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

Of course, she thought, reasoning through the depths of her wanting. He had been worrying about Mitch all day …

With her heart going out to him, she wondered how she could ever have doubted that he was anything other than trustworthy, and that that integrity he was showing her now would extend to every aspect of his life. And her intuition must have recognised that for her to have still found herself so attracted to him, even when she’d wanted to believe the worst about him.

She wanted to tell him she was sorry she’d misjudged him so completely, but she was still too aroused and racked with need for him to speak. She laid tentative fingers on his forearm. ‘It’s all right,’ she assured softly, with wild impulses leaping through her from the sensation of his skin beneath her fingers. ‘We don’t need one.’

‘You’re protected?’ The disbelief that chased away some of the shadows from his face was worth a month of birthdays, Rayne thought, smiling shyly, too aroused to tell him why. That weeks ago she’d been given the Pill to correct her erratic cycle, thrown out of kilter through worrying about her mum.

‘We’ll be perfectly safe—I promise,’ she breathed, her simmering desire beginning to bubble over again just from caressing the superbly contoured muscle of his upper arm. It felt firm and solid. As solid as the rest of his body as he came down to her again, causing her to gasp from the weight and power of him, and then from a breath-catching expectancy as he gently parted her legs.

But he didn’t enter her right away. Instead, with his hot, hard flesh merely nudging at her moist softness, he treated her to a torturous game of re-arousal that had her sobbing at the ecstasy of his tormenting lips and hands until she spread her legs fan-like and raised her hips uninhibitedly to his in a frenzied and unequivocal invitation to him to take her.

And that was more than he could take, she realised, gasping and overcome by sensation when one long, hard thrust had him sinking deeply into her eager warmth.

Pushed over the limit, she started to climax at once, bucking and sobbing until she was nothing but an abandoned mass of writhing sensations, propelled to greater and greater heights by King’s driving and increasingly deeper penetration.

Her zenith when it came was a starburst of colour and spell-binding pleasure in which she felt she was being catapulted to another planet. And then the moment came when King’s own climax burst and he was flowing into her, joining her with him and to him, sending the earth spinning off its axis as they floated together—one mind and one body—in some glorious parallel universe.

When she awoke, she was alone in the big bed and the blinds were drawn up to reveal the cloudless Mediterranean blue sky.

She was in a very masculine room, with plain soft furnishings and heavy designer furniture, in contrast to the pale and more delicate fitments of her own room.

Her stomach flipped now as she remembered what had transpired, the tender spots on the most intimate places of her body an exciting reminder of a long and rapturous night.

Now, though, remembering why she had come here and all that had transpired yesterday, she wondered just how wise she had been in letting it happen.

The Claybornes had as good as destroyed her family—or at least Mitch Clayborne had, even if Grant Hardwicke had brought it on himself in incurring Mitch’s wrath by planning to run off with his wife. But Rayne’s mother wasn’t aware of that, and Rayne vowed she would do her best to keep her from ever finding out. However, where King was concerned, her mother still believed, as Rayne had, that he was just as guilty as Mitch of stealing her father’s work. So whatever would her mother say if she knew how little it had taken for her daughter to wind up in bed with King? She’d be horrified and hurt beyond belief, Rayne thought, as she would if she knew about Grant’s affair. And how could she explain to her mother that King had played no part in hurting her father, when she didn’t think Cynthia Hardwicke would even survive knowing the whole truth?

All she could do, she reasoned, was not tell her mother anything—not even let her know that she had been here.

As for Mitch Clayborne …

Turning over in bed, she let out a low groan. She didn’t think she could stand the embarrassment of ever facing him again.

She was just about to step out of bed but, hearing the door opening and realising she was entirely naked, she slipped back in, pulling the single sheet up over her breasts.

Despite her concerns, her heart leaped to see King striding in wearing a white dressing gown and leather slippers. He had combed his hair, but his unshaven jaw was even darker this morning and his tanned chest and legs contrasted deeply with the robe.

‘You slept well,’ he commented, and his smile was so warm that all her worries were in danger of melting like the winter’s last snows. ‘Hélène’s cooking breakfast, but I thought you might like a glass of orange juice to revive you,’ he said.

