A Delicious Deception (12 page)

Painfully, she recalled her mother’s constant assurance that it was Grant’s memory that had given her the strength to fight through her recent illness. So what would it do to her now if she found out that all that love and devotion she’d thought he’d shown her had been just a sham? It would destroy her!

‘I’m sorry I’ve had to be the one to destroy all your illusions about love and commitment, my dearest.’

‘I’m not your dearest.’ She wasn’t ready yet to accept endearments from him after he had opened her eyes so cruelly.

‘Maybe not,’ he conceded which, contrarily, hurt her even more, ‘but you’re feeling bruised and cut up about it, naturally.’

How do you know how I feel?
she wanted to fling at him, but bit the words back. It wasn’t his fault that everything she’d believed in seemed to have crumbled to dust within the space of a few short minutes, even if it felt like it right at this moment.

She turned away from him, her hands resting limply on the top of the balustrade.

‘He lied,’ was all she could say, staring out at the darkening
sea, hurting so much she didn’t think she’d live to trust anyone ever again. ‘To me. To Mum …’

‘I’m sorry,’ he murmured deeply. And, after a few seconds, ‘Passion makes us do the most unprincipled things,’ he said.

Didn’t she know it!

‘It’s the second strongest animal force in the universe.’

‘Only the second?’ she uttered disdainfully.

‘Perpetuation of the species.’ His tone was flat—unsentimental. ‘Preceded only by self-survival.’

He made it all seem so cold. So basic.

He laughed rather harshly when she told him so. ‘Isn’t it?’ he suggested with unyielding scepticism.

‘Is that all you think love is for?’ she challenged, wondering how she had got on to this subject with him as she faced him again. ‘Just to create babies?’

‘Yes, but then we aren’t actually talking about love, are we … Lorri?’

He caught her hand, his fingers strong and warm, but angrily she tugged out of their grasp.

‘Don’t call me that!’ It was her father—her father, whom she had loved and trusted and looked up to, who had first started using that name. Everyone else had simply called her Lorrayne. ‘It’s Rayne to you!’

Which suited him fine, King thought, having been used to calling her that. It suited the woman she had become and who had changed so dramatically from the thin and stammering—at least with him, he remembered wryly—little scarecrow whom he’d known as Lorri, and who had graced the office for a time with her quiet presence.

‘Then don’t hate me, Rayne, for simply acquainting you with the facts.’

‘I don’t hate you.’ Hate was just the flip side of a coin that suggested far too intense an emotion than she was prepared even to think about. ‘Why should I hate you?’

‘For knocking your gallant knight down off his horse?’

‘I’m getting used to it,’ she murmured with unshed tears in her eyes. Her emotions were too raw at that moment to stop herself from tagging on, ‘After all, you did it to me once before.’

A frown knitted his brows as his gaze probed the moist hazel-green of hers.

‘I was mad about you,’ she admitted, not caring what she said any more.

‘I know.’

His deep revelation shocked and surprised her. Had she been that obvious?

‘You noticed me?’ she breathed, having never beyond her wildest teenage dreams ever dared to hope.

‘You were a child,’ he remarked succinctly.

‘I was eighteen!’

‘As I said—a child,’ he repeated with a soft chuckle, lifting her chin with his forefinger, his thumb lightly brushing her pouting lips. ‘A little girl with big hungry eyes …’ Because he knew now why those eyes had kept tugging at something inside him ever since that night he’d walked in and saw her standing here on the terrace. ‘Huge hungry eyes,’ he continued, ‘that I remember thinking even then that one day some man would drown in. But which right then belonged to a love-sick teenager whose main reason for agreeing to help out in that office, I suspect, was to try and make me want to take her to bed.’

‘I wasn’t love-sick,’ she denied with embarrassed colour flaring in her cheeks, overwrought from the feelings that had been building in her for hours because of his keeping her in suspense, because of his opinion of her father. Because she had been aching to see him—and talk to him—all day when she should have been hating him, convinced as she had been of just how ruthless he was. And when all she wanted him to do right now—and from the first moment she’d seen him walk in here tonight—really was to take her to bed. ‘Anyway,
if I had been, it wouldn’t have worked with you, would it,’ she murmured with her blood suddenly pounding in her ears because the touch of his hands sliding lightly across her shoulders and down over her bare arms seemed to be setting her insides on fire. ‘Most of the time you ignored me.’

