At No Man's Command
MELANIE MILBURNE
The shock engagement of the century!It looks as if our favourite tearaway, the notorious Aiesha Adams, is trying to change her spots. Inside sources have revealed that not only is she currently holed up in the Scottish countryside with the gorgeous aristocrat James Challender, but the pair are secretly engaged!We’ve always had a soft spot for Aiesha, and with rumours of her unhappy childhood trailing her footsteps wherever she goes, we knew her wild streak hid something more. But we thought Aiesha and James were sworn enemies… Perhaps when there are fireworks outside the bedroom, the sparks are just too impossible to resist!Discover more at www.millsandboon.co.uk/melaniemilburne
The shock engagement of the century!
It looks like our favorite tearaway, the notorious Aiesha Adams, is trying to change her spots. Inside sources have revealed that not only is she currently holed up in the Scottish countryside with the gorgeous aristocrat James Challender, but the pair are secretly engaged!
We’ve always had a soft spot for Aiesha, and with rumors of her unhappy childhood trailing her footsteps wherever she goes, we knew her wild streak hid something more. But we thought Aiesha and James were sworn enemies…perhaps when there are fireworks outside the bedroom, the sparks are just too impossible to resist!
The dark blue of his eyes intensified, holding hers in a lock that made something inside her belly tilt and then spill.
‘You’re scared.’
Aiesha sent her tongue out in a quick darting movement to moisten her lips. ‘Let me go, James.’
‘I have a little forfeit to collect first.’
Something dropped off a shelf in her stomach. ‘Forfeit?’
He spread his hands through the mane of her hair, his gaze moving from her eyes to her mouth in a slow and mesmerising fashion. ‘You remember? Now I get to kiss you. Fair’s fair.’
She affected a sneer but was pretty sure it was wide of the mark. ‘Is that meant to be a punishment?’
‘Why don’t we find out?’ he said, tugging her against him, and his mouth came down over hers.
From as soon as MELANIE MILBURNE could pick up a pen she knew she wanted to write. It was when she picked up her first Mills & Boon® at seventeen that she realised she wanted to write romance. After being distracted for a few years by meeting and marrying her own handsome hero, surgeon husband Steve, and having two boys, plus completing a Masters of Education and becoming a nationally ranked athlete (masters swimming), she decided to write. Five submissions later she sold her first book and is now a multi-published, bestselling, award-winning USA TODAY author. In 2008 she won the Australian Readers’ Association most popular category/series romance, and in 2011 she won the prestigious Romance Writers of Australia R*BY award.
Melanie loves to hear from her readers via her website, www.melaniemilburne.com.au (http://www.melaniemilburne.com.au) or on Facebook: www.facebook.com/pages/Melanie-Milburne/351594482609 (http://www.facebook.com/pages/Melanie-Milburne/351594482609).
At No Man’s Command
Melanie Milburne
www.millsandboon.co.uk (http://www.millsandboon.co.uk)
To Nadine and Regan Drew. Thanks for your friendship and all the fun memories we share. May there be many more to come! xx
Contents
CHAPTER ONE (#uce723e05-024b-557c-b5a1-7e049aaf384a)
CHAPTER TWO (#ub67843b0-fe37-54ce-8d7c-80f76132c4e4)
CHAPTER THREE (#u034286ec-a30f-5b92-9f35-f3256e21ed5e)
CHAPTER FOUR (#u1487ee09-29c9-54dc-ac4f-d71a4e8d4d0e)
CHAPTER FIVE (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER SIX (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER SEVEN (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER EIGHT (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER NINE (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER TEN (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER ELEVEN (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER TWELVE (#litres_trial_promo)
EXTRACT (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER ONE
AIESHA HAD BEEN at Lochbannon a week without a single whisper in the press about her whereabouts. But then, who would have thought of hunting her down in the Highlands of Scotland in the home of the woman whose marriage she had effectively destroyed ten years ago?
It was the perfect hideaway, and the fact that Louise Challender had been called away to visit a sick friend abroad meant Aiesha had had the place to herself for the last couple of days. And, being the dead of winter, there was not even a housekeeper or a gardener to disturb her idyll.
Bliss.
She closed her eyes and, tilting her head back, breathed in the ice in the air as fresh flakes of snow began to fall. The soft press of each snowflake was like a caress against her skin. After the traffic fumes and incessant noise and activity of Las Vegas, the cold, fresh, quiet Highland air was like breathing in an elixir, bringing her jaded senses back to zinging life.
Being up here on her own where no one could find her was like coming off a stage. Stepping out of a costume. Undressing the part of Vegas showgirl. She could feel it falling away from her like a heavy cloak. Up here she could take her game face off. The flirty vamp face. The face that told everyone she was perfectly happy singing in a gentlemen’s club because the tips were great and she had the days free to shop, hang out by the pool or get a spray tan.
Up here in the Highlands she could relax. Regroup. Get in touch with nature.
