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

‘And are you still unprepared?’

No, she wasn’t, she realised, because even this conversation with him was turning her on, making her body zing with a host of traitorous impulses.

‘I can deal with it,’ she said huskily, wishing she could tear herself away from him, but she couldn’t seem to do it.

‘Can you?’ When she didn’t respond, too sensually aware to answer, coolly he suggested, ‘Let’s see.’

As he was speaking he’d positioned himself on the edge of the desk. Now, as his arm snaked around her tiny waist, Rayne lost her balance and shot out a hand to steady herself, gasping as she made unwitting contact with the hard, bunching muscles of his thigh.

The intimacy sent shock waves coursing through her body. She could tell from King’s sharply drawn breath that it was having a devastating effect on him too.

‘Heaven help me if you weren’t sent here just to drive me out of my mind!’ he rasped before his mouth came down to plunder the warm, willing cavern of hers.

This time she didn’t stop to think because the scent and sound and feel of him were driving her insane for him and suddenly she was utterly lost to the eager and hungry demands of her own body.

When he tugged her blouse open and pulled a lacy cup down over her full, high breast, she arched her back, angling her body in sweet invitation to him to take the hard throbbing tip into his mouth.

Proud of her femininity, she writhed between his thighs, thrilling in his strength as he used them to clamp her to him, while he continued to drive her crazy by suckling harder at her breast.

Unlocking her womb, she thought crazily, as sensations spiralled downwards to the most secret heart of her, making her hot and moist in readiness for the hard penetration of his body.

‘Deny it all you like, you’re going to be my woman, Rayne. You are my woman. Understand?’ he breathed raggedly against the sensitised hollow of her ear. ‘Otherwise why would you let me do this?’ His fingers found her other breast, making her gasp and strain against him as he tormented the sensitive bud. ‘Or this?’ His other hand slid down her body to clasp her buttock, caressing and moulding, its heat searing through her thin trousers before it moved possessively round to cup her aching femininity. ‘Why?’ he demanded huskily. ‘If you can’t accept that, too?’

She wanted to protest. She knew she should. But how could she? she demanded chaotically of herself. When she knew she had been made for this! That she was his and always had been, and that even if her mind recognised the treachery of acknowledging it, her body wouldn’t listen.

But she had to make it listen …

He’s your enemy. So what does that make you?

Dredging up every ounce of self-discipline that she could muster, she wrenched herself away from him.

‘I don’t want this!’ she choked, dragging the back of her hand across her mouth.

‘Really?’ Still perched on the edge of the desk, he was breathing as heavily as she was. ‘Then you’re putting up a darn good show of convincing me otherwise.’

‘I don’t care what you think.’ Which was a joke, she thought distractedly, even as she said it. Because, for some strange reason she still did. ‘I don’t want to get involved with you.’

‘Why not? When it’s so patently obvious that we could be good together?’ He looked hot and flushed and still so obviously aroused. ‘Are you in a relationship with someone else?’

‘That’s none of your business,’ she snapped, straightening her clothes with faltering fingers.

‘So you aren’t,’ he deduced correctly.

Because wouldn’t it have been the best way of keeping him at bay, she thought, realising it too late, if she had said she was?

‘So what was it, Rayne? A disappointing attachment?’

You could say that! her heart screamed bitterly, because there had been nothing that had shamed or disillusioned her more than her reckless crush on him.

‘I just don’t go in for casual sleeping around.’

‘I’m pleased to hear it,’ he responded deeply, his eyes fixing on her with a dark intensity. She looked really quite shaken, he thought, wondering why, when in every other way she seemed so much a woman of the world. ‘For what it’s worth … it doesn’t rank very highly with me, either.’

‘Hah!’ Despite her brittle little laugh, she couldn’t help wondering if he was telling the truth. She wanted to kick herself for hoping that he was.

‘You really have a very low opinion of me, don’t you?’ he remarked, running a long tapered hand through his thick hair. She was surprised to notice that it was trembling slightly.

So even the high-and-mighty Kingsley Clayborne was human!

She wondered why she was even allowing herself to grant him any concessions, and put it down to the fact that she was so affected by him—by what she had allowed him to do to her—that she was still too unsettled by it to feel anything.

‘Why should it matter to you what I—’ she began as she was smoothing back her hair, but broke off when a stick prodding the door he’d failed to close brought it flying open. Both of them had been too otherwise preoccupied to hear the wheelchair approaching.

‘King? Rayne? Oh, there you both are!’ Mitchell Clayborne’s colour was unusually high as he manoeuvred his chair into the room and Rayne guessed he’d been doing too much, against his doctor’s orders.

‘King, I wanted you to retrieve the book I dropped down behind the bedside cabinet but, since Rayne’s here, she can do it for me and perhaps read a little to me. Have you finished with her?’

King’s eyes were speculative as, on his feet now, he regarded her from his superior height, looking totally unfazed by what had just happened between them.

‘Yes, I’ve finished with her,’ he told his father.

Reluctantly inhaling his scent, keen to get away, Rayne brushed past him, although she could tell from that slight compression of his devastating mouth that what he was really saying was that where she was concerned he hadn’t even begun yet.

CHAPTER FOUR (#ulink_cc1ed112-af46-58a7-ad77-7ff57766bc31)

THE following day Rayne decided to escape from the house for a while, needing some time to decide what she was going to do.

She was uncomfortable associating with the people who had wreaked such devastation on her family, but she couldn’t see what else she could do. She didn’t want to leave there without the evidence or admission that she was determined to secure for her father’s sake.

She had started asking Mitch questions last night while she had been reading to him—very subtly, and supposedly innocently. Like how he had begun in business. And when exactly had he hit upon the idea for the MiracleMed software. How he had felt when it had taken off.

‘King must have been very proud of you,’ she’d ventured, assessing his reaction, looking for any change in his hard, world-weary features, any note of guilt in his gravelly voice.

He’d seemed all right at first. But then he’d grown more and more agitated, even when their conversation had reverted to more casual topics. As well he should have! Rayne thought bitterly.

He’d looked so unwell, though, and had sounded so breathless that her conscience wouldn’t allow her to ask any more leading questions.

‘I think you should go to bed,’ she had advised worriedly, ringing the bell to summon one of the male members of staff to help him. She was frustrated, though, that yet another day had gone by and she was still no nearer to realising her goal.

Now, this morning, he had sent for her and told her that he didn’t need her services today, and so she’d decided to take herself down into the town for a proper look around.

‘You’ll need some of these,’ he’d told her from his bed, pressing a whole wad of banknotes into her hand.

Shocked and embarrassed, she had thrust them back at him. ‘I can’t,’ she’d protested, appalled at taking money from anyone—let alone someone she despised so much.

‘Don’t be silly. How do you think you’re going to get around and buy the odd souvenir?’ he’d demanded of her gruffly. ‘With those big bright eyes and that naturally winning smile?’

Shrugging off his compliment, she had to accept that he was right. Being robbed hadn’t exactly left her in a position to be proud.