Thanking him, Rayne took the crystal glass and drank from it gratefully. She couldn’t believe how thirsty she was—or how hungry. Obviously making love with him had stirred her appetites, she realised, in more ways than one.

‘King … About last night,’ she began when she came up for air, hardly able to look at him after all they had shared.

‘What are you going to tell me?’ He looked at her knowingly. ‘That it shouldn’t have happened?’

‘Something like that,’ she murmured sheepishly, finishing her juice.

‘Too late, my sweet. It did.’ He sounded fatalistic as he removed the empty glass from her hand. ‘Not once—but twice—’ his mouth was pulling sensually ‘—if I remember correctly. So what excuse are you going to give me for virtually ripping off my shirt and then nearly driving me out of my mind with your wicked ways?’

The dark intensity of his eyes was making her throb in every intimate part of her that he had made his own, which meant that her ‘wicked ways’, as he’d called them, still weren’t satisfied. Because she still craved him, and even more so as she remembered every tender caress of his skilled and wonderful hands and the burning heat of his mouth on the most secret places of her body.

In a voice tremulous with desire she said, ‘I didn’t rip off your shirt.’ And because this whole scenario was too embarrassing for her she said, ‘I think I should go.’

‘Go?’ He frowned. ‘Go where? To the bathroom? Or home?’ he enquired flippantly.

‘Home, of course,’ she responded seriously. ‘It’s much too embarrassing to stay here now that Mitch knows who I am.’

‘Is that the only reason?’ he purred with sensuality curling his fantastic mouth again and, before she could answer, too ashamed to know how to respond, he said, ‘He’s expressly requested that you stay. So do I. In fact, I insist upon it.’

‘Insist?’ Rayne echoed with her rebellious nature surfacing through her unquenchable desire.

‘All right, then. I invite you to stay,’ he amended.

‘Why?’

‘Because I think you must be feeling a little overwrought and probably much too tired after … last night,’ he reminded her with his irises darkening, although he was still smiling, ‘to be in any fit state to go anywhere.’

‘I’m surprised, after all you called me yesterday—deceitful, lying, naïve—’ she took a warped pleasure in reminding him equally ‘—that you should even care.’

‘Of course I care.’

A glimmer of something deep inside her responded too eagerly to that heavily breathed statement. A throwback to her teenage years. That was all it was, she told herself chaotically.

‘You’re under my roof,’ he went on, surprising her because she’d thought it was Mitch’s house. ‘I wouldn’t want to be responsible for driving you out.’

‘Your roof?’ she enquired obliquely, while reluctantly processing the fact of his merely feeling responsible for her.

‘Does that surprise you?’

‘No.’ Nothing about him surprised her.

‘My roof. My house …’ her breath caught sharply as the mattress suddenly depressed beneath his weight ‘… and my bed.’

His voice was arousing in itself, even without the things he was saying, and she thought of those couple of lovelorn weeks she had spent in his office, listening to his voice from behind that glass partition, wondering what it would be like to hear it roughened by desire.

‘If Hélène’s getting breakfast, we don’t have time,’ she said breathlessly because he was already turning back the sheet, making her whole body scream in anticipation.

He laughed softly. ‘Oh, yes,’ he said, pressing his lips against her forehead, and his voice was so soft she had to close her eyes because she couldn’t deal with the depth of feeling it aroused in her, ‘I think we do.’

CHAPTER EIGHT (#ulink_e029ebc6-7815-57d3-ba53-b7b4c364da89)

RAYNE decided she had to go and visit Mitch at the clinic as soon as possible, since it had all come out now, who she was and why she was there.

She didn’t feel like seeing a man who had used the terms of a signed agreement as a payback to ruin his ex-partner because, no matter how bad or naïve a businessman Grant Hardwicke had been, that was what Mitch had effectively done. But although she was still in shock over the things King had told her about her father, she still felt she owed it to Grant Hardwicke to hear the facts first-hand from Mitch himself.

At King’s insistence, Rayne allowed him to drive her to the hospital, where a handful of reporters who had learned of Mitch’s condition leaped on them like locusts as soon as they arrived at the main doors.

‘Is it true, Mr Clayborne, that this health scare of your father’s is more serious than the clinic is saying?’