‘I wasn’t knocked out by spiky bleached hair and dark purple lips and eyes,’ he stated with his mouth moving wryly. ‘And what would you have preferred me to have done? Taken you over my knee for even thinking about it with a man way out of your age group?’

‘You were only twenty-three!’ she reminded him, breathless from her galloping emotions, wanting to run away from them—from him—and all the things he was saying that was sending a reckless excitement leaping through her. ‘That’s only five years.’

‘And those five years made a world of difference,’ he said sagely.

Which they would have, she accepted in hindsight.

Riveted by a desire that was stronger than her will, she looked up at him now to ask in a voice that was huskily provocative, ‘So what are you saying? That I’m too young for you?’

She heard the sharp catch of his breath above the chorus of crickets and, from the lights that had just come on around the terrace, saw the sensuous pull of his lips before he answered thickly, ‘Not any more.’

Common sense should have told her to stop this insanity before it got too far out of hand but, as his mouth came down over hers, it was already too late.

A
S
K
ING
wrapped his arms around her, Rayne felt herself melting against him.

His jaw rasped against hers where he hadn’t shaved since that morning, but she rejoiced in its roughness and in his hard warmth that was driving every last trauma—of the day, of the past week and of the longer past—from her mind.

The only thing that mattered was him—here and now, the desire that had her clinging to him, as the only sure, secure thing in her crumbling universe.

She had wanted this—so much! Wanted it now a thousand times more than she had ever wanted it before. It was as if all the feelings she had had for him as a teenager hadn’t died but had been shut away inside her, brooding and intensifying so that now they overwhelmed her like a flood, gushing through her from her toes upwards and spreading along every nerve and sinew of her being.

He had called her a child then, but she was a woman now and she wanted to prove it to him, angling her body so that her needs were obvious—the craving for his hands against her naked flesh.

He read her like a book, following each silent sentence her body was conveying to him as long tanned fingers slipped the fine straps off her shoulders so that the chiffon bodice rippled like a waterfall down over the betraying fullness of her breasts.

King groaned deeply in his throat, his body hardening from her perfect femininity. He felt like ravaging her, driving them both wild in his need to blot out all the things that Mitch had revealed to him today. To lose himself inside the warm, slick wetness of her glorious body. But he forced himself to exercise all his powers of restraint, knowing that she wouldn’t thank him for that.

This woman needed to be handled with kid gloves, her beautiful body served and pleasured with the skill and tenderness it deserved.

She had deceived him, it was true. But only because she’d believed him to be party to a gross misdemeanour against her father—a father who hadn’t been wholly worthy of her trust and fierce loyalty. Nevertheless, the fact that she
had
deceived him made him glean a delicious thrill in inflicting some sensual punishment upon her in making her wait for all her body—and his own!—craved.

Dipping his head, he drew the hard peak of one pink begging nipple slowly into his mouth, taming the urge to pull her against him as his strong hands rested on the firm, gentle curves of her straining hips.

He was driving her crazy, Rayne thought headily, clutching at his shoulders, wanting to rip off his shirt, feel the hardness of his muscles and his hair-roughened chest against her breasts.

‘Easy,’ he advised softly, his breath fanning the wet swollen tip he had just released from its torturous pleasure. ‘What is it you want? Show me what you want.’

Maybe she should have been embarrassed, she thought distractedly, but hunger had stripped her of all inhibitions, so that now she had no qualms about doing as he’d asked.

Thrusting her neglected breast towards him, she uttered a deep, guttural sob when his mouth closed over it, sending sensations plummeting down through the centre of her body.

‘Is this it?’ he broke off to murmur against the pale fleshy mound after a few moments. ‘Is this what you want?’

No, I want you! All of you! Around me! On top of me! Inside me!

She heard her brain screaming out those phrases and couldn’t believe that any man could reduce her to thinking them. But this wasn’t any man, she assured herself hectically. This was King.

