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

CHAPTER SIX

THE sky was changing from molten gold to burnished crimson.

In the grounds surrounding the house and on the forested hillside the crickets had struck up their shrill evening chorus, while in the distance, way below, Monte Carlo was waking up for the night.

From the terrace, her hand on the sun-warmed stone of the balustrade, Rayne watched the lights gradually come on in the hotels and apartments, and in the cafés and bars along the coast.

A thousand stars shining almost as brightly as the planet whose light seemed to be winking at her above the dark pointed spear of a cypress tree. One lonely star in a flaming universe, Rayne thought, which was how she felt right at that moment since Hélène had taken herself off to her rooms at least an hour ago, and Rayne hadn’t heard anything from King since he’d left with his father and the paramedics that morning.

A sharp breath escaped her as she heard the low growl of a car turning in through the gates, which she couldn’t see from the house as it was hidden by trees, and the next second saw the Lamborghini coming along the drive. The car drew up and her heart leapt when she saw King get out and hand his keys to a member of staff to garage it for the night.

She heard their muffled voices, King’s low and congenial, the other man’s infused with courtesy and yet genuine respect for his mega-rich, mega-influential employer. King was his employer, she had no doubt about that, since Hélène had told her that he oversaw most of his father’s affairs these days.

She had tried ringing his cellphone several times to find out how Mitch was, but if it wasn’t engaged it had been on voicemail. The one message she had left around lunchtime, asking King to call her, hadn’t been answered, and Hélène hadn’t been able to tell her anything beyond the fact that Mitch was still having tests.

Watching King’s dark head disappear under the portico, she waited, breath held, for him to come into the house. A few moments later she swung round with her heart leaping absurdly as she caught the sound of his light footsteps moving towards her over the terrace.

‘How’s Mitch?’ she asked without any preamble.

Bracing herself for some sarcastic response about her caring, his appearance, nevertheless, made her whole body go weak.

He was still dressed in the white shirt and dark suit trousers he had been wearing that morning, but his jacket was hooked over one shoulder. He was tie-less now and his shirt with the two top buttons unfastened was unusually crumpled. His hair looked as if he had been raking it back all day, but now there were dark strands falling loosely across his forehead as if he had finally given up trying to control it. His strong jaw was darkened by a day’s growth of stubble and there were dark hairs curling over the open V of his shirt.

Never had she seen him look so dishevelled, Rayne realised. Nor so utterly and sensationally male.

‘He had an angina attack. It wasn’t a coronary.’ The relief with which he informed her of that was almost tangible.

‘So he’s going to be all right?’

His eyes tugged over the golden slope of her shoulders beneath the shoelace straps of her dress, and Rayne felt as if the fine white chiffon would melt beneath the searing steel of his eyes.

‘Do you truly care?’ he murmured, so softly that she might have misheard him as he tossed his jacket unceremoniously down onto one of the heavily cushioned dining seats.

‘Of course I care. I left a message,’ she told him a little sharply, ‘but you didn’t answer.’

Because he hadn’t known what to say to her after their antagonised scene this morning. Hadn’t known then—when he was at the hospital—or now—when he was faced with the reality of telling her—exactly how to deal with the things his father had told him.

He merely dipped his head in acknowledgement of what she had said.

‘They’re keeping him in for observation, but hopefully he’s going to be all right.’

He looked so weary—devastated, almost, Rayne would have said—that she had the strongest urge to go over and put her arms around him in the way he’d done with her the other day. Tell him that she understood the anguish in having a sick parent—of losing a parent, even—but she held back. This was King Clayborne, after all. Hard. Impervious. Impenetrable. And he had found her out in the web of deceit she’d been weaving ever since she’d been here. He’d have no sympathy for her. Or any member of her family.

Steeling herself against that imperviousness with her head held stiffly, she enquired, ‘Have you come back to ask me to leave?’

‘No.’

No? Surprise pleated her forehead. ‘I thought you wouldn’t be able to get rid of me fast enough.’

‘That’s what I thought,’ he admitted with a heavy sigh.

