At No Man's Command

James Challender wasn’t just a press magnet. He was press superglue. Where he went the press followed, especially if anyone got a heads-up on his upcoming engagement. He was one of London’s most eligible bachelors—the epitome of the Prize Catch. Every woman under the age of fifty panted after him. He was suave, sophisticated. Not a playboy like his father, but a classy specimen of modern sexy corporate man. Before she knew it, her sanctuary would be invaded by hundreds of journalists and prying cameras, hoping to get the latest scoop on him.

She would be hunted down. Found. Exposed. Mocked. Shamed.

The scandal she was trying to distance herself from would arrive on the doorstep. The shame of being at the centre of something so sordid wasn’t new to her. She’d spent most of her life attracting scandals, encouraging them, relishing in them for the attention they gave her, which made up for the lack of attention she’d received as a child.

But that chapter was supposed to be over.

She wanted to put that part of her life behind her and move forward. The meeting with Antony Smithson—aka Antony Gregovitch—was supposed to have been her big break. The chance to get out of the club scene and nail the recording contract she’d longed for since she was a little kid singing into her hairbrush in front of a mottled mirror in a council flat. Instead, she’d found out he wasn’t a music producer at all. He’d lied to her from the moment he’d sat down to listen to her sing through her shift. He’d come night after night, staying to talk to her between breaks, buying her drinks, telling her how beautiful her voice was, how talented she was. Fool that she was, she had sucked it all up and basked in his praise.

That was what angered her the most—the fact she hadn’t seen through him. How could she have been so gullible, especially the way she’d been dragged up by a bunch of tricksters and sham artists? He hadn’t been the handsome prince to rescue her from a life of singing to people who were too drunk to even listen to a word of her lyrics. He was a married man with a wife and family who was looking for a bit of cheap fun on the side.

Now she was painted as a heartless home-wrecker and her chance to prove she was so much more than a nightclub one-trick pony was over. She had no recording contract. She didn’t even have a job. Antony’s wife’s smear campaign had seen to that. There wasn’t a club in Vegas—possibly in the entire world—that would take her on now.

And now she had to deal with James High-and-Mighty Challender.

In spite of everything, Aiesha couldn’t help a tiny smile of self-congratulation. She knew exactly how hard to tug on his chain. She had practised her moves on him when she was fifteen. He had a little more self-control than his sleazeball of a father, but she hated him just as much. But then she hated all men, especially superrich ones who thought they could have anyone they wanted just by fanning open their wallet. Sexually they were OK, quite useful for a bit of fun now and again, but as people? No. She hadn’t met any she respected as a person. The men in her life had always let her down. Tricked her. Betrayed her. Exploited her.

James Challender might think he could control her but she wasn’t leaving Lochbannon on his say-so. His mother had given her permission to stay for as long as she liked. She wasn’t going to be pushed around by a stuffed shirt whose vocabulary didn’t possess the words fun or spontaneity. He was a nitpicking, timekeeping workaholic who got antsy if the cushions on the sofa weren’t neatly aligned.

And as for his so-called fiancée...what a joke! They deserved each other. Phoebe whatever-her-name-was did nothing but smile inanely at the cameras, showing off her perfect toothpaste-commercial smile and her perfect clothes and her perfect figure while her equally pampered and perfect parents pumped up her trust fund.

Bitch.

Aiesha tapped her fingers against her lips. Maybe there was a way for her to get this unexpected little speed bump to work in her favour. Why would anyone think she was hooking her claws into a boring old married politician back in Vegas when someone as staggeringly gorgeous as James Challender was spending the week cloistered with her up here in the Highlands?

She reached for her phone with a mischievous grin. Twitter, here I come!

* * *

James hadn’t been able to get through to his mother but he left a message. A rather stern one, lecturing her on the pitfalls of harbouring a headline-grabbing harlot who was sure to pilfer the silver or trash the place with a wild party in her absence.

He rubbed a golf-ball knot of tension in his neck as he looked at the steady fall of snow outside the library window. For once the weather forecasters were spot on. It was snowing a blizzard and any chance of leaving now—let alone in the morning—was well and truly out of the question.

