Free Back in the Lion's Den by Elizabeth Power

doctors can’t seem to make up their minds as to what’s wrong with me.’ Even her rather resigned little shrug seemed like an effort. ‘Can you credit that? Conan pays them a fortune and they can’t even come up with a simple diagnosis. One says it’s simply post-viral syndrome. Another one even stuck his neck out and suggested I have ME.’
    ‘And you can’t get about?’ Sienna queried, sympathising. ‘Or take any form of gentle exercise?’ From casual comments Conan had made, Sienna knew he wanted his mother to try and get about more.
    ‘Exercise?’
    From the way she said it, Sienna thought, anyone would think she’d suggested a trip to the moon.
    ‘That’s the answer to everything nowadays, isn’t it?’ Avril remarked rather derisively. ‘Especially with you younger generation.’
    It was a conscious slight, Sienna decided, against all her years of training, and for a moment she felt as though she’d travelled back in time and was again the tentative, insecure creature she’d been, who’d often had to bite her tongue and had been made to feel like an interloper in her husband’s family. Now, undeterred, and with a wealth of experience of working with both the fit and healthy and the elderly, she said, ‘It’s the answer to a lot of things.’
    ‘Not in this case, Sienna—though your concern for me, I must say, is rather surprising.’
    Because old hostilities were still there, she realised. And barely concealed where Avril was concerned.
    ‘I don’t like seeing anyone sick or suffering,’ Sienna explained, brushing a rose petal from the loose white skirt she had teamed with a pale blue camisole. ‘Especially when they can be repaired.’
    The woman uttered a feeble laugh. ‘I’m past repairing.’
    ‘No, you’re not,’ Sienna returned decisively.
    She was well aware that Conan’s mother was little more than sixty-five, and couldn’t help wondering if the woman’s depression and mysterious debilitating illness had swayed her towards such fatalism. She also couldn’t help thinking either how alike Niall and her mother-in-law were—in that way at least. Because her younger son had shown the same kind of resignation about a lot of things. Unlike Conan, Sienna realised intuitively, who would bend the world to his will if he had to. But then he was only Niall’s half-brother, and had been born with a different set of genes …
    ‘You know, you’re much more confident than you were,Sienna.’ She could feel his mother studying her from behind her smoky grey lenses. ‘Confident. And much more … mature.’
    ‘I’ve had to be,’ Sienna remarked, cringing as she recalled the optimistic young bride Niall had first brought with him into this family circle—a circle she’d fitted into as badly as the proverbial square peg!
    ‘You didn’t have to do it alone.’ She meant bringing up Daisy, and Sienna felt her stomach muscles tightening. ‘Conan tells me your parents are still in Spain. And yet they get to see her?’ she expressed, when Sienna nodded.
    When
she
hadn’t. That was clearly what the other woman was saying.
    ‘I’m sorry.’ Sienna stared at the bright blossoms draping the flower-decked pergola, not knowing, in the circumstances, how she could have done things any other way. ‘I really am.’
    ‘There were faults on both sides,’ her mother-in-law was admitting surprisingly. ‘I realise that now. You were far too determined. Too strong-willed for a man like Niall. And far too young to take on the responsibilities of a wife and mother. You weren’t …’ Her voice tailed off, as though she’d thought better of expressing her views aloud.
    ‘I wasn’t the sort of wife you would have chosen for him?’ Sienna supplied crisply, remembering this family’s rejection of her a little less painfully than she once had.
    ‘I know I might have made you feel like that.’ A sigh seemed to shiver through the woman’s thin frame, but all she added—as though it excused