A Delicious Deception (17 page)

Because he was a consummate lover, Rayne marvelled, being as exquisitely tender as he was passionate.

‘Then shut up and kiss me,’ she ordered playfully, thinking she’d die of wanting if he didn’t hurry up and do so. ‘Otherwise I might—’

As his mouth swooped down over hers, cutting her off in full flow, suddenly he was the one taking command. She felt the surge of his body as he pulled her hard against him, thrilling her with the knowledge that she could have this effect on such an incredible man.

‘I think,’ he rasped, coming up for air, ‘that I’m going to have to take you out for breakfast. Otherwise, we’re just going to wind up back in bed. And, much as I’d welcome that diversion
right now, there are a number of administrative things that require my attention before the day’s out.’

‘Is there anything I can help you with?’ she volunteered, wanting as much as she wanted his lovemaking to be useful to him.

‘You? Help?’ He looked both surprised and amused.

‘Why not?’ she suggested. ‘I type. I can do your letters for you. I’ll even edit them if you want me to.’

Of course, King thought, smiling reflectively. She was a journalist, which required using all her powers of initiative. Even so, he was touched by her desire to help him, especially on a beautiful day like this. Most women he’d known—particularly Sophie Ringwood—used to complain that he was always working and that he wasn’t giving them enough attention. This woman, however—despite how pig-headedly he had treated her to start with—was offering him her time and effort and her intellectual skills, not just the generosity of her beautiful body.

‘If you could, it would cut the time in half,’ he said. ‘And then I’m yours for the rest of the day.’

A little frisson ran through Rayne, not just from the thought of helping him, but also from what he’d said about being hers.

‘Promise,’ she purred, touching her tongue alluringly to her top lip, and though she knew he’d meant having him sexually, her heart wanted to interpret it as much more than that.

There was a warming satisfaction in sharing the more serious aspects of his life with him, Rayne decided a little later, hugging the feeling to her as she filed a copy of the letter she had recently typed for him just as he finished making some highly important international call.

‘Whoever put this away put it in the wrong file,’ she observed, waving the errant copy letter she had just removed from its clip over her shoulder.

‘Thanks for noticing. It was probably me,’ King remarked,
coming across to the filing cabinet to take it from her, and she guessed that even if it hadn’t been his own mistake, he wasn’t the type of man who would openly blame his secretary in front of anyone else.

Impressed with her efficiency, taking the letter from her, King stooped to press his lips to the inviting nape of her beautifully exposed neck, feeling his urges rising almost instantly.

She was clearly bra-less beneath her top, and the warmth of her, with that faintly exotic perfume, was driving him just short of insane.

‘Do you usually do this to all your secretaries?’ she asked with a delicious little shiver when his arm, coming diagonally across her breasts, drew her back against him so that she could feel the potent warmth of his superbly masculine body.

‘No,’ he responded deeply. ‘Nor have I ever made love to one on my desk before.’

‘You’re not!’ she squealed excitedly, her breath shortening because he’d swung her up into his arms and was striding back with her across the room, before stooping to sweep papers aside with a careless arm and setting her down on the hard green leather surface. ‘Someone might come in! One of the maids. Hélène …’

‘To hell with Hélène and the maids,’ he ground out through a jaw clenched rigid with sexual tension. ‘To hell with work, with business and the whole darn world!’ Because that was how she made him feel.

Heat radiated through Rayne’s blood as he leaned across her, taking her mouth and reaching up to tug the pins out of her hair.

‘That’s better,’ he approved breathlessly, his eyes burning with feverish satisfaction as the fiery swathe tumbled wildly about her shoulders. ‘That’s how I like you. Looking hot and dishevelled. Like you’ve just spent all night in my bed.’

But there was more to this, he thought. Much more than this. She had the power to make him lose control like no other
woman had ever been able to do—the power to make him feel things that he had never allowed himself to feel. He didn’t know where it could lead—or how. He only knew that over the past few days he had allowed her to get under his well-protected skin and that she didn’t look like surfacing from it at any time soon.

Nor did he want her to …

‘Promise me you’ll always be here when I need you like this,’ he rasped, his sentence broken by the fevered kisses along her cheek, her throat, against her hair.

Was he proposing? Rayne’s mind swam from the staggering possibility.

But no, he wasn’t, her common sense quickly kicked in to assure her. He just wanted her in his bed, although instinct told her that he wasn’t a man who would make a suggestion like that lightly.

I promise,
she breathed silently, so close to agreeing to become his mistress that she wasn’t sure how she would have answered if the intercom beside them hadn’t buzzed—and kept on buzzing until King threw up a switch when it became clear that the person on the other end wasn’t going to be ignored.

‘Yes. What is it?’ he demanded in a voice roughened by passion.

‘There’s a bunch of reporters outside the gates,’ the voice of the English security guard Rayne had seen around the place announced, sounding particularly harassed.

‘Have you told them my father’s condition is stable? That he isn’t giving them the satisfaction of dropping off the planet just to give them a story?’ King’s words were strung with impatience.

There was a fairly long pause before the other man said, ‘I think it’s more about you and Miss Hardwicke, sir.’

A rising tension started to grip Rayne before King swore under his breath and sat up.

‘For heaven’s sake, Peters! You’ve dealt with this sort of thing often enough to know what to do.’

‘Yes, sir. But this is different. I think you’d better come down.’

‘What is it?’ Rayne asked nervously, the thought of having her affair with King reported by the press abhorrent to her. But a deep-buried fear—a fear that had surfaced when she’d seen Nelson Faraday here the other day and then spoken to him yesterday—made her stomach start to feel queasy and her mouth go dry.

‘Welcome to the rich man’s world, Rayne,’ King muttered with a grimace. ‘You’ll get used to it, but it still doesn’t make it acceptable or any less annoying.’

