The Heiress Bride

When she turned he didn’t move, and she found herself trapped against the basin. She raised wary eyes, and caught a strange look in his. A look that seemed attentive and faintly puzzled. Without speaking he lowered his head, pressing a quick, warm kiss on her mouth.

It was over before she had a chance to either reciprocate or protest, or even decide which she wanted to do.

“Thank you,” he said. And still he didn’t move away, his steady gaze questioning.

She stared back, refusing to evade the challenge.

He was too adept at finding vulnerable areas of her psyche. A reporter’s instinct, she guessed, that told him where to dig for what lay under the surface. For what people preferred to keep hidden.

He knew that since the kiss in the garden she’d been unwillingly attracted to him. No doubt the knowledge gave him great satisfaction. But that didn’t mean she’d give in to the attraction.

His smile widened a little, and then his head dipped again.

Alysia whipped her own head back, her hands clutching at the cold porcelain of the basin behind her.

Chase straightened. Alysia tried to keep her eyes steady and indifferent. She still felt a tingle of surprised pleasure on her lips. But mingled with the pleasure was hostility, resentment that this man could produce that sensation.

At last Chase took a step away, then another. Blocking the doorway, he cast a lightning glance over her, and she realized that she was taut as a bowstring, her body curved so that her breasts and hips were thrust forward. Hastily she readjusted her stance, releasing her grip on the basin to bring her arms protectively across her midriff.

Chase laughed then, his eyes going glittery. She must have imagined that fleeting tenderness, there was no sign of it now. The thought pierced her, unexpectedly poignant.

“That cocktail,” he said conversationally, “was it chilled?”

Alysia blinked at the non sequitur. “Yes. There was ice in it.”

“I thought so.” He stood there a moment longer, surveying her in a not unfriendly way but with a hint of sarcasm in his slight smile. Then he sketched her a salute. “Tell your father he ought to get a burglarproof catch on that window. Good night—I’ll find my own way out.”

She heard his quick footsteps on the stairs, and the forceful closing of the front door, and then the distinct sound of whistling as he went on down the path.

Pink and sweet—and cold. That’s what he thought of her, Alysia acknowledged irritably. Translated it meant insipid and uninteresting.

It didn’t matter. What Chase Osborne thought of her was a matter of total indifference to her. Wasn’t it?

Chapter Three

Alysia and her father spent Christmas Day with his sister in Auckland. Aunt Patricia’s children were all married but some of them brought along their families for Christmas dinner.

Perhaps because she’d been an only child herself, Alysia enjoyed the children, willingly keeping them amused while their parents relaxed after a too-large midday meal.

At the end of the day she helped her cousin Valda pack children and their paraphernalia into the family station wagon.

Stuffing a teddy bear into a carry bag, Valda asked her curiously, “Do you really want to work at the Clarion?”

Alysia straightened from fastening a child’s safety belt. “Of course.”

Valda cast her a shrewd look. “To please your father?”

Alysia tucked an errant strand of her hair into its clasp. “To carry on the family tradition.”

“Robbie!” Momentarily distracted, Valda admonished her younger son. “Leave your sister alone!” Turning back to Alysia, she looked at her speculatively. “I wondered if you chose to study journalism in Wellington just for a chance to spread your wings. Between your father and my mother you’d led a pretty sheltered life.”

While Alysia was at university she had boarded with her aunt and uncle. Her father had vetoed her sharing accommodation with friends, seemingly convinced that student houses were both expensive and dens of iniquity. And Aunt Patricia had discharged her responsibility very conscientiously.

“I had a good time while I was at university,” Alysia said. “Your mother never locked me in.”

Valda laughed. “Good for you. Well, if you’re happy—Robbie, I said stop that! Where’s that husband of mine?”

“I’ll find him,” Alysia offered, and made for the house.

Between Christmas and New Year, Alysia drove to Auckland to help her university friends celebrate one of their birthdays.

Seated round a large table in an upmarket restaurant, the group bantered with the waitress, laughed at corny jokes and enjoyed being together again.

They had reached the dessert course when Alysia saw Chase Osborne across the room, dining tête-à-tête with a dark, sultry young woman wearing a slinky black dress that showed off her generously curved figure.

The woman was talking, using her hands for emphasis, showing off long, elegant nails painted a brilliant pink, and occasionally pushing at the riot of loose curls about her face. Chase smiled now and then at something she said, and once laughed outright.

That was when he noticed Alysia, his eyes catching hers across the room, laughter still on his mouth as he lifted a hand to her.

She felt the impact of that look like a small shock, and nodded to him, mustering a smile.

His eyes took in her companions and then returned to his partner. Alysia tore her gaze away. The birthday boy had called for another bottle of wine and was refilling glasses over laughing protests.

When the waiter carried in a cake ablaze with candles the party became even more lively, attracting the notice of other diners, some of whom good-naturedly joined in the singing of “Happy Birthday.” Determined not to glance in Chase’s direction again, Alysia was nevertheless acutely aware that he too had looked up at the cheers and laughter.

As the group left the restaurant, the host’s unsteady steps being hilariously directed by two other young men, Chase and his companion were in the foyer. With a word to the woman, he crossed to Alysia and drew her aside. “You’re not driving home tonight?”

“I’m staying with my cousin in Auckland.”

“Did you bring your own car to the restaurant?”

“No. What does it have to do with—”

“I can give you a lift.”

