A Delicious Deception

‘He doesn’t like me,’ Rayne observed dryly, her confident manner concealing how uncomfortably sticky he’d made her feel beneath her light clothes. Had he picked up on the fact that she was hiding something from them? Or was her guilty secret letting her imagination run away with her?

‘You’ll have to excuse my son. He suspects every woman who happens to give me the time of day,’ Mitch told her. ‘Especially if she’s young and pretty. Usually he manages to frighten them off before the dust has time to settle under their feet.’

‘That’s pretty selfish of him.’ Rayne’s eyes lingered in the direction the other man had gone, her jaw tightening in rebellion.

‘He has no reason to be. With a physical and intellectual package like that, they all wind up wanting King anyway.’ He gave a harsh bark of laughter. ‘Well, who would want an old fossil like me?’ He started to cough, the contents of his glass threatening to slop over the side. As Rayne moved forward to take it from him, he waved her impatiently aside. ‘But what’s a man to do?’ The terrace lights had come on, taking over from the sun that had dipped behind the mountains and glinting on the crystal he lifted to his mouth, draining it in one swift gulp. ‘He calls it protecting my interests. Here—’ he thrust the empty glass in her direction ‘—pour me another one, will you?’

Rayne looked at him dubiously. He was already looking rather florid. She’d also learned from his late-middle-aged and amiable Swiss housekeeper while she’d been there that Mitchell Clayborne had high blood pressure as well as a heart condition, which was why Rayne had been hesitant to tell him who she was and why she was there. ‘Do you think you should?’

‘For heaven’s sake, girl! You have the audacity to question my actions while you’re a guest in my house?’

‘I didn’t mean to.’ Nor did she want to find herself worrying over someone who had treated her father so abominably. It felt like a betrayal, somehow. But her father’s ex-colleague and business partner seemed world-weary and surprisingly bitter, she had decided over the past few days, guessing that it was probably because of his disability, although having an heir as forceful and dynamic as King couldn’t help. But she was getting used to her host’s outbursts, startling though they were, and so she took the glass he was handing her and poured him another drink.

‘You’re behaving just like King,’ he persisted. ‘And while he’s excused through blood, I won’t take it from anyone who isn’t. D’you understand?’

‘Perfectly,’ she breathed with mock deference as she handed him his refill, and caught a surprising glint of warmth in his watery blue eyes. ‘If you don’t need anything else,’ she tagged on, uncomfortable even with fraternizing with him because of what he had done in the past, ‘I think I’ll get an early night.’

He smiled, gesturing her away with his glass, his angry mood dispelled. ‘Good idea. Oh, Rayne …’ Stopping before the open door that separated the luxurious living quarters from the terrace, she turned round with the scent of a potted gardenia trespassing on her senses. ‘About King … Did you do something to antagonise him before I came out?’

Her heart skipped a nervous little beat. ‘No. Why?’

‘I haven’t seen him quite so … intense before.’

She shrugged, trying to shake off the feeling of exposure she had sensed under those steely-blue eyes, trying not to remember how she had felt in the past. ‘Perhaps he had a hard day.’

‘Nonsense. He thrives on hard work and pressure where lesser mortals crack up and fall by the wayside.’

‘He sounds like a dynamo.’

‘He is.’

‘Even dynamos can break down.’

‘If you think that, then you don’t know King.’

Don’t I? she thought bitterly, but said, ‘Obviously not.’

‘But you will,’ he said, seemingly with some relish. ‘He’s going to be around for a while.’

‘That’s nice.’ She was finding it difficult keeping her voice light, making out that she didn’t care one way or the other, while her insides were screaming with guilt and resentment and a whole heap of worrying doubts over what she was getting herself into.

‘And Rayne …’ About to step inside, keen to escape to her room, Rayne glanced reluctantly over her shoulder as Mitch called to her again. ‘Be nice to him,’ he advised with just a hint of caution. ‘For both our sakes.’

