A Delicious Deception (18 page)

For a moment he just stood there, looking as though she had just taken the wind right out of his sails.

‘You slept with me. The so-called “enemy”,’ he reminded her with disdain in the hard, twisting line of his mouth.

‘That’s different.’

‘Why? Because I’m a much better proposition?’ he suggested cruelly.

Because I love you!
her mind screamed, although she couldn’t tell him that.

‘Believe that if you want to,’ she murmured instead, feeling his contempt like an arrow piercing her heart. ‘I’ve told you the truth. Why won’t you believe me?’ she appealed to him, and knew the answer even before he replied.

‘Give me one good reason why I should.’

He was standing there with his fists balled against his hips, the offending crumpled newspaper still clutched in his hand.

Because it’s the truth, she wanted to say again, but knew that it would be futile. She had deceived him in the beginning. By lying about her passport. Her reason for being there. By not coming clean about who she was.

‘If you trusted me, I wouldn’t have to,’ she said resignedly, knowing she’d done nothing to earn that trust, nor would she ever be likely to. It was written all over his hard, handsome face, in the bleak, steely depths of his eyes.

She couldn’t stay there and look at him any longer. She brushed past him and ran up to her room, where she collapsed on the bed in a state of total despair.

If she left now she would have to run the gauntlet of reporters, but even that was preferable to staying here and suffering the torture of King’s contempt.

He didn’t love her, and she’d been a fool to imagine that there could ever have been any chance of him loving her, she thought, castigating herself for being so stupid.

She’d been a fling. A way of distracting himself from everything else that had happened over the past week. But what she had thought had begun to grow between them would never have stood the test of time if what little respect and belief he had had in her could be pounded into the ground at the first hurdle.

She heard the growl of the Lamborghini as she was dragging her suitcase up onto the bed, rushing to the window in time to see it tearing down past the curve in the drive towards the electrically operated gates.

It didn’t stop to appease the paparazzi who would have had to leap aside to let it pass, and her only thought, as she visualised the gates closing behind the powerful car and heard the sound of its throbbing engine roaring away, was that she would probably never see Kingsley Clayborne again.

P
REGNANT?
How could she be? Rayne asked herself over and over, as she had been doing since it had been confirmed over a week ago now.

She had been taking the Pill. A low dosage one, it was true. But she’d believed it to be a foolproof contraceptive. Apart from which, when she’d made love with King over those wild few days in Monaco, she’d felt an added security in the knowledge that it was probably the safest time of her cycle.

But Nature, it seemed, was mocking her in its triumph over seeing her impregnated with King Clayborne’s seed. Against all the odds. Against their best intentions. And against—she was certain where King was concerned, anyway—his strongest wishes. She was only relieved that he wasn’t around to find out.

Queasily, she wheeled her supermarket trolley to the checkout and started unloading its contents.

It had been over ten weeks since she had left the Monaco mansion, fleeing in a cab—doing as King had done and ignoring the paparazzi—intent only on getting the first flight home. Ten weeks since she had left a note for him, propped up on his bedside cabinet, to the effect that she’d been telling him the truth and wishing him well.

He hadn’t responded. Nor had she expected him to. She was just a girl he had had a good time with, for as short a time as it had been doomed to last.

The press had hounded her for a couple of weeks, but when she refused to comment on the alleged accusations, or on her relationship with King, they had backed off and it had all blown over. Probably, she guessed, because she wasn’t newsworthy enough to warrant any more attention, since it was obvious she wasn’t one of his
favoured
women.

And now she was carrying his child. A child whose two grandfathers had wound up hating each other, and whose father certainly didn’t have any love for its mother.

Inserting her credit card into the machine when the assistant gave her the total amount of her bill, Rayne felt the bite of anguished tears behind her eyes as she attempted to key in her pin number.

‘Take it out and try again,’ the checkout girl told her in a sing-song voice when the machine refused to accept the number she had given it.

She did, only to have the same thing happen again—twice.

She heard the girl muttering something about getting it authorised when a deep voice from the queue behind her suggested, ‘Allow me.’

