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

‘Even a country that is less than five hundred acres across.’

She pulled a face and smiled, amazed at how small an area Monaco took up, amazed too by King’s knowledge of it.

‘And you? Do you believe in fairy tales, Rayne?’ he asked, his voice suddenly strung with mocking amusement.

‘Fairy tales?’ She pretended to be considering it as she looked up at him askance.

‘Happy ever afters. Two people living side by side and loving each other until death they do part.’

‘Well, it’s obvious you don’t,’ she lobbed back, noting the cynicism with which he’d said it. But then, after the way his parents’ marriage had broken up, she supposed she could understand why.

‘I know what Mum and Dad had,’ she murmured almost reverently. ‘All right, it wasn’t exactly a fairy tale. They had their ups and downs. But they loved each other, and knew they always would.’ And they had instilled in their only daughter the importance of the qualities that kept a marriage strong. Love, trust and faithfulness. It was something she strongly believed in and it was something she staunchly refused to allow anyone to dismiss lightly. Even King Clayborne. ‘You were just unlucky,’ she said, moving away from the window and the image that had sparked off this unwelcome conversation with him in the first place.

The cathedral. The palace. The exotic gardens. They did it all. He even showed her the amazingly palatial building of the famous casino, although they didn’t actually go inside.

It wasn’t until they got back into the car that Rayne realised she’d switched her phone off before going into the cathedral and had forgotten to switch it back on. She chastened herself for letting everything go out of her mind simply because she was with King.

She started when her phone began to ring almost as soon as she had switched it on.

‘Lorrayne?’ Cynthia Hardwicke said when Rayne put the phone to her ear.

Immediately Rayne tensed up. King hadn’t yet switched the car’s engine on. Could he have heard the way her mother had addressed her?

Trying to sound normal, she wished her mother a happy birthday when she had finished enthusing about the bouquet Rayne had sent her.

‘I’m glad you like it,’ she breathed, relaxing a little, relieved to hear her mother sounding so buoyant. She envisaged Cynthia Hardwicke, with her grey-tinged auburn hair freshly tinted for her holiday, starting to regain the weight she had lost, her skin—usually as pale as her own—beginning to bloom again beneath a welcome Majorcan sun.

‘Like them? I can’t tell you how much they’ve brightened my day! But why did you have the message signed “Rayne”, love?’ She gave a little chuckle. ‘Weren’t you thinking?’

Catching her breath, Rayne cast a surreptitious glance at King.

He was scanning through various menus on his own phone. Checking appointments and deleting texts, she decided, her eyes drawn to that strong, steady hand that had driven her nearly mindless for him yesterday.

He still hadn’t started the engine, letting her take her call.

Killing time, she suspected, while he waited for her to finish. Nevertheless, she knew that although he was displaying all outward signs of being courteous and respecting her privacy by appearing otherwise engaged, that sharp brain of his was probably attuned to every agitated response she was uttering.

‘I couldn’t have been. I’m sorry,’ she added quickly, because she certainly didn’t feel happy being forced to deceive her own mother. ‘But you’re all right, are you?’ she asked uneasily, having sensed a flicker of interest from the man beside her since uttering that apology, even though he still appeared preoccupied with the obvious running of his business.

‘Of course I am,’ Cynthia Hardwicke assured her, although there was a curious note in the disembodied voice. ‘But are you? You don’t sound yourself, darling. Is anything the matter?’

‘No, of course not.’ She laughed to try and convince her parent that everything was as it should be, to try and behave normally.

‘Are you with someone?’

Rayne could feel herself growing hot and sticky from her toes upwards.

‘Who is it?’ Her mother persisted in wanting to know.

Rayne hesitated before replying. ‘It’s just a friend.’ Involuntarily, her gaze strayed to King and his heart-stopping profile. It exhibited forcefulness overlaid with unstinting sensuality. Authority and energy, harnessed with a magnetism that had the drawing power over a woman that the moon had over the tides. But he had obviously picked up the gist of the conversation because his mouth was twitching now in what she could only describe as sensual mockery. He clearly didn’t regard her as a friend, any more than she considered him one. Though for plainly different reasons where she was concerned!

