Indecent Deception

Even when the locals had finally drifted in to gape, if not to admire, the gulf between her parents had been insurmountable. The damage had been done. Treated with complete contempt by her husband and two eldest children, Belle had been an easy mark for a smooth-tongued younger man. In striking out to find happiness with Dennis, her mother had made an appalling error of judgement. But Chrissy believed that Belle had been driven, not least by her husband’s blatant infidelity, into making that final choice.

‘I thought most of this area was up for redevelopment,’ Blaze mused. ‘The demolition squad is practically parked on your doorstep.’

It was a dirty little street of narrow terraces, set on the edge of a gigantic building site. Some of the houses were already boarded up.

‘Not quite Buck House, is it?’ Chrissy snapped in an artificially correct voice, calculated to annoy.

Blaze filtered the car to a smooth halt, carefully avoiding the spill of rubbish from a tumbled dustbin. ‘What a little snob you are,’ he murmured drily. ‘I was only initiating conversation.’

Opening the door with desperate fingers, Chrissy flung him a look of incredulity. ‘N-no, you weren’t. You can’t open your mouth without being superior!’

Without a further word, she skidded out on to the pavement. Rifling in her bag for her key, she hurried down the street to an end terrace and unlocked the door.

‘Is that you, Miss Hamilton?’

Swallowing convulsively, Chrissy stilled in the act of closing the door. Her landlady was barring her passage to the stairs. ‘You’re back early.’

‘If you’ll excuse me, Mrs Davis—’

‘What about the rent? You got it yet?’ the older woman interrupted bluntly. ‘Because if you haven’t you can get out of here today. Give me that key!’

‘Mrs Davis, you will get—’

‘Nothing ever seems to come of your promises, luv. I must’ve been mad to take you in. Girls with kiddies in tow aren’t reliable. I should have known better,’ Mrs Davis fumed. ‘But I felt sorry for you, didn’t I? Well, I’ve got my own bills to think about and—’

A crisp, cool voice intervened. ‘How much does Miss Hamilton owe you?’

Her landlady spun in amazement. Chalk-pale with mortification and shock, Chrissy’s head twisted on her shoulders. Blaze stood in the doorway, not one whit perturbed by the scene he had interrupted. He was pulling a wallet from his jacket.

‘Three weeks, she owes,’ Mrs Davis retorted truculently, and added the amount.

A handful of notes changed hands faster than Chrissy could part her lips. ‘You can’t take his m-money!’ she protested.

‘Oh, can’t I? I don’t care who pays as long as it’s paid.’ Mrs Davis directed a grim smile of approval at Blaze. ‘And don’t you forget that you’re to be out of here by Saturday. I’ve got a removal van booked for the morning.’

Chrissy was so profoundly embarrassed as her landlady disappeared back into her ground-floor flat that she couldn’t bring herself even to look at Blaze. ‘I’ll post it to you,’ she promised shakily. ‘W-when I can,’ honesty bade her admit.

‘No hurry.’

She was quite nauseated by the knowledge that she was now in his debt. But she could do nothing but accept his charity. Mrs Davis wouldn’t give up the money and Chrissy was in no position to offer repayment. On the other hand, it was thanks to Blaze that she was not now being thrown out on the street. It took immense courage to rise above her sense of humiliation. Raising her bowed head, Chrissy collided with impenetrable sapphire eyes in one brief, stricken connection. ‘Thanks,’ she forced out with difficulty. ‘Maybe I’ll see you around some time,’ she concluded with awkward finality.

Without awaiting any further response, she started up the stairs, fast. On the first landing, she pressed open the door of her bed-sit with raw relief. She simply couldn’t have borne another second of his company.

‘What on earth are you doing back?’ her babysitter, Karen, demanded, rising from the single armchair with a frown.

‘It’s a long story.’

Rosie threw herself at Chrissy’s knees with a whoop of delight.

‘Bloody hell!’ a very male voice ejaculated.

Chrissy spun as though she had been jabbed in the back by a hot poker. She hadn’t heard Blaze follow her upstairs. He had to move like a leopard on the prowl. With Rosie planting an enthusiastic kiss on her cheek, she was paralysed to the spot, devastatingly conscious of Blaze’s stunned and silent scrutiny.

Chapter 2

There was a horrible hiatus. Karen hovered the way impressionable females usually did in Blaze’s vicinity. Possibly she recognised him. Rarely out of the society pages and the gossip columns, Blaze was very well-known. His life in the fast lane was notorious.

