His Most Exquisite Conquest: A Delicious Deception / The Girl He'd Overlooked / Stepping out of the Shadows

‘Like them? I can’t tell you how much they’ve brightened my day! But why did you have the message signed “Rayne”, love?’ She gave a little chuckle. ‘Weren’t you thinking?’

Catching her breath, Rayne cast a surreptitious glance at King.

He was scanning through various menus on his own phone. Checking appointments and deleting texts, she decided, her eyes drawn to that strong, steady hand that had driven her nearly mindless for him yesterday.

He still hadn’t started the engine, letting her take her call.

Killing time, she suspected, while he waited for her to finish. Nevertheless, she knew that although he was displaying all outward signs of being courteous and respecting her privacy by appearing otherwise engaged, that sharp brain of his was probably attuned to every agitated response she was uttering.

‘I couldn’t have been. I’m sorry,’ she added quickly, because she certainly didn’t feel happy being forced to deceive her own mother. ‘But you’re all right, are you?’ she asked uneasily, having sensed a flicker of interest from the man beside her since uttering that apology, even though he still appeared preoccupied with the obvious running of his business.

‘Of course I am,’ Cynthia Hardwicke assured her, although there was a curious note in the disembodied voice. ‘But are you? You don’t sound yourself, darling. Is anything the matter?’

‘No, of course not.’ She laughed to try and convince her parent that everything was as it should be, to try and behave normally.

‘Are you with someone?’

Rayne could feel herself growing hot and sticky from her toes upwards.

‘Who is it?’ Her mother persisted in wanting to know.

Rayne hesitated before replying. ‘It’s just a friend.’ Involuntarily, her gaze strayed to King and his heart-stopping profile. It exhibited forcefulness overlaid with unstinting sensuality. Authority and energy, harnessed with a magnetism that had the drawing power over a woman that the moon had over the tides. But he had obviously picked up the gist of the conversation because his mouth was twitching now in what she could only describe as sensual mockery. He clearly didn’t regard her as a friend, any more than she considered him one. Though for plainly different reasons where she was concerned!

‘I thought I knew all your friends,’ Cynthia pressed. Which was true, Rayne thought. She did. ‘You’re sounding pretty secretive. That’s not like you.’

‘It’s no one of any significance,’ Rayne stressed, already regretting the comment when she saw the way King was looking at her as she wound up the conversation and rang off.

‘Why didn’t you tell her about us?’ he enquired, turning all his attention towards her now.

‘There is no “us”,’ she reminded him tartly, feeling the heat of shame creeping up her neck and into her cheeks when a masculine eyebrow lifted in obvious dispute.

‘No? Not when I only have to touch you to send your hormones rocketing through the roof? I’d say that was significant enough to constitute an “us”.’

He’d also taken her out to breakfast that first morning. Showed her around Monte Carlo and bought her lunch today. Not to mention making his credit card available to pay for her mother’s birthday bouquet!

‘I’m sorry about the way I described you,’ she felt she had to offer, even if his reasons for helping her might be purely self-motivated. ‘But I had to put her off the scent.’

‘The scent of what?’ he asked smoothly.

‘That I’m here.’

‘In Monaco? Or with me?’

‘Both,’ she answered truthfully now. ‘She thinks I’m staying with my friend in Nice. If I told her I was in Monte Carlo on my own, she’d worry.’

‘And if you said you were with me?’

‘Then I’d have to explain how I came to be in Mitch’s house in the first place, and she’d worry even more.’ No, more than that. She’d have a fit, Rayne thought, shuddering to think what Cynthia Hardwicke would say if she knew that her daughter was hobnobbing with the family who had ruined her husband. Another shiver went down her spine as she thought of how easily she could become involved—especially with King—if she didn’t watch her step.

‘You don’t think she’d approve of you picking up older men?’

‘I didn’t pick him up,’ she reminded him, stressing the point. ‘I meant I’d have to tell her how I’d had my belongings stolen. With losing Dad so recently, Mum gets worked up about things and imagines something terrible’s going to happen to me. If she thought I needed her in any way, she’d be over here like a shot, and I couldn’t risk letting her do that.’ Even if the Claybornes hadn’t been in the picture. ‘She needs her holiday a hundred times more than I need mine. I don’t intend doing anything that would spoil it for her.’