‘I thought I knew all your friends,’ Cynthia pressed. Which was true, Rayne thought. She did. ‘You’re sounding pretty secretive. That’s not like you.’

‘It’s no one of any significance,’ Rayne stressed, already regretting the comment when she saw the way King was looking at her as she wound up the conversation and rang off.

‘Why didn’t you tell her about us?’ he enquired, turning all his attention towards her now.

‘There is no “us”,’ she reminded him tartly, feeling the heat of shame creeping up her neck and into her cheeks when a masculine eyebrow lifted in obvious dispute.

‘No? Not when I only have to touch you to send your hormones rocketing through the roof? I’d say that was significant enough to constitute an “us”.’

He’d also taken her out to breakfast that first morning. Showed her around Monte Carlo and bought her lunch today. Not to mention making his credit card available to pay for her mother’s birthday bouquet!

‘I’m sorry about the way I described you,’ she felt she had to offer, even if his reasons for helping her might be purely self-motivated. ‘But I had to put her off the scent.’

‘The scent of what?’ he asked smoothly.

‘That I’m here.’

‘In Monaco? Or with me?’

‘Both,’ she answered truthfully now. ‘She thinks I’m staying with my friend in Nice. If I told her I was in Monte Carlo on my own, she’d worry.’

‘And if you said you were with me?’

‘Then I’d have to explain how I came to be in Mitch’s house in the first place, and she’d worry even more.’ No, more than that. She’d have a fit, Rayne thought, shuddering to think what Cynthia Hardwicke would say if she knew that her daughter was hobnobbing with the family who had ruined her husband. Another shiver went down her spine as she thought of how easily she could become involved—especially with King—if she didn’t watch her step.

‘You don’t think she’d approve of you picking up older men?’

‘I didn’t pick him up,’ she reminded him, stressing the point. ‘I meant I’d have to tell her how I’d had my belongings stolen. With losing Dad so recently, Mum gets worked up about things and imagines something terrible’s going to happen to me. If she thought I needed her in any way, she’d be over here like a shot, and I couldn’t risk letting her do that.’ Even if the Claybornes hadn’t been in the picture. ‘She needs her holiday a hundred times more than I need mine. I don’t intend doing anything that would spoil it for her.’

‘That’s very commendable,’ he murmured, the sound rumbling deeply from his chest. ‘You love her very much, don’t you?’

His observation was, like his eyes, so direct and probing that she looked quickly away without answering, ashamed to let such a hard-headed character as he was see the welling emotion she had to fight to control.

King couldn’t take his eyes off her tight, tense features—the perfect structure of her forehead, the pert nose with those slightly flaring nostrils, the gentle curve of her cheek.

This girl was a real enigma, he decided, with his face a study in concentration. On the one hand she seemed guarded and extremely defensive, which aroused his natural suspicions, especially since he’d taken her as a gold-digger. Definitely like someone with something to hide. Yet on the other hand she spoke about and behaved towards her mother as though she would give her life for the woman if she had to, which didn’t quite tie in with the hard-headed opportunist he was prepared to think she was. He was finding, he realised, that he harboured very conflicting opinions about Rayne Carpenter, and it wasn’t in his nature to be confounded by anyone. And on top of that there was still this strong and nagging feeling of having known her before …

‘We all do things according to what our consciences tell us we should do, don’t we?’ she suggested meaningfully, wishing she could control her tongue and not let her emotions run away with her until she was ready to hit him—and his father—with the truth.

‘Should it prick my conscience that every time you come within a yard of me I want to take you to bed?’ he said softly, fondling her hair. ‘Or that you want me to against your own better judgement?’

The space between them was suddenly charged with so much electricity it was as if someone had lit a whole boxful of fire-crackers and Rayne’s heart started hammering in her chest.

‘Can we drop this subject? Please,’ she breathed emphatically.

Her breath seemed to stick in her lungs as his arm came across the back of her seat, bringing him closer to her.

