Indecent Deception

Downstairs the fridge revealed three bottles of champagne, a wizened tomato and an abandoned lunchbox with mouldy contents. She found biscuits in a cupboard but what she really wanted was a decent cup of tea.

Unfortunately the ancient range in one corner was stone-cold. Her mouth tightening expressively, Chrissy surrendered. It was obvious that nobody gave two hoots about her comfort! Lifting Rosie, she carried her upstairs. At least if she went to bed she would be warm.

Naturally there was no hot water in the nearest bathroom. It didn’t surprise her. Shivering with cold, she checked on her sister, cosily snuggled up beneath her blankets, and then she doused the torch and dived into the chilly embrace of the bed. She slept instantly, felled at last by the traumas of the past week.

But once she started having the dream—that dream unlike any other in her experience—it seemed so real that she briefly thought she was awake. Where once she had been cold, she was hot in the grip of an amazingly erotic fantasy where she lay in a shameless tangle of limbs.

It wasn’t she lying there while male hands roamed slowly, expertly over every quivering inch of flesh tantalisingly shielded by a thin layer of cotton. It wasn’t she who arched and moaned when knowing fingers skimmed over the straining mounds of her breasts, her nipples tightening instantly into an almost painful sensitivity. And most certainly it wasn’t she who dragged him hungrily down to her in the darkness and virtually crashed into combustible collision with the hot, hard urgency of his devouring mouth.

The surge of excitement that engulfed her was reassuringly unreal. She was a burning current, a blazing fuse wire hurtling at a breakneck pace towards dynamite, nothing on her mind but the terrible need for that imminent explosion. And then somewhere in the darkness there came a tiny recognisable sound, a faint gurgle as Rosie mumbled in her sleep, a sound so inherently familiar that Chrissy’s eyes shot wide open and then she knew she was awake. Oh, lord, did she know, still trapped beneath the demanding weight of an all-male body.

Tearing her swollen mouth free, she jerked her head away with a rising moan of horror. ‘Get off me!’ she gasped, stricken.

Two things happened almost simultaneously. Suddenly she was free. Suddenly the air was blue with male outrage. No awakening could have been more violent or terrifying. Sixth sense told her who had been taking advantage of her virtually inanimate body while she had believed she was dreaming. But sixth sense was choosing an identity almost more threatening than that of a total stranger, so she refused to listen to it.

A lamp went on, illuminating the scene. Sitting bolt upright, clutching the duvet to her like a protective cocoon, Chrissy was shattered into complete silence by the sight that met her frightened gaze.

‘What the hell are you doing in my bed?’ Blaze raked at her from between gritted teeth.

Chapter 3

Chrissy took one glazed look at him and then closed her eyes. ‘D-don’t you think you ought to put some clothes on?’

‘I want an explanation!’ Blaze grated as though he were the one with the grounds for most complaint.

She could still see him in her mind’s eye. Six feet three inches of lean, all-male virility and not a stitch of clothing to interrupt the view. Embarrassment, bewilderment and incredulity held her in paralysis. What was he doing in this house? What was he doing in the only bed? What, worst of all, had she allowed him to do to her?

‘W-will you get out of here?’ she spat, lifting her lashes too soon and catching a glimpse of his long golden back view as he hauled up a pair of jeans.

‘This is my room!’ he roared back at her.

Chrissy was trembling. ‘You’re going to w-wake Rosie...’

‘Rosie?’ Aghast, he strode round to her side of the bed and stared down in disbelief at the small curled-up shape showing only a fluff of tousled hair above the blankets. ‘She’s in here as well? We might’ve—she might’ve seen— Bloody hell!’

Without warning, he bent down, scooped Chrissy bodily out of the bed and, striding to the door, he deposited her on the landing. Then, practically on tiptoe and with an exaggerated care which would have been sheer comedy in any other circumstances, he closed the door. He needn’t have bothered. Rosie slept like the dead.

‘We’ll discuss this downstairs,’ he bit out fiercely.

‘I’d l-like to know w-what you’re doing here,’ Chrissy dared, shivering with cold and barefoot into the bargain.

‘Downstairs,’ he repeated with arrogant emphasis. ‘And the explanation had better be good.’

Ignoring him, Chrissy went back into the bedroom and crossed the floor to where her case lay open. Pulling out an outsize sweater, she donned it in haste.

‘If you wake that baby, I’ll hit the roof!’ he spat like an avenging angel.

‘Nothing short of an earthquake wakes her when she’s really tired,’ Chrissy muttered.