Rayne swung round and found herself looking up into the steely gaze of two heart-wrenchingly familiar blue eyes.

‘King!’ Every self-destructive nerve pulsed into life and everything else around her seemed to melt away, leaving her breathless from his tall, dark, imposing masculinity. ‘You don’t have to,’ she uttered croakily, trembling so much she was hardly able to speak. But he was already reaching around her and inserting his credit card in the slot that had rejected hers with comparatively steady fingers, making Rayne catch her breath from his suffocating nearness and the achingly familiar scent of his cologne.

The girl with the sing-song voice looked up at him dreamily as she handed him the till receipt, with nothing having dared question his credit-worthiness!

‘Have a good day, sir,’ she said deferentially, beaming up at him and completely ignoring Rayne.

‘You can’t do this,’ she protested as he tucked the till receipt with his credit card into the inside pocket of the dark suit jacket he was wearing. A hand-stitched, impeccably tailored suit worn with a white silk shirt that made her feel positively drab in comparison. Her beige cropped trousers with an elasticated waist and her one-size-too-big black T-shirt she’d bought to accommodate her tender and already expanding breasts just didn’t compete.

‘It seems I just did,’ he remarked dryly. Already, with one arm, he was scooping up her tote bag, which was so full that she’d have had to carry it in both of hers, and with his other hand at her elbow, without any preamble, he said, ‘Come on.’

‘Where?’ she demanded, flabbergasted.

Who did he think he was that he thought he could just march in here and start taking over her life? But as they were passing the counter in front of the in-store bakery, the sweet smell of the cakes was so cloying that a wave of nausea suddenly surged up inside her and had her fleeing towards the merciful sign she spotted just inside the Exit door.

When she emerged a little later, looking pale and with every trace of lipstick she had been wearing wiped clean away, King was waiting just a few steps from the door she had disappeared through.

A thick eyebrow climbed his forehead as Rayne approached. ‘I thought you’d taken off through a back window or something,’ he drawled, looking faintly amused. But then his eyes scanned her pinched wan face and those devastatingly handsome features took on a serious cast. ‘You look dreadful,’ he commented, his examining gaze too probing, too disconcertingly shrewd. ‘Are you all right?’

No, I’m not! I’m having your baby!
she wanted to fling at him bitterly, but knew that he wouldn’t welcome hearing that.

‘I thought about it,’ she parried in response to his remark
about disappearing out of a window. ‘But I thought I might get myself arrested, having already tried to use a pin number that wouldn’t work.’ It dawned on her now that she’d had so much on her mind she’d obviously inserted the wrong card.

‘That isn’t funny,’ he chided softly.

‘No, it isn’t. It was downright embarrassing,’ she expressed, feigning a tight little laugh. ‘But I needn’t have worried because you were on hand to compensate for my inadequacies.’ With a sideways tilt of her head, she was unable to stop herself from adding, ‘Just like old times, hmm?’

‘And, just like old times, you’re determined to keep me at arm’s length and treat me like I’m your bitterest enemy.’

Well, what did he expect? Rayne thought poignantly. Instead, though, with the barest movement of her shoulder, she said, ‘How’s Mitch?’

‘He’s fine,’ he said impatiently, as though he had no inclination to discuss his father just at that moment.

Rayne merely nodded, relieved at least that his father had recovered from his heart scare and she looked away from his indomitable son towards a stand of mixed doughnuts marked ‘Tuesday’s Best Buys’, biting her lower lip.

‘Why did you run away from me, Rayne?’

With her eyes downcast to hide the pain in them, she said flippantly, ‘I needed the Ladies.’

His chest lifted on an impatient sigh. ‘I didn’t mean now. You know exactly what I’m talking about.’

‘What did you expect me to do?’ she queried accusingly. ‘You thought I was a two-faced liar, to put it bluntly, and I couldn’t convince you otherwise. Oh, I can understand why I hadn’t exactly earned your undying trust, but I didn’t deserve the things you said to me, so I thought it was best to leave.’

‘Without telling me?’ The disbelief he must have felt when he’d come back that day and realised that she’d gone was still apparent in his voice. ‘By leaving me a polite little note?’ She thought at first that it was pain pulling his features into
tight, tense lines until, torturously, she reminded herself of how little he cared for her.