‘Have you never heard the expression “He who pleads is lost”?’ he murmured with his smile predatory, his lashes thick and dark, shielding his eyes as they rested on the fullness of her trembling, slightly parted mouth.

When his lips touched hers it was only to make contact with the outer corner of her mouth, a contact that left her craving the full onslaught of his kiss, made her grasp the seat to stop herself from twining her arms around his warm, muscled torso as he lifted his head.

‘What’s wrong, Rayne? Can’t you accept the consequences of what you’ve got yourself into?’ His voice was quite steady, not ragged with sexual desire as she’d imagined it would be. In fact there was a note of hidden danger in the very choice of his words.

‘I wasn’t aware I’d got myself into anything,’ she uttered tremulously, knowing he was still suspicious of her, still vigilant, even if she had imagined that softening in him just now, because she had, she realised, telling herself now that she had been a fool to do so.

‘Then you obviously need convincing,’ he said.

She expected him to demonstrate exactly what he meant, but he didn’t. Instead he simply started the powerful car and drove them back to the villa.

So what had he meant by that? she wondered when, once there, he left her to her own devices, abandoning her to deal with some business in the study. Did he intend to keep her on tenterhooks—make her wait until her guard was down before proving his point to her again? That she couldn’t resist him. Or had he guessed the secret she was keeping from him and Mitch and was merely luring her into a false sense of security until such time as he disclosed what he had uncovered?

And that was a very unfortunate pun, Rayne decided with a grimace because, if she wasn’t careful, she was in danger of him not only guessing who she really was before she was ready to tell him, but also of winding up in his bed! And wouldn’t that be a double victory for him? She shivered just from the thought of it, although even self-loathing couldn’t temper the excitement that heated her blood every time she considered him being her lover.

‘I don’t think you should be doing this,’ Rayne counselled, watching Mitch manoeuvring his chair along the wooded path where he had insisted she bring him today. ‘Getting out so early so as to give everyone the slip is one thing, but persuading me to bring you over such uneven ground as this—’

‘Will you shut up?’ Mitch said, carrying on ahead of her, his hard mottled hands on the wheels pushing him stubbornly to his goal.

The trees thinned out, making Rayne gasp, not only from the sheer danger of the cliff edge just below them, but at the panorama of nothing but glittering sea and sky that had suddenly opened up in front of them.

‘Can you show me anything better than that?’ Mitch challenged, waving a hand towards the view. ‘I used to come here a lot when I was young. It’s where I proposed to my first wife.’

‘King’s mother,’ Rayne said tentatively.

‘Did you know she left me?’ He gave a harsh bark of laughter. ‘Of course you did. Everybody knows it. Everyone knows I’m not the easiest of men to live with.’

Rayne glanced down at him, noting something that sounded remarkably like regret in his voice. Did he still miss the woman who had deserted him and their five-year-old child? Miss her still, even though he’d finally found someone else to take her place?

‘As a boy, King blamed himself for his mother leaving us. For leaving him,’ Mitch was saying, much to Rayne’s surprise. ‘It hardened him. Made a cynic of him. Especially where marriage and family is concerned. We never could form the bond we should have formed. He was already a man by the time I met Karen.’

‘Your second wife?’ A woman half his age, who had died so tragically when their car had come off the road, Rayne reflected, although it was King she was reluctantly thinking of. King, the child who had lost a mother, even though she was still alive. And King the man, who was left scarred by the desertion. Left hard and uncaring. Unable to trust …

Mitch nodded and started to cough. ‘Here. Help me with this thing, will you?’ he spluttered.

He was having difficulty opening the zip of a leather pouch he’d brought with him. When she gave it back to him, he swore when he looked inside.

‘What’s wrong?’ Rayne asked him anxiously.

‘Does anything have to be wrong?’ he wheezed, turning his chair with such angry force that it lurched sideways, lodging one wheel in a grassy hollow.

Rayne shot over to grab the handles, trying to pull it free.

‘I can’t move it!’ she gasped, finding the man’s bulk and the awkward angle of the chair too much for her inadequate strength. To add to that, Mitch’s breathing was beginning to worry her.

‘I’m going to ring King,’ she said quickly, taking out her phone when her attempts to dislodge the chair proved ineffectual.