‘That’s very commendable,’ he murmured, the sound rumbling deeply from his chest. ‘You love her very much, don’t you?’

His observation was, like his eyes, so direct and probing that she looked quickly away without answering, ashamed to let such a hard-headed character as he was see the welling emotion she had to fight to control.

King couldn’t take his eyes off her tight, tense features—the perfect structure of her forehead, the pert nose with those slightly flaring nostrils, the gentle curve of her cheek.

This girl was a real enigma, he decided, with his face a study in concentration. On the one hand she seemed guarded and extremely defensive, which aroused his natural suspicions, especially since he’d taken her as a gold-digger. Definitely like someone with something to hide. Yet on the other hand she spoke about and behaved towards her mother as though she would give her life for the woman if she had to, which didn’t quite tie in with the hard-headed opportunist he was prepared to think she was. He was finding, he realised, that he harboured very conflicting opinions about Rayne Carpenter, and it wasn’t in his nature to be confounded by anyone. And on top of that there was still this strong and nagging feeling of having known her before …

‘We all do things according to what our consciences tell us we should do, don’t we?’ she suggested meaningfully, wishing she could control her tongue and not let her emotions run away with her until she was ready to hit him—and his father—with the truth.

‘Should it prick my conscience that every time you come within a yard of me I want to take you to bed?’ he said softly, fondling her hair. ‘Or that you want me to against your own better judgement?’

The space between them was suddenly charged with so much electricity it was as if someone had lit a whole boxful of fire-crackers and Rayne’s heart started hammering in her chest.

‘Can we drop this subject? Please,’ she breathed emphatically.

Her breath seemed to stick in her lungs as his arm came across the back of her seat, bringing him closer to her.

‘Have you never heard the expression “He who pleads is lost”?’ he murmured with his smile predatory, his lashes thick and dark, shielding his eyes as they rested on the fullness of her trembling, slightly parted mouth.

When his lips touched hers it was only to make contact with the outer corner of her mouth, a contact that left her craving the full onslaught of his kiss, made her grasp the seat to stop herself from twining her arms around his warm, muscled torso as he lifted his head.

‘What’s wrong, Rayne? Can’t you accept the consequences of what you’ve got yourself into?’ His voice was quite steady, not ragged with sexual desire as she’d imagined it would be. In fact there was a note of hidden danger in the very choice of his words.

‘I wasn’t aware I’d got myself into anything,’ she uttered tremulously, knowing he was still suspicious of her, still vigilant, even if she had imagined that softening in him just now, because she had, she realised, telling herself now that she had been a fool to do so.

‘Then you obviously need convincing,’ he said.

She expected him to demonstrate exactly what he meant, but he didn’t. Instead he simply started the powerful car and drove them back to the villa.

So what had he meant by that? she wondered when, once there, he left her to her own devices, abandoning her to deal with some business in the study. Did he intend to keep her on tenterhooks—make her wait until her guard was down before proving his point to her again? That she couldn’t resist him. Or had he guessed the secret she was keeping from him and Mitch and was merely luring her into a false sense of security until such time as he disclosed what he had uncovered?

And that was a very unfortunate pun, Rayne decided with a grimace because, if she wasn’t careful, she was in danger of him not only guessing who she really was before she was ready to tell him, but also of winding up in his bed! And wouldn’t that be a double victory for him? She shivered just from the thought of it, although even self-loathing couldn’t temper the excitement that heated her blood every time she considered him being her lover.

‘I don’t think you should be doing this,’ Rayne counselled, watching Mitch manoeuvring his chair along the wooded path where he had insisted she bring him today. ‘Getting out so early so as to give everyone the slip is one thing, but persuading me to bring you over such uneven ground as this—’

‘Will you shut up?’ Mitch said, carrying on ahead of her, his hard mottled hands on the wheels pushing him stubbornly to his goal.

The trees thinned out, making Rayne gasp, not only from the sheer danger of the cliff edge just below them, but at the panorama of nothing but glittering sea and sky that had suddenly opened up in front of them.

‘Can you show me anything better than that?’ Mitch challenged, waving a hand towards the view. ‘I used to come here a lot when I was young. It’s where I proposed to my first wife.’

‘King’s mother,’ Rayne said tentatively.

‘Did you know she left me?’ He gave a harsh bark of laughter. ‘Of course you did. Everybody knows it. Everyone knows I’m not the easiest of men to live with.’