He dropped his hand back down by his side with a whooshing sigh. Thank God no one knew he was here with Aiesha. Yet. He’d checked on his phone earlier to see if anyone had tracked her down but so far they hadn’t. The Vegas scandal was still generating plenty of comments, most of them unflattering to her on her part in destroying a perfectly respectable man’s career and marriage. Personally, he thought some of the comments were a little harsh. Surely the man in question had to take some responsibility?

But then he thought of her little seductive moves downstairs. She was one hell of a temptation even the purest of monks would find hard to resist. His body was still reverberating with shockwaves of unbridled lust. She did it for the sport of it. It amused her to tempt and tease. It was a game, a competition to see who had the most willpower. He’d won that battle a decade ago. He’d been proud of his strength of will, but back then she’d been a kid. Now she was an adult and twice as dangerous. She’d had years to perfect her art of playing the courtesan.

James clenched and unclenched his hands. His skin was still burning from her sizzling touch and nothing he did would quell it. He had never thought of himself as a hedonistic sensualist. He enjoyed sex but there was an element to it that had always disturbed him. The closeness that came with sex and the out of control aspect made him uneasy. The idea of being vulnerable and at the mercy of another unnerved him and meant he always kept his passion on a tight leash. He was by no means prudish but he was uneasy with the thought of giving in to primal urges without thought of the consequences.

Like his father, for instance, moving from one relationship to another with a series of totally unsuitable women. His latest mistress was barely legal, yet another wannabe starlet looking for a sugar daddy to give her a good time. The shallowness of his father was a constant irritation to him. A constant embarrassment. A constant source of shame. He hated the assumption he was like his father because they shared the same features.

He wasn’t the same.

He had drive and ambition where his father had none. He had focus and discipline. He cared about the company. He cared about the people who worked in the company.

Hard work and responsibility weren’t words James associated with his father. Born to wealth, which he’d proceeded to dispense with as soon as it was bequeathed to him, Clifford Challender had all but destroyed the coffers and the reputation of the architectural empire James’s grandfather had worked so hard to build.

Now the baton was in James’s hand and he wasn’t going to let it go until he had the company back where it belonged, up there with the top ten architectural firms in the country.

The Sherwood project was a pivotal step towards that dream. The multimillion-pound redesign of Howard Sherwood’s London home and his Paris townhouse was small change compared to other projects the influential and well-connected businessman could send James’s way. If James secured this contract then his dream of designing luxury environmentally friendly accommodation in select wilderness areas across the globe would be one step closer. It wasn’t just the money that motivated him. The project was true to his values as an architect. He wanted to leave a legacy of buildings that enhanced the environments in which they were set, not exploiting or desecrating or destroying them. And it would be one step closer to proving he was nothing like his wastrel father.

Bonnie lifted her golden head off the carpet at James’s feet and gave a soft whine. ‘You want to go outside, old girl?’ he asked. ‘Come on. It looks like your babysitter’s walked off the job.’

The snow was already up to his calves and the wind was howling like a dervish but fortunately the dog didn’t take too long about her business. James dusted the snow off his shoulders as he came back in the back door leading off the kitchen. The back of his neck prickled when he saw Aiesha leaning in an indolent manner against the kitchen counter, her lushly youthful mouth curved upwards in a mocking tilt. ‘I hope you’re not expecting me to cook dinner for you.’

‘I wouldn’t dream of putting you to the tedious inconvenience of doing something for someone else.’

He opened the fridge and inspected the contents. The usual suspects were there—eggs, yoghurt, milk and cheese, vegetables in the crisper and Bonnie’s meat in a Tupperware container.

‘You can feed the dog now you’re here,’ Aiesha said. ‘And you can walk her. I’m not going to freeze my butt off just because that overweight mutt needs to take a leak every five minutes.’

He closed the fridge to look at her again. ‘So how are you going to earn your keep?’

Her grey eyes glinted as the tilt of her lush mouth went a little higher. ‘Any suggestions?’