Rayne’s frown deepened. ‘What’s changed your mind? Or do you just want to keep me here to extract some sort of payment from me for lying to you?’

He came over to lean on the balustrade, looking out towards the sea beyond the twilit city. He chuckled softly, an almost self-derisory sound. ‘What sort of man do you imagine I am, Lorrayne?’

She couldn’t answer at first because all the replies that sprang to mind weren’t very complimentary. And because he was so near that she could feel the power of his masculinity emanating from him, smell the faint hint of his animal scent beneath the lingering traces of his cologne.

‘Tough. Determined. Implacable.’ Her mouth pulled slightly as she finished reeling them off.

He made another self-deprecating sound down his nostrils as he angled his body towards her, his forearm resting on the still warm stone. ‘Why do I get the impression that those adjectives were carefully chosen from the best of a bad bunch?’

Because they were, she thought, but remained silent this time.

‘You also thought I was grossly unscrupulous in being party to some treacherous and probably very unlawful act against your father,’ he stated, straightening up, ‘but I want you to know categorically now that I wasn’t.’

Strangely, she believed him, Rayne realised, shocked. But there was no room for anything other than truth in the deep intensity of his voice, nor, she accepted with a pulse-quickening heat stealing through her as she brought her head up, in the disturbing clarity of his eyes.

‘And Mitch?’ She looked quickly seaward to avoid his penetrating gaze, fixing hers on the light-spangled silhouette of a cruise ship moored way out in the distant harbour. ‘Did you tell him who I was?’

Her voice was infused with resentment, King noted. Something she had held against Mitch—against him—for years. ‘He knows who you are,’ he disclosed.

‘And what did he say?’ She looked up at him again now, her lovely face pained and accusing. ‘Did he admit that MiracleMed was Dad’s? And that he snatched it from under his nose?’

King took a deep breath. ‘It wasn’t quite like that, Lorri.’

‘No?’ Her head was tilted in rebellious challenge and her hair was as fiery as the Monte Carlo sunset. ‘How was it?’ she bitterly invited him to tell her.

King glanced away, way down across the scintillating Principality, watching a stream of red tail lights form a blur of colour along the highway following the curve of the coast.

This day had wreaked havoc on him, if any day could. First finding out that Rayne was Lorri Hardwicke. Then Mitch’s suspected heart attack. And, to add to all that, those soul-sinking moments at the clinic when he’d believed his father was the worst kind of criminal. But Mitch’s sin had been a moral one, rather than anything illegal. Even so, it still offended King’s sense of propriety to realise that Grant Hardwicke had been treated so unfairly. And it wasn’t going to be easy telling his daughter the truth when, either way, she wasn’t going to want to hear the answer.

‘Your father signed an agreement with Mitch just after they went into partnership together, to the effect that any work done for the company while they were directors of the company would be to the benefit of the company. I know. I’ve read the clause in that agreement. I had my secretary email it through to me today. Your father was the technical whiz-kid, but was lax when it came to business dealings or keeping vital records. If he hadn’t been, he would have registered his right in that software prior to signing that agreement, but he didn’t, which was a pity,’ he said, sounding as though he meant it. ‘And much to his cost, as it turned out.’

‘And that’s it?’ she queried in protest. ‘He signed his rights away and it’s a pity! Why? Because it made Claybornes so much money!’

‘Lorrayne, stop,’ King advised gently, understanding her pain, her justified anger and bitterness. He wished he hadn’t learned from Mitch today that he could have acknowledged the other man’s concept of that software and that he had chosen not to. It had been an act of vengeance against a man who had been his friend and whom he had wound up hating. ‘No one could have quite foreseen the impact that MiracleMed would make after it was launched.’

‘But it did!’ she complained. ‘And Dad never received any credit for it!’

‘And, believe me, no one regrets that more than I do,’ King said somberly.

He didn’t add that, for what it was worth, Mitch now regretted it too. That would be like openly admitting his father’s wrongdoing, and if Mitch wanted to apologise to her then it was up to Mitch to do it himself.