His hands on her hips were warm and firm, yet still holding her away from him when all she wanted was to
feel
him, feel the evidence of just how much he wanted her.

But he was controlling the pace, she realized, wanting more of what he was doing to her and yet crazy for this particular sensuous torture to end as he burned a slick, hot path between the valley of her breasts with a teasingly slow caress of his tongue.

‘I hate you, King Clayborne,’ she groaned.

She could say it now. Now, when the conflagration of need that was burning inside her raged so fiercely that there could be no turning back because what was there to lose? He knew how much she wanted him. Needed him.

‘No, you don’t,’ he murmured thickly against her ribcage.

He knew that too, she accepted helplessly, because she couldn’t fool him any more than she could fool herself. But to express what she was feeling in any other way would be no less than sheer folly, she realised, despairing at herself for wanting—needing—him so much.

With a deep groan from the depths of his throat he caught her to him then, and from that moment he was no longer in control.

Hungrily his mouth captured hers, their breath mingling, tongues blending in an urgent mimicry of the ultimate outcome of where all this was leading, as Rayne let her head fall back in wanton acquiescence to all that was about to happen.

They were equal now. Mouth to mouth. Pulsing body to
pulsing body. Locked in the most fundamental act between a man and a woman.

Below them, beneath the darkening Mediterranean sky, Monte Carlo pulsed with a life of its own but they were oblivious to it, the sound of their impassioned breathing like an extension of the exotic chorus outside.

His teasing had backfired on him, Rayne realised with her heart singing. He was desperate to make love with her, a scenario she had only ever dared to dream about seven years ago. But now it was happening and the reality was sending shock waves of pleasure through her body way beyond any she could ever have imagined.

With a small sob of need and urgent trembling fingers, she tugged at the buttons of his shirt.

His chest was bronzed and beautifully contoured, as she had imagined it would be, the feathering of hair that ran down and disappeared inside his shirt igniting a fire in her as she ran her hands across it.

‘You’re beautiful.’ It seemed as natural to say it as it did to breathe, as very softly she pressed her kiss-swollen lips to his heaving chest. He smelled of pine and a masculine musk that acted like an aphrodisiac on her already heightened senses. His skin tasted slightly salty when she brought her tongue across the hard wall of muscle and bone.

‘Not nearly as beautiful as you.’

Did he really think that? Or was it just sex talking? How could she compare with the super-model type of woman his name was usually linked with? At that moment, though, she didn’t care—only that he was with her. Like this.

‘Take this off,’ he urged raggedly, already tugging her dress down over her hips. ‘I want to see you. All of you.’

Before she could murmur an objection, having thought about his type of woman and feeling extremely self-conscious about not living up to all he expected her to be, the whisper of fabric was nothing more than a pool of light around her
ankles and she was standing there in nothing but her flimsy white sandals and a white lacy string that left very little hidden from the dark intensity of his gaze.

‘King,’ she breathed, hiding her sudden embarrassment against the warm hard wall of his shoulder. Gently, though, those warm strong hands held her away from him.

‘Let me look at you,’ he exhaled in a way that was half an entreaty, half a command.

Allowing it, she stood stock-still and closed her eyes against the starkly visual images of what she knew he would be seeing. Red hair cascading like a dark waterfall over one shoulder, the urgent rising of pale breasts with their rosy tips still hard and turgid from his exquisite attentions.

She wondered if he’d think as she did. That her breasts were slightly too full for her tiny waist and the less curvy flare of her hips. But he was smiling when she opened her eyes, the smile of a man well gratified with the gift he was being given.

He reached out then, cupping the undersides of her breasts as tenderly as if each were a rare treasure, and Rayne gave a small moan, her lashes coming down over her eyes against the excruciating pleasure that ripped through her lower body as his thumbs lightly stroked the sensitised peaks.

‘Look at me.’

She didn’t want to! How could she stand here like this and let him see the naked longing in her eyes? Face him, knowing that her body was betraying the extent of her need of him? But his voice was as much her master as the sensations that were holding her in thrall and very slowly her lashes fluttered apart.