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

And if he did find out that she had been lying to him?

She shuddered, closing her mind against that intimidating scenario. That was something she definitely refused to think about on top of everything else.

The florist at the other end of the line seemed to be taking forever to deal with the order Rayne was trying to telephone through.

‘And the name on the card?’ she asked mechanically, in heavily accented English.

‘I explained to the lady I spoke to first that I haven’t got a card, but she said it would be all right if I brought the cash down before you close this afternoon. My name’s Lorrayne Hardwicke,’ Rayne told her, sending anxious glances towards the closed door.

She had come in here to the study to make a couple of calls and to try and sort out a birthday bouquet to be sent to her mother. She’d wanted to do it from the privacy of her own suite, but the maids were changing the bed and giving the rooms an extra fine clean today, and time was getting scarce if she wanted her mother to receive her flowers in the morning.

‘I’m afraid I cannot process the order unless we receive the credit or the money … what is it you say? Upfront,’ the woman emphasised, remembering. ‘I’m sorry, mademoiselle, but those are the conditions.’

‘But your manageress distinctly assured me it would be all right,’ Rayne despaired. She hadn’t missed sending her mother flowers on her birthday since she was eighteen, when things had started really going downhill for her parents. And OK, she couldn’t pay with a card, but she had a small amount of cash that she had earned from chauffeuring Mitch around, and the florist had said it would be all right.

‘My manageress has just left for the afternoon. I will try and get hold of her and ring you back if you will give me your number. What did you say your name was?’

‘Lorrayne Hardwicke.’

‘Can you spell that, please?’

Rayne darted another glance towards the door as she heard voices on the other side of it.

‘I’ll call you back,’ she said quickly, snapping her cellphone shut a fraction of a second before the door opened and King walked in.

‘What the …?’ His smile for whomever he had been talking to outside was wiped away by surprise at seeing her sitting there behind his father’s desk.

‘My room’s being cleaned and I needed to make a couple of calls,’ she told him croakily, not sure what was disturbing her most. Nearly being caught red-handed blurting out who she really was, or the visual images of what had happened between them earlier in the day. ‘Of course, if I’m intruding …’ She was already swivelling back on the studded leather chair.

‘I wouldn’t say that.’

In fact he was looking at her over what seemed like an acre of polished mahogany as though he was imagining her naked and spreadeagled across it. Or was that just what her own wild imaginings were conjuring up? She slammed the lid down on her errant thoughts before they could manifest themselves on her face. ‘I … I didn’t hear you come in.’

‘Evidently not.’ He’d been to pick up Mitch at his own insistence, and had come in here to find his pen to sign some letters his secretary had faxed through while he was gone. ‘Otherwise you wouldn’t be acting as though I’d just caught you rifling through the silver cabinets.’ A distracted smile twisted the sensuous line of his lower lip. ‘Perhaps that’s it,’ he declared airily, pocketing his pen. ‘Are you looking for something, Rayne?’

‘No.’ At least that much was true. If she had been, it would be for the evidence that would prove that MiracleMed was her father’s. She knew, though, that she didn’t have a cat in hell’s chance of finding it here in this luxurious Mediterranean retreat, if in fact any proof existed at all.

‘If you must know, I’m just a bit peeved because I was trying to order some flowers for Mum,’ she told him, gripping the padded arms of the chair, which she seemed to have become rooted to ever since he had come in, ‘but it seems you can’t even breathe these days if you haven’t got a credit card.’

He nodded. ‘Make the call,’ he advised. To her stunned surprise, he was taking his wallet from the inside pocket of his jacket. ‘Make the call,’ he reiterated, taking out a credit card.

‘I … I couldn’t possibly,’ she stammered, blushing to her roots as she realised how her statement must have sounded. As though she was asking him to help her. ‘I didn’t mean I wanted you to …’

‘What’s the number?’ he asked, ignoring her embarrassment.

Seeing how determined he was, she quoted it from the piece of paper she’d jotted it down on earlier.

‘Now what is it you want?’

With a little shrug, feeling indebted, uncertainly she told him. He dealt with it swiftly and effortlessly. And not only that—in fluent French!