He didn’t know why his father had suddenly burdened him with this today, unless it was because he’d feared he was going to die and wanted to get it off his chest. But at least he could understand now why his father had become so bitter, and how shouldering such a weight of remorse could have contributed to making him ill.

‘OK. So there’s nothing I can do about it now,’ she accepted grudgingly, ‘because it was all signed, sealed and delivered legally! But that doesn’t alter the fact that your father came by that software immorally and very conveniently, after that quarrel he obviously instigated, which made Dad walk out. And I know it wasn’t Dad’s fault, because Dad never quarrelled with anyone!’

‘For heaven’s sake, Lorri, stop being so naïve!’

‘Naïve?’ She gave a brittle little laugh. ‘You think I don’t know my own father?’

‘Apparently not.’

She sent a sidelong glance up at him. ‘What’s that supposed to mean?’ she bit out with her eyes narrowing.

‘It means that, much as I believe my father exercised his rights under that agreement—whether ethically or otherwise—I also believe that it’s time you, my misinformed little kitten, heard a few home truths about what really broke up their partnership.’

‘I already know that,’ Rayne tossed back assuredly. ‘It was professional jealousy. He knew what Dad had created was going to be worth a fortune and he wanted to reap all the rewards for it himself!’ She couldn’t believe she was saying things like this about Mitch Clayborne. The man who had taken her in. Offered her food and shelter and a safe haven to get her affairs sorted out when she’d found herself virtually stranded so far from home.

‘Jealousy, maybe. But not so much professional as deeply personal, I imagine,’ King was saying with a grim cast to his features. ‘My father quarrelled with yours because of the affair Grant was having with Mitch’s wife.’

‘You’re lying!’ She couldn’t believe King could dream up something so despicable.

‘Am I? Then why do you think there were never any proper claims made by your father to try and secure the rights to his software?’

‘Because you threatened him! I was there when you did it!’ she reminded him passionately.

‘And you think that was enough to stop him pursuing any claim against the company if he thought he could have, unless he hadn’t something to hide?’

She wanted to protest, but his words rang with something so akin to the truth that they left her speechless. There were times when she had wondered why her father hadn’t fought harder to try and get the rights to MiracleMed into his name. Sometimes she had begged him to, but he hadn’t, and she’d thought it was because he just hadn’t had any fight left in him.

‘I came round that night—rightly or wrongly—to tell him to stay away from my father. I had very little else on my mind except that my stepmother had been killed and that Mitch was more than likely to be in a wheelchair for life. He’d known about the affair for weeks, which had led to Grant leaving the company. But it was the shock of being told by Karen that she was leaving Mitch to run away with your father that caused him to lose control of the car that night and swerve into that tree. He was going to leave you, Lorrayne. You and your mother. The dear, devoted husband and father.’ The censure which dripped through his words was evidence of just how little respect he had for Grant Hardwicke—or the institution of marriage. ‘Did you really not know?’

Mortified, Rayne could only stare up at him. Finally she made a small negative gesture with her head.

How could it be true? Her parents had loved each other, she reflected achingly. Or had King been right in calling her naïve? Had Cynthia Hardwicke known? Been aware of her husband’s infidelity? But no, she couldn’t have been!

Painfully, she recalled her mother’s constant assurance that it was Grant’s memory that had given her the strength to fight through her recent illness. So what would it do to her now if she found out that all that love and devotion she’d thought he’d shown her had been just a sham? It would destroy her!

‘I’m sorry I’ve had to be the one to destroy all your illusions about love and commitment, my dearest.’

‘I’m not your dearest.’ She wasn’t ready yet to accept endearments from him after he had opened her eyes so cruelly.

‘Maybe not,’ he conceded which, contrarily, hurt her even more, ‘but you’re feeling bruised and cut up about it, naturally.’

How do you know how I feel? she wanted to fling at him, but bit the words back. It wasn’t his fault that everything she’d believed in seemed to have crumbled to dust within the space of a few short minutes, even if it felt like it right at this moment.

She turned away from him, her hands resting limply on the top of the balustrade.