A rocket blast of blood slammed into his groin at her saucy look. His mind filled with images of his body rocking against hers, pumping, thrusting, exploding. He clenched his teeth, fighting the demons of desire that plagued him whenever she was within touching distance. She knew the effect she had on him. Knew it and relished it. But he wondered if it was not so much a game now but a tactic to get rid of him.

The more he thought about it, the more likely it seemed. She had hidden herself away from the press in the last place anyone would think to find her. His coming here had jeopardised the safety of her hideout.

He had no time for the press, especially since his father’s exploits had sullied the family name so lamentably, but his own profile had attracted a fair bit of interest over the years. He had been in the gossip pages more than he wanted to be, but that came with the territory of being considered one of Britain’s most eligible bachelors. The announcement of his engagement would bring a storm of interest his way, which was clearly something Aiesha was keen to avoid while she was holed up here with him.

James curled his top lip at her. ‘You think I’d get mixed up with a cheap little two-bit tramp like you?’

She sent her smoky eyes over his body from head to foot, lingering on his groin for a heart-stopping, pulse-thundering pause, before re-engaging with his gaze with a mischievous twinkle of her own. She lifted the smartphone she was holding in one hand, tapping one of her slender fingers on the screen. ‘You might want to check in with your fiancée. Fill her in on your current location and choice of company before she hears it from another source.’

James felt every hair on his scalp tighten at the roots as if being tugged out by tiny elves. But, before he could get his mouth open to speak, his phone started to ring. He took it out of his pocket, his stomach dropping as Phoebe’s image came up on the screen. ‘Hi, Phoebe, I was just about to—’

‘You bastard!’

‘It’s not what you think,’ he said, thinking on his feet and not doing a particularly good job of it. ‘She’s practically my...er...adopted sister. My mother is supposed to be here but she got called away at the—’

‘Oh, for God’s sake. Don’t take me for a complete and utter fool. It’s all over social media. You’re having a fling with a—’ the disgust and incredulity was starkly apparent in Phoebe’s tone ‘—a Vegas lounge singer?’

James blinked. His heart thudded. His brow broke out in a hot prickling sweat. The Sherwood project flashed before his eyes. All the tricky negotiations he’d gone through to nail the pitch, all the work he’d done—hours and hours, weeks and weeks, months and months of his time—would be for naught if the ultra-conservative Howard Sherwood heard about this before he could explain the circumstances. ‘Listen, I can explain everyth—’

‘It’s over,’ Phoebe said. ‘Not that I was going to say yes if you ever happened to get around to proposing to me. Daddy was right about you. He said the apple never falls far from the tree and your family tree is particularly rotten. You’re just like your jailbait-slavering father. I don’t want my name to be dragged down to that level. Goodbye.’ Click.

James curled his fingers around his phone so tightly he was sure the screen would crack or his fingers. Possibly both. He swung his gaze to Aiesha’s smile. Not a cat-got-the-canary one. A cat-got-the-whole-contents-of-the-aviary smile. A red mist of anger blurred his vision. He had to blink a couple of times to clear it. ‘You little game-playing bitch,’ he bit out. ‘What the hell do you think you’re doing?’

She pushed her lips out in a pout. ‘That’s hardly the way to address your brand-new mistress, is it?’

He clenched his jaw so firmly it reverberated inside his skull like a slammed door. ‘No one will believe it. Not for a New York second.’ Mental gulp. I hope.

Aiesha held up her phone again, scrolling through the feed of tweets, and began reading aloud. ‘“WTG! About time. Always knew JC had a thing for you.”’ She looked up at him with that bad girl smile of hers. ‘Guess how many retweets so far?’

James swung away, ploughing a hand through his hair. How would he ever live this down? Everyone in London—everyone on the planet—would be rolling about the floor laughing at his choice of partner. A sluttish club singer who was sleeping her way up the social ladder like a poisonous viper winding its way up a vine.

Everyone would be saying it, the words he dreaded the most: like father, like son.

But wait...

Maybe there was a way he could switch this around. It would reflect badly on him if their ‘relationship’ was viewed as nothing more than a casual fling or temporary hook-up. He would look exactly like his father if he didn’t go into damage control and fast.

Think. Think. Think.

Aha!

