The Heiress Bride

“Well, you’ve found me. Now either go back and tell him I’m here and I’m fine, or get out of my way.”

He made no attempt to do so. “All in good time, Princess,” he said lazily. “I’m not your lackey.”

Unaccountably Alysia’s heart was hammering. He hadn’t moved an inch, but she sensed anger behind the deceptively gentle tone. An irrational, atavistic fear made her lash out with words. “No,” she said, her head lifting to an unconsciously arrogant tilt. “You’re my father’s.”

He seemed to be contemplating her, holding himself so still it was uncanny. The moon reappeared, throwing a faint nimbus around his head but scarcely lighting his face except for the glitter of his eyes. He made a short, sharp sound that might have been the beginning of a laugh. “Is that what you think?” he asked her. “He’s my employer.”

“So you jump when he says ‘Jump’ and obediently check up on his daughter when he tells you to. I didn’t know that was part of the deputy editor’s job description.”

“It’s part of being a guest in Spencer’s house,” Chase replied. “He didn’t like to leave the party, as he’s the host. I take it you didn’t want to be found.”

Ignoring the implication that she was neglecting her duties as her father’s hostess, Alysia said, “I didn’t need to be found! I would have been coming back in a minute anyway.”

“Well, then—” at last he moved aside so that she could precede him “—I’ll escort you.”

She swept past him, and Chase followed, not speaking again. But she could feel his gaze like a burning laser right between her shoulder blades.

When they reached the pepper tree he stepped forward and lifted the hanging branch. As she passed under it a cool, spice-scented leaf brushed her cheek. Her bare shoulder came in contact with the fabric of Chase’s jacket.

The house, lit from end to end, was before them, but they were still in the shadow of the tree when he caught her arm, drawing her back to face him.

Surprised, Alysia raised her head. “What is it?”

“Just this,” he answered.

His hand slid about her waist, pulling her against him so that her body curved at the hard bar of his arm, and her head fell back in astonishment before his mouth descended on hers.

He ignored her startled movement, one hand going to her nape while his mouth continued to explore hers in a kiss that was surely too expert.

Too surprised at first to resist, she had let her lips remain soft under his, but now she closed them firmly against the seductive coaxing that invited her to reciprocate. She made herself rigid in his embrace, her hands splayed on his upper arms, feeling the tensing of the muscles when he tightened his hold. As his mouth insisted on a response from her, she counted to ten and refused to give in to the growing urge to kiss him back.

His fingers tangled in her hair and his lips compelled hers apart—until Alysia sank her teeth briefly and quite hard into his lower lip. She heard him give a low grunt deep in his throat before he raised his head and she was free.

Her high heels sinking in to the yielding turf beside the path, she nearly overbalanced. Chase grabbed at her wrist, half holding her off and half supporting her, and as she recovered herself she saw that he was silently laughing. He touched a finger gingerly to his lip and said, “Not quite what I expected.”

“What did you expect, then?” she asked, her voice low but shaking with anger and a peculiar sense of excitement. He surely hadn’t thought she’d capitulate?

“What you tried at first,” he said frankly. “The stone statue impersonation. It was quite effective, too. But this—” he touched his lip again “—is…interesting.”

His tone held a kind of speculative respect.

He hadn’t hurt her. But beneath the experienced technique that had forced her to fight her own arousal, the kiss had been an expression of dominance. She’d deliberately taunted him, admittedly inviting retaliation, and he’d chosen a very male way of showing her that he wouldn’t allow her to get away with it.

Inwardly seething but not deigning to reply or even give in to the temptation to slap him, which would no doubt amuse him further, she turned and walked from him toward the house, but when she reached the steps he was right behind her.

Inside it was warm and seemed stuffy. Her father was seeing people off at the front door. As Alysia and Chase approached he said, “There you are! Come and say good-night to Howard and Mollie, Alysia.”

She expected Chase to leave her. Instead he stayed at her side, and when the Franklins had left he said, “I’ll be off, too.”

“It’s early!” Spencer protested. “The young ones are still dancing—why don’t you two go and join them? I think Alysia deserves to enjoy herself now.”

“Alysia?” Chase turned to her, the perfect picture of courtesy.

“Thank you,” she said precisely, “but I have a headache, and the music is a bit loud.”

“Perhaps you’d rather go to bed,” he suggested, his tone all concern, but his eyes held a wicked challenge.

She kept her own face schooled to a polite mask. “I’ll see our guests off first,” she told him. “You said you were going?”

Her father looked at her with surprise, but Chase gave her an appreciative grin and said, “If you’re not going to partner me after all.”

The grin was amazingly attractive. He seemed to have forgotten his flare of temper in the garden and the devastating way he’d expressed it. Now he regarded it as some kind of joke.

Alysia said, letting her eyes show her angry contempt, “I know you’ve enjoyed yourself.”

“Even more than I anticipated,” he assured her. “Thank you for making the evening so—stimulating.”

Her eyelids flickered and she fought the impulse to look at her father to see if he was catching any hint of the undercurrents.

To her relief, Chase turned to him, shaking his hand. “A great party.”

Spencer beamed. “Alysia did a wonderful job.”

“Really, all I did was hire the caterers,” she protested mildly. But pleasure at her father’s rare praise warmed her cheeks and a spot somewhere in her midriff.

Verne Hastie came to say goodbye, and Alysia fixed a hostess smile on her face, turning from his beery breath as he kissed her cheek, his big hands squeezing her bare shoulders.

“We should entertain more often,” Spencer suggested when he’d closed the door on the last of the guests. “The Clarion’s a family paper—the staff needs to feel a part of it.”

“Of the family?” Her father was proud of the Kingsley tradition, of his ancestry and of the Clarion’s long—by New Zealand standards—history, but tonight was the first time she’d heard him claim the paper’s staff as family.

“The younger ones,” he said vaguely, “need to feel they belong. I lost two good people this year. Moving on.”

But he was gaining another in the New Year—Alysia. Who wouldn’t be leaving. She said, “Not many people nowadays stay with a company for life.”

“Pity. No sense of continuity, of loyalty.”

Chase ought to be held for a time by loyalty, by gratitude for the fast series of promotions he’d enjoyed under Spencer’s patronage.

But didn’t Spencer see that the very ambition he had admired and fostered in the younger man must inevitably lead to his desertion?

Alysia said, “Chase Osborne can’t rise any higher at the Clarion, can he?” The Kingsleys always retained the top positions. It was one of the few truly family newspapers left.

Her father’s gaze was penetrating while at the same time she had the impression his mind wasn’t fully on their conversation. “I didn’t train up a man like Chase to lose him to some big city corporation. He knows I’ll see him right.”

Had Chase already been looking elsewhere? Alysia wondered later as she prepared for bed. Was that what was behind the promotion, the creation of a prestigious new position for him?

But in a year or two would that be enough to hold him, in a job where he could go no further?