‘I’ll see you later, Karen,’ Chrissy said hurriedly.

As the other girl left with visible reluctance, Blaze strolled deeper into the room, scanning the sparse, worn furniture and the few shabby toys littering the cramped floor space. With a grace of movement that was inbred, he swung back to look at Chrissy, a wry twist to his expressive mouth. ‘I suppose I should have been prepared for this scenario,’ he drawled. ‘But I wasn’t. I was still thinking of you as a kid.’

‘I’m almost twenty-one.’ As she spoke, Rosie was struggling to get down, and reluctantly she bent to lower the wriggling toddler to the floor. She was praying that Blaze would leave, couldn’t imagine what strange quirk had made him follow her upstairs.

‘Still practically jailbait,’ he mused half under his breath.

Her cheeks fired scarlet, her mouth tightening. Did he automatically divide all women into two camps? Those he could sleep with and those he thought he shouldn’t sleep with? The idea revolted her, but it also resurrected cringing recollections of their last encounter. Hurriedly, she buried her mind’s urge to relive the past. In preference she reflected grimly on Blaze’s ‘love them and leave them’ reputation.

He was an unashamed user and abuser of the female sex, she thought in disgust. Once she had believed that her sister, Elaine, was too calculating to be hurt by any man. But Elaine had fallen hard for Blaze. After a brief whirl, he had ditched her again with savage unconcern, devastating her pride and driving her into a face-saving marriage with a man she didn’t love. Her over-confident sister had become just another line in a gossip column, another notch on his bedpost, and for the first time in her life Chrissy had felt sympathy for Elaine.

‘So this is the reason you can’t go home.’ Astonishingly, Blaze crouched down on Rosie’s level and solemnly accepted the scruffy pink rabbit he was being invited to admire.

‘Wosee’s wabbit,’ Rosie told him importantly.

‘I love wabbits,’ Blaze teased, the most natural, utterly breathtaking smile warming his darkly tanned features. The usual chill and cynicism etched there was briefly put to flight. As he ruffled Rosie’s black curls, he straightened again.

Bemused by this totally unexpected display of humanity, Chrissy dragged disobedient eyes from the wide, blatantly sensual arc of his mouth. Her chest felt oddly tight as she sucked in oxygen, suddenly short of breath.

Blaze sighed. ‘It’s probably a very stupid question, but how the hell did you land yourself in a mess like this?’

He had simply assumed that Rosie was her child. But then, everybody did. In the circumstances it was a natural assumption, and she could not possibly trust him with the truth. Rosie was her half-sister, the last pathetic footnote to her late mother’s ‘marriage’ to Dennis Carruthers.

‘I think you should leave,’ she said stiffly.

‘You’re right. I should walk back out of here and forget I ever left the car,’ Blaze murmured grimly. ‘But I have the hideous suspicion that all this would travel with me. Clearly you’re broke, and now you’re also unemployed’

‘And whose f-fault is that?’ she cut in shrilly.

‘I’m not in the habit of censoring speech in private conversation,’ he countered without an ounce of embarrassment. ‘But if I said one thing that was unfounded on fact, you’re welcome to call me to account over it.’

The invitation merely made her turn away in sharp distress. Dear God, how she loathed him! But he had uttered not a single untruth. The bald facts were exactly as he had stated them. Nouveau riche and painfully rough round the edges, the Hamiltons had certainly failed to merge tastefully with the surrounding countryside. Her father had loved putting on vulgar displays of his new-found wealth. He had thought that he needed to impress people to win respect. But all that he had won was derision.

‘I gather that you have to get out of here,’ Blaze prompted shortly. ‘Have you found somewhere else to go?’

‘No.’ The admission was dredged from her. Not that he needed it. He would know as well as she did that she had no hope of finding somewhere else without cold, hard cash to put down in advance.

London was a terrifyingly anonymous place to live in without friends. Those Chrissy had made at college had swiftly drifted away when she was forced to drop out of her teacher-training course and shoulder full-time care and responsibility for her little sister. In one gigantic bound, Chrissy had gone from teenage freedom to adult reality. She had grown up ten years in the first six months.

A succinct and unsuppressed swear word fell from his lips. ‘What are you planning to do this weekend?’ he demanded harshly. ‘Set up home on the street?’