‘OK.’ She shrugged, trying to sound nonchalant rather than as if she were dying inside from her unrequited love for him. ‘So I should have been grown-up and mature and told you I was leaving, and if the way I did it offended you then I apologise. I’m sorry. But you didn’t exactly make me feel like sticking around.’

Yet that didn’t stop her from wanting him now as fiercely and as desperately as she had ever done. Now, when he stood before her with that breath-catching vitality that paid homage to everything that was fit and strong and so intensely masculine, and which was making her weak with longing for his arms around her. Now, when she looked her worst and didn’t have a chance in hell of ever securing his love. Now, when she was carrying his child …

She felt as if she would choke on her emotions—which, with the cloyingly sweet smell of confectionery that was wafting towards them, brought another wave of nausea rising up in her.

‘Oh, heaven …’ she breathed, bringing her hand to her mouth to try and curb the sickness, not wanting to make a fool of herself here in public. In front of him. Not wanting him to know …

‘What the …?’

She steeled herself against his hard scrutiny, fighting her reaction to him, which wasn’t helping her queasiness at all as strong masculine fingers caught her hand and brought it down from her face so that he could study her tense, wary features.

She looked pale. Too pale, he thought. In fact he would have said washed out, King decided, noticing the dark smudges under her eyes that made her appear fragile and exceedingly tired. And yet, even like that, she was still able to produce that familiar kick in his loins, he realised as his gaze slid over her body.

She was wearing an unflatteringly loose T-shirt over less than flattering trousers and beneath her top her beautifully full breasts seemed to be straining against the inadequate cups of her bra. Yet she was still the most beautiful woman he knew, with that long, sensuous red hair that was inviting him to run his fingers through it and those guarded green eyes that were half-veiled from him by her thick lashes as though she were concealing …

And suddenly it hit him with a force that for a few moments seemed to leave him winded.

‘Are you pregnant?’ he whispered huskily when he could speak again, his eyes narrowing into steel-blue speculative slits.

Rayne swallowed, grateful that the nausea was subsiding. ‘What makes you think that?’ she hedged.

‘I wasn’t born yesterday.’

It was no good denying it, she realised. He could calculate just as well as she could.

She tossed her head up, throwing caution to the winds. ‘And what if I am?’

‘If you are, then we’ve got rather a lot to talk about, don’t you think?’ he proposed, his half-veiled eyes inscrutable, his mouth grim.

‘What is there to say?’ She gave a hopeless little shrug. ‘It wasn’t supposed to happen.’ Pray heaven he wouldn’t think she would ask him for anything, she worried, mortified.

‘But it clearly has. And, as the father … I take it I’m not being presumptuous in deducing that I
am
the father. All right,’ he capitulated, putting up a hand to ward off the silent attack in her eyes. ‘That wasn’t intended as an insult.’

‘No?’
she uttered with biting accusation.

‘No,’ he underscored. ‘And, as I was about to say … as your child’s father, I think you’ll agree that that gives me some rights as to how we proceed.’

‘We?’ Rayne emphasised, so bowled over by how he was
suddenly taking control that she was scarcely aware of being guided outside until they were in the car park.

The warmth of the late summer afternoon hit them after the cooling air-conditioning inside.

‘Why didn’t you tell me, Rayne?’ he enquired, ignoring her last comment and aiming his remote control switch at the familiar black beast of the Lamborghini parked just a few strides away.

The vehicle’s immediate response had heads turning to look, first at the car and then at the man who was rich enough to be driving it. Several pairs of feminine eyes feasted on him before sliding to Rayne, whom they quickly dismissed as too insignificant to be the lover of such a stupendously attractive man.

‘It wasn’t your fault,’ she responded, unable to tell him that she had ached to hear from him again. That since finding out she was pregnant she had wanted to contact him but had balked at such a rash action, fearing what his reaction might be. He might think she had allowed herself to get pregnant to try and trap him, or just to get money out of him. After all, it wasn’t as if they had even had a proper relationship …