She had to admit he looked annoyed—very annoyed—as he got to his feet.

‘I should have gone.’ She didn’t intend to say it, except that she had this feeling that her whole world was about to explode.

‘No, you shouldn’t.’ King’s brows were drawn together as he bent down and kissed the top of her head. ‘Stay here,’ he advised calmly, straightening his clothes and running hasty fingers through his hair because someone had started rapping on the door.

‘Hélène?’

She looked as flustered as the morning she had come and told them that Mitch wasn’t well, Rayne thought as King opened the door.

Already on her feet, Rayne felt the dubious glances the housekeeper was casting her way.

‘It is this article, Monsieur King. In the English paper.’

Rayne could see that it was folded at a particular page as King took the newspaper from her.

‘Mon dieu!’

‘All right, Hélène. I’ll deal with it.’

The housekeeper seemed on the verge of tears as King closed the door behind her.

‘What the …?’

‘What is it?’ Rayne whispered, hardly daring to breathe, watching the strong masculine features that had been flushed from their lovemaking turn pale as he continued to read.

‘Would you care to explain
this?
’ he seethed when he’d finished, thrusting the newspaper at her.

Rayne’s blood seemed to freeze in her veins as she recognised the photograph of herself and King and read the bold headline above it.

IN BED WITH THE ENEMY?

Her fingers were trembling so much she could scarcely clutch the page as her darting eyes digested what had been written about them.

To her horror, it went on to mention Grant Hardwicke and his exact position with the company.

Rayne could only stare at the photograph of the two of them together, which depicted her walking with her face turned towards King, while he had a protective arm around her shoulders, trying to shield her from the glare of the camera.

‘I … I can’t,’ she stammered, shaking her head in disbelief.

‘Oh, come on, Rayne!’ King’s anger was white-hot, barely controlled. ‘You can do better than that!’

‘I can’t! I didn’t know anything about this!’

‘Well, someone did! Who else would have known about those allegations only forty-eight hours after I’d found out the truth myself if you hadn’t told them?’

The chill that had been gripping her spread slowly outwards from her heart to her very extremities. She knew without even reading the by-line. It was the work of Nelson Faraday!

Ice trickled through her veins as all her worst fears were manifested in the article she was holding. It was what she had been dreading ever since the morning she’d come down and seen who King’s interviewer was.

‘What’s the matter, darling?’ There was no warmth in the way he said it. ‘Were you planning to be gone before this &’ he was snatching the paper from her ‘… this gutter-mongering came out?’

‘No!’

‘Then can you look me in the eyes and tell me honestly that you had nothing to do with this? That you never contacted or discussed the facts about your father and this company with Faraday?’

She wanted to say no. To sweep away the hurt, anger and
disbelief with which he was looking at her. But how could she? she asked herself, agonised.

Dropping her head into her hands with her loose hair tumbling around them, she just stood there and groaned.

‘I see,’ King rasped, and it was all there in his voice. Condemnation. Disillusionment. Disgust.

‘No, you don’t,’ Rayne sighed, dragging her fingers down her face as she brought her head up in an all but vain attempt to change his harshening opinion of her.

‘Then enlighten me, sweetheart.’

His false endearments and his cutting tone pierced her to the heart after all they had shared, and especially after his tenderness of only a few minutes ago. ‘Tell me what bizarre coincidence has suddenly led to this article coming out if you’re as innocent as you’re trying to lead me to believe.’

She shook her head. ‘The only coincidence is that he’s here,’ she murmured, remembering how sick to the stomach she had felt when she had seen him coming in that day with King from the terrace.

‘So you thought you’d capitalise on your fortuitousness and get your story to him while he was still here.’

‘No!’

‘When exactly did you do it, Rayne? The day you saw him here? Yesterday? Wasn’t it him you were speaking to on the boat when I came up on deck?’

‘Yes, but—’

‘So while we were making love and you were driving me insane by making me feel like I was the only man you ever wanted to be with, you’d already been up there playing both sides of the coin and plying him with … this!’ The way he stabbed the newspaper with an angry finger made her visibly flinch.

‘No. That isn’t true!’ she protested, hurting, unable to imagine how he could reduce something as incredible as
what they had had on his boat yesterday afternoon to something so low.

‘Really? Then tell me what is? Or would you actually know the truth if it hit you, Lorrayne?’

He couldn’t believe he was standing here speaking to her like this. But then he hadn’t reckoned on being played for such a fool. Neither had he reckoned on how close he had come to trusting her, or how much he had wanted to trust her. The fact that he couldn’t was like a knife twisting inside him, gouging out scars that even a lifetime’s immunity hadn’t healed.

‘I did tell him about MiracleMed,’ she admitted shakily. ‘But not yesterday. And not recently. It was years ago, when we worked together. And I did it without even thinking. I didn’t know he’d ever use it in any way to hurt anyone. To hurt me … I was as naïve as they came. Dad was going through a bad time and drinking heavily. I just needed someone to talk to and … well … he was there.’

‘And he just happened to resurrect all that? Risk a lawsuit over something someone of little more importance than the office junior told him goodness knows how many years ago?’ He looked and sounded incredulous and, put like that, she could see why he didn’t believe her.

‘He came here. He saw me with you.’ And suspected there was something amiss about her being here when he realised she wasn’t using her real name.

‘So?’

‘It obviously jogged his memory.’

‘Obviously!’ King wasn’t giving any quarter.

‘And he’s always been one to bear a grudge.’

‘And why would he do that? Did you rob him of a story? Is that it?’

‘No.’

‘Then you’d better give me a reason, Rayne, and you’d better make it good!’

‘Because I wouldn’t sleep with him!’ she hurled back, wounded by his inexorable interrogation. ‘Satisfied?’