‘We’ll manage,’ she muttered tightly.

‘Like you’re managing now?’ he derided cruelly. ‘Have you asked your father for help?’

‘I haven’t spoken to him in three years,’ she confided unsteadily. ‘He was f-furious when I moved in with Mum down here. He doesn’t know about Rosie and it wouldn’t make any difference if he did. As far as he’s concerned, I betrayed him when I went to Mum—’

‘Your brother? Your sister?’ Blaze cut in. ‘Surely one of them—?’

Chrissy vented a humourless laugh at the ridiculous idea of either Rory or Elaine taking up the cudgels on their behalf or even putting their hands into their pockets. Rory lived in California now with his wife and family and, just like Elaine, he had been appalled by what their mother had done. Neither had been willing to forgive Belle. Even when she was lying in Intensive Care, her life expectancy measured in hours, Elaine had refused Chrissy’s pleas for her to come down to London.

Chrissy had never got the chance to tell them about Rosie and, in any case, the revelation would only provoke horror and disgust. Rosie was Belle’s daughter by another man, the result of an illegal union that had made headlines for days in the tabloids when Dennis was arrested. After all, Belle hadn’t been the only woman he had deceived into a quick trip to the altar. There had been two others, neither of whom he had bothered to divorce.

‘I never got on that well with Dad anyway,’ Chrissy pointed out, eager to close the subject because she didn’t want to tell lies.

‘Who would?’ Blaze breathed with chilling hauteur. ‘He’d sell his granny to cannibals to make a fast buck.’

As he made the grim assurance, cold, clear anger lightened his eyes and tautened his sculpted cheekbones. Chrissy stared, puzzled by his vehemence. What had her father done to rouse his ire? But before she could voice her curiosity Blaze shrugged back a silk shirt-cuff and glanced at his watch. ‘I’ve got a business meeting in an hour.’

‘I’ll post that money to you,’ she said again.

‘Forget it,’ he advised carelessly. ‘Consider it small compensation for the loss of your job.’

A painful flush stained her pallor. ‘I don’t want your ch-charity!’

‘Think of it as conscience money.’ Narrowed very blue eyes lingered on the betraying shimmer of tears below her lashes, the defeat slumping her shoulders. ‘I owe you and right now you need a helping hand,’ he intoned with a faintly scornful twist of his mouth as if he couldn’t quite credit how anyone of intelligence could end up in such a situation.

‘I don’t w-want your helping hand! I don’t want your lousy money!’ Chrissy spat.

‘I’m afraid you’re stuck with it,’ Blaze informed her flatly. ‘If it’s not too rude a question...where’s Rosie’s father?’

‘Behind bars!’ Chrissy told him fiercely.

‘In prison?’ She really had his attention now. For a split-second, he actually looked shocked. Blaze, the unshockable, shocked. Lush black lashes, inherited along with his golden skin tone from his Spanish father, briefly veiled his astonishingly noticeable eyes from her view. ‘When you screw up, you go the full yard, don’t you?’ he murmured.

She couldn’t quite believe her ears, and then she remembered that this was Blaze, who followed few of the rules that governed other people’s behaviour. He was prone to saying exactly what he thought with a brand of devastating honesty that frequently unnerved those around him. He had no time for civilised dissimulation. His raw energy always had an edge of impatience, as if restlessness ran in his bloodstream.

‘I want you to go,’ she said.

He studied her with grim detachment. She was at the end of her rope. He knew it, and she hated him for it. ‘Either you go home and crawl or you fling yourself on the tender mercies of the social services,’ he drawled. ‘You can’t make it without somebody’s help—’

‘Will you get out of here?’ Chrissy wrenched open the door with violence. She was shaking with the force of her emotions.

For a split-second, Blaze stilled. He stared down into her blazing green eyes, and for the first time that day they really connected. She fell into bottomless blue like a novice swimmer and forgot to breathe, her throat tightening, an electrifying tension shooting through her slim body.

He ran a blunt forefinger along the ripe fullness of her soft lower lip, and his touch was a flame dancing provocation on her too sensitive skin. ‘You are extraordinarily intense. You feel, you really do feel. That’s bound to get you into tight corners. Intensity is a passport to pain. Don’t you know that yet?’