‘Am I supposed to be grateful for that?’ He took the stairs two at a time.

‘W-well, it’s more than I’ve got to be grateful for,’ Chrissy shot at him shakily. ‘How d-dare you put your filthy hands on me?’

‘Hell’s teeth,’ he seethed. ‘I didn’t know it was you!’

He strode into the kitchen, illuminating lights all the way.

‘I thought the electricity was off,’ she breathed irrelevantly.

‘Switched off. The builders forgot to put it on again.’ Blaze threw himself down on a chair by the scarred kitchen table and fixed smouldering sapphire-blue eyes on her shrinking figure. ‘What were you doing in my bed?’

‘It’s the only bed in the house,’ she protested, wondering how on earth he was managing to make her feel the one most in the wrong.

‘The furniture I had in storage was supposed to arrive this afternoon.’ In the long pause, he studied her intently and there was a new, disturbing light in that all-enveloping gaze. ‘I didn’t check when I came in. I put on the electric, came upstairs and got into bed in the dark. I didn’t want to wake you and the kid up by making a lot of noise—’

‘Your consideration o-overwhelms me.’ Furniture in storage. The truth had been shouting at her from the instant she sat up in that bed. She just hadn’t wanted to believe it. ‘Th-this is your h-house, isn’t it?’

‘Yeah, and I’m a lot like Baby Bear when I find someone uninvited in my bed,’ he drawled sardonically.

He hadn’t denied it. Westleigh Hall belonged to him yet he had hired her without telling her that fact. Indeed he had deliberately deceived her. A deep flush carmined her fine skin. She was so shaken by the realisation that her tongue was glued to the roof of her mouth. This was her employer. Blaze Kenyon. What was he playing at? What was to happen now? Had he offered her the job as a cruel joke?

Dimly she had assumed that her new boss might be a little strapped for cash and that was why he was willing to take on someone without references or any real experience. Blaze’s Ferrari put paid to that idea. She found it hard to believe that Blaze had not been able to find someone more suitable...someone without a child in tow.

‘I didn’t know it was y-your bed... It was the only bed,’ she reminded him in an undertone. ‘We had to sleep somewhere. There was no light, no food, no heat—’

‘Money for food.’ With a flourish, Blaze slapped down a handful of notes and a small sheet of paper instructing her to do some shopping. It had been sitting on the top of the fridge, which was taller than she was. With only the aid of a torch, she would never have seen it.

‘We only got here at t-ten.’ She explained about the bomb scare. ‘I didn’t see the note.’

‘I was expecting food tonight,’ he divulged grimly.

Chrissy understood why women occasionally battered men to death. She thought of their joyless arrival and the complete absence of anyone willing to show them how to settle in.

‘If the furniture didn’t come, Hamish should have taken you back to the lodge to spend the night with him and Floss,’ Blaze mused impatiently. ‘Weren’t you prepared to accept the offer?’

She nearly told him the truth, but that might get the charmless Hamish into trouble. If there was the smallest chance that she could work here...and she couldn’t afford not to fight for that chance...it wouldn’t be a good idea to get on the wrong side of Blaze’s other employees. ‘I didn’t want to bother them,’ she muttered. ‘I think he was busy.’

‘I pay him to be busy at what I tell him to be busy at.’ It was chillingly cold and she suppressed a shiver. ‘Why don’t you put on the kettle? I could do with something warm...considering that the something that was warming me up appears to be out of bounds.’

‘K-kettle?’ she echoed jerkily, naïvely unbalanced by that softly added double entendre.

‘The object with the spout and the flex.’

Mercifully she espied it on the top of the fridge. She filled it although she felt more like throwing it at him. ‘W-why didn’t you tell me that I’d be working for you?’

‘I didn’t want you to turn it down without thinking it through,’ he murmured flatly. ‘You weren’t going to get a second chance. I need a housekeeper without a lot of fancy ideas and you need a job. Basically, that’s all there was to it.’

But she sensed something more. Biting at her lower lip, she glanced across at him. His shirt hung open, framing the muscular brown breadth of his chest and the curling black hair hazing his pectorals before it arrowed down over his flat stomach. In the act of staring, she caught herself up and shut her eyes on an aching sense of chagrin and confusion. Was she becoming like all the rest? Couldn’t she take her eyes off him? Or was it that much harder now since that night all those years ago when he had touched her and the whole world had vanished as though he had pressed a destruct button somewhere deep down inside her?