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

Rayne glanced down at him, noting something that sounded remarkably like regret in his voice. Did he still miss the woman who had deserted him and their five-year-old child? Miss her still, even though he’d finally found someone else to take her place?

‘As a boy, King blamed himself for his mother leaving us. For leaving him,’ Mitch was saying, much to Rayne’s surprise. ‘It hardened him. Made a cynic of him. Especially where marriage and family is concerned. We never could form the bond we should have formed. He was already a man by the time I met Karen.’

‘Your second wife?’ A woman half his age, who had died so tragically when their car had come off the road, Rayne reflected, although it was King she was reluctantly thinking of. King, the child who had lost a mother, even though she was still alive. And King the man, who was left scarred by the desertion. Left hard and uncaring. Unable to trust …

Mitch nodded and started to cough. ‘Here. Help me with this thing, will you?’ he spluttered.

He was having difficulty opening the zip of a leather pouch he’d brought with him. When she gave it back to him, he swore when he looked inside.

‘What’s wrong?’ Rayne asked him anxiously.

‘Does anything have to be wrong?’ he wheezed, turning his chair with such angry force that it lurched sideways, lodging one wheel in a grassy hollow.

Rayne shot over to grab the handles, trying to pull it free.

‘I can’t move it!’ she gasped, finding the man’s bulk and the awkward angle of the chair too much for her inadequate strength. To add to that, Mitch’s breathing was beginning to worry her.

‘I’m going to ring King,’ she said quickly, taking out her phone when her attempts to dislodge the chair proved ineffectual.

‘No! We don’t need him,’ Mitch protested to her dismay.

‘I’ll have to,’ Rayne told him, too frightened by the danger of the situation to be intimidated by him, even if every bone in her body rebelled at having to explain to King.

He answered her call on the second ring, his voice deep and strong, the voice of a man who could take on the world and come out fighting.

‘King! It’s Mitch! We’re …’ Quickly she acquainted him with their exact location. ‘He’s got his chair stuck in a rut and he seems to have come out without his medication. It’s for his breathing. I think it’s—’

‘I know where it is,’ he rasped, and that was it. He was on his way before she even had time to cut the call.

Rayne couldn’t have been more grateful when she heard the throb of the Lamborghini’s engine. Through the trees she saw the car practically skid to a halt and she went weak with relief when King leapt out and raced towards them without bothering to close the door.

‘Thank heaven you’re here!’ she breathed.

It was with immense gratitude that she relinquished the handles of the chair into his stronger and more capable hands.

‘Keep clear of this,’ he ordered, and with his efficient and determined strength managed to bring the man and his chair back onto even ground.

How effortlessly he had saved the day, Rayne marvelled, with tears of relief biting behind her eyes now that the ordeal was over.

‘You should never have brought him out here,’ he admonished after he’d overseen Mitch take his medication and was now pushing him back to the car. ‘Or at the very least you should have told me where you were going.’

‘He didn’t want me to,’ Rayne argued, refusing to be the whipping boy for two very indomitable males.

‘Then you should have refused to drive him. Or at least used your own initiative to let me know where you were going.’

‘It wasn’t her fault.’ Mitch sent a scowling upward glance back over his shoulder at his son. ‘And stop talking about me like I wasn’t here. That isn’t like you, King. Anyway, I wanted some freedom. I get sick and tired of people fussing over me. Rayne doesn’t fuss over me,’ he expanded surprisingly, without looking at her as she trooped along beside them, still feeling shaken, and now unjustly chastened, by King’s flaying tongue.

‘I really didn’t know he was going to get me to drive him here,’ she admitted, trying to placate him, sensing he was still angry with her after he had got his father and his chair back into the Bentley and was now moving back to his own car. ‘But I couldn’t go against his wishes and tell you he was going out. He’s got so much pride, King. Almost as much as you,’ she tagged on by way of an accusation, surprising herself by defending Mitch. ‘He feels humiliated asking you to do the simplest things he used to do himself,’ she uttered with angry tears welling up in her from those frightening moments when she’d been hanging on to that chair, sick with worry over Mitch Clayborne’s state of health. ‘Have you never felt humiliated by anything?’

She looked like a warring goddess, King thought, seeing her eyes dancing like splintering emeralds and her tousled red hair falling wildly round her shoulders as her beautiful body squared in decisive challenge against him. But those tears were genuine, and the fierceness with which she was standing up for his father touched him in a way he didn’t want to be touched.

One stride was all it took and he was reaching for her.

‘It’s all right,’ he reassured her, enfolding her in his arms and feeling her slender body shaken by sobs. ‘It’s all right. There’s no harm done,’ he murmured into her perfumed hair.

