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

And now she was being as cynical as he was, she thought, in willing herself to believe those things about him when, had she not known him better, and particularly after what Hélène had told her, she would have said he was a man of principle—a man who wouldn’t stoop to stealing another man’s intellectual property and helping to ruin his life.

But he had, she thought bitterly, standing there at the foot of the stairs and closing her eyes against the truth. That Kingsley Clayborne, the man who had broken her heart as a teenager and who now had her craving his attentions with every weak, betraying cell in her body, just wasn’t the man she wanted him to be.

Half an hour later, Mitch still hadn’t put in an appearance and King was still tied up with his visitor on the terrace.

Coming downstairs again into the deserted opulence of the sitting room, Rayne could still hear their muted voices drifting in from the sun-soaked terrace. The male interviewer’s tones were rather even and uninteresting in contrast to the deeper, richer modulations of King’s.

How could any woman not find herself drawn to him and in the most fundamental way? Rayne wondered, listening to him. When everything about him was unadulterated perfection? The way he looked, the way he conducted himself, the way he dressed. That sexy yet authoritative voice that had the power to make every woman he spoke to go weak at the knees.

Then there were the other traits of his personality, too. Determination and drive and that restless energy about him that made up the whole man, and amounted to a pretty formidable package which made him impossible to ignore.

In fact it gave her goosebumps all over her body, just as it was doing now. Goosebumps and a multitude of nervous flutters in her stomach from the thought of what she had to do and the consequences of what telling him the truth might be.

Hearing the scrape of chairs on the terrace, accompanied by phrases that warned her that the interview was drawing to a close, suddenly Rayne lost her nerve. Wasn’t it Mitch she should be confronting first anyway?

She had almost reached the stairs when she caught the sound of the men’s footsteps across the tiled floor and she quickened her own, keen to get away before they reached the hall.

‘Oh, Rayne …’ Too late, the honeyed resonance of King’s voice drifted towards her, lifting the hairs at the nape of her neck, exposed by her loosely piled-up hair. ‘Have you seen Hélène?’

‘Not for some time,’ she said shakily, turning round, her breath locking from the impact of his dark-suited executive image, from his poised elegance and commanding stature.

Why was it that other men seemed to diminish beside him? she wondered with painful awareness. She had only a fleeting impression of his younger, shorter companion because her gaze was held—against her will, it seemed—by the steel-blue snare of King’s.

Beneath her simple white top and jeans, her body pulsed from the pull of his powerful magnetism and it wasn’t until he broke the contact to say something to his tawny-haired visitor that Rayne, remembering her manners, turned to speak to the man.

As she did so, her greeting, like her smile, died on her lips and Rayne could feel her blood starting to run cold.

‘What are you doing here?’ the interviewer asked.

‘Do you two know each other?’ King enquired with a rather quizzical expression.

Rayne wanted to deny it, her mind chaotically processing what the chances were of the journalist who’d come to interview King being someone from her past. And not just someone. But Nelson Faraday!

‘We worked together,’ she admitted when she could wrench her tongue from the roof of her mouth, hoping against hope that the slick-talking journalist wouldn’t give her away, not before she’d had the chance to do it herself.

‘In what capacity?’ King asked, still wearing that interested smile, but behind the urbane veneer Rayne could sense every sharp instinct honing in like a stalking tiger’s.

‘I was the office junior,’ Rayne put in quickly. ‘When I started, Nelson here was already destined for greater things.’ So great that she’d packed him up after only a couple of evenings out with him because she hadn’t liked his cut-throat methods of reporting. But this man knew more about her than was comfortable. In fact, it was downright mortifying, Rayne thought, in view of where she was and who she was with.

‘You’re too modest,’ her ex-colleague told her, much to Rayne’s overriding dread and dismay, because it was clear the man had picked up on her reluctance to talk. She could tell he was assessing what she might be doing in this billionaire’s pad and, from the way his eyes took in both her and King, knew that his mind was already working overtime. ‘She might have been the office junior when she started out on that provincial little rag, but everyone could see she had the nose of a bloodhound and that once she’d got going there’d be no one to touch Lorrayne Hardwicke for sniffing out a scoop.’

It was clear Nelson Faraday was still holding a grudge, Rayne realised, horrified, her eyes darting guardedly towards King.

