could say that! her heart screamed bitterly, because there had been nothing that had shamed or disillusioned her more than her reckless crush on him.
‘I just don’t go in for casual sleeping around.’
‘I’m pleased to hear it,’ he responded deeply, his eyes fixing on her with a dark intensity. She looked really quite shaken, he thought, wondering why, when in every other way she seemed so much a woman of the world. ‘For what it’s worth … it doesn’t rank very highly with me, either.’
‘Hah!’ Despite her brittle little laugh, she couldn’t help wondering if he was telling the truth. She wanted to kick herself for hoping that he was.
‘You really have a very low opinion of me, don’t you?’ he remarked, running a long tapered hand through his thick hair. She was surprised to notice that it was trembling slightly.
So even the high-and-mighty Kingsley Clayborne was human!
She wondered why she was even allowing herself to grant him any concessions, and put it down to the fact that she was so affected by him—by what she had allowed him to do to her—that she was still too unsettled by it to feel anything.
‘Why should it matter to you what I—’ she began as she was smoothing back her hair, but broke off when a stick prodding the door he’d failed to close brought it flying open. Both of them had been too otherwise preoccupied to hear the wheelchair approaching.
‘King? Rayne? Oh, there you both are!’ Mitchell Clayborne’s colour was unusually high as he manoeuvred his chair into the room and Rayne guessed he’d been doing too much, against his doctor’s orders.
‘King, I wanted you to retrieve the book I dropped down behind the bedside cabinet but, since Rayne’s here, she can do it for me and perhaps read a little to me. Have you finished with her?’
King’s eyes were speculative as, on his feet now, he regarded her from his superior height, looking totally unfazed by what had just happened between them.
‘Yes, I’ve finished with her,’ he told his father.
Reluctantly inhaling his scent, keen to get away, Rayne brushed past him, although she could tell from that slight compression of his devastating mouth that what he was really saying was that where she was concerned he hadn’t even begun yet.
THE following day Rayne decided to escape from the house for a while, needing some time to decide what she was going to do.
She was uncomfortable associating with the people who had wreaked such devastation on her family, but she couldn’t see what else she could do. She didn’t want to leave there without the evidence or admission that she was determined to secure for her father’s sake.
She had started asking Mitch questions last night while she had been reading to him—very subtly, and supposedly innocently. Like how he had begun in business. And when exactly had he hit upon the idea for the MiracleMed software. How he had felt when it had taken off.
‘King must have been very proud of you,’ she’d ventured, assessing his reaction, looking for any change in his hard, world-weary features, any note of guilt in his gravelly voice.
He’d seemed all right at first. But then he’d grown more and more agitated, even when their conversation had reverted to more casual topics. As well he should have! Rayne thought bitterly.
He’d looked so unwell, though, and had sounded so breathless that her conscience wouldn’t allow her to ask any more leading questions.
‘I think you should go to bed,’ she had advised worriedly, ringing the bell to summon one of the male members of staff to help him. She was frustrated, though, that yet another day had gone by and she was still no nearer to realising her goal.
Now, this morning, he had sent for her and told her that he didn’t need her services today, and so she’d decided to take herself down into the town for a proper look around.
‘You’ll need some of these,’ he’d told her from his bed, pressing a whole wad of banknotes into her hand.
Shocked and embarrassed, she had thrust them back at him. ‘I can’t,’ she’d protested, appalled at taking money from anyone—let alone someone she despised so much.
‘Don’t be silly. How do you think you’re going to get around and buy the odd souvenir?’ he’d demanded of her gruffly. ‘With those big bright eyes and that naturally winning smile?’
Shrugging off his compliment, she had to accept that he was right. Being robbed hadn’t exactly left her in a position to be proud.
‘I’ll pay you back,’ she’d promised resolutely, not only for his benefit, but for her own. She didn’t like being in this man’s debt any more than she wanted to like him, but he was making it very hard for her not to do either.
Now, coming down into the hall, her heart sank when King appeared, looking dynamic in dark blue corduroys and an ivory-white shirt that left his forearms bare, just as she was asking one of the maids in her somewhat limited French if she could call her a cab.
One fluent instruction from him in the girl’s own language had the young maid almost bobbing in compliance before she cast a swift glance at Rayne and darted away.
‘What did you say to her?’ Rayne enquired, puzzled, because it certainly didn’t sound like anything as simple as ordering a taxi.
‘I told her I’d take care of it,’ he replied succinctly and without any of the mental disturbance that just the sight of him was producing in her.
‘I don’t need you to rescue me from every difficult situation,’ she assured him with a slight tremor marking her words, unintentionally conveying to him how unsettled he was making her feel.
‘Nevertheless … you’ve got me.’ There was triumph in the clear blue eyes that drifted lazily over her tie-waisted chequered blouse and white cut-offs. ‘Now, where did you want to go?’
‘Nowhere in particular,’ she said, being deliberately obstructive. She wanted his help even less than she wanted his father’s, and she certainly didn’t welcome how her body was responding just from the way he was looking at her. ‘I was just going to do a bit of sightseeing—and without having to worry about the car,’ she told him, wishing he’d just take out his phone and order the cab he’d said he’d deal with.
But with a hand at her elbow, sending her thoughts spinning into chaos, he said, ‘In that case, I’ll be more than delighted to show you around.’
She wanted to protest. To tell him that she was going out because the strain was proving too much, being in this house with her father’s bitterest enemies and not feeling able to tell them who she was. But mainly, she decided, it was because of King himself. Because he disturbed her equilibrium so much and made her feel so ashamed of how he made her feel every time he came near her that she wanted to put as much distance between him and herself as she possibly could.
But with King Clayborne, she was discovering, argument
