Marrying The Enemy!

For however long what took? Proving her false identity? Was that what he was hoping for?

‘I’m doing no such thing! I’ve got a very adequate hotel room in town, thanks!’ she snapped, deciding that staying under the same roof with this man could lead her into nothing but trouble. ‘Naturally I’ll want to—’ she started, but he cut in, his expression inexorable, his mouth grim.

‘You’ll do exactly as I say.’

She wanted to argue against it, but that overriding determination in him—that tyrannical streak that she knew very well was characteristic of the Masterton men—was too strong. It was the reason why Shirley had left home, why she had struggled for an existence on her own with only her child after Page had prevented her marriage, why she’d been dragged down into the unfortunate lifestyle that had led to her overdose. Accidental, the coroner had said, brought about by a lethal blend of booze and barbiturates.

Something speared through Alex—something cutting and deep. Oh, to find some skeleton in the impeccable Masterton cupboard! Particularly in the high and mighty, unimpeachable York’s!

But refusing to do as he said, insisting on staying at the hotel, wouldn’t help her in trying to convince him that she was his cousin, nor to find those letters which, suddenly, had become the most important things in her life. And so, feigning sweetness, with a totally false smile, she uttered, ‘As you put it so hospitably, how can I refuse?’

CHAPTER TWO (#ulink_b2faa666-001f-5d18-85eb-27a827bdce34)

MOORLANDS stood in its own grounds on the fringes of a small Somerset resort, a beautifully grey-gabled, Cotswold-style house with fields rising to woodland on one side and the town stretching away to the sea on the other.

As they came up the long drive in York’s powerful saloon Alex was relieved that the journey from the church had been a short one, so that she hadn’t had to engage in much conversation with him.

‘The beech hedge was planted courtesy of Edmundo, our long-standing gardener,’ he commented about the copper-leafed boundary fence hung with cobwebs of frost on their right. ‘But then you wouldn’t remember him, would you?’ he breathed derisively, bringing the car around a triangular grassy island with an old and gnarled maple tree at its centre, testing her again—as he would continue to test her, she realised, every step of the way.

‘As a matter of fact I do,’ she shot back. ‘Portuguese, isn’t he?’ And the only person at Moorlands whom Shirley had spoken of with any affection, she remembered. ‘Didn’t he come to work here the year my mother was born?’

York slanted her a look that said it would take more than that to impress him. ‘Very good,’ he drawled. And then he added, ‘How old is his son?’

‘What?’

He had brought the car between two ivy-covered walls onto the deserted, cobbled forecourt, the look he gave her hard and inquisitorial when she didn’t immediately respond.

‘He didn’t have a son—just two daughters,’ she assured him after a long moment’s deliberation, colour swamping her cheeks as she went on heatedly, ‘If you think I’m going to spend my time here indulging in some sort of question-and-answer game with you, you’re very much mistaken, York Masterton! Either you accept me for who I am or you throw me out and let me go back to the hotel, which I’d be more than happy to do!’

He smiled knowingly. ‘I’ll bet you would!’ he said, cutting the engine of the BMW and turning towards her with his eyes anything but friendly. ‘Why didn’t you come here straight away instead of turning up at the funeral like some fugitive if you’ve got nothing to hide? Or would that have been too complicated? Did you imagine I’d be at more of a disadvantage meeting you in the churchyard like that, too unsettled by the occasion to think about much else, rather than if you’d faced me here, on my home territory?’

She hadn’t reckoned on his being quite so resolute in not believing her. But she had all the papers, so why was he managing to make her feel so unnerved?

‘This isn’t your home,’ was all she could think of to say at that moment. From what she had read in the papers, she’d thought that these days he lived in a luxury apartment in London.

‘It is now.’ Disconcertingly, his arm came across the back of her seat, and she almost hated herself for the small tingle that ran through her as he leaned across and murmured in a voice of mocking sensuality, ‘Mine and yours.’ She had to make a conscious effort to desist from inhaling the subtle, tangy spice of his aftershave. ‘That should make a very…interesting partnership.’

‘A partnership—with you?’ she choked, despising her body’s totally unwelcome awareness of him. ‘I’d rather go into business with a gorilla!’

He laughed without humour, that strong, masculine jaw hardening. ‘You’ve certainly come with some pretty well-conceived opinions about me, haven’t you…cousin?’ His tone derided the title. ‘Well, for your information, they’re all true. But who said anything about business?’

Alex felt her throat working nervously. Whoever he thought she was—his estranged cousin out for all she could get, or a total impostor—he had no qualms about using that powerful masculinity to try and scare her off.

Well, he wasn’t going to succeed!

Ignoring his innuendo, she uttered nonetheless unsteadily, ‘I told you—I didn’t come here for the money.’

