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

‘I did steal that software.’

King’s face was sculpted with harsh lines of bewilderment. ‘What are you saying?’ he whispered, his face turning pale, his mouth contorting in revulsion and disbelief.

‘It’s true,’ Mitch admitted heavily. ‘I know you thought I put a lot of my own time into it, but I didn’t. I’m glad it’s out. I’m glad you know, King. It’s been hell keeping it to myself—and from you in particular—all of these years.’

For once King found himself unable to think straight. Had he really heard Mitch correctly? Was his own father admitting to being a thief? Was that what had been gnawing away at him for so long? Making him so bitter?

‘You let me—let everyone—believe he produced the whole thing in the company’s time. Or a large part of it, anyway. Under Clayborne’s corporate umbrella!’ King reminded him roughly.

‘It was his word against mine—and he had no proof.’

‘So you took it on yourself to call it yours? Another man’s intellectual property!’ King stared at his father, appalled. ‘Didn’t it occur to you that you might be robbing him of his livelihood? That he had dependants? A wife and a daughter?’

‘So she’s come after me,’ Mitch murmured, sounding far away, as though he wasn’t listening. ‘After all these years! What a sparky little thing.’

‘She’s deceitful!’ King rasped, feeling his earlier anger brewing, although he wasn’t sure any more whether to be angry with her as well as his father, or just with himself. ‘What I hadn’t realised until now was that you were. My own father!’

He swung away towards the window again, massaging his neck, sightlessly watching the glittering sky mellowing with the lateness of the day. He didn’t want to be speaking to his father like that. Not while he was so unwell.

He hadn’t wanted to speak to Rayne as he had either, but the shock of discovering who she was with the knowledge that he had not only been ensnared by her beautiful face and body, but had also been made a fool of into the bargain had been much too much for his masculine self-esteem to take all in one go.

He couldn’t forget though how fiercely she had defended Grant Hardwicke, standing up for him with all the loyalty and determination of a loving daughter. Nor could he forget the emotion in her face when she had asked him if she could come here today and he had point-blank refused to let her. After she had helped his father, too. After she could so easily have turned away and not got involved. Although she hadn’t, he reflected, even though only minutes before she had been accusing Mitch of committing the worst possible corporate crime against her father. And in that, he thought, with his big body stiffening, she had been right … ‘King?’

The weak appeal had him reluctantly turning to regard the semi-reclining form on the bed, the tension so gripping in his shoulders that he thought his spine would snap.

‘Why?’ he demanded of his father, his strong features ravaged by a complexity of emotions. ‘Why did you do it, damn you? Why, Mitch?’

Amazingly, there was contrition and sadness too, King noted, in the watery blue eyes looking out of his father’s loose-skinned, rather florid face. ‘Do you—of all people—really need to ask?’ He looked away, towards the ceiling and the metal curtain track that ran around his bed, sighing heavily. ‘You know why.’

CHAPTER SIX (#ulink_79c64529-b1a0-5458-ad90-ef739452c96b)

THE sky was changing from molten gold to burnished crimson.

In the grounds surrounding the house and on the forested hillside the crickets had struck up their shrill evening chorus, while in the distance, way below, Monte Carlo was waking up for the night.

From the terrace, her hand on the sun-warmed stone of the balustrade, Rayne watched the lights gradually come on in the hotels and apartments, and in the cafés and bars along the coast.

A thousand stars shining almost as brightly as the planet whose light seemed to be winking at her above the dark pointed spear of a cypress tree. One lonely star in a flaming universe, Rayne thought, which was how she felt right at that moment since Hélène had taken herself off to her rooms at least an hour ago, and Rayne hadn’t heard anything from King since he’d left with his father and the paramedics that morning.

A sharp breath escaped her as she heard the low growl of a car turning in through the gates, which she couldn’t see from the house as it was hidden by trees, and the next second saw the Lamborghini coming along the drive. The car drew up and her heart leapt when she saw King get out and hand his keys to a member of staff to garage it for the night.

She heard their muffled voices, King’s low and congenial, the other man’s infused with courtesy and yet genuine respect for his mega-rich, mega-influential employer. King was his employer, she had no doubt about that, since Hélène had told her that he oversaw most of his father’s affairs these days.

