A Delicious Deception Read Free Page B

condition, which was why Rayne had been hesitant to tell him who she was and why she was there. ‘Do you think you should?’
    ‘For heaven’s sake, girl! You have the audacity to question my actions while you’re a guest in my house?’
    ‘I didn’t mean to.’ Nor did she want to find herself worrying over someone who had treated her father so abominably. It felt like a betrayal, somehow. But her father’s ex-colleague and business partner seemed world-weary and surprisingly bitter, she had decided over the past few days, guessing that it was probably because of his disability, although having an heir as forceful and dynamic as King couldn’t help. But she was getting used to her host’s outbursts, startling though they were, and so she took the glass he was handing her and poured him another drink.
    ‘You’re behaving just like King,’ he persisted. ‘And whilehe’s excused through blood, I won’t take it from anyone who isn’t. D’you understand?’
    ‘Perfectly,’ she breathed with mock deference as she handed him his refill, and caught a surprising glint of warmth in his watery blue eyes. ‘If you don’t need anything else,’ she tagged on, uncomfortable even with fraternizing with him because of what he had done in the past, ‘I think I’ll get an early night.’
    He smiled, gesturing her away with his glass, his angry mood dispelled. ‘Good idea. Oh, Rayne …’ Stopping before the open door that separated the luxurious living quarters from the terrace, she turned round with the scent of a potted gardenia trespassing on her senses. ‘About King … Did you do something to antagonise him before I came out?’
    Her heart skipped a nervous little beat. ‘No. Why?’
    ‘I haven’t seen him quite so … intense before.’
    She shrugged, trying to shake off the feeling of exposure she had sensed under those steely-blue eyes, trying not to remember how she had felt in the past. ‘Perhaps he had a hard day.’
    ‘Nonsense. He thrives on hard work and pressure where lesser mortals crack up and fall by the wayside.’
    ‘He sounds like a dynamo.’
    ‘He is.’
    ‘Even dynamos can break down.’
    ‘If you think that, then you don’t know King.’
    Don’t I?
she thought bitterly, but said, ‘Obviously not.’
    ‘But you will,’ he said, seemingly with some relish. ‘He’s going to be around for a while.’
    ‘That’s nice.’ She was finding it difficult keeping her voice light, making out that she didn’t care one way or the other, while her insides were screaming with guilt and resentment and a whole heap of worrying doubts over what she was getting herself into.
    ‘And Rayne …’ About to step inside, keen to escape to herroom, Rayne glanced reluctantly over her shoulder as Mitch called to her again. ‘Be nice to him,’ he advised with just a hint of caution. ‘For both our sakes.’
    I’ll fall at his feet, shall I?
she suggested silently.
Like I’m sure every nubile woman he meets probably does!
    Her face ached from her forced smile as she got out, ‘Of course,’ aware that she was suddenly in danger of finding herself in way over her head, even as she told herself that she refused to be intimidated by King’s arrival. He might look like the stuff of every woman’s dreams, she accepted grudgingly, as the spacious interior of his father’s summer retreat, which had astounded her with its elegance and luxury ever since she’d been there, now felt as though it was swallowing her up. And if just a compliment from him or the most casual of physical contact—like shaking hands with him, for goodness’ sake!—made her pulse quicken a bit … well … it was only her hormones working, wasn’t it? She was only human, after all! But she’d come to Monaco to try to right the wrong that had been done to her father and she had no intention of letting a man like King—or her uncontrollable hormones—stand in her way!

CHAPTER TWO
    T HE shapes and tones and hues of Monte