Revisit her dreams...
The only hiccup was the dog.
Aiesha could babysit cats, no problem. Cats were pretty easy to take care of. She just filled their dish with biscuits and cleaned out their litter tray, if they had one. She didn’t have to pat them or get close to them. Most cats were pretty aloof, which suited her just fine.
Dogs were different. Dogs wanted to get close to you. To bond with you. To love you.
To trust you to keep them safe.
Aiesha glanced down at the limpid brown eyes of the golden retriever sitting at her feet with slavish devotion, its tail brushing against the carpet of snow like a feathered fan.
The memory of another pair of trusting brown eyes stabbed at her heart like a knitting needle. Eyes that still haunted her, even though so many years had passed. She pushed back the thick sleeve of her coat and looked at the underside of her wrist where the blue-and-red ink of her tattoo was a vivid and permanent reminder of her failure to keep her one and only best friend safe.
Aiesha swallowed the monkey wrench of guilt in her throat and frowned down at the dog. ‘Why can’t you take yourself for a walk? It’s not as if you need me to show you the way. There aren’t any fences to stop you.’ She made a shooing motion with her hand. ‘Go on. Go for a run. Go chase a rabbit or a stoat or something.’
The dog continued to look at her with that unblinking stare, a soft little ‘play with me’ whine coming from its throat. Aiesha blew out a breath of resignation and began trudging in the direction of the forest that fringed the stately Highland home. ‘Come on, then, you stupid mutt. But I’m only going as far as the river. It looks like this snow’s going to set in for the night.’
* * *
James Challender drove through the snow-encrusted wrought-iron gates of Lochbannon as evening folded in. The secluded estate was spectacular in any season but in winter it turned into a wonderland. The Gothic-style mansion with its turrets and spires looked like something out of a children’s fairy tale. The frozen water in the fountain in front of the house looked like a Renaissance ice sculpture with delicate icicles hanging down like centuries-old stalactites. The thick forest that backed on to the estate was coated in pure white snow, the rolling fields were also thickly carpeted, and the air was so sharp and clean and cold it burned his nostrils as he drew it in.
The lights were on in the house, which meant the housekeeper, Mrs McBain, had generously postponed her annual holiday to look after Bonnie while his mother visited her friend, who had suffered an accident in outback Australia. James had offered to look after the dog but his mother had insisted via a hurried text before she boarded her flight that it was all organised and not to worry. Why his mother couldn’t put her dog in boarding kennels like everyone else did was beyond him. It wasn’t as if she couldn’t afford it. He’d made sure she was well provided for after the divorce from his father.
Lochbannon was a little large for an older single woman with only a dog for company and a handful of staff, but he had wanted to give his mother a safe haven, a place that was totally unconnected to her former life as Clifford Challender’s wife.
Although he had insisted the estate was in his mother’s name, James liked to spend the occasional week up in the Highlands away from the fast lane of London, which was why he’d decided to come up in spite of his mother’s assurances that Bonnie was well taken care of.
This was the one place he could focus without distractions. A week working here was worth a month in his busy London office. He liked the solitude, the peace and tranquillity of being alone, without people needing him to fix something, do something or be something.
Here he could let his shoulders down and relax. Here he could think. Clear his head of the stress of managing a company that was still suffering the effects of his father’s mishandling of projects and clients.
Lochbannon was also one of the few places where he could escape the intrusive spotlight of the press. The repercussions of his father’s profligate lifestyle had spread across his own life like an indelible stain. The newshounds were always on the lookout for a scandal to prove their theory of ‘like father, like son.’
Even before he turned off the engine he heard the sound of Bonnie’s welcoming bark. He smiled as he walked to the front door. Maybe his mother was right about her precious dog being too sensitive to leave with strangers. Besides, he had to admit there was something rather homely and comfortable about an enthusiastic canine greeting.
The door opened before he could put his key in the lock and a pair of wide grey eyes blinked at him in outraged shock, as if suddenly finding a prowler on the doorstep instead of the postman. ‘What the hell are you doing here?’
James’s hand fell away from the door. His body went stiff as if the snow falling behind him had frozen him to the spot. Aiesha Adams. The infamous, lethally gorgeous, impossibly sexy and outrageously wild Aiesha Adams. ‘I believe that’s supposed to be my line,’ he said when he could locate his voice.
At a casual glance there was nothing outstanding about her features. Dressed in a loose-fitting boyfriend sweater and yoga pants and without make-up, she looked like your average girl next door. Midlength chestnut hair that was neither curly nor straight but somewhere in between. Skin that was clear and unlined apart from a couple of tiny scars that were either from chickenpox or the site of a picked pimple, one on the left side of her forehead and one just below her right cheekbone. She was of average height and of slim build, the result of lucky genes rather than effort, he surmised.
For a moment—a brief moment—she looked fifteen years old again.