I’ll fall at his feet, shall I? she suggested silently. Like I’m sure every nubile woman he meets probably does!

Her face ached from her forced smile as she got out, ‘Of course,’ aware that she was suddenly in danger of finding herself in way over her head, even as she told herself that she refused to be intimidated by King’s arrival. He might look like the stuff of every woman’s dreams, she accepted grudgingly, as the spacious interior of his father’s summer retreat, which had astounded her with its elegance and luxury ever since she’d been there, now felt as though it was swallowing her up. And if just a compliment from him or the most casual of physical contact—like shaking hands with him, for goodness’ sake!—made her pulse quicken a bit … well … it was only her hormones working, wasn’t it? She was only human, after all! But she’d come to Monaco to try to right the wrong that had been done to her father and she had no intention of letting a man like King—or her uncontrollable hormones—stand in her way!

CHAPTER TWO

THE shapes and tones and hues of Monte Carlo took her breath away, as they had been doing every time she’d looked down on them from her bedroom balcony over the past few days. But this morning, with the sun still low enough to have turned the sea to gold and wrapped the distant mountains in a haze of heat, this wakening resort seemed, like her, to be holding its breath, before offering up its vibrant heart to another day of wealth and glamour and total luxury.

Rayne grimaced at the comparison because she hadn’t come to Monaco to indulge herself. But while she was here, she thought, noticing how the trees on the steep ascent of the hillside above the house were touched with the same flame gold as the water in the harbour, then at least she could appreciate the scenery.

The only blot on her immediate horizon, she decided, was King.

She’d been careful before she’d embarked on this trip to do a little research into where he would be, and right now he should have been attending some week-long charity function in New York. After all, King didn’t live here. He had some luxurious pad in London, and she’d heard that he and his father didn’t always see eye to eye.

What he was doing here, she didn’t know, only that it was going to be difficult enough confronting Mitch with who she was and why she was there, but with that six-foot-something of potent manhood thrown into the mix, the prospect was no less than unnerving.

He was hard, ruthless and clever. He was also suspicious, which left her feeling as though every secret she harboured was under threat of being exposed to him, while every feminine cell in her body reacted to his raw sexuality with a strength that left her shocked and ashamed.

She’d thought such wild reactions were the predilection of teenage girls. Because he had affected her then—seven years ago—although he’d scarcely spared more than a passing glance her way. A wheat-blonde, spiky-haired teenager with purple-shadowed eyes and lipstick. An experimental and pathetic Lorri Hardwicke, whose nevertheless deeply buried secret had been an excruciating crush on the firm’s youngest and most dynamic recruit who, not long out of university, was already being primed for directorship.

She had wanted him from the first instant she had nearly collided with him as he was coming out of the office one day when she had been meeting her father for lunch, and from that moment she had woven all sorts of wild fantasies around him.

Young and guileless and between jobs, introduced to him only briefly, she’d jumped at the chance to help out in the office for a couple of weeks when one of the typists was on leave. It had offered her a chance to be near King, after all. But he’d scarcely spoken to her and, like Mitch, he had spent a lot of time out of the office. And when he was there she’d watched him from a painful distance behind her frosted glass partition, imagining a golden future when he would suddenly realise she was there, waiting in the wings for him to notice her, ask her out and initiate her into the sophisticated art of making love. Because with a man like him, she had decided, without any doubt in her fixated young mind, lovemaking would be no less than an art.

Even after she’d left, she still kept hoping. That was until the evening he had come round to the house and shattered all her dreams. Made her hate him with an emotion all the more intense because of what it had replaced.

Bitterly her thoughts drifted back to that night seven years ago. It was just a few weeks after her father had had a row with Mitchell Clayborne and walked away from their partnership—with devastating repercussions.

She had been to the gym and had cycled home in the rain, coming in to hear raised voices, her father’s thin and defensive, King’s deep and inexorable.