‘No! We don’t need him,’ Mitch protested to her dismay.

‘I’ll have to,’ Rayne told him, too frightened by the danger of the situation to be intimidated by him, even if every bone in her body rebelled at having to explain to King.

He answered her call on the second ring, his voice deep and strong, the voice of a man who could take on the world and come out fighting.

‘King! It’s Mitch! We’re …’ Quickly she acquainted him with their exact location. ‘He’s got his chair stuck in a rut and he seems to have come out without his medication. It’s for his breathing. I think it’s—’

‘I know where it is,’ he rasped, and that was it. He was on his way before she even had time to cut the call.

Rayne couldn’t have been more grateful when she heard the throb of the Lamborghini’s engine. Through the trees she saw the car practically skid to a halt and she went weak with relief when King leapt out and raced towards them without bothering to close the door.

‘Thank heaven you’re here!’ she breathed.

It was with immense gratitude that she relinquished the handles of the chair into his stronger and more capable hands.

‘Keep clear of this,’ he ordered, and with his efficient and determined strength managed to bring the man and his chair back onto even ground.

How effortlessly he had saved the day, Rayne marvelled, with tears of relief biting behind her eyes now that the ordeal was over.

‘You should never have brought him out here,’ he admonished after he’d overseen Mitch take his medication and was now pushing him back to the car. ‘Or at the very least you should have told me where you were going.’

‘He didn’t want me to,’ Rayne argued, refusing to be the whipping boy for two very indomitable males.

‘Then you should have refused to drive him. Or at least used your own initiative to let me know where you were going.’

‘It wasn’t her fault.’ Mitch sent a scowling upward glance back over his shoulder at his son. ‘And stop talking about me like I wasn’t here. That isn’t like you, King. Anyway, I wanted some freedom. I get sick and tired of people fussing over me. Rayne doesn’t fuss over me,’ he expanded surprisingly, without looking at her as she trooped along beside them, still feeling shaken, and now unjustly chastened, by King’s flaying tongue.

‘I really didn’t know he was going to get me to drive him here,’ she admitted, trying to placate him, sensing he was still angry with her after he had got his father and his chair back into the Bentley and was now moving back to his own car. ‘But I couldn’t go against his wishes and tell you he was going out. He’s got so much pride, King. Almost as much as you,’ she tagged on by way of an accusation, surprising herself by defending Mitch. ‘He feels humiliated asking you to do the simplest things he used to do himself,’ she uttered with angry tears welling up in her from those frightening moments when she’d been hanging on to that chair, sick with worry over Mitch Clayborne’s state of health. ‘Have you never felt humiliated by anything?’

She looked like a warring goddess, King thought, seeing her eyes dancing like splintering emeralds and her tousled red hair falling wildly round her shoulders as her beautiful body squared in decisive challenge against him. But those tears were genuine, and the fierceness with which she was standing up for his father touched him in a way he didn’t want to be touched.

One stride was all it took and he was reaching for her.

‘It’s all right,’ he reassured her, enfolding her in his arms and feeling her slender body shaken by sobs. ‘It’s all right. There’s no harm done,’ he murmured into her perfumed hair.

It seemed so right to cling to him, Rayne thought, steadied by his hard warmth. He seemed so dependable and strong. So much so that she wanted to stay there with her head resting against his shoulder while she breathed in his very masculine scent and felt the heavy beat of his heart drumming against hers.

But that was just a flight of fancy because of all she’d been through this morning, she told herself. Because she needed someone and he just happened to be here.

‘I’ve got to get Mitch home,’ she said huskily, pulling herself free, and tripped across to the Bentley without a glance back.

In her room the following evening, Rayne paced the tastefully patterned tiles, reflecting on the previous day’s events.

That episode with Mitch had been scary, but so had those traitorous feelings she’d experienced during those few crazy moments in King’s arms.

Sexual attraction was one thing. You didn’t have to know or even like someone very much to feel its unmistakable and often dangerous tug. But what she had felt when King had shown that tender and more understanding side of his nature yesterday had been thoroughly more bewildering and complicated.