But look a little closer and the unusual colour of her eyes was nothing short of arresting. Breath-snatching. Storm and smoke and shadows swirled in their depths.
The shape of her mouth had the power to render a man speechless. That lush, ripe mouth was pure sin. The bee-stung fullness, the youthfulness, and the vermillion borders so beautifully aligned it physically hurt to look and not touch.
What was she doing here? Had she broken in?
What if someone found out she was here...with him? His heart galloped ahead a few beats. What if the press found out? What if Phoebe found out?
Aiesha’s chin came up to that don’t-mess-with-me height James had seen her do so well in the past, her body posture morphing from schoolgirl to sultry, defiant tart in a blink. ‘Your mother invited me.’
His mother? James’s frown was so tight it made his forehead hurt. What was going on? His mother’s rushed text message hadn’t mentioned anything about Aiesha. Not. One. Word. Why would his mother invite the girl who’d caused so much heartbreak and mayhem in the past? It didn’t make sense.
‘Rather magnanimous of her under the circumstances, is it not?’ he said. ‘Has she locked up her jewellery and all the silver?’
Her eyes flashed gunmetal-grey fire at him. ‘Is anyone with you?’
‘I hate to repeat myself, but I believe that’s what I’m supposed to be asking you.’ James closed the door on the chilly air but, in doing so, it made the sudden silence and the space between them far too intimate.
Being intimate—in any sense of the word—with Aiesha Adams was dangerous. He dared not think about it. Would not think about it. Being in the same country as her was reputation suicide, let alone in the same house. She oozed sex appeal. She wore it like a slinky coat, slipping in and out of it whenever she felt the urge. Every movement she made was pure seductress. How many men had fallen for that lithe body and that Lolita mouth? Even with that smoky glower and that upthrust chin she still managed to look sex kittenish. He could feel the thrum of his blood in his veins, the sudden rush of sexual awareness that was as shocking to him as it was unwelcome.
He bent down to ruffle Bonnie’s ears to distract himself and was rewarded with a whimper and a lavish licking. At least someone was pleased to see him.
‘Did anyone follow you here?’ Aiesha asked. ‘The press? Journalists? Anyone?’
James straightened from ruffling the dog’s ears to give her a sardonic look. ‘Running away from another scandal, are we?’
Her lips tightened, her eyes burning with the dislike she had always assaulted him with. ‘Don’t pretend you don’t know. It’s been in every paper and newsfeed.’
Was there anyone who didn’t know? The news of her affair with a married politician in the U.S. had gone viral. James had pointedly ignored it, or tried to. But then some unscrupulous newshound had unearthed Aiesha’s role in the break-up of his parents’ marriage. It had only been a sentence or two and not every paper or newsfeed ran with it, but the shame and embarrassment he had been trying to put behind him for a decade was back with a vengeance.
But what else could he expect? Aiesha was a wild child who attracted scandal and had been from the moment his mother had brought her home from the back streets of London as a teenage runaway. She was a smart-mouthed little guttersnipe who deliberately created negative drama, even for the people who tried to help her. His mother had been badly let down by Aiesha’s disreputable behaviour in the past, which was why he was puzzled that she had allowed her to come and stay now. Why would his mother invite the unscrupulous girl who had stolen not only heirloom jewellery from her, but tried to steal her husband from her, as well?
James shrugged off his coat to hang it in the cupboard in the hall. ‘Married men are a particular obsession of yours, are they not?’
He felt the stab of those grey eyes drilling between his shoulder blades. He felt the sudden kick of his pulse. He got a thrill out of seeing her rattled by him. He was the only person she couldn’t hide her true colours from. She was a true chameleon, changing to serve her interests, laying on the charm when it suited her, reeling in her next victim, enjoying the game of slaying yet another heart and wallet.
But he was immune. He’d seen her for what she was right from the start. She might have got rid of her East End accent and chain-store clothes, but underneath she was a pickpocket whose aim in life was to sleep her way to the top. Her latest victim was a U.S. senator whose career and marriage were unravelling as a result. The press had captured a damning shot of her leaving his suite at the Vegas hotel where she worked as a lounge singer.
‘No one must know I’m here,’ she said. ‘Do you understand? No one.’
James turned from neatly arranging the sleeves of his coat to face her. She was still looking at him with hatred but something else moved in her gaze, a flicker of uncertainty, or was it fear? She quickly disguised it, however. She jutted her chin and flattened those delectably full lips. Her mouth had always fascinated him. Ripe and soft and full, a mouth built for sin and sex and seduction. There was nothing innocent about her mouth or her body. She was a five-foot-eight knockout package of sinuous catlike curves that could wrap around a man until he was strangled by his need of her.
And she knew it.
James moved past her to stride to the warmth of the sitting room. Thinking about that mouth was a bad move. He could practically feel those plump lips clasped around him, drawing on him until he went weak at the knees. He suppressed a shudder of traitorous desire. He would not think about that mouth. He would not think about that body. He would not think of the lust that burned inside him.