‘You’re the thief, Grant Hardwicke! Not my father! Stay away from him. Do I make myself clear? Leave him alone or you’ll have me to deal with!’ It still made her shudder to remember his cruel, icy threat. ‘Believe me, after this you won’t know what hit you if you ever dare show your face at our house or at the office again!’

Towering over Grant Hardwicke, King had been standing in the hallway of the modern detached home her mother had so prized, while her father had seemed to visibly diminish before Rayne’s eyes. His features blanched and strained, she had seen Grant grab the doorframe as though it was too much of an effort to support himself under the weight of the younger man’s hostile and verbal attack.

Soaked to the skin, hair flattened by the rain, she’d flown at King like a drenched sparrow as he’d come striding back across the hall.

‘Don’t you dare hurt my father!’ she’d sobbed, lashing out at him, her flailing fists ineffectual against the impenetrable wall of his body. ‘I’ll kill you first! I will! I’ll kill you!’

‘Calm down, Lorri …’ He had referred to her by name. It was the first time she could remember him using it, much less showing her any attention, but then it had been only to catch her flying wrists and thrust her aside as if she were an unwanted toy. ‘Don’t waste your hysterics and your childish little threats on me,’ he’d warned with particular brutality to her teenage pride. ‘Save them for someone who deserves them,’ he’d snarled savagely. ‘Like your father!’ He had slammed out of the door with his hurtful and puzzling words burning in her ears.

‘It’s about that software, love,’ Grant Hardwicke had breathed brokenly when she had rushed over to him. He’d looked drained and exhausted as she’d helped him onto an easy chair. ‘Mitchell’s saying it’s company property and King’s backing him up. I’m afraid they’re determined to keep it. I’ve lost everything, Lorri. Everything.’ She had never forgotten the desperation in her father’s voice.

‘But it’s yours, Dad. You wrote it!’ Rayne remembered stressing, as though that had counted for anything where the Clayborne men were concerned. It was software he had written especially for the medical profession. One he had said would benefit a lot of people—because her father was like that—caring and generous. It was something he had produced for the common good. It was his baby. His brainchild, which he’d conceived and worked on and slaved over in his own time before he had ever joined forces with Mitchell Clayborne. But Mitchell Clayborne had stolen the credit for it, launching it under his own company flag with the full knowledge and support of his equally unscrupulous and ambitious son and heir.

Her mother had been out at a line-dancing class that night and Rayne was glad she had because it was the first and only time in her life she had seen her father cry. Her strong and devoted father, who had always been her rock and the backbone of his family, reduced to tears in losing all he’d worked for. But he had no proof of his copyright for that software he had written, and the Claybornes had gone on to prosper unbelievably because of it, while Grant Hardwicke’s troubles had only increased.

Because of his age, he had found it impossible to get another position. He’d started drinking, which made him ill, and then he was made bankrupt, which in turn meant her mother having to lose her lovely home.

Rayne was certain that all her father’s problems had started that night she had walked in on King’s unmitigated venom. A venom that had had a poisoning effect on her family, virtually destroying everything that had been good about it, everything she’d loved.

What she had felt for him had been unreal, Rayne thought bitterly, mocking herself now. A teenage fancy, as insubstantial as mist, killed off by his pulsing anger and his verbal brutality towards her father, even before she’d realised how unscrupulous he was. As well as defending Grant, she knew now that in striking King that night she had been giving vent to the loss of all her young dreams. But long after the anguish of that night had receded, it was the physical power of him and those firm hands on her body as he’d put her from him that had lingered in her memory …

She came downstairs now with half a hope that, in spite of what Mitch had said, perhaps his son’s visit might have been a flying one and that he might have been called away on some vital company business during the night.

That was until she saw him striding in through the front door in a short-sleeved white shirt that exposed his tanned, muscular arms and dark suit trousers hugging his powerful hips and her heart seemed to stand still before vaulting into a double-quick rhythm.