There was tension in his jaw and in the sudden granitelike mask of his features. His cheekbones seemed to stand out prominently beneath the olive of his skin.

‘Oh, dear …’ The other man was putting up a good show of looking shamefaced, because he couldn’t have failed to notice the atmosphere that had grown cold enough to freeze the heat of the Mediterranean day. ‘Did I say something I shouldn’t have?’ he remarked with an award-winning performance of mock innocence.

‘No, of course not,’ Rayne put in quickly, wise to Nelson Faraday’s tactics and to what he must be thinking. That she was either romantically involved with Clayborne’s dynamic helmsman or she was there to dig up some dirt on the family. Which was too close to the truth, she thought, with her heart frantically pumping.

‘You certainly didn’t,’ King remarked with a pasted-on smile, the cynicism with which he said it making Rayne shiver.

‘Well, it’s lovely seeing you again, Lorrayne.’ The younger man was backing away, his eyes suddenly wary beneath the implacable steel of King’s. ‘I’ll forward a copy of the article to you, sir.’ Nelson was lapsing into total deference, as he always had with his most prized interviewees, and King Clayborne had to be among his most prized of all.

‘You do that.’ King’s tone was clipped, lethally low.

His anger was roused and she was about to bear the brunt of it, Rayne realised, knowing she deserved no less. Knowing she should have told him—told them both—from the start.

Like a coward, though, as soon as the other man had left, she started towards the stairs, wanting to get away from King until he had calmed down.

‘Oh, no, you don’t!’ Strong fingers suddenly clamped onto her wrist, preventing her precipitous flight up the stairs. ‘So you’re Lorri Hardwicke. Well, well.’

‘Let me go!’ She could feel his white hot anger pulsing against her as those determined fingers tightened relentlessly around her soft flesh. ‘I was going to tell you! Both of you!’ she gasped as he pulled her towards him.

‘You were? Well, that’s very magnanimous of you!’ he scorned. ‘And when exactly were you going to do that? When you’d got your “scoop”, or whatever it is you’re after? What exactly is it you’re after, Rayne?’ His face was livid, his voice so dangerously soft that with one fearful yet furious yank she managed to pull free.

‘What was rightfully my father’s!’ she shot up at him, massaging her wrist, numb from the pressure he’d applied.

‘And what is that?’ he breathed equally softly, every long lean inch of him powerfully intimidating, like a dangerous adversary she’d been unfortunate to cross. Well, he wasn’t going to intimidate her!

‘You know very well!’ There were family loyalties at stake here. ‘You stole that software from him! You and Mitch! You knew MiracleMed was his and you stole it!’

‘And you, my dear young woman, have been very much misinformed if you think you can make a serious allegation like that.’

‘I haven’t been misinformed! I know the hours he put in—at home, as well as in the office. And don’t speak to me like that. I don’t need to be patronized by you!’

‘Just the pleasure I can give that beautiful body when it suits you.’

‘No!’ Shame washed over her like scalding water.

‘Don’t deny it, Rayne. You’re as enslaved by your desire for me as I am for you. Or was that all part of the act?’ he tossed at her roughly.

‘No!’ What could she say? How on earth had they got on to this? ‘That … that just happened,’ she stammered, stepping back as he moved nearer, knowing that even now, if he touched her, she would have no defence or resistance against his particular brand of humiliation. And it would be humiliation. He’d make certain of that.

‘I’ll bet it did! And I’ll bet you’ve been laughing all the way to the bank in thinking I was so taken in.’

‘You were never taken in.’

‘Maybe not. But Mitch was. So what is it you want?’ he demanded. ‘Money?’

‘That’s the only thing that matters to people like you, isn’t it?’ She was near to tears, but tears of anger and frustration which had been bottled up for so long. ‘Well, it might surprise you to know that some of us put honour and respect before making ourselves rich at other people’s expense.’

‘Really?’ A masculine eyebrow arched in obvious derision. ‘There didn’t seem to be much honour and respect in the way you engineered your scheming little way into this house. Those thieves didn’t take your passport, did they, Rayne?’

His question, so direct and demanding, seemed to suck the air right out of her body. King Clayborne might be a lot of things, but a fool wasn’t one of them.