She had tried ringing his cellphone several times to find out how Mitch was, but if it wasn’t engaged it had been on voicemail. The one message she had left around lunchtime, asking King to call her, hadn’t been answered, and Hélène hadn’t been able to tell her anything beyond the fact that Mitch was still having tests.

Watching King’s dark head disappear under the portico, she waited, breath held, for him to come into the house. A few moments later she swung round with her heart leaping absurdly as she caught the sound of his light footsteps moving towards her over the terrace.

‘How’s Mitch?’ she asked without any preamble.

Bracing herself for some sarcastic response about her caring, his appearance, nevertheless, made her whole body go weak.

He was still dressed in the white shirt and dark suit trousers he had been wearing that morning, but his jacket was hooked over one shoulder. He was tie-less now and his shirt with the two top buttons unfastened was unusually crumpled. His hair looked as if he had been raking it back all day, but now there were dark strands falling loosely across his forehead as if he had finally given up trying to control it. His strong jaw was darkened by a day’s growth of stubble and there were dark hairs curling over the open V of his shirt.

Never had she seen him look so dishevelled, Rayne realised. Nor so utterly and sensationally male.

‘He had an angina attack. It wasn’t a coronary.’ The relief with which he informed her of that was almost tangible.

‘So he’s going to be all right?’

His eyes tugged over the golden slope of her shoulders beneath the shoelace straps of her dress, and Rayne felt as if the fine white chiffon would melt beneath the searing steel of his eyes.

‘Do you truly care?’ he murmured, so softly that she might have misheard him as he tossed his jacket unceremoniously down onto one of the heavily cushioned dining seats.

‘Of course I care. I left a message,’ she told him a little sharply, ‘but you didn’t answer.’

Because he hadn’t known what to say to her after their antagonised scene this morning. Hadn’t known then—when he was at the hospital—or now—when he was faced with the reality of telling her—exactly how to deal with the things his father had told him.

He merely dipped his head in acknowledgement of what she had said.

‘They’re keeping him in for observation, but hopefully he’s going to be all right.’

He looked so weary—devastated, almost, Rayne would have said—that she had the strongest urge to go over and put her arms around him in the way he’d done with her the other day. Tell him that she understood the anguish in having a sick parent—of losing a parent, even—but she held back. This was King Clayborne, after all. Hard. Impervious. Impenetrable. And he had found her out in the web of deceit she’d been weaving ever since she’d been here. He’d have no sympathy for her. Or any member of her family.

Steeling herself against that imperviousness with her head held stiffly, she enquired, ‘Have you come back to ask me to leave?’

‘No.’

No? Surprise pleated her forehead. ‘I thought you wouldn’t be able to get rid of me fast enough.’

‘That’s what I thought,’ he admitted with a heavy sigh.

Rayne’s frown deepened. ‘What’s changed your mind? Or do you just want to keep me here to extract some sort of payment from me for lying to you?’

He came over to lean on the balustrade, looking out towards the sea beyond the twilit city. He chuckled softly, an almost self-derisory sound. ‘What sort of man do you imagine I am, Lorrayne?’

She couldn’t answer at first because all the replies that sprang to mind weren’t very complimentary. And because he was so near that she could feel the power of his masculinity emanating from him, smell the faint hint of his animal scent beneath the lingering traces of his cologne.

‘Tough. Determined. Implacable.’ Her mouth pulled slightly as she finished reeling them off.

He made another self-deprecating sound down his nostrils as he angled his body towards her, his forearm resting on the still warm stone. ‘Why do I get the impression that those adjectives were carefully chosen from the best of a bad bunch?’

Because they were, she thought, but remained silent this time.

‘You also thought I was grossly unscrupulous in being party to some treacherous and probably very unlawful act against your father,’ he stated, straightening up, ‘but I want you to know categorically now that I wasn’t.’

Strangely, she believed him, Rayne realised, shocked. But there was no room for anything other than truth in the deep intensity of his voice, nor, she accepted with a pulse-quickening heat stealing through her as she brought her head up, in the disturbing clarity of his eyes.

‘And Mitch?’ She looked quickly seaward to avoid his penetrating gaze, fixing hers on the light-spangled silhouette of a cruise ship moored way out in the distant harbour. ‘Did you tell him who I was?’