She was there to get an admission—and through the tabloids if Mitch refused to comply with what she wanted—and getting emotionally involved with King Clayborne wasn’t on her agenda. Even if Mitchell Clayborne thought it should be!

‘Is there something you’re not telling me, Rayne?’ he had asked her after she’d pulled out of King’s arms and climbed into the Bentley yesterday.

‘No, I don’t think so,’ she’d refuted, knowing full well he was referring to the embrace he had just witnessed between them.

‘Pity,’ he’d expressed, although that unusual glint in his watery blue eyes had assured her he didn’t believe her. ‘You’d be a good match for him. He needs someone who’ll stand up to him once in a while, and I must admit it would be no hardship to me if you were to stick around.’

Which she definitely wasn’t going to! Rayne thought now, with the same stab of guilt she’d felt yesterday in realising that she was unintentionally getting herself caught up in Mitch’s affections.

She was getting far too involved with both men, and she had never intended that, she thought despairingly. The longer she stayed, the more she was becoming embroiled in their everyday lives, their worries, their concerns and, where King was concerned, she didn’t even have to spell out the problem to herself there.

Quite simply, that crazy fever she had been suffering from as a hapless teenager had returned in full force, threatening to consume her with its intensity because she had no protection against it. His cruel words and actions then should have immunized her for life, and she thought they had until she had met him again the other night. How he made her feel was like an ever-changing strain of some deadly virus that couldn’t be controlled, and the second time around it was even more potent and deadly than the first. It didn’t help either, telling herself that she was a woman now and therefore should have known better. Known how to ride the torments of this lethal attraction until it passed. Because it wouldn’t, she was shocked to realise. Because the only drug that would alleviate her symptoms was in the full-blown act of his possession of her. And then the relief, she thought, would only be short-lived, because once she had allowed herself to cross that line with him she knew she would never be able to have enough of King Clayborne. Like a drug, after its effects had worn off, the symptoms would return until she could indulge herself again, which would mean taking him into her until she could feel his power and his energy filling her up and seeping into every clamouring cell of her body, by which time she would be a hopeless addict.

No, she resolved, coming to a standstill at last on the beautiful pale Indian rug and making her decision.

First thing in the morning, she determined with a sudden painful contraction of her stomach muscles, she was going to let them both know exactly who she was and what she was doing there.

CHAPTER FIVE

‘MONSIEUR CLAYBORNE? Non, he is not up yet,’ the housekeeper informed Rayne when she enquired where he was. ‘And Monsieur King …’ Hélène Dupont always referred to him as that, Rayne noticed, as though to call him simply ‘King’ would somehow detract from the respect she felt he commanded ‘… I believe he is still giving an interview on the terrace.’

‘An interview?’ Rayne queried, her curiosity aroused.

‘It’s to do with the documentary he is sponsoring. The one about clean water for some African villages. I believe he is heavily committed to that. They rang early. It was unexpected,’ Hélène told her before concluding, ‘I think he will be about half an hour more.’

‘Thanks,’ Rayne responded, her smile strained, her insides knotted up, as they had been almost continuously since she’d made her decision to tell the truth, so much so that she’d scarcely slept last night.

Finding out about the charitable work that King was involved in didn’t make her feel any better about deceiving him. In fact, it made her feel a whole lot worse.

She hadn’t, until now, even considered him having a compassionate side. Not really compassionate. Not until he had comforted her on that cliff-top the other morning. But then hadn’t he seen to it that her mother got her flowers when she was having difficulty ordering them? And rushed back from New York as soon as he’d been alerted to his father’s state of health?

But then again, perhaps his main reason for coming back from New York was to suss her out, Rayne reflected disparagingly. After all, he’d already been forewarned that she was there. And as for the flowers? Well, he wanted to get her into bed, didn’t he? And there could be other reasons for wanting to help people less fortunate than oneself. Like the publicity, for starters.

With his influence and money he could easily afford to help fund an irrigation programme for people in Africa. And it wouldn’t do his company’s image any harm at all to have favourable deeds associated with the Clayborne name.