‘No one will find you here because you’re not staying.’
She followed him into the sitting room, her bare feet padding over the Persian carpet like the paws of a light-footed lioness. ‘You can’t throw me out. This is your mother’s house, not yours.’ She stood with her arms folded across her chest, looking exactly like she had a decade ago, all pouty, sulky teenager even though she was now twenty-five years old.
He let his gaze run over her in a leisurely sweep as if inspecting a cheap and tawdry item he had no intention of buying. ‘Pack your bags and get out.’
She slitted her eyes like a wildcat staring down a wolf. ‘I’m not leaving.’
James felt his blood skip and then roar through his veins. It thickened in his groin, reigniting the embers of a fire that had never quite been extinguished. He hated himself for it. He saw it as a weakness. It reduced him to the baseness of a wild animal with no other instinct than to mate with whatever willing female was available.
He wasn’t cut from the same low-quality cloth as his father. He could control his impulses. Aiesha had tried her seduction routine on him ten years ago but he hadn’t taken the bait.
And he wasn’t going to take it now.
‘I’m expecting a guest,’ he said.
‘Who?’
‘The woman I intend to marry is joining me at the weekend. You’ll be decidedly de trop.’
She laughed out loud, even going so far as to bend over double to hold her sides as if he’d told her the most humorous of jokes. ‘You mean to say you’ve actually asked that stuck-up frozen-faced heiress who doesn’t do anything but spend Daddy’s money on the High Street to marry you?’
James ground his teeth so hard he thought he’d have to take his meals through a straw for the rest of his life. ‘Phoebe’s the patron of several well-known charities.’
Aiesha was still giggling like a naughty schoolgirl. It made the base of his spine tighten like a bowstring. How like her to mock the most important decision of his life. He had chosen his future bride after lengthy consideration. Phoebe Trentonfield had her own money, which meant he could rule out the gold-digging factor. It had plagued him for most of his adult life, trying to find a partner who wanted him for himself instead of his money. It was the first box he wanted ticked. He was thirty-three years old. He wanted to settle down. He wanted to build a stable home life—like the one he’d thought he had until his father’s affairs had come to light. He wanted his mother to enjoy the experience of having grandchildren. He wanted someone who was content to be a traditional wife so he could rebuild the Challender empire his father had so recklessly frittered away. He wanted stability and predictability instead of scandal and chaos. His father was the impulsive one. Not him. He knew what he wanted and was determined and disciplined enough to get it and keep it.
Aiesha gave him a goading look. ‘What’s she going to say when she finds out you’re here with me?’
His molars went down another couple of millimetres. ‘She’s not going to find out because you’re leaving first thing in the morning.’
She hitched one of her hips in a model-like pose, a teasing smile still lurking around the corners of her mouth. ‘So you’re not going to be a big old meanie and throw me out in the snow on my toosh tonight, then?’
He wanted to bury her in the snow, at least ten feet deep so he wouldn’t be tempted to touch her. And the less he thought about her curvy little toosh the better. How was he going to get her out of here? He could hardly send her packing at this time of night, with the roads so slippery and treacherous. He had only just made it through from the main road himself. The nearest village had a bed and breakfast but it was currently closed for the winter. The closest hotel was a half hour drive away...an hour in these conditions. ‘Does your car have snow chains?’ he asked.
‘I didn’t bring a car. Your mother picked me up from the airport in Edinburgh.’
What was his mother thinking? This was getting crazier by the minute. He hadn’t known his mother had been in contact with Aiesha over the years. What was she thinking bringing the daughter of the devil back into her life?
Was this a set-up? A practical joke?
Surely not... How on earth could it be? His mother had insisted he not worry about the dog. Surely she knew how dangerous it would be to put Aiesha in the same house as him. She was a ticking time bomb. She courted trouble. She craved attention from anyone wearing trousers, making it her mission to get them out of them as fast as she could. She was ruthless and shameless and as sexy as a pin-up girl. Damn it. ‘Right, well, I’ll drive you back to the airport first thing in the morning,’ he said. ‘Your little stint as dog-and house-sitter is over.’
She sashayed over to him, deliberately trailing one of her fingertips along one of the whitened tendons on the back of one of his clenched fists. ‘Loosen up, James. You’re as wound up as a tight spring. If you need an outlet for all that pressure—’ she batted her impossibly long eyelashes at him ‘—just call me, OK?’
James forced himself to endure the electric shock of her touch without flinching. He forced himself not to look at her mouth, where the tip of her pink tongue had left a moistly glistening trail. He forced himself not to slam her against the nearest wall and slake the fireball of his lust by plunging into her hot, wet warmth and doing what he’d always wanted to do to her. Every cell in his body was vibrating with need, and what sickened him the most was she damn well knew it. ‘Get the freaking hell out of my sight.’
Her eyes glinted with devilment. ‘I love it when a man talks dirty to me.’ She gave an exaggerated little shiver that made her braless breasts jiggle beneath her sweater. ‘It makes me come in a flash.’