‘Then what for—if you’re who you say you are?’ he demanded, allowing her to breathe again when he moved back, absently taking his keys out of the ignition. ‘And you haven’t answered my other question. Why were you talking round the graveyard instead of coming here to see me first?’

Alex bit her tongue to stop herself retorting that she hadn’t been ‘stalking’, as he had put it, advising herself that it would be in her best interests not to antagonise him deliberately.

‘I thought you’d answered that yourself. Why, I’m positively terrified of you, aren’t I, York?’ she couldn’t, however, resist tossing back sarcastically with a pale, beautifully manicured hand against her chest ‘The truth is, I didn’t get into Heathrow until breakfast time yesterday morning. It was a twenty-four-hour flight and I’m lucky if I slept for two. Consequently all I was fit for was to book into the nearest hotel and fall into bed, and I didn’t wake up until nine o’clock yesterday evening. I only found out then, when I picked up a paper someone had left in the lounge, that Page had died. How do you think I felt, finding out that his funeral was today?’

‘Immensely relieved, I would have thought.’ His own sarcasm was unrelenting.

‘You don’t have the slightest sympathy for how I might feel, do you?’ she breathed, her teeth clenched as she struggled to control her temper. At least that was one advantage she had over the fiery-natured adolescent he had known. She was more in control.

He would never have a good word to say about Shirley—or anyone connected with her. She should have expected it. ‘My mother was born here-even if I wasn’t—even if she was regarded as being outside the socially accepted circle for having me. And whatever Page did to her—he was my grandfather. You’re not the only one who’s been blessed with the ability to feell’

He waited patiently while she finished. She wasn’t going to add that she had strong doubts about the last point—doubts about whether he could feel at all—which only increased as he drawled cynically, ‘Congratulations on the performance. Do you expect me to believe that you didn’t wait until Page was safely out of the way before you risked coming here? Were you hoping I’d be less of a problem to manipulate? Because, if you were, you’re in for a pretty rude awakening, Alex Johns—or whatever your real name might be. So what is it if, as you say—’ his chin jerked roughly upwards ‘—it isn’t the money?’

Those grey-green eyes were penetrating, causing Alex’s tongue to stray across her top lip. Fortunately, though, another car was coming up the drive, drawing York’s attention mercifully away from her. What would he have said if she’d told him? she wondered as she opened her door and stepped out into the cold, glittering day.

Half of Moorlands. A generous allowance and a few shares in the business.

As the solicitor and his clerk left, Alex stood numbly by the long leaded window, her arms folded, watching the dark saloon drive away.

‘How does it feel—getting things the easy way?’

Alex swung round, her gaze skittering across the plush, classically furnished lounge.

Jacketless, York was standing in the doorway, his hands on his hips, his long, powerful legs astride beneath the tailored trousers. Not many people had come back to the house, but those who had had gone. All except Celia, who was upstairs somewhere getting changed.

‘If you need to ask any more questions, why don’t you have it out with your solicitor?’ she recommended, with a toss of her head towards the window. ‘He seemed perfectly satisfied that he was dealing with the right woman.’ She felt her throat contract as he came into the room, an animal of such impressionable strength and forcefulness that inevitably her pulses started to quicken.

‘I’m not surprised—when you had him eating out of your hand from the word go.’

‘That’s hardly true,’ she reminded him. In fact the solicitor had been a very pleasant but astute middle-aged man. ‘And I thought you said he couldn’t be charmed by my winning smile.’

His gaze flicked cursorily over her slender figure beneath the pearl-grey silk blouse and straight navy skirt—all that she had been able to find that morning amongst her possessions suitable for wearing to a funeral.

‘Maybe I was wrong.’ His gaze lifted to assess the creamy smoothness of her complexion, the darkly fringed sapphire of almond-shaped eyes, the wide, sensual mouth, all framed by the intriguing silver of her hair—and in a voice that was dangerously soft he said, ‘Is any man immune?’

The tightening in Alex’s throat became almost painful and she took an involuntary step back, only to feel the soft cushions of the window-seat against her leg.

‘You’ve got all the charm of a beautiful woman plus a cool, level-headed intelligence. That’s a dangerous combination. The Alexia I knew was guileless, passionate, impulsive…’

‘She was a child!’

Light played across the rich ebony of that arrogant, tilted head.

“‘She”?’ he repeated in a voice like soft, suffocating silk.

‘So now you’ve got me doing it!’ Impatience coloured her voice. ‘What do you think I did with her? Killed her off and stole her identity?’ she argued, barely able to keep her mind on what she was saying. He was so dangerously attractive, had such a fascinating lure for the opposite sex that she might have melted under the blaze of that powerful magnetism if she hadn’t been so aware of how insensitive he was. ‘You saw all my papers!’

‘Yes.’

And he had had little choice but to accept them, as the solicitor had—to accept them as authentic, she thought, with a small twist of satisfaction. ‘So why are you still insinuating I’m not telling the truth?’