Astonished, she looked past him to where the sultry beauty waited. “Your girlfriend might object to that.”

“Your father might object to you being driven by some young idiot who’s over the limit.”

“My friends are not idiots. Donna doesn’t drink at all, and she’ll be driving some of us home. The others are taking a taxi. Not that it need concern you.”

He released her arm without apology. “I’m glad to hear it. You’ll be all right, then?”

“I’m not a silly teenager, Chase.”

“Okay. You go home tomorrow?”

“Yes.”

“Me, too.” He cast a comprehensively critical glance over her friends in the background. “See you back in Waikura, then.” He walked off to rejoin his dinner date, who tucked a hand into his arm and lifted her face to give him a dazzling smile.

Alysia left the restaurant with the others and tried to share in their hilarity as they made for the car and piled in to it. She had enjoyed the chance to relax, be young and a little goofy with her friends. But now they seemed very juvenile, and their tipsy humor failed to amuse her anymore. Somehow tonight was spoiled for her.

“Your boss’s daughter?” Mariette asked Chase as they walked to his car.

“Yes.” He’d told her that when he went to speak with Alysia. To make sure she wasn’t going to do anything silly and dangerous.

“Is she underage?”

“For drinking? No.” Feeling a need to justify himself, Chase added, “But her father’s very protective.”

Mariette gave him a sideways look. “Seems he’s not the only one. She didn’t look too thrilled with you.”

“She doesn’t like me much,” Chase admitted shortly, not sure why that irritated him.

Before the Christmas party he’d scarcely thought of Alysia Kingsley at all. She’d only appeared during vacations from school or university, not changing a great deal from the quiet, pretty, but rather colorless kid he’d first met.

At the party he’d noted that the duckling who had never been ugly was definitely a swan, but it wasn’t until he’d found her in the garden, looking pensive and somehow poignant, that he’d had to quell a surprising impulse to take her in his arms, not only to comfort, but to find out what that slight but feminine body would feel like snuggled against his.

Her instant resentment of his presence, the fierceness of her unsuspected dislike, had if anything heightened the sexual curiosity she’d aroused. He’d been unable to resist kissing her even though he knew she wouldn’t welcome it. Not at all his usual style.

And despite her effort to freeze him off he’d recognized the subtle signs of her instinctive response.

She was a bundle of contradictions. A spoiled daddy’s girl who somehow managed to seem insecure, vulnerable. Docile and compliant with her father, but capable of a cutting arrogance with lesser mortals. She didn’t hide her hostility to Chase, yet he’d swear she felt the same sexual buzz he did when he touched her.

And tonight he shouldn’t even be thinking about Alysia Kingsley while another woman hung on his arm saying something he hadn’t even heard. He smiled down at Mariette. “Sorry, what did you say?”

“Are we going back to my place?”

Although he’d had every intention of doing so when he phoned and suggested a date, Chase shook his head. “I’ll drop you off,” he said, pleading pressure of work. It wouldn’t be fair to accept the invitation when another woman was annoyingly uppermost in his thoughts. He’d drive to Waikura tonight.

“Good birthday party?” Spencer enquired at breakfast on Monday. Alysia hadn’t returned from Auckland until late on Sunday night, and when she’d let herself in the house had been in darkness.

“Fine,” she answered automatically. “It was nice seeing my friends again.”

“You have friends in Waikura,” Spencer commented.

“Not really, now.” Away at boarding school through her high school years, she had lost touch with her earlier playmates.

In the days that followed, making the most of her last long holiday, Alysia swam, pottered around the house and indulged herself with books that weren’t prescribed for exams.

On New Year’s Eve, dressed in a brief tube top and shorts, she was lying on a rug under the pepper tree, absorbed in a fat romantic historical saga, when Chase found her.

He’d knocked at the front door and, getting no reply, walked around the back. Realizing that Alysia was unaware of his presence, he’d spent a few minutes contemplating the picture she made, without the prickly defenses she always assumed in his presence. Lying on her side, her head propped on one hand, her knees drawn up, she might have been still a teenager, but for the decidedly womanly curve of her hip, and the glimpse of a cleavage afforded by the skimpy top she wore.

Her expression was absorbed, the jade-green eyes half hidden by long lashes, her lips innocent of makeup and slightly parted. He watched her tongue briefly touch the upper one as she turned a page, and his body tightened and stirred.

He remembered the taste of her mouth, remembered how despite her maddening refusal to allow her rigidly held body to accept his embrace, that mouth, which had mocked and defied and flicked him on the raw, felt soft and sweet and incredibly seductive. A contradiction.

Looking at her body now, Chase’s mouth curved in self-mockery. He could have sworn that when he first kissed her she’d almost opened up to him, at least physically, and then she’d stalked off without a word. Banged down the shutters in his face. And, but for an occasional brief, unwitting chink, she’d kept them down ever since.

If she thought he’d back off she could think again. She’d thrown out a challenge and he’d never refused one in his life. One day he’d make her acknowledge that this unsettling desire to touch, to explore, to know, wasn’t all on his side.

She might the boss’s daughter, heiress to Kingsley’s little kingdom, but she’d learn that sex was the great leveler. When it came down to it, a naked princess was like any other woman without her clothes.

Alysia turned another page. A shadow fell across it and Chase’s deep voice said, “Hi, there.”

“Chase!” At first she couldn’t see him properly against the sun as she scrambled to her feet. “What are you doing here?”

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