James curled his fingers so tightly into his palms he felt every one of their joints protest. ‘Be ready at seven. Understood?’
She gave him another sultry little smile that sent another scorching flare to his groin. ‘You can’t get rid of me that easily. Didn’t you hear the weather report for tonight?’
A fist of panic clutched at his insides. He’d heard it in the car half an hour ago but back then he’d welcomed the thought of a blizzard snowing him in for a few days so he could put the final touches to the drawings on the Sherwood project before Phoebe joined him at the weekend.
He glared at Aiesha with such intense loathing he could feel it burning through his eyeballs like hot pokers. ‘You planned this, didn’t you?’
She tossed the length of her glossy chestnut hair back over one of her shoulders as she laughed that spine-fizzing laugh again. ‘You think I’ve got that much power that I can manipulate the weather to suit me? You flatter me, James.’
He sucked in a breath as she moved to the stairs with her swinging hip gait. Carnal lust roared in his body but he wasn’t going to let her win this. They could be snowed in for a month and he would still resist her.
He would not give in.
He. Would. Not. Give. In.
CHAPTER TWO
AIESHA LEANED BACK against the door of her bedroom and let out a long ragged breath. Her heart was still flapping like a loosely tied flag in a gale force wind. This couldn’t be happening.
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.
His eyes nailed hers like blue darts, his mouth so tightly set it looked physically as well as morally painful for him to get the words out. ‘How much?’
Aiesha pictured the cottage in the country she had dreamed of since she was a little girl living in council flats with walls as thin as diet wafers. She had dreamed of a place surrounded by flowers and fields and forest, of peace and calm instead of shouting and swearing and fighting. No pimps. No drugs. No violence.
Solitude. Safety.
She named a figure that sent James’s brows shooting towards his hairline. ‘What?’ he choked.
She folded her arms in an implacable manner. ‘You heard.’
He frowned at her blackly. ‘You’re joking, surely?’
‘Nope.’
He coughed out a disbelieving laugh. ‘This is ludicrous.’ His hand scored a jagged pathway through his hair. ‘Am I even having this conversation?’
‘Want me to pinch you?’
He quickly stepped back from her, holding his hands up in front of himself like a barrier. ‘Don’t touch me.’
Aiesha smiled as she deliberately stepped closer. It was thrilling to have so much sensual power at her disposal. The air vibrated with electric voltage; she could feel it lifting the skin of her arms in a carpet of goose bumps and wondered if his body was undergoing the same sensual overload. Was his blood thundering through his veins, thickening him? Extending him to full erection? Was he feeling that primal ache that consumed everything but the desperate need to copulate?
Maybe she should ignore that silly little foghorn inside her head. What would it hurt to have a little bit of fun to pass the time? He had always been the subject of her fantasies.
Now she could make them real.
She lazily stroked her fingertip over the thick and neatly aligned Windsor knot of his tie, close to where a pulse was beating like a piston in his tanned and cologne-scented neck. She breathed in lemon and lime and something else that was elusive and yet potently addictive. ‘What are you afraid of, posh boy?’ Her fingers slipped down from the knot to play with the end of his tie like a mean cat with a mouse’s tail. ‘That this time around I might prove to be irresistible?’
She heard his jaw lock. Heard his teeth grind. Saw his pupils flare as his eyes flicked to her mouth for a nanosecond.
‘I can resist you.’ His voice was so deep and so husky it sounded as if it had been scraped along a rough surface and only just survived the journey.
Aiesha looked at the dark pinpricks of regrowth surrounding his mouth and chin. He had a strong, uncompromising mouth, his top lip neatly sculpted, but his lower lip was fuller, rich with sensual promise. Something unfurled deep and low inside her belly, like a satin ribbon running away from its spool.
Suddenly the game she’d been playing turned deadly serious.
The battle of wills she was so sure she could win shifted its power balance. She felt it in the immeasurable beat of time where his gaze grazed her mouth again. It provoked a visceral reaction inside her body, a lightning strike of lust that all but knocked her off her feet.
She sent her tongue out over her lips to try and quell the fizzing sensation that was fast becoming an ache. His warm, faintly mint-scented breath skated over the surface of her lips as, centimetre by centimetre, millimetre by millimetre he ever so slowly began to close the distance. Her own breath felt painfully restricted as she drew it into her lungs, as if the space inside her chest was already taken up by something big and suffocating. She rose up on tiptoe, closing her eyes, waiting, waiting, waiting for that first blissful moment of contact...
Her eyes sprang open when she heard him take a step back from her. His expression was as stiff and formal as the wallpaper on the wall behind him. ‘I’ll deposit the money in your bank account once I have a legal contract drawn up,’ he said.
She arched a brow. ‘The terms being?’
‘If you speak out of turn to the press you’ll have to repay the amount in full plus twenty per cent interest.’
