The Heiress Bride

“Your boss’s daughter?” Mariette asked Chase as they walked to his car.

“Yes.” He’d told her that when he went to speak with Alysia. To make sure she wasn’t going to do anything silly and dangerous.

“Is she underage?”

“For drinking? No.” Feeling a need to justify himself, Chase added, “But her father’s very protective.”

Mariette gave him a sideways look. “Seems he’s not the only one. She didn’t look too thrilled with you.”

“She doesn’t like me much,” Chase admitted shortly, not sure why that irritated him.

Before the Christmas party he’d scarcely thought of Alysia Kingsley at all. She’d only appeared during vacations from school or university, not changing a great deal from the quiet, pretty, but rather colorless kid he’d first met.

At the party he’d noted that the duckling who had never been ugly was definitely a swan, but it wasn’t until he’d found her in the garden, looking pensive and somehow poignant, that he’d had to quell a surprising impulse to take her in his arms, not only to comfort, but to find out what that slight but feminine body would feel like snuggled against his.

Her instant resentment of his presence, the fierceness of her unsuspected dislike, had if anything heightened the sexual curiosity she’d aroused. He’d been unable to resist kissing her even though he knew she wouldn’t welcome it. Not at all his usual style.

And despite her effort to freeze him off he’d recognized the subtle signs of her instinctive response.

She was a bundle of contradictions. A spoiled daddy’s girl who somehow managed to seem insecure, vulnerable. Docile and compliant with her father, but capable of a cutting arrogance with lesser mortals. She didn’t hide her hostility to Chase, yet he’d swear she felt the same sexual buzz he did when he touched her.

And tonight he shouldn’t even be thinking about Alysia Kingsley while another woman hung on his arm saying something he hadn’t even heard. He smiled down at Mariette. “Sorry, what did you say?”

“Are we going back to my place?”

Although he’d had every intention of doing so when he phoned and suggested a date, Chase shook his head. “I’ll drop you off,” he said, pleading pressure of work. It wouldn’t be fair to accept the invitation when another woman was annoyingly uppermost in his thoughts. He’d drive to Waikura tonight.

“Good birthday party?” Spencer enquired at breakfast on Monday. Alysia hadn’t returned from Auckland until late on Sunday night, and when she’d let herself in the house had been in darkness.

“Fine,” she answered automatically. “It was nice seeing my friends again.”

“You have friends in Waikura,” Spencer commented.

“Not really, now.” Away at boarding school through her high school years, she had lost touch with her earlier playmates.

In the days that followed, making the most of her last long holiday, Alysia swam, pottered around the house and indulged herself with books that weren’t prescribed for exams.

On New Year’s Eve, dressed in a brief tube top and shorts, she was lying on a rug under the pepper tree, absorbed in a fat romantic historical saga, when Chase found her.

He’d knocked at the front door and, getting no reply, walked around the back. Realizing that Alysia was unaware of his presence, he’d spent a few minutes contemplating the picture she made, without the prickly defenses she always assumed in his presence. Lying on her side, her head propped on one hand, her knees drawn up, she might have been still a teenager, but for the decidedly womanly curve of her hip, and the glimpse of a cleavage afforded by the skimpy top she wore.

Her expression was absorbed, the jade-green eyes half hidden by long lashes, her lips innocent of makeup and slightly parted. He watched her tongue briefly touch the upper one as she turned a page, and his body tightened and stirred.

He remembered the taste of her mouth, remembered how despite her maddening refusal to allow her rigidly held body to accept his embrace, that mouth, which had mocked and defied and flicked him on the raw, felt soft and sweet and incredibly seductive. A contradiction.

Looking at her body now, Chase’s mouth curved in self-mockery. He could have sworn that when he first kissed her she’d almost opened up to him, at least physically, and then she’d stalked off without a word. Banged down the shutters in his face. And, but for an occasional brief, unwitting chink, she’d kept them down ever since.

If she thought he’d back off she could think again. She’d thrown out a challenge and he’d never refused one in his life. One day he’d make her acknowledge that this unsettling desire to touch, to explore, to know, wasn’t all on his side.

She might the boss’s daughter, heiress to Kingsley’s little kingdom, but she’d learn that sex was the great leveler. When it came down to it, a naked princess was like any other woman without her clothes.

Alysia turned another page. A shadow fell across it and Chase’s deep voice said, “Hi, there.”

“Chase!” At first she couldn’t see him properly against the sun as she scrambled to her feet. “What are you doing here?”