‘And the recipient?’ he enquired, reverting to English to ask her.

Cynthia Hardwicke, she almost said, realising only just in time that that would blow her cover good and proper. ‘Address it to “Mum,” care of …’ Casually she filled him in with the name of the friend her mother was staying with. ‘And the message is simply, Happy Birthday. Love from Rayne.’

It took him just seconds, it seemed, to supply the florist with his own details, his voice deep and confident, its dark rich timbre sending an unwanted tingle along Rayne’s spine.

‘Thanks,’ she murmured when he had finished, unable to look at him as she came around the desk. ‘I really wasn’t asking you to do that. I can let you have the cash.’

‘There’s no hurry,’ he said, his tone surprisingly reassuring, the sudden touch of his hand on her shoulder bringing her startled gaze to his.

She looked instantly wary, King thought, noticing the guarded emotion in the green-gold depths of her eyes. They were, quite simply, the most beautiful eyes he had seen on any woman he’d ever met, but there was some other emotion behind the wariness that was defying him to touch her. Sadness, he was startled to recognise. Deep-buried, but not altogether concealed. And he knew in that moment that somehow—somewhere—those eyes had penetrated his consciousness before. Last week? Last year? He gave a mental shrug. Perhaps it was only in his dreams.

‘We got off to a bad start.’ He was surprised at how hoarse his voice sounded. Was it because his hormones had kicked in again, causing him to harden from the warmth of her body through her thin blouse? Or was it the dark and heady mixture of her perfume? ‘I thought it might be sensible if we were both to try again.’ Otherwise she’d get away from him, he was sure, and he’d never lost a woman he’d set his heart on having in his life.

‘Try?’ she ventured croakily, realising why she had never stood a chance against his potent masculinity as a teenager. He was really quite amazing. With those dynamically dark looks. In the way he spoke. The way he carried himself. As if he owned the world. Which he probably did. Or a fair proportion of it anyway, she thought cynically, resenting him for how rich he was, how influential, and for making her wish that she was spreadeagled over that desk with him …

‘To be civil to each other,’ she heard him saying. ‘I’ll accept that your reason for being here is all above board. And you …’ He was massaging his lower jaw with his free hand. ‘You’ll promise to keep your hands to yourself.’

Wings of colour touched her cheeks from his all too shaming reminder of how she had struck him. ‘As long as you promise to do the same with yours.’

‘If that’s what you want.’

Rayne felt her throat constrict. ‘What’s that supposed to mean?’

He smiled silkily. ‘You know very well.’

Yes, she did. The last thing she wanted was for him to spell it out, but it seemed he was going to anyway as he went on.

‘Calling a truce, unfortunately, isn’t going to put paid to the fact that there’s a definite chemistry between us, Rayne, even if you do want to deny it. But a woman doesn’t respond to a man the way you responded to me unless she wants that man to make love to her. Even if she is, as I’d very much like to rule out, a woman with some other agenda.’

‘I got carried away—that was all,’ she said quickly, hating to admit it but desperate to quash any adverse notion in his mind about her reasons for being there. ‘So. I find you attractive.’ Who wouldn’t? ‘But we don’t always give in to what our baser instincts are telling us to do, do we? I’m sorry I reacted in the way I did.’ She was referring to striking him. ‘I was just a bit wound up, that’s all. Unprepared …’

‘For what happened between us?’

She nodded.

‘And are you still unprepared?’

No, she wasn’t, she realised, because even this conversation with him was turning her on, making her body zing with a host of traitorous impulses.

‘I can deal with it,’ she said huskily, wishing she could tear herself away from him, but she couldn’t seem to do it.

‘Can you?’ When she didn’t respond, too sensually aware to answer, coolly he suggested, ‘Let’s see.’

As he was speaking he’d positioned himself on the edge of the desk. Now, as his arm snaked around her tiny waist, Rayne lost her balance and shot out a hand to steady herself, gasping as she made unwitting contact with the hard, bunching muscles of his thigh.

The intimacy sent shock waves coursing through her body. She could tell from King’s sharply drawn breath that it was having a devastating effect on him too.