Aiesha pushed her pursed lips from side to side. ‘Twenty per cent seems a bit steep to me. Let’s make it ten.’
‘Fifteen.’
‘Five, or I tell the press right here and now we’re having a tawdry little affair that will be over once this snow melts.’
His jaw worked for a moment before he gave a curt nod of agreement. But she wasn’t sure if he was agreeing because he thought the deal fair or because he couldn’t wait to get away from her. His brusque statement suggested the latter. ‘I’m going to the study to work for the rest of the evening.’
Aiesha hitched one hip higher than the other in her best femme-fatale pose. ‘All work and no play makes James a very dull boy.’
His eyes held hers in a tight little lock that made the backs of her knees tingle. ‘I know how to play. I’m just a little more careful than most over choosing my playmates.’
She curved her mouth in a mocking manner. He might find it easy to resist her now but she wasn’t finished with him yet. She would bring him to his knees before the week was out. He would not be so straitlaced and sure of himself once she had him where she wanted him. She could hardly wait.
‘I bet Phoebe Frozen-Face doesn’t do it up against the kitchen bench or outside under the stars on a hot sweaty night. I bet she’s a bed and missionary girl with all the lights off. Am I right?’
His lips came together in a flat white line. ‘Please spare me the sordid details of your sexual practices. I’m not interested.’
‘Yes, you are.’ Aiesha all but purred the words at him. ‘I bet you’re wondering what it would feel like to do me right here and now. On the rug at our feet. So rough one or both of us gets carpet burn.’
The words were provocative, goading, tempting. The erotic images they triggered in her mind even more so. She knew she was being utterly brazen but something about his steely resistance fired her determination to have him finally admit his desire for her. It was the ultimate challenge.
He was the ultimate challenge.
James gave her a dismissive look but she noticed the hammer was back in the lower quadrant of his jaw. ‘Keep your Vegas-showgirl tactics for someone who actually gives a damn,’ he said. ‘I have far better things to do with my time.’
Aiesha watched as he turned and strode purposefully out of the room, his back and shoulders as stiff as a plank, his hands balled into fists as hard as cannonballs at his sides.
An anticipatory smile turned up the corners of her mouth.
I am so going to win this.
CHAPTER FOUR
JAMES STARED AT his computer screen, but instead of seeing the designs he’d drawn up for the Sherwood townhouse he saw Aiesha lying naked on the Persian rug in the sitting room with him pounding into her. Her hair was fanned out over the rug, her beautiful breasts jiggling sexily, her feline back arching as she came with a primal scream that—
He gave himself a mental slap and refocused on the project in front of him. The plans, which had seemed so brilliant the day before, now looked like a boring set of angles and planes.
He pushed himself back from the desk and stood and stretched the stiffness out of his back. That wasn’t all that was stiff...but the less he thought about that the better.
He stood in front of the window, staring at the moonlit white-out outside. His Highland sanctuary had become a prison of torturous temptation. A temple of sinful longings. He was trapped inside a house with a wanton woman with seduction on her mind. Aiesha was on a mission and he was her target. How was he going to resist her? She was a potent cocktail of sass and sensuality. He was already drunk on looking at her. On smelling her exotic fragrance that seemed to be in every room of the house, following him, haunting him, tempting him. He was mesmerised by those unique eyes, transfixed by that sinfully luscious mouth and that lithe body with its catwalk sway of hips and pelvis. His body throbbed with such raw longing he considered plunging himself in the snow outside to cool off.
Everything about her turned him on. Her wilfulness, her naughty pouts, the way she tossed her hair over her shoulders like a flighty filly tossed its mane. The way her grey eyes looked at him knowingly, smoulderingly, with that come-and-get-me-I-know-you-want-to steadiness as if she could sense his lust for her lurking, thickening him beneath his clothes.
James muttered an expletive and turned away from the window. It was well past midnight and he hadn’t eaten. He would kill for a glass of red wine but bringing alcohol into a situation like this was asking for the sort of trouble he could do without right now. Falling into Aiesha’s honey trap was exactly what she expected him to do. It was what every man she set her sights on did. She collected men like trophies, the richer and more powerful the better. He was just another prize to tick off her list. One she had wanted a long time. It was her unfinished business—the seduction of the son and heir to complete her set—the father and now the son. He would be discarded like yesterday’s news as soon as she proved what she wanted to prove.
James could only hope the fervid interest in their relationship would die away once some other couple was targeted. He loathed being besieged by the press. It brought back the cringeworthy memories of the days after Aiesha had sold her story. The cameras had been set up outside his parents’ London home for over a week. He hadn’t been living at home at the time but that didn’t stop the barrage of attention. He was set upon at his apartment in Notting Hill. Every day microphones were thrust in his face as he left for work, asking him for comments on his father’s behaviour. They followed him everywhere, even during work hours. The intrusion was so bad at one point that one of his most important clients had taken his business to a rival firm.