‘No,’ she answered, inhaling again. ‘It was in the glove compartment of the car with my driving licence.’

‘And your credit cards? Where have they been while Mitch and I have been financing your every requirement? Your meals. Trips into town. The flowers for your poor ailing mother?’

The disparaging way he referred to Cynthia Hardwicke sent anger coursing through Rayne in red-hot shafts.

‘My mother has been sick! Very sick!’ she retorted fiercely. ‘And don’t you ever dare to refer to her illness like that again! And my credit cards were stolen! They took my bag. My traveller’s cheques. All my money. Everything! It was only when Mitch jumped to the conclusion that I’d lost my passport as well and invited me back here that … well … that I let him think so. I felt he owed it to me. Or to Dad at least.’ And it was her father who had said that windows of opportunity didn’t just open on their own—that you had to create them. ‘I needed to talk to him but I knew it wouldn’t be easy, and it just seemed like the perfect chance I’d been waiting for.’

‘I’ll bet it did! So what have you been hoping to gain out of all this if, as you say, you’re far too honourable to contemplate blackmailing him with the threat of selling some cracked-up story to the papers? Are you in league with this Faraday character? Is that it? Was that why he turned up here so coincidentally today?’

‘That was only coincidence,’ she retorted with bright wings of colour staining her cheeks. ‘And I wasn’t going to blackmail Mitch. I was hoping—if I could talk to him—let him know who I was and what my father went through—that it might prick his conscience in some way. That I might be able to appeal to his better nature.’ Hotly then, she couldn’t help adding, ‘I didn’t imagine for one moment I could ever appeal to yours!’

‘So why didn’t you tell him who you were? Right away? The day you got here?’ he interrogated, ignoring her last derogatory remark about himself. ‘Or was the prospect of sharing a house with such a newsworthy name too much for your journalistic instinct to pass up?’

‘I didn’t because he seemed so shaken up after those lads had taken his wheel,’ she answered, ignoring him in turn, even though she was railing inside at his high-and-mighty attitude, ‘I didn’t want to do or say anything that might have upset him even more. And the day after that he still wasn’t well.’ And then you arrived, she remembered with her mouth firming in rebellion, although she didn’t tell him that. Didn’t let on that she feared and regarded him with far more respect than she feared and regarded his father, not least because of the frightening strength of her attraction to him. ‘And then when Hélène said he had a heart problem and high blood pressure …’ Her shoulder lifted in a kind of hopeless gesture. ‘I didn’t want to be responsible for making him ill.’

A thick eyebrow was lifting again in patent scepticism. ‘Do I detect a conscience, Rayne? Surely not! And you’ll have to excuse me,’ he tagged on, with no hint of apology in his voice. ‘It’s Lorri, isn’t it? But then it’s difficult keeping up with the change of identity.’

‘It isn’t a change of identity. Rayne Carpenter’s the name I write under,’ she said, admitting it now.

‘Why? So that your victims won’t know who you are when they read the sensationalist dirt you’ve managed to dredge up about them?’

‘I don’t write that sort of news story.’ Chance would have been a fine thing! She had never got beyond covering house-fires started from flaming chip pans and local demonstrations about library closures, whatever Nelson Faraday had led him to believe. ‘I only write the truth.’

‘Or your warped version of it.’

‘Is it warped to expect some credit for my father’s work? I’m not after any personal or financial gain, whatever you may think.’

‘No. Just making strong allegations about a man who isn’t well enough to defend himself. Well, I’ll defend him, Lorri. And you’ll find I’m not half so weak—or so smitten—as my father is. Grant Hardwicke did a lot of the work on MiracleMed. I believe I’m right in saying that. But he did it under a corporate umbrella.’

‘Which was what you told him the night you came round and threatened him!’ she reminded him. ‘And just for wanting recognition for what was rightfully his! He created that software long before he ever joined forces with Mitch. He just didn’t have the resources to launch it. He was honest and hardworking and never cheated or lied to anyone in his entire life. And you made him ill,’ she uttered, aggrieved, and with such painful emotion in her voice it was difficult to breathe. ‘You and Mitch! He might still have been alive today if you hadn’t!’