‘Heaven help me if you weren’t sent here just to drive me out of my mind!’ he rasped before his mouth came down to plunder the warm, willing cavern of hers.

This time she didn’t stop to think because the scent and sound and feel of him were driving her insane for him and suddenly she was utterly lost to the eager and hungry demands of her own body.

When he tugged her blouse open and pulled a lacy cup down over her full, high breast, she arched her back, angling her body in sweet invitation to him to take the hard throbbing tip into his mouth.

Proud of her femininity, she writhed between his thighs, thrilling in his strength as he used them to clamp her to him, while he continued to drive her crazy by suckling harder at her breast.

Unlocking her womb, she thought crazily, as sensations spiralled downwards to the most secret heart of her, making her hot and moist in readiness for the hard penetration of his body.

‘Deny it all you like, you’re going to be my woman, Rayne. You are my woman. Understand?’ he breathed raggedly against the sensitised hollow of her ear. ‘Otherwise why would you let me do this?’ His fingers found her other breast, making her gasp and strain against him as he tormented the sensitive bud. ‘Or this?’ His other hand slid down her body to clasp her buttock, caressing and moulding, its heat searing through her thin trousers before it moved possessively round to cup her aching femininity. ‘Why?’ he demanded huskily. ‘If you can’t accept that, too?’

She wanted to protest. She knew she should. But how could she? she demanded chaotically of herself. When she knew she had been made for this! That she was his and always had been, and that even if her mind recognised the treachery of acknowledging it, her body wouldn’t listen.

But she had to make it listen …

He’s your enemy. So what does that make you?

Dredging up every ounce of self-discipline that she could muster, she wrenched herself away from him.

‘I don’t want this!’ she choked, dragging the back of her hand across her mouth.

‘Really?’ Still perched on the edge of the desk, he was breathing as heavily as she was. ‘Then you’re putting up a darn good show of convincing me otherwise.’

‘I don’t care what you think.’ Which was a joke, she thought distractedly, even as she said it. Because, for some strange reason she still did. ‘I don’t want to get involved with you.’

‘Why not? When it’s so patently obvious that we could be good together?’ He looked hot and flushed and still so obviously aroused. ‘Are you in a relationship with someone else?’

‘That’s none of your business,’ she snapped, straightening her clothes with faltering fingers.

‘So you aren’t,’ he deduced correctly.

Because wouldn’t it have been the best way of keeping him at bay, she thought, realising it too late, if she had said she was?

‘So what was it, Rayne? A disappointing attachment?’

You could say that! her heart screamed bitterly, because there had been nothing that had shamed or disillusioned her more than her reckless crush on him.

‘I just don’t go in for casual sleeping around.’

‘I’m pleased to hear it,’ he responded deeply, his eyes fixing on her with a dark intensity. She looked really quite shaken, he thought, wondering why, when in every other way she seemed so much a woman of the world. ‘For what it’s worth … it doesn’t rank very highly with me, either.’

‘Hah!’ Despite her brittle little laugh, she couldn’t help wondering if he was telling the truth. She wanted to kick herself for hoping that he was.

‘You really have a very low opinion of me, don’t you?’ he remarked, running a long tapered hand through his thick hair. She was surprised to notice that it was trembling slightly.

So even the high-and-mighty Kingsley Clayborne was human!

She wondered why she was even allowing herself to grant him any concessions, and put it down to the fact that she was so affected by him—by what she had allowed him to do to her—that she was still too unsettled by it to feel anything.

‘Why should it matter to you what I—’ she began as she was smoothing back her hair, but broke off when a stick prodding the door he’d failed to close brought it flying open. Both of them had been too otherwise preoccupied to hear the wheelchair approaching.

‘King? Rayne? Oh, there you both are!’ Mitchell Clayborne’s colour was unusually high as he manoeuvred his chair into the room and Rayne guessed he’d been doing too much, against his doctor’s orders.

‘King, I wanted you to retrieve the book I dropped down behind the bedside cabinet but, since Rayne’s here, she can do it for me and perhaps read a little to me. Have you finished with her?’