It had taken him this long to build up trust with a good clientele and now Aiesha was back and up to her usual mischief.
James took Bonnie out for a last pit stop before doing the rounds of turning off the lights downstairs. He came to the sitting room, where the door was slightly ajar, the muted light of the side-table lamps creating a soft V-shaped beam across the floor of the hall.
He pushed the door open to find the coffee table in front of the sofa littered with the remains of a snatch-and-grab meal: an empty wine glass, a side plate with cheese fragments and a browned apple core on it, a scrunched-up paper napkin, an empty yogurt container and a sticky teaspoon, a trail of crumbs. Typical. She was swanning about the place like the lady of the manor, expecting everyone else to pick up after her. He wasn’t running a hotel, for God’s sake. Who did she think she was, leaving his mother’s sitting room in such a state?
His gaze went to the sofa and found...Sleeping Beauty.
That was exactly what Aiesha looked like. She was lying on her side facing the fire that had burned down low in the grate, her cheek resting on one of the velvet scatter cushions, her arms tucked in close to her chest and her slim legs curled up like a child’s. Her hair was tousled and loose about her shoulders, one curly tendril lying like an S on her cheek. In sleep she looked innocent and vulnerable, far younger than twenty-five.
The eight years difference in their ages suddenly felt like a century. Make that an entire geological period.
Should he wake her?
No!
James looked at the fire. It would make too much noise getting that going again. The room, along with the rest of the house, was centrally heated but set on a timer. He could feel the slight chill in the air as the ormolu clock on the mantelpiece ticked its way to 1:00 a.m.
His gaze went to the mohair throw rug draped over the back of the wing chair. Should he or shouldn’t he? He debated with himself for another thirty seconds as he watched her sleep. Her chest rose and fell, her soft mouth opening slightly as her breath came out on a sigh. Her eyelids with their spider-leg-long lashes fluttered and her forehead puckered as if something she was dreaming about had disturbed her. But after a moment or two her forehead smoothed out and she burrowed deeper into the sofa cushions like a dormouse curling up for winter.
James waited another half a minute before stealthily tiptoeing across the carpet like a burglar to get the throw rug—mentally rolling his eyes at the ridiculousness of his caution—and brought it back to gently cover her with it.
It was as if he had dropped a plank of timber on her.
She suddenly leapt off the sofa and struck out with her fists, catching him on the side of the nose in a glancing blow that made stars explode behind his eyes.
James swore and, stumbling backwards, cupped his hand over his throbbing nose, the blood dripping through his fingers to the carpet at his feet. Pain pulsed in sickening waves through his face, his skull and his stomach. He swayed on his feet as he fought against the dizziness as a school of silverfish floated before his gaze.
Aiesha reeled back from him, speaking through her hands that were clasped over her mouth in stunned horror. ‘Oh, my God! Did I hurt you?’
‘No,’ he said through clenched teeth as he reached with his other hand for his handkerchief to stem the flow of blood. ‘I have spontaneous nosebleeds all the time.’
Her eyes were still as wide as her discarded dinner plate. ‘I’m sorry. I—I didn’t know who it was.’
He glared at her over the wad of his handkerchief. His nose was still pulsating with eye-watering pain as it hosed blood. What was she thinking, swinging at him like that? She was the intruder, not him. ‘Who the hell did you think it was?’
Her teeth chewed at her lower lip, her gaze falling away from his as she backed out of the room. ‘Erm...I’ll go and get you some ice...’
* * *
Aiesha held a hand against her juddering heart as she stumbled to the kitchen. The shock of waking to see a dark shape looming over her had made her react on instinct. Her primal brain hadn’t had time to recognise it was not some predatory lecher after a quick feel. Her instinctive reaction to hit out was something she’d learned from a young age, having to dodge the inappropriate attention from her mother’s collection of unsavoury partners. It was why she never spent the whole night with anyone. Ever. It was too awkward explaining her restlessness...or the nightmares. The last time she’d had a nightmare she’d wet the bed.
Try explaining that to a lover.
Aiesha looked at her reddened knuckles. If the pain throbbing in them was any indication, James was going to have a shiner by morning, if not sooner.
Her heart was not quite back where it belonged when she came back with a therapeutic ice pack she’d found in the freezer.
James was sitting on the sofa she had fallen asleep on earlier, his head tilted back, the strong column of his throat exposed. He opened one eye to look at her. ‘That’s a mean right hook you’ve got there.’
Aiesha averted her gaze as she handed him the ice pack. ‘I took up boxing classes a couple of years ago. It’s great for fitness. You should try it.’
He winced as he pressed the pack to the bridge of his nose. ‘Somehow, the thought of thumping an opponent until they lose consciousness doesn’t appeal.’
She bit her lip again. ‘Does it hurt terribly?’
He gave her a look. ‘That was the intention, wasn’t it?’
