wondered five years ago—at the same time as she’d thanked her good fortune!—how she had ever been lucky enough to attract the attention of someone like Ethan Black. The epitome of tall, dark and handsome, he could—and usually did—have any woman that he wanted. Mia may have been the only daughter of multi-millionaire William Burton and beautiful socialite Kay, but beneath the fashionable designer-label clothes her mother had insisted on buying for her Mia had also been terribly shy, and merely pretty rather than beautiful, like the women Ethan was usually attracted to.

Once she’d learned of Ethan’s mother’s affair with her father, the reason for Ethan’s attraction had become obvious: Grace had made a play for the father, Ethan the daughter. One of them was sure to succeed.

‘And let’s call our parents’ past relationship the nasty little affair that it really was, shall we?’ Mia’s top lip turned back with distaste.

‘I told you it wasn’t like that—’

‘I’m really not interested, Ethan.’

‘No—because you prefer to twist events to suit your own warped take on what really happened five years ago.’

‘Nothing of what I eventually learnt about that situation suited me, Ethan,’ Mia assured him furiously. ‘Certainly not the realization that the only reason my father had chosen that particular boarding school to send me to in the first place was so that he had an excuse to visit his mistress. That’s quite a play on words, don’t you think? My headmistress was also my father’s mistress—’

‘Stop it, Mia!’ Ethan reached out to grasp the tops of her arms and shake her. ‘Just stop it!’

‘Let go of me, Ethan,’ Mia gasped. ‘You’re hurting me!’

His fingers tightened rather than relaxed, her leather jacket proving no barrier to the pain of his fingers biting into her arms.

‘I’m hurting you?’ He thrust her firmly away from him, his gaze raking over her mercilessly. ‘Do you have any idea—any idea at all—of the heartache you caused your father—have continued to cause him—by just disappearing in that way five years ago?’

‘But I’m sure my leaving didn’t affect you in the same way—did it, Ethan?’ she murmured scornfully.