His Most Exquisite Conquest: A Delicious Deception / The Girl He'd Overlooked / Stepping out of the Shadows. Robyn DonaldЧитать онлайн книгу.
for one thing, King.’ They both glanced in the direction of the shaky, gravelly voice, accompanied now by the unmistakable squeak of the wheelchair approaching. ‘She didn’t want to come.’
It was true. She hadn’t at first. When those thieves had left her with nothing but a car with a virtually empty fuel tank, no money or credit and no place to stay, she had been uncomfortable enough with Mitchell Clayborne’s gratitude for returning his property without his offer of assistance when he realised the loss and inconvenience that helping him had caused her. After all, she’d been lying in wait for him solely for one reason: to confront him with who she was and to threaten him if necessary with exposure in the papers if he didn’t come clean and admit the wrong that both he and King had done to her father. To try and prick his conscience—if he had one!—where Grant Hardwicke had failed, because Mitch Clayborne and his son had taken something more precious from her family than a simple wheel! But he’d seemed so shaken up by those morons running off with it that it hadn’t been the time or the place. Besides, she’d only been waiting at that café because she knew she would never have got past this villa’s impregnable security if she had tried to see him here, so, after her initial hesitation, she’d decided to grab the opportunity she was being offered with both hands.
After all, the Claybornes owed her family big time, she’d decided, and all she had to do was bide her time until she had got her credit cards sorted out, enjoy a bit of luxury for a night or two and then, when her host was feeling better, she’d come clean and tell him who she really was. But it hadn’t worked out like that.
‘Hear that, King?’ Mitchell Clayborne brought his chair out into the scented dusky air, warm still even though the light was fading. His iron-grey hair, combed straight back, was still thick like his son’s, but his face was more harshly etched as his lined blue eyes clashed with the brooding intensity of the younger man’s. ‘I said she didn’t want to come.’
Despite the gathering shadows around the pale stonework of the house, Rayne saw a fragment of a smile pull at King’s sensual mouth.
‘Your discretion becomes you,’ he remarked quietly. His eyes said something quite different, though, she was sure, as they swept over her tight, tense features—as did the scarcely concealed scepticism with which he spoke.
Did he know? she wondered with her heart banging against her ribs. Had he guessed who she was and was just playing with her? Or did his only beef about her stem from the fact that she hadn’t come through his stringent security system? Been passed to him first for his cold and calculating assessment?
‘Leave her alone, King.’ Mitchell was pushing himself over to the table as King reached for the cut glass decanter beside the coffee pot and poured some of its golden contents into a matching tumbler. ‘Can’t I enjoy a bit of female company without you vetting her like she was some filly with a dubious pedigree?’ Mitch took the glass from the man who was more than thirty-five years his junior, and yet whose influence and power in the corporate world was more respected and deferred to even than the older man’s these days.
King’s shoulder lifted and a sudden last shaft of sunlight, piercing through the trees that decked the hillsides, splintered colour from the crystal decanter in his hand. ‘Of course.’ Replacing its stopper, he put the decanter back on the table with a dull thud. ‘But be it on your own head, Mitch. I’m not going to be riding this one.’
Rayne’s back stiffened from the double entendre as she watched him walk away, looking every bit as proud as the man in the wheelchair, but exuding an air of such uncompromising autonomy that lesser men, including his own father, could only hope to aspire to.
‘He doesn’t like me,’ Rayne observed dryly, her confident manner concealing how uncomfortably sticky he’d made her feel beneath her light clothes. Had he picked up on the fact that she was hiding something from them? Or was her guilty secret letting her imagination run away with her?
‘You’ll have to excuse my son. He suspects every woman who happens to give me the time of day,’ Mitch told her. ‘Especially if she’s young and pretty. Usually he manages to frighten them off before the dust has time to settle under their feet.’
‘That’s pretty selfish of him.’ Rayne’s eyes lingered in the direction the other man had gone, her jaw tightening in rebellion.
‘He has no reason to be. With a physical and intellectual package like that, they all wind up wanting King anyway.’ He gave a harsh bark of laughter. ‘Well, who would want an old fossil like me?’ He started to cough, the contents of his glass threatening to slop over the side. As Rayne moved forward to take it from him, he waved her impatiently aside. ‘But what’s a man to do?’ The terrace lights had come on, taking over from the sun that had dipped behind the mountains and glinting on the crystal he lifted to his mouth, draining it in one swift gulp. ‘He calls it protecting my interests. Here—’ he thrust the empty glass in her direction ‘—pour me another one, will you?’
Rayne looked at him dubiously. He was already looking rather florid. She’d also learned from his late-middle-aged and amiable Swiss housekeeper while she’d been there that Mitchell Clayborne had high blood pressure as well as a heart condition, which was why Rayne had been hesitant to tell him who she was and why she was there. ‘Do you think you should?’
‘For heaven’s sake, girl! You have the audacity to question my actions while you’re a guest in my house?’
‘I didn’t mean to.’ Nor did she want to find herself worrying over someone who had treated her father so abominably. It felt like a betrayal, somehow. But her father’s ex-colleague and business partner seemed world-weary and surprisingly bitter, she had decided over the past few days, guessing that it was probably because of his disability, although having an heir as forceful and dynamic as King couldn’t help. But she was getting used to her host’s outbursts, startling though they were, and so she took the glass he was handing her and poured him another drink.
‘You’re behaving just like King,’ he persisted. ‘And while he’s excused through blood, I won’t take it from anyone who isn’t. D’you understand?’
‘Perfectly,’ she breathed with mock deference as she handed him his refill, and caught a surprising glint of warmth in his watery blue eyes. ‘If you don’t need anything else,’ she tagged on, uncomfortable even with fraternizing with him because of what he had done in the past, ‘I think I’ll get an early night.’
He smiled, gesturing her away with his glass, his angry mood dispelled. ‘Good idea. Oh, Rayne …’ Stopping before the open door that separated the luxurious living quarters from the terrace, she turned round with the scent of a potted gardenia trespassing on her senses. ‘About King … Did you do something to antagonise him before I came out?’
Her heart skipped a nervous little beat. ‘No. Why?’
‘I haven’t seen him quite so … intense before.’
She shrugged, trying to shake off the feeling of exposure she had sensed under those steely-blue eyes, trying not to remember how she had felt in the past. ‘Perhaps he had a hard day.’
‘Nonsense. He thrives on hard work and pressure where lesser mortals crack up and fall by the wayside.’
‘He sounds like a dynamo.’
‘He is.’
‘Even dynamos can break down.’
‘If you think that, then you don’t know King.’
Don’t I? she thought bitterly, but said, ‘Obviously not.’
‘But you will,’ he said, seemingly with some relish. ‘He’s going to be around for a while.’
‘That’s nice.’ She was finding it difficult keeping her voice light, making out that she didn’t care one way or the other, while her insides were screaming with guilt and resentment and a whole heap of worrying doubts over what she was getting herself into.
‘And Rayne …’ About to step