Aiesha walked over to the remains of the fire and gave it a futile poke. She could sense his watchful gaze resting on her. He’d found her asleep. Off guard. Vulnerable. Had she given anything away while sleeping? Murmured anything? Revealed anything of the turmoil of her past?
She tamed her body language the way she’d been doing since she was eight years old. Show no emotion. Show no fear. ‘I don’t like people sneaking up on me.’
‘I was trying to make you comfortable. You were lying asleep in front of a dead fire. I was worried you might be cold.’
Worried? Ha. When had anyone been concerned about her welfare? She was invisible unless she made people notice her. She had spent her life as an outsider. Not good enough. Not educated enough. Not posh enough.
The thought of him caring about her comfort disturbed her. No one cared about her. No one watched out for her. Not unless they wanted something.
Aiesha turned and squared her gaze with his. ‘Why didn’t you wake me up? Why creep around and scare the crap out of me? I’m glad I punched you. I should’ve hit you harder.’
He took the ice pack away from his face, frowning at her, but not in anger. There was something measuring about his gaze as it held hers. She looked away, flattening her mouth, locking him out.
He came over to where she was standing in front of the dead fire. ‘You want to hit me again?’ he asked. ‘Come on. Put up your fists and clobber me with your best shot.’
She crossed her arms, flashing him a cutting glare. ‘Stop making fun of me.’
Those dark blue eyes continued to penetrate and probe. ‘I’m not joking, Aiesha. Get it out of your system. You want to hit me, then go ahead and hit me. I won’t hit you back. I can take it like a man.’
Aiesha clenched her fists. She could hit him. She could probably knock him out cold if she put her mind to it. Trouble was, her mind was out of sync with her heart.
She hated that she’d hurt him. She loathed violence. Violence sickened her. She’d only taken up boxing as a precaution while living in Vegas. It wasn’t called Sin City for nothing. Men with too much alcohol on board thought it their right to grope and proposition her each night as she left the club. She had never hit anyone before, just a punching bag in the gym. That punching bag had been the substitute for all the men she wished she’d been able to pummel back the way they had pummelled her mother. Hadn’t she herself copped enough hits and slaps in her time to want to eradicate all violence from the world?
And then there was poor little Archie. He had trusted her to keep him safe from that despicable Beast Man and she had failed him. She tried to block the sound of that startled yelp inside her brain. She tried to block the sound of that fatal crack, as poor little Archie’s neck was broken. She tried to block the sight of that poor little limp body hanging from Beast Man’s horrible hand like a trophy.
Aiesha could feel her defences crumbling like the ashes of the log she’d poked in the grate a minute ago. James had seen her off guard. Unprotected by her outer shell of hard-nosed tart. Her fight-or-flight instincts were battling it out inside her chest. She could feel every moment of the struggle like fists landing heavy blows against her heart.
Flee.
Fight.
Flee.
Fight.
She was conscious of the silence...measured by the sound of the ticking clock on the mantelpiece above the fireplace. She was conscious of the dryness of her mouth and the unfamiliar hot moist prickling at the back of her eyes. She was conscious of a tight restriction as the deep well of her buried emotion bubbled up in her throat like a foul sewer.
She. Would. Not. Cry.
Aiesha blinked and quickly slipped her armour back on. She opened and closed her hands, testing him. Watching to see if he so much as flinched. ‘I could really hurt you,’ she said.
‘Undoubtedly.’
She couldn’t make out his expression. Was he testing her? Seeing if she would take up the dare? She brought her hand up but he didn’t move a muscle. His gaze was steady on hers. She placed her hand on the side of his face, her skin catching on the graze of his stubble. Something caught in her chest. A snag. A hitch. Then a letting go...
There was another heartbeat of silence.
He covered her hand with his, holding it within the gentle prison of his fingers. ‘That the best you could do?’ he said.
Aiesha looked at his mouth before flicking her gaze back to his. ‘I don’t want to ruin that pretty-boy face of yours.’
The dark blue of his eyes intensified, holding hers in a lock that made something inside her belly tilt and then spill. ‘You’re scared.’
She sent her tongue out in a quick darting movement to moisten her lips. ‘Let me go, James.’
‘I have a little forfeit to collect first.’
Something dropped off a shelf in her stomach. ‘Forfeit?’
He spread his hands through the mane of her hair, his gaze moving from her eyes to her mouth in a slow and mesmerising fashion. ‘You punched me in the nose. I get to kiss you. Fair’s fair.’
She affected a sneer but was pretty sure it was wide off the mark. ‘Is that meant to be a punishment?’
‘Why don’t we find out?’ he said and, tugging her against him, his mouth came down over hers.
His lips were warm and firm, slow and deliberate. Purposeful. His tongue stroked against her top lip and then her lower lip without deepening the kiss. It sent every one of Aiesha’s nerves into a frenzied clamour of want. She wound her arms around his neck, leaning into him to give more of herself to the kiss. She opened her mouth, inviting him in, teasing him with the flicker of her tongue against his lips.
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