fool! What was she letting herself get into? Why had she imagined she could come here without inviting a whole heap of trouble? Yet—from another life, it seemed—reluctantly she was aware of how his body would feel beneath her hands, of the hard, burning arousal of his kisses. Because Alexia had known. But that Alexia was dead. And all she had to do was play the part until her purpose here was accomplished…
‘Unlike you,’ she said softly, refusing to be swayed by the power of his sexuality, ‘I’ve always been rather particular with whom I play.’
He chuckled at that. Perhaps he didn’t mind being reminded that he had once been photographed with an actress who’d later become mixed up in a pretty hairraising scandal. ‘An unfortunate liaison,’ he said dismissively.
‘Very,’ she said pointedly, although she knew that his integrity had emerged unscathed.
‘Nevertheless, until I’m satisfied as to exactly who you are, you’ll be coming back to Moorlands with me where I can keep an eye on you for however long it takes.’
For however long what took? Proving her false identity? Was that what he was hoping for?
‘I’m doing no such thing! I’ve got a very adequate hotel room in town, thanks!’ she snapped, deciding that staying under the same roof with this man could lead her into nothing but trouble. ‘Naturally I’ll want to—’ she started, but he cut in, his expression inexorable, his mouth grim.
‘You’ll do exactly as I say.’
She wanted to argue against it, but that overriding determination in him—that tyrannical streak that she knew very well was characteristic of the Masterton men—was too strong. It was the reason why Shirley had left home, why she had struggled for an existence on her own with only her child after Page had prevented her marriage, why she’d been dragged down into the unfortunate lifestyle that had led to her overdose. Accidental, the coroner had said, brought about by a lethal blend of booze and barbiturates.
Something speared through Alex—something cutting and deep. Oh, to find some skeleton in the impeccable Masterton cupboard! Particularly in the high and mighty, unimpeachable York’s!
But refusing to do as he said, insisting on staying at the hotel, wouldn’t help her in trying to convince him that she was his cousin, nor to find those letters which, suddenly, had become the most important things in her life. And so, feigning sweetness, with a totally false smile, she uttered, ‘As you put it so hospitably, how can I refuse?’
MOORLANDS stood in its own grounds on the fringes of a small Somerset resort, a beautifully grey-gabled, Cotswold-style house with fields rising to woodland on one side and the town stretching away to the sea on the other.
As they came up the long drive in York’s powerful saloon Alex was relieved that the journey from the church had been a short one, so that she hadn’t had to engage in much conversation with him.
‘The beech hedge was planted courtesy of Edmundo, our long-standing gardener,’ he commented about the copper-leafed boundary fence hung with cobwebs of frost on their right. ‘But then you wouldn’t remember him, would you?’ he breathed derisively, bringing the car around a triangular grassy island with an old and gnarled maple tree at its centre, testing her again—as he would continue to test her, she realised, every step of the way.
‘As a matter of fact I do,’ she shot back. ‘Portuguese, isn’t he?’ And the only person at Moorlands whom Shirley had spoken of with any affection, she remembered. ‘Didn’t he come to work here the year my mother was born?’
York slanted her a look that said it would take more than that to impress him. ‘Very good,’ he drawled. And then he added, ‘How old is his son?’
‘What?’
He had brought the car between two ivy-covered walls onto the deserted, cobbled forecourt, the look he gave her hard and inquisitorial when she didn’t immediately respond.
‘He didn’t have a son—just two daughters,’ she assured him after a long moment’s deliberation, colour swamping her cheeks as she went on heatedly, ‘If you think I’m going to spend my time here indulging in some sort of question-and-answer game with you, you’re very much mistaken, York Masterton! Either you accept me for who I am or you throw me out and let me go back to the hotel, which I’d be more than happy to do!’
He smiled knowingly. ‘I’ll bet you would!’ he said, cutting the engine of the BMW and turning towards her with his eyes anything but friendly. ‘Why didn’t you come here straight away instead of turning up at the funeral like some fugitive if you’ve got nothing to hide? Or would that have been too complicated? Did you imagine I’d be at more of a disadvantage meeting you in the churchyard like that, too unsettled by the occasion to think about much else, rather than if you’d faced me here, on my home territory?’
She hadn’t reckoned on his being quite so resolute in not believing her. But she had all the papers, so why was he managing to make her feel so unnerved?
‘This isn’t your home,’ was all she could think of to say at that moment. From what she had read in the papers, she’d thought that these days he lived in a luxury apartment in London.
‘It is now.’ Disconcertingly, his arm came across the back of her seat, and she almost hated herself for the small tingle that ran through her as he leaned across and murmured in a voice of mocking sensuality, ‘Mine and yours.’ She had to make a conscious effort to desist from inhaling the subtle, tangy spice of his aftershave. ‘That should make a very…interesting partnership.’
‘A partnership—with you?’ she choked, despising her body’s totally unwelcome awareness of him. ‘I’d rather go into business with a gorilla!’
He laughed without humour, that strong, masculine jaw hardening. ‘You’ve certainly come with some pretty well-conceived opinions about me, haven’t you…cousin?’ His tone derided the title. ‘Well, for your information, they’re all true. But who said anything about business?’
Alex felt her throat working nervously. Whoever he thought she was—his estranged cousin out for all she could get, or a total impostor—he had no qualms about using that powerful masculinity to try and scare her off.
Well, he wasn’t going to succeed!
Ignoring his innuendo, she uttered nonetheless unsteadily, ‘I told you—I didn’t come here for the money.’
‘Then what for—if you’re who you say you are?’ he demanded, allowing her to breathe again when he moved back, absently taking his keys out of the ignition. ‘And you haven’t answered my other question. Why were you talking round the graveyard instead of coming here to see me first?’
Alex bit her tongue to stop herself retorting that she hadn’t been ‘stalking’, as he had put it, advising herself that it would be in her best interests not to antagonise him deliberately.
‘I thought you’d answered that yourself. Why, I’m positively terrified of you, aren’t I, York?’ she couldn’t, however, resist tossing back sarcastically with a pale, beautifully manicured hand against her chest ‘The truth is, I didn’t get into Heathrow until breakfast time yesterday morning.