Though she was saying it, some small part of her acknowledged that it wasn’t strictly true. That there were other events that had contributed to the strain her father had been under. Like his bouts of drinking that had only made their family life harder. And the way he’d seemed to lose the will to do anything—even look for a job towards the end—which had only added to his increasing sense of worthlessness.

‘I admire your loyalty to your father,’ King surprised her by expressing. ‘But I didn’t see him as quite the paragon of virtue you obviously did. We’re all human, dearest, and Grant Hardwicke could be as opportunistic and self-motivated as the next man.’

‘That’s a lie!’

‘Is it?’ King’s mouth was a tight, inexorable line. Looking back, he still couldn’t believe the man’s crocodile tears when he’d told him about Mitch’s accident. But then he hadn’t been crying for Mitch—his closest friend and colleague. All he’d been concerned about was his own personal losses and all he might have stood to lose if his accusations of theft had ever been brought to the public’s notice. ‘Far be it from me to want to hurt you, but I can be every bit as ruthless as you’re accusing me of being if—’

He broke off abruptly as a flushed-faced Hélène suddenly came rushing down the stairs towards them, her features looking pinched within their frame of greying bobbed hair. ‘Oh, monsieur! You had better come quickly. It’s Monsieur Clayborne!’ Her hand went to her chest. ‘He has the pain …’

King was springing away from them without any further prompting, taking the open staircase two steps at a time.

He was already at his father’s bedside when Rayne raced up to Mitch’s room with the housekeeper close behind her. One look at the elderly man who was sitting on the edge of the bed, still only half-dressed, revealed that he was in extreme pain.

‘Call an ambulance!’ King directed urgently towards Hélène.

While the housekeeper was summoning help on the bedroom telephone, Rayne hurried over to the bed.

Oh, please! she prayed. Let him be all right! Don’t let it be my fault that this has happened!

‘He needs to lie back,’ she instructed, sensing that this was one occasion when King needed someone’s help and advice, with all her basic first aid training rushing to the fore. And when he looked at her questioningly, ‘It’s all right. I know what I’m doing,’ she assured him, suggesting how he could help, already plumping pillows and generally helping to make his father as comfortable as she could. Now wasn’t the time to tell him how she had taken a first aid course after her father had died, when she’d read how anyone could make a difference in a medical emergency.

Glad that at least she hadn’t contributed to this situation by actually telling Mitch who she really was, she watched King through eyes suddenly blurry with relief, gently easing his father back against the pillows, catching his deep, low murmurs of reassurance—despite his own concern—as he tried to put the older man’s mind at rest.

Oh, to have him speak to her with that depth of emotion! She felt a surge of longing that was quite out of place in the current situation, or within the bounds of anything approaching logic. Why did she want anything more from him other than—as he’d pointed out to her downstairs—the pleasure her body craved from him? Surely she wasn’t allowing herself to think of him in any capacity beyond that? Because if she were, she warned herself harshly, then she was being a total fool.

The ambulance didn’t take long to arrive.

‘Can I come with you?’ Rayne appealed to King, hot on his heels as he flew down the stairs while the medical team were bringing Mitch down in the lift.

‘You?’ he emphasised, his expression a contrary mix of surprise and blinding objection. She had been quick to help his father, King thought. And she looked concerned. Genuinely upset. But with a woman—particularly this woman—who could tell? ‘That won’t be necessary,’ he told her succinctly, leaving her staring after his dark retreating figure and feeling as though she had been slapped in the face.

‘What is it, King?’ Mitchell Clayborne was staring at his son’s broad back as King in turn stood staring out of the window of the private clinic. ‘God knows I haven’t been the best of fathers, but I would have thought the news that I’m not going to be consigned to the history books just yet would have made you a bit happier than you seem.’

Sighing heavily, King dragged himself away from an absent study of the clear evening sky, his mouth pulling down on one side at his father’s dry remark. Mitch certainly sounded better, and his breathing was easier than it had been a few hours ago, but he had no intention of causing the man any undue distress.

‘It’s nothing that can’t wait,’ he answered.

‘And it’s nothing that I’m not man enough to take—even wired up like a puppeteer’s blasted dummy! Tell me.’

It was clear to King that the man would be more likely to die of a heart attack from being kept in suspense rather than from being told the truth.