King’s eyes were speculative as, on his feet now, he regarded her from his superior height, looking totally unfazed by what had just happened between them.

‘Yes, I’ve finished with her,’ he told his father.

Reluctantly inhaling his scent, keen to get away, Rayne brushed past him, although she could tell from that slight compression of his devastating mouth that what he was really saying was that where she was concerned he hadn’t even begun yet.

CHAPTER FOUR

THE following day Rayne decided to escape from the house for a while, needing some time to decide what she was going to do.

She was uncomfortable associating with the people who had wreaked such devastation on her family, but she couldn’t see what else she could do. She didn’t want to leave there without the evidence or admission that she was determined to secure for her father’s sake.

She had started asking Mitch questions last night while she had been reading to him—very subtly, and supposedly innocently. Like how he had begun in business. And when exactly had he hit upon the idea for the MiracleMed software. How he had felt when it had taken off.

‘King must have been very proud of you,’ she’d ventured, assessing his reaction, looking for any change in his hard, world-weary features, any note of guilt in his gravelly voice.

He’d seemed all right at first. But then he’d grown more and more agitated, even when their conversation had reverted to more casual topics. As well he should have! Rayne thought bitterly.

He’d looked so unwell, though, and had sounded so breathless that her conscience wouldn’t allow her to ask any more leading questions.

‘I think you should go to bed,’ she had advised worriedly, ringing the bell to summon one of the male members of staff to help him. She was frustrated, though, that yet another day had gone by and she was still no nearer to realising her goal.

Now, this morning, he had sent for her and told her that he didn’t need her services today, and so she’d decided to take herself down into the town for a proper look around.

‘You’ll need some of these,’ he’d told her from his bed, pressing a whole wad of banknotes into her hand.

Shocked and embarrassed, she had thrust them back at him. ‘I can’t,’ she’d protested, appalled at taking money from anyone—let alone someone she despised so much.

‘Don’t be silly. How do you think you’re going to get around and buy the odd souvenir?’ he’d demanded of her gruffly. ‘With those big bright eyes and that naturally winning smile?’

Shrugging off his compliment, she had to accept that he was right. Being robbed hadn’t exactly left her in a position to be proud.

‘I’ll pay you back,’ she’d promised resolutely, not only for his benefit, but for her own. She didn’t like being in this man’s debt any more than she wanted to like him, but he was making it very hard for her not to do either.

Now, coming down into the hall, her heart sank when King appeared, looking dynamic in dark blue corduroys and an ivory-white shirt that left his forearms bare, just as she was asking one of the maids in her somewhat limited French if she could call her a cab.

One fluent instruction from him in the girl’s own language had the young maid almost bobbing in compliance before she cast a swift glance at Rayne and darted away.

‘What did you say to her?’ Rayne enquired, puzzled, because it certainly didn’t sound like anything as simple as ordering a taxi.

‘I told her I’d take care of it,’ he replied succinctly and without any of the mental disturbance that just the sight of him was producing in her.

‘I don’t need you to rescue me from every difficult situation,’ she assured him with a slight tremor marking her words, unintentionally conveying to him how unsettled he was making her feel.

‘Nevertheless … you’ve got me.’ There was triumph in the clear blue eyes that drifted lazily over her tie-waisted chequered blouse and white cut-offs. ‘Now, where did you want to go?’

‘Nowhere in particular,’ she said, being deliberately obstructive. She wanted his help even less than she wanted his father’s, and she certainly didn’t welcome how her body was responding just from the way he was looking at her. ‘I was just going to do a bit of sightseeing—and without having to worry about the car,’ she told him, wishing he’d just take out his phone and order the cab he’d said he’d deal with.

But with a hand at her elbow, sending her thoughts spinning into chaos, he said, ‘In that case, I’ll be more than delighted to show you around.’

She wanted to protest. To tell him that she was going out because the strain was proving too much, being in this house with her father’s bitterest enemies and not feeling able to tell them who she was. But mainly, she decided, it was because of King himself. Because he disturbed her equilibrium so much and made her feel so ashamed of how he made her feel every time he came near her that she wanted to put as much distance between him and herself as she possibly could.