Burnt by that near caress and his proximity, she leapt back, staggered and dazed by the sensations she had briefly experienced. If it was at all possible, her hatred intensified to the brink of explosion. His pity blistered into her skin like acid. ‘Go on, g-get out!’ she practically screamed at him.

When he had gone, the room was strangely shrunken in its emptiness. She blinked, shook her head uncertainly, and shivered. Once before he had made her feel like that. Trapped, hypnotised, lost. It was petrifying, overwhelming. Self could not seem to exist when he came too close. But this time, at least, he hadn’t lost his temper.

Few were aware of it, but a seething black temper lurked behind those stunningly blue eyes and that cool half-smile. Once, just once, she had fallen foul of that temper by accidentally stumbling into the firing line. But he clearly didn’t remember that...oh, no, why should he? It was only little Chrissy he had bitten to the bone with that cruel whiplash tongue, only little Chrissy, offspring of the infamously vulgar Hamilton clan. Why should he remember half frightening her out of her wits?

She was dismayed by the emotion shuddering through her in great waves, could hardly believe that she could still feel so strongly after all this time. Yet she did. Once he had touched her with raw sexual derision, just once, when she was seventeen and stupidly, recklessly naïve. It had been over in seconds but she had never forgotten the humiliation of his drunken assumption that she was throwing herself at his head as so many other women had.

Nor had she forgotten the resounding force of his savage rejection. Without ever issuing the smallest invitation to him, she had been flung away, thrust bodily out of reach as if she was too utterly revolting to be borne. Reeling with shame and confusion at what he had made her feel, she had then been forced to withstand a verbal beating into the bargain.

‘If you don’t watch out, you’ll turn into a tart like that sister of yours!’ Blaze had intoned viciously. ‘I may have been a few times round the block but I do have some standards!’

Nor had the brutality ended there on that unforgivable insult to Elaine. With an explicit lack of inhibition, Blaze had told her what he thought of her and what would happen if she continued on the promiscuous path he had so ridiculously imagined her to be embarking on. If anything, the moral lecture from his immoral corner had been salt rubbed into the wound.

That he could have thought even for a conceited moment that she wanted him...that she was just another bimbo willing to do absolutely anything to get him. The recollection still made her feel sick. She had not had a teenage crush on Blaze Kenyon. She had never, ever denied that physically he was almost unbelievably attractive. But she had never been able to stand him. As a human being he scored nil all the way down the line. Like a chalk scraping down a blackboard, he set her teeth on edge.

Yet the split-second savagery of his mouth on hers had devastated her. She had felt her own response with disbelief and horror. The shame of that momentary self-betrayal had been agonising. And, linked with his derision, the agony had become anguish. He might as well have stripped her naked and tossed her into a crowded street to be laughed at. Endowed with all the sensitivity he lacked, Chrissy had felt suicidal.

‘So what next?’ Karen grimaced, shrugging into her coat and hauling her suitcase on to the landing. ‘You worry me to death.’

‘If I go to the social services,’ Chrissy whispered tautly, ‘they’ll probably put Rosie in care.’

‘Stuff!’ Karen said. ‘They’ll stick you in a hostel or a B and B.’

‘I don’t have any right to keep her,’ Chrissy reminded her painfully. ‘And if they ask Dennis what he wants, he’s sure to say adoption. He never wanted her in the first place.’

‘What’s it got to do with him?’ Karen snorted.

‘He is her father. He’s got more rights than I’ve got...’

‘She’s a sweet kid, but I don’t know why you want to be lumbered at your age,’ the older girl admitted bluntly. ‘I mean, she really isn’t your responsibility. And let’s face it, kiddo...what can you give her?’

‘Karen!’ Chrissy was shaken and hurt by that forthright assessment.

‘Look, this isn’t easy to say, but adoption would give her a good home and two parents. Be practical, Chrissy.’ Karen sighed ruefully. ‘I can’t cut it here without a job. That’s why I’m going back to Liverpool. How do you expect to make it with a child?’

‘Other people do!’

‘They have to. You don’t. Rosie does have other options,’ Karen stressed. ‘You have to face facts some time. Even if you do get another job, you won’t make enough to cover childcare. You just haven’t got the earning power.’

It was a relief when Karen’s cab arrived. Like it or not, the other woman had faced her with certain inescapable facts. Karen had looked after Rosie for a pittance and the arrangement had only been temporary. Sooner or later, Chrissy would have been faced with finding a replacement, and her salary would not have stretched to the going rate. Not if she had wanted them to eat as well.