‘It’s about Rayne,’ he breathed, the air seeming to shiver through his nostrils.

‘What about her?’ Mitch brought his head off the mountain of pillows, suddenly looking alarmed. ‘She’s all right, isn’t she?’

King nodded. He couldn’t believe how fond of her his father had become.

‘What, then?’ Mitch demanded with considerably less than his usual strength.

King hesitated, but only briefly. ‘She’s Lorri Hardwicke,’ he stated, drawing another deep breath.

Mitch stared at him for a long worrying moment before closing his eyes.

‘Shouldn’t I have realised it!’ he exclaimed somewhat breathlessly at length, with an unusual tremor in his gravelly voice.

‘Do you know why she’s here?’

‘I think I can guess,’ Mitch returned. ‘But tell me anyway.’

‘She’s saying what Grant said all those years ago. That Claybornes took the credit for MiracleMed when it really belonged to him. In short, she’s accusing us—but you in particular—of, at best, gross professional misconduct and, at worst, outright theft.’

Had he gone too far? King wondered anxiously, wanting to kick himself for telling him when he saw the pain that darkened Mitch’s eyes and heard the way his breathing had suddenly became more laboured.

‘She’s right, King.’

‘What?’ Above the sound of footsteps hurrying along the corridor outside and the intermittent bleep of Mitch’s monitoring machine, King’s response was one of almost inaudible shock.

‘I did steal that software.’

King’s face was sculpted with harsh lines of bewilderment. ‘What are you saying?’ he whispered, his face turning pale, his mouth contorting in revulsion and disbelief.

‘It’s true,’ Mitch admitted heavily. ‘I know you thought I put a lot of my own time into it, but I didn’t. I’m glad it’s out. I’m glad you know, King. It’s been hell keeping it to myself—and from you in particular—all of these years.’

For once King found himself unable to think straight. Had he really heard Mitch correctly? Was his own father admitting to being a thief? Was that what had been gnawing away at him for so long? Making him so bitter?

‘You let me—let everyone—believe he produced the whole thing in the company’s time. Or a large part of it, anyway. Under Clayborne’s corporate umbrella!’ King reminded him roughly.

‘It was his word against mine—and he had no proof.’

‘So you took it on yourself to call it yours? Another man’s intellectual property!’ King stared at his father, appalled. ‘Didn’t it occur to you that you might be robbing him of his livelihood? That he had dependants? A wife and a daughter?’

‘So she’s come after me,’ Mitch murmured, sounding far away, as though he wasn’t listening. ‘After all these years! What a sparky little thing.’

‘She’s deceitful!’ King rasped, feeling his earlier anger brewing, although he wasn’t sure any more whether to be angry with her as well as his father, or just with himself. ‘What I hadn’t realised until now was that you were. My own father!’

He swung away towards the window again, massaging his neck, sightlessly watching the glittering sky mellowing with the lateness of the day. He didn’t want to be speaking to his father like that. Not while he was so unwell.

He hadn’t wanted to speak to Rayne as he had either, but the shock of discovering who she was with the knowledge that he had not only been ensnared by her beautiful face and body, but had also been made a fool of into the bargain had been much too much for his masculine self-esteem to take all in one go.

He couldn’t forget though how fiercely she had defended Grant Hardwicke, standing up for him with all the loyalty and determination of a loving daughter. Nor could he forget the emotion in her face when she had asked him if she could come here today and he had point-blank refused to let her. After she had helped his father, too. After she could so easily have turned away and not got involved. Although she hadn’t, he reflected, even though only minutes before she had been accusing Mitch of committing the worst possible corporate crime against her father. And in that, he thought, with his big body stiffening, she had been right … ‘King?’

The weak appeal had him reluctantly turning to regard the semi-reclining form on the bed, the tension so gripping in his shoulders that he thought his spine would snap.

‘Why?’ he demanded of his father, his strong features ravaged by a complexity of emotions. ‘Why did you do it, damn you? Why, Mitch?’

Amazingly, there was contrition and sadness too, King noted, in the watery blue eyes looking out of his father’s loose-skinned, rather florid face. ‘Do you—of all people—really need to ask?’ He looked away, towards the ceiling and the metal curtain track that ran around his bed, sighing heavily. ‘You know why.’