But with King Clayborne, she was discovering, argument was futile.

Consequently, it was with a raging awareness of him and a mind that was far from relaxed that she allowed him to drive her into town.

She was relieved, though, when he kept the conversation light. Impersonal. Not touching on any awkward topics. Like why he made rockets go off inside her every time he touched her. Or why she pretended not to want to go to bed with him, when every betraying cell in her body assured him that she did!

Instead, he acquainted her with the lesser-known facts about Monaco as they drove down through its flower-decked streets which, earlier in the season, formed the circuit for the world-famous motor racing Grand Prix. And he gave her an insight into the country’s history and its royalty, making it interesting for her. Making her want to know more as she listened to his deep and sensually caressing voice, remembering how it had warmed and excited her all those years ago.

‘Did your mother receive the flowers?’ he asked as he finished parking the Lamborghini in a space he had had no difficulty finding.

‘Yes, thank you,’ Rayne responded succinctly.

‘Did she like them?’

‘Probably,’ she answered minimally again.

She caught the curiosity in his eyes and in the faint smile that touched his hard yet exciting mouth, and she knew she had to explain. He had paid for them, after all.

‘When I rang Mum earlier, the friend she’s staying with said she was still asleep. She offered to wake her to show them to her, but I thought it best not to disturb her. After what she’s been through, she needs to get all the rest and relaxation she can.’

‘She must appreciate having such a thoughtful and caring daughter,’ he commented, taking the keys out of the ignition.

‘She deserves no less,’ Rayne expressed, absurdly warmed by what had been no less than a compliment from him. ‘She’s always been there for me.’

‘You’ve been fortunate in having such a good relationship with your mother.’

‘Didn’t you with your mother?’

The question slipped out and she didn’t know why she had asked it. He could have had seven doting mothers for all it meant to her.

‘My parents divorced when I was five. My father got custody. I only saw my mother on a few occasions after that. She preferred rearing horses to rearing children. The last I heard, she was living on a stud farm with her third husband somewhere in Colorado.’

Rayne shrugged. ‘That’s a pity,’ she said, meaning it.

In answer she saw the firm masculine mouth compress. ‘Not really. I went to boarding school, which was best for Mitch and for me. I learned how to be self-sufficient-independent—from a very early age, which stood me in good stead, as it turned out.’ He wasn’t actually spelling it out, but Rayne didn’t need to ask to know that he was talking about Mitch’s accident. ‘I don’t know whether I would have been so equipped to handle everything that was thrust on me if I’d had the type of family life that most people take for granted. I think it’s true what they say. That what you’ve never had, you never miss.’

Rayne didn’t wholly agree with that. After all, if he had had a bit more maternal love perhaps he wouldn’t have been so ruthless and insensitive towards other people. Like her father, she thought achingly, her teeth clamping together as she looked away.

‘I was lucky,’ she murmured half to herself and in a tone that emphasised the whole poignancy of her loss. ‘Dad was always there too and he was quite simply the most caring, understanding and honourable man I’ve ever met.’

‘Quite a happy family, then?’ He sounded quite cynical, and Rayne wondered why. Was it because he hadn’t known that sort of stability himself? Being packed off to boarding school. Being made to feel abandoned—although he hadn’t said so—by both his parents.

She could almost have felt sorry for him, except that King Clayborne wasn’t the type of man to inspire pity.

Even so, against all the odds, she was surprised to find herself enjoying his company as he guided her around the Principality. She even found herself laughing at something he was saying as he brought her across the tree-fringed square that gave onto the wide imposing frontage of the palace.

Pale and majestic with its crenellated towers, it was once the home, Rayne reminded herself, of the beautiful actress of the nineteen-fifties who had been plucked out of Hollywood and brought here by her prince, only to steal the hearts of his people.

In fact there were photographs of her adorning shop windows all over the town, Rayne had noticed, still a lure for the tourists even so many years after her death, a beautiful legend whose name had become synonymous with Monaco.

‘It must have been like a fairy tale for her,’ Rayne whispered a little later when she saw yet another image of the princess in the latest shop window they were passing. ‘To win not only a prince’s love—but a whole country’s.’