It seemed so right to cling to him, Rayne thought, steadied by his hard warmth. He seemed so dependable and strong. So much so that she wanted to stay there with her head resting against his shoulder while she breathed in his very masculine scent and felt the heavy beat of his heart drumming against hers.

But that was just a flight of fancy because of all she’d been through this morning, she told herself. Because she needed someone and he just happened to be here.

‘I’ve got to get Mitch home,’ she said huskily, pulling herself free, and tripped across to the Bentley without a glance back.

In her room the following evening, Rayne paced the tastefully patterned tiles, reflecting on the previous day’s events.

That episode with Mitch had been scary, but so had those traitorous feelings she’d experienced during those few crazy moments in King’s arms.

Sexual attraction was one thing. You didn’t have to know or even like someone very much to feel its unmistakable and often dangerous tug. But what she had felt when King had shown that tender and more understanding side of his nature yesterday had been thoroughly more bewildering and complicated.

She was there to get an admission—and through the tabloids if Mitch refused to comply with what she wanted—and getting emotionally involved with King Clayborne wasn’t on her agenda. Even if Mitchell Clayborne thought it should be!

‘Is there something you’re not telling me, Rayne?’ he had asked her after she’d pulled out of King’s arms and climbed into the Bentley yesterday.

‘No, I don’t think so,’ she’d refuted, knowing full well he was referring to the embrace he had just witnessed between them.

‘Pity,’ he’d expressed, although that unusual glint in his watery blue eyes had assured her he didn’t believe her. ‘You’d be a good match for him. He needs someone who’ll stand up to him once in a while, and I must admit it would be no hardship to me if you were to stick around.’

Which she definitely wasn’t going to! Rayne thought now, with the same stab of guilt she’d felt yesterday in realising that she was unintentionally getting herself caught up in Mitch’s affections.

She was getting far too involved with both men, and she had never intended that, she thought despairingly. The longer she stayed, the more she was becoming embroiled in their everyday lives, their worries, their concerns and, where King was concerned, she didn’t even have to spell out the problem to herself there.

Quite simply, that crazy fever she had been suffering from as a hapless teenager had returned in full force, threatening to consume her with its intensity because she had no protection against it. His cruel words and actions then should have immunized her for life, and she thought they had until she had met him again the other night. How he made her feel was like an ever-changing strain of some deadly virus that couldn’t be controlled, and the second time around it was even more potent and deadly than the first. It didn’t help either, telling herself that she was a woman now and therefore should have known better. Known how to ride the torments of this lethal attraction until it passed. Because it wouldn’t, she was shocked to realise. Because the only drug that would alleviate her symptoms was in the full-blown act of his possession of her. And then the relief, she thought, would only be short-lived, because once she had allowed herself to cross that line with him she knew she would never be able to have enough of King Clayborne. Like a drug, after its effects had worn off, the symptoms would return until she could indulge herself again, which would mean taking him into her until she could feel his power and his energy filling her up and seeping into every clamouring cell of her body, by which time she would be a hopeless addict.

No, she resolved, coming to a standstill at last on the beautiful pale Indian rug and making her decision.

First thing in the morning, she determined with a sudden painful contraction of her stomach muscles, she was going to let them both know exactly who she was and what she was doing there.

CHAPTER FIVE (#ulink_07f34954-954c-5446-b046-33ad0d35c3c7)

‘MONSIEUR CLAYBORNE? Non, he is not up yet,’ the housekeeper informed Rayne when she enquired where he was. ‘And Monsieur King …’ Hélène Dupont always referred to him as that, Rayne noticed, as though to call him simply ‘King’ would somehow detract from the respect she felt he commanded ‘… I believe he is still giving an interview on the terrace.’

‘An interview?’ Rayne queried, her curiosity aroused.

‘It’s to do with the documentary he is sponsoring. The one about clean water for some African villages. I believe he is heavily committed to that. They rang early. It was unexpected,’ Hélène told her before concluding, ‘I think he will be about half an hour more.’

‘Thanks,’ Rayne responded, her smile strained, her insides knotted up, as they had been almost continuously since she’d made her decision to tell the truth, so much so that she’d scarcely slept last night.

Finding out about the charitable work that King was involved in didn’t make her feel any better about deceiving him. In fact, it made her feel a whole lot worse.

She hadn’t, until now, even considered him having a compassionate side. Not really compassionate. Not until he had comforted her on that cliff-top the other morning. But then hadn’t he seen to it that her mother got her flowers when she was having difficulty ordering them? And rushed back from New York as soon as he’d been alerted to his father’s state of health?