‘He lied,’ was all she could say, staring out at the darkening sea, hurting so much she didn’t think she’d live to trust anyone ever again. ‘To me. To Mum …’

‘I’m sorry,’ he murmured deeply. And, after a few seconds, ‘Passion makes us do the most unprincipled things,’ he said.

Didn’t she know it!

‘It’s the second strongest animal force in the universe.’

‘Only the second?’ she uttered disdainfully.

‘Perpetuation of the species.’ His tone was flat—unsentimental. ‘Preceded only by self-survival.’

He made it all seem so cold. So basic.

He laughed rather harshly when she told him so. ‘Isn’t it?’ he suggested with unyielding scepticism.

‘Is that all you think love is for?’ she challenged, wondering how she had got on to this subject with him as she faced him again. ‘Just to create babies?’

‘Yes, but then we aren’t actually talking about love, are we … Lorri?’

He caught her hand, his fingers strong and warm, but angrily she tugged out of their grasp.

‘Don’t call me that!’ It was her father—her father, whom she had loved and trusted and looked up to, who had first started using that name. Everyone else had simply called her Lorrayne. ‘It’s Rayne to you!’

Which suited him fine, King thought, having been used to calling her that. It suited the woman she had become and who had changed so dramatically from the thin and stammering—at least with him, he remembered wryly—little scarecrow whom he’d known as Lorri, and who had graced the office for a time with her quiet presence.

‘Then don’t hate me, Rayne, for simply acquainting you with the facts.’

‘I don’t hate you.’ Hate was just the flip side of a coin that suggested far too intense an emotion than she was prepared even to think about. ‘Why should I hate you?’

‘For knocking your gallant knight down off his horse?’

‘I’m getting used to it,’ she murmured with unshed tears in her eyes. Her emotions were too raw at that moment to stop herself from tagging on, ‘After all, you did it to me once before.’

A frown knitted his brows as his gaze probed the moist hazel-green of hers.

‘I was mad about you,’ she admitted, not caring what she said any more.

‘I know.’

His deep revelation shocked and surprised her. Had she been that obvious?

‘You noticed me?’ she breathed, having never beyond her wildest teenage dreams ever dared to hope.

‘You were a child,’ he remarked succinctly.

‘I was eighteen!’

‘As I said—a child,’ he repeated with a soft chuckle, lifting her chin with his forefinger, his thumb lightly brushing her pouting lips. ‘A little girl with big hungry eyes …’ Because he knew now why those eyes had kept tugging at something inside him ever since that night he’d walked in and saw her standing here on the terrace. ‘Huge hungry eyes,’ he continued, ‘that I remember thinking even then that one day some man would drown in. But which right then belonged to a love-sick teenager whose main reason for agreeing to help out in that office, I suspect, was to try and make me want to take her to bed.’

‘I wasn’t love-sick,’ she denied with embarrassed colour flaring in her cheeks, overwrought from the feelings that had been building in her for hours because of his keeping her in suspense, because of his opinion of her father. Because she had been aching to see him—and talk to him—all day when she should have been hating him, convinced as she had been of just how ruthless he was. And when all she wanted him to do right now—and from the first moment she’d seen him walk in here tonight—really was to take her to bed. ‘Anyway, if I had been, it wouldn’t have worked with you, would it,’ she murmured with her blood suddenly pounding in her ears because the touch of his hands sliding lightly across her shoulders and down over her bare arms seemed to be setting her insides on fire. ‘Most of the time you ignored me.’

‘I wasn’t knocked out by spiky bleached hair and dark purple lips and eyes,’ he stated with his mouth moving wryly. ‘And what would you have preferred me to have done? Taken you over my knee for even thinking about it with a man way out of your age group?’

‘You were only twenty-three!’ she reminded him, breathless from her galloping emotions, wanting to run away from them—from him—and all the things he was saying that was sending a reckless excitement leaping through her. ‘That’s only five years.’

‘And those five years made a world of difference,’ he said sagely.

Which they would have, she accepted in hindsight.

Riveted by a desire that was stronger than her will, she looked up at him now to ask in a voice that was huskily provocative, ‘So what are you saying? That I’m too young for you?’