But Karen also made her see something that she had refused to see before. Was she being selfish in her desire to keep Rosie? Rosie didn’t have enough clothes or toys or stimulation. All those things cost money they didn’t have. Perhaps worst of all was the acknowledgement that she couldn’t even give her sister security. She didn’t even know where they’d be sleeping in forty-eight hours’ time. What sort of life was that to give Rosie? Didn’t she deserve more?

Chrissy was afraid of approaching the social services. She was not Rosie’s legal guardian. Apart from the registration of her birth, the authorities had had no further notice of her sister’s existence. They had moved three times while Belle was still alive, on each occasion to smaller, cheaper apartments. Her mother, stubbornly set on denying Rosie’s existence, had refused to take up her entitlement to child benefit. The very frequency of their changes of address had put paid to any further enquiries from the powers-that-be.

So far they had fallen through the system...but what would happen if they were forced to seek help? Would she lose Rosie? That fear had prevented Chrissy from attempting to put her relationship with her baby sister on a proper legal footing. Furthermore, as she had told Karen, Dennis would be sure to be asked what he wanted, and Dennis, who had been furious when her mother became pregnant, would be certain to opt for adoption.

Chrissy didn’t believe that she could love a child of her own body more than she loved Rosie. Belle had never come to terms with what Dennis had done to her. It was the pregnancy which had killed Belle. Not so much the strain of carrying a baby at the age of forty-five as the shame of all that had gone before. Dennis’s rejection when he’d realised that her mother was running out of money. His arrest, the publicity. The horrific sense of humiliation with which Belle had endured her pregnancy.

After the birth, Chrissy had hoped that her mother would recover. But she hadn’t. Sinking deeper and deeper into depression, Belle had lost all pride in her appearance and had done the barest minimum necessary in caring for Rosie. She had refused to see a doctor. In desperation, Chrissy had approached the doctor herself, begging him to visit. Unfortunately, Belle had put on a terrific act for his benefit, and after his departure there had been the most terrible row and Belle had threatened to throw Chrissy out if she ever interfered again.

Inevitably her mother had neglected her own health, and chest problems that had troubled her in earlier years had returned. A bout of flu had turned into pneumonia. She had been rushed into hospital but it had been too late.

Belle had had no will to fight for survival. She had simply drifted away. At the time of her death, they had been on the brink of moving again, and after the funeral Chrissy had gone ahead with the move. Only the doctor had enquired about Rosie’s welfare, and Chrissy had lied. She had told him that she would take her sister home to her family and, not knowing the circumstances of Rosie’s birth, he had not questioned that story.

At half-eight the next morning, a loud knock landed on the door. Opening it a crack, Chrissy’s troubled eyes focused incredulously on Blaze Kenyon. Taking advantage of her bemusement, he pressed the door wide and strolled in.

‘Have you had breakfast yet?’

‘Breakfast?’ she echoed foolishly.

‘I didn’t want to miss you. That’s why I came early.’ He hunkered down on his knees to respond to Rosie’s rush in his direction. ‘Friendly little scrap, isn’t she? Have you got a sitter for her?’

‘No.’ In a complete daze, Chrissy stared at him, wincing as her little sister flung herself at him with gay abandon. ‘Friendly’ was an understatement. Rosie was all over him like a rash. Men were almost non-existent in her world. Blaze was an object of curiosity.

‘Carry...carry Wosee,’ she demanded.

‘Hold on a minute,’ Blaze drawled as he dug a mobile phone out of the holster on his belt. Calmly holding it out of Rosie’s reach, he punched out a number and ordered a cab to their address.

‘W-why do you want a cab?’ Chrissy enquired.

Blaze swung Rosie into his arms and vaulted upright again. ‘There’s no room for a child in my car.’

Chrissy folded her arms. ‘But we’re not going anywhere.’

‘I’m taking you out to breakfast. Does the scrap need a bottle or something?’ He surveyed Rosie uncertainly.

‘She’s nearly two and a half,’ Chrissy said drily.

A broad shoulder sheathed in a black cashmere sweater moved in a careless shrug. ‘Children are a closed book to me.’

Maybe he thought they were in need of a good square meal. She couldn’t think of any other explanation for his arrival. Her cheeks flaming, she said, ‘Look, we’re not going anywhere. We don’t need breakfast—’