What if his relationship with Aiesha was a little more serious?

James took out his phone again and typed a quick tweet and pressed send before he was tempted to think twice. This could work. It had to work. Please God, let it work.

‘What are you doing?’ she asked. ‘You can’t retract it now. It’s too late. It’s gone viral.’

‘I’m not retracting it.’ He gave her a payback smile as he slipped his phone back in his pocket. ‘Congratulations, Aiesha. You just got yourself engaged.’

CHAPTER THREE

ENGAGED?

Aiesha hid her surprise at his countermove behind her trademark screen of streetwise brashness. ‘Do I get a big, flashy diamond ring with that?’

His smile dropped away and his deep blue eyes glittered with disgust as they took in the impudent height of her chin. ‘You’re the last person on earth I would ever consider becoming engaged to and you damn well know it. You’re the one who set this up. Now you can deal with the consequences. We’ll stay engaged until the press loses interest. I give it a couple of weeks, tops.’

Aiesha folded her arms across her chest, the action pushing her breasts up so that a generous hint of her cleavage showed. She enjoyed watching him try to keep his gaze north of her neckline. He was so starchy and uptight, but she knew that inside those crisply ironed trousers with their knife-sharp creases was a hot-blooded man in his prime. ‘How much are you going to pay me for this little pretend gig? You should know by now I’m not the kind of girl to do anything for free...even for...erm...’ she gave him a little wink as she put her fingers up in mock quotation marks ‘“...family.”’

His savage frown brought his brows together over his eyes. ‘Have you no shame?’

She laughed at his schoolmasterish-stern expression because she knew it would annoy him. She liked annoying him. He was always so serious and sober. So grave and so disciplined. It amused her to niggle him, to watch him fight to control his temper. She watched as a dull flush rode high on his sharp aristocratic cheekbones and a muscle flickered in his jaw, on and off, as if it was being tugged by a surgical needle and thread beneath the skin.

Yep. He was furious with her all right. He looked as if he wanted to shake her until her teeth fell out and rolled along the floor like marbles.

But there was something else throbbing in the air and it wasn’t anger.

Aiesha could feel the echo of it pulsing in her own body. She became aware of every one of her erogenous zones as if his steely gaze had burned through the ice that kept each of them in a deep-freeze lockdown.

Molten heat pooled between her thighs as she thought of those clenched hands relaxing enough to reach out and stroke her flesh, for one of those broad, masculine fingertips to brush across the pebble of each of her nipples, to tease the puckered skin until she gasped out loud with the pleasure.

She glanced at his tight-lipped mouth. She had always wondered how it would feel to have that mouth lose its rigidly disapproving lines and soften in passion, to meld to hers in a fiery lock of lust and longing, for his tongue to stab through the seam of her mouth to plunder hers.

Aiesha suppressed an involuntary shiver. She wasn’t interested in being overcome with passion. Unlike most women, she could always separate sex from emotion. She could get down and dirty, but her heart and her head were never in it, only her body. Her body had needs and she saw to them if and when the right opportunity came along.

But something warned her about getting physical with James Challender, like a foghorn sounding in the distance. She couldn’t put her finger on it, or describe it accurately, but she knew if she stepped over the boundary of becoming involved with him sexually then it might not just be her body that would receive him.

No one but no one had access to her heart and she was going to keep it that way.

His slate-blue eyes seared hers. ‘How long have you been in contact with my mother?’

Aiesha held his accusing look with a defiant hoist of her chin. ‘She wrote to me the year after her divorce from your father was finalised.’

His brows snapped together. ‘You’ve been in contact that long?’

‘On and off.’

‘But...but why?’

Aiesha had been surprised by Louise’s first phone call eight years ago. With the benefit of hindsight and a little more maturity, she knew she had acted appallingly to the only person who had ever shown her a shred of genuine affection.

