prepared to think she was. He was finding, he realised, that he harboured very conflicting opinions about Rayne Carpenter, and it wasn’t in his nature to be confounded by anyone. And on top of that there was still this strong and nagging feeling of having known her before …
‘We all do things according to what our consciences tell us we should do, don’t we?’ she suggested meaningfully, wishing she could control her tongue and not let her emotions run away with her until she was ready to hit him—and his father—with the truth.
‘Should it prick my conscience that every time you come within a yard of me I want to take you to bed?’ he said softly, fondling her hair. ‘Or that you want me to against your own better judgement?’
The space between them was suddenly charged with so much electricity it was as if someone had lit a whole boxful of fire-crackers and Rayne’s heart started hammering in her chest.
‘Can we drop this subject? Please,’ she breathed emphatically.
Her breath seemed to stick in her lungs as his arm came across the back of her seat, bringing him closer to her.
‘Have you never heard the expression “He who pleads is lost”?’ he murmured with his smile predatory, his lashes thick and dark, shielding his eyes as they rested on the fullness of her trembling, slightly parted mouth.
When his lips touched hers it was only to make contact with the outer corner of her mouth, a contact that left her craving the full onslaught of his kiss, made her grasp the seat to stop herself from twining her arms around his warm, muscled torso as he lifted his head.
‘What’s wrong, Rayne? Can’t you accept the consequences of what you’ve got yourself into?’ His voice was quite steady, not ragged with sexual desire as she’d imagined it would be. In fact there was a note of hidden danger in the very choice of his words.
‘I wasn’t aware I’d got myself into anything,’ she uttered tremulously, knowing he was still suspicious of her, still vigilant, even if she had imagined that softening in him just now, because she had, she realised, telling herself now that she had been a fool to do so.
‘Then you obviously need convincing,’ he said.
She expected him to demonstrate exactly what he meant, but he didn’t. Instead he simply started the powerful car and drove them back to the villa.
So what had he meant by that? she wondered when, once there, he left her to her own devices, abandoning her to deal with some business in the study. Did he intend to keep her on tenterhooks—make her wait until her guard was down before proving his point to her again? That she couldn’t resist him. Or had he guessed the secret she was keeping from him and Mitch and was merely luring her into a false sense of security until such time as he disclosed what he had uncovered?
And that was a very unfortunate pun, Rayne decided with a grimace because, if she wasn’t careful, she was in danger of him not only guessing who she really was before she was ready to tell him, but also of winding up in his bed! And wouldn’t that be a double victory for him? She shivered just from the thought of it, although even self-loathing couldn’t temper the excitement that heated her blood every time she considered him being her lover.
‘I don’t think you should be doing this,’ Rayne counselled, watching Mitch manoeuvring his chair along the wooded path where he had insisted she bring him today. ‘Getting out so early so as to give everyone the slip is one thing, but persuading me to bring you over such uneven ground as this—’
‘Will you shut up?’ Mitch said, carrying on ahead of her, his hard mottled hands on the wheels pushing him stubbornly to his goal.
The trees thinned out, making Rayne gasp, not only from the sheer danger of the cliff edge just below them, but at the panorama of nothing but glittering sea and sky that had suddenly opened up in front of them.
‘Can you show me anything better than that?’ Mitch challenged, waving a hand towards the view. ‘I used to come here a lot when I was young. It’s where I proposed to my first wife.’
‘King’s mother,’ Rayne said tentatively.
‘Did you know she left me?’ He gave a harsh bark of laughter. ‘Of course you did. Everybody knows it. Everyone knows I’m not the easiest of men to live with.’
Rayne glanced down at him, noting something that sounded remarkably like regret in his voice. Did he still miss the woman who had deserted him and their five-year-old child? Miss her still, even though he’d finally found someone else to take her place?
‘As a boy, King blamed himself for his mother leaving us. For leaving him,’ Mitch was saying, much to Rayne’s surprise. ‘It hardened him. Made a cynic of him. Especially where marriage and family is concerned. We never could form the bond we should have formed. He was already a man by the time I met Karen.’
‘Your second wife?’ A woman half his age, who had died so tragically when their car had come off the road, Rayne reflected, although it was King she was reluctantly thinking of. King, the child who had lost a mother, even though she was still alive. And King the man, who was left scarred by the desertion. Left hard and uncaring. Unable to trust …
Mitch nodded and started to cough. ‘Here. Help me with this thing, will you?’ he spluttered.
He was having difficulty opening the zip of a leather pouch he’d brought with him. When she gave it back to him, he swore when he looked inside.
‘What’s wrong?’ Rayne asked him anxiously.
‘Does anything have to be wrong?’ he wheezed, turning his chair with such angry force that it lurched sideways, lodging one wheel in a grassy hollow.
Rayne shot over to grab the handles, trying to pull it free.
‘I can’t move it!’ she gasped, finding the man’s bulk and the awkward angle of the chair too much for her inadequate strength. To add to that, Mitch’s breathing was beginning to worry her.
‘I’m going to ring King,’ she said quickly, taking out her phone when her attempts to dislodge the chair proved ineffectual.
‘No! We don’t need him,’ Mitch protested to her dismay.
‘I’ll have to,’ Rayne told him, too frightened by the danger of the situation to be intimidated by him, even if every bone in her body rebelled at having to explain to King.
He answered her call on the second ring, his voice deep and strong, the voice of a man who could take on the world and come out fighting.
‘King! It’s Mitch! We’re …’ Quickly she acquainted him with their exact location. ‘He’s got his chair stuck in a rut and he seems to have come out without his medication. It’s for his breathing. I think it’s—’
‘I know where it is,’ he rasped, and that was it. He was on his way before she even had time to cut the call.
Rayne couldn’t have been more grateful when she heard the throb of the Lamborghini’s engine. Through the trees she saw the car practically skid to a halt and she went weak with relief when King leapt out and raced towards them without bothering to close the door.
‘Thank heaven you’re here!’ she breathed.
It