She heard the sharp catch of his breath above the chorus of crickets and, from the lights that had just come on around the terrace, saw the sensuous pull of his lips before he answered thickly, ‘Not any more.’

Common sense should have told her to stop this insanity before it got too far out of hand but, as his mouth came down over hers, it was already too late.

CHAPTER SEVEN

AS KING wrapped his arms around her, Rayne felt herself melting against him.

His jaw rasped against hers where he hadn’t shaved since that morning, but she rejoiced in its roughness and in his hard warmth that was driving every last trauma—of the day, of the past week and of the longer past—from her mind.

The only thing that mattered was him—here and now, the desire that had her clinging to him, as the only sure, secure thing in her crumbling universe.

She had wanted this—so much! Wanted it now a thousand times more than she had ever wanted it before. It was as if all the feelings she had had for him as a teenager hadn’t died but had been shut away inside her, brooding and intensifying so that now they overwhelmed her like a flood, gushing through her from her toes upwards and spreading along every nerve and sinew of her being.

He had called her a child then, but she was a woman now and she wanted to prove it to him, angling her body so that her needs were obvious—the craving for his hands against her naked flesh.

He read her like a book, following each silent sentence her body was conveying to him as long tanned fingers slipped the fine straps off her shoulders so that the chiffon bodice rippled like a waterfall down over the betraying fullness of her breasts.

King groaned deeply in his throat, his body hardening from her perfect femininity. He felt like ravaging her, driving them both wild in his need to blot out all the things that Mitch had revealed to him today. To lose himself inside the warm, slick wetness of her glorious body. But he forced himself to exercise all his powers of restraint, knowing that she wouldn’t thank him for that.

This woman needed to be handled with kid gloves, her beautiful body served and pleasured with the skill and tenderness it deserved.

She had deceived him, it was true. But only because she’d believed him to be party to a gross misdemeanour against her father—a father who hadn’t been wholly worthy of her trust and fierce loyalty. Nevertheless, the fact that she had deceived him made him glean a delicious thrill in inflicting some sensual punishment upon her in making her wait for all her body—and his own!—craved.

Dipping his head, he drew the hard peak of one pink begging nipple slowly into his mouth, taming the urge to pull her against him as his strong hands rested on the firm, gentle curves of her straining hips.

He was driving her crazy, Rayne thought headily, clutching at his shoulders, wanting to rip off his shirt, feel the hardness of his muscles and his hair-roughened chest against her breasts.

‘Easy,’ he advised softly, his breath fanning the wet swollen tip he had just released from its torturous pleasure. ‘What is it you want? Show me what you want.’

Maybe she should have been embarrassed, she thought distractedly, but hunger had stripped her of all inhibitions, so that now she had no qualms about doing as he’d asked.

Thrusting her neglected breast towards him, she uttered a deep, guttural sob when his mouth closed over it, sending sensations plummeting down through the centre of her body.

‘Is this it?’ he broke off to murmur against the pale fleshy mound after a few moments. ‘Is this what you want?’

No, I want you! All of you! Around me! On top of me! Inside me!

She heard her brain screaming out those phrases and couldn’t believe that any man could reduce her to thinking them. But this wasn’t any man, she assured herself hectically. This was King.

His hands on her hips were warm and firm, yet still holding her away from him when all she wanted was to feel him, feel the evidence of just how much he wanted her.

But he was controlling the pace, she realized, wanting more of what he was doing to her and yet crazy for this particular sensuous torture to end as he burned a slick, hot path between the valley of her breasts with a teasingly slow caress of his tongue.

‘I hate you, King Clayborne,’ she groaned.

She could say it now. Now, when the conflagration of need that was burning inside her raged so fiercely that there could be no turning back because what was there to lose? He knew how much she wanted him. Needed him.

‘No, you don’t,’ he murmured thickly against her ribcage.

He knew that too, she accepted helplessly, because she couldn’t fool him any more than she could fool herself. But to express what she was feeling in any other way would be no less than sheer folly, she realised, despairing at herself for wanting—needing—him so much.

With a deep groan from the depths of his throat he caught her to him then, and from that moment he was no longer in control.