Louise Challender had always wanted a daughter; she was the type of woman who should have had a brood of children to love and nurture, and yet she’d been unable to have another child after giving birth to James. It had put an enormous strain on her marriage to Clifford, but then Clifford wasn’t the type of man who would have been a suitable father for anyone, let alone a brood of kids. He was too immature and selfish, like a spoilt child who had been overindulged and always expected everything to go his way. Aiesha had seen that from the moment she had been introduced to him when Louise brought her home from the streets, where she’d been living since her stepfather had kicked her out a week after her mother had overdosed on heroin. She’d refused to take her mother’s place in his bed so he’d turned her out of the house, but not before committing an unspeakable act of cruelty that still caused her nightmares all these years on. If only she had thought to get Archie out of the house first.

If only. If only. If only...

Watching as her beloved dog was strangled to death in front of her had destroyed her belief in humanity. Archie had only yelped the once but his cry had haunted many a sleepless night since.

Aiesha blinked the distressing scene out of her head as best she could. She wasn’t that powerless young girl any more. She was the one in control now. She allowed no man to have an advantage on her.

Clifford Challender might wear bespoke clothes and speak with an upper-class accent but underneath he was no different from her brutish, despicable, drug-dealing stepfather. She had proven it. It had only taken five minutes alone with him in the study to set it up. She had planned it to the last detail. They’d agreed to meet at a hotel in London’s West End to ‘begin’ their affair. Clifford had taken the bait—as she had known he would—with the press waiting to capture the moment, but, looking back now, she regretted that Louise had been hurt in the process.

Although she had never told Louise, or indeed anyone, how deeply traumatised she had been from that last interaction with her stepfather, over time she had been able to understand why she had behaved as she had. She had been so angry, so viciously angry, at the injustice dished out to her and to poor little Archie that she had come into the Challender household with the sole agenda to cause as much mayhem as she could. Like a wounded animal, she had scratched and bitten at the hand that was trying its best to comfort and feed her.

Aiesha had apologised to Louise since and they had never mentioned it again by tacit agreement. But if Louise was bitter or still held any resentment she certainly gave no sign of it. If anything, Aiesha got the impression that Louise was much happier without the shackles of a marriage that had limped along for years for the sake of appearances.

But James’s bitterness was another thing entirely.

He hadn’t forgiven her for the attention she had drawn to his family. Drunk on the power of payback, Aiesha had sold her story to the press. Although no crime had been committed, for Clifford Challender hadn’t done anything other than agree to meet her, the press had run with the Lolita angle and run wild. Selling her story hadn’t necessarily been about the money—although it had come in very handy at getting her set up until she came of age—but about showing the world she would not be ignored or silenced just because she was from the wrong side of the tracks.

The impact on the Challender name in the architectural sector had been catastrophic. At the time she hadn’t thought or cared how her actions would impact on James, but impact they did. Along with his father, he’d lost current and potential clients, and it had only been in the last year or so that he had been able to redress the effects of the fallout of the scandal.

No wonder he hated her.

And no wonder he couldn’t understand what possible reason his mother would have for staying in contact with her, even sporadically, much less invite her to stay in her home for as long as she wanted.

Aiesha wasn’t sure she understood it herself.

‘Your mother isn’t one to bear grudges,’ she said. ‘Unlike someone else I know, she’s prepared to let bygones be bygones.’

His glittering eyes, his knitted brow, his flared nostrils and his iron-hard jaw visibly quaked with contempt. ‘My mother’s a fool to be taken in by you again. You haven’t changed an iota. You’re still a smart-mouthed, conniving little gold-digging tramp on the make. The fact that you want money to pose as my fiancée proves it.’

Aiesha tossed her head in a devil-may-care manner. ‘Take it or leave it, James. It’s your reputation on the line, not mine. I don’t have anything to lose.’

His hands balled into fists as if he didn’t trust himself not to reach for her and do her an injury. A perverse part of her was excited to see him teetering on the cliff edge of the iron-strong self-control he so prided himself on possessing. It made her want to push and push and push until he fell into sin. It was why she goaded him so shamelessly. She wanted to prove he was no different from all the other men she’d had dealings with throughout her life. He might have been surrounded by silver spoons and salvers, and slept on silk and satin sheets, but behind that stiff, upper-lip, straitlaced demeanour was a brooding, simmering passion that was as primal and earthy as any other sexually mature man.