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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 herhusband’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