suite.’
She could see the question in those shrewd, perceptive eyes: was she guessing, or had she simply been informed?
‘In that case…’ With a gesture of exaggerated politeness he indicated for her to precede him out of the room, guided her across the sunny, tastefully furnished hall and up the curving staircase to the floor above.
‘This will be your room.’ He threw open one of the doors off the long landing. Sunlight streamed in from the leaded casement windows, spilling across the cream and floral duvet on the double bed.
This room overlooked the back of the house. Outside, the manicured gardens and the sweeping fields rising to the woods still glittered under a silver veil. A picturebook landscape. Lifeless, Alex decided, until she spotted a wisp of smoke drifting upwards from the chimney of a farm building in the distance.
‘The bathroom,’ she guessed, moving towards a door.
‘Wrong.’ His voice came, deep and relentlessly testing, from behind her. ‘My room. It might seem a little too cosy to you, but at least this way I can keep account of exactly what you’re doing.’
Alex’s feet pivoted on the pale, patently expensive carpet ‘Is that how you get your kicks?’ she breathed accusingly. ‘Listening to what your guests get up to?’
York’s mouth pulled down at the corners. ‘Not usually. But then we haven’t exactly established whether you’re a guest or not, have we?’
‘Haven’t we?’ she retorted, his suspicions beginning to test her reserves. And, though she hadn’t intended using it in any way as a defence, she couldn’t help adding, ‘I believe I’m co-owner, which surely gives me rights to come and go as I please, or even to bring friends back here if I so think fit?’
She had no intention of doing anything of the sort—she had said it only to show him that she couldn’t easily be cowed by his infernal arrogance—because although she got on well with people she was very much a loner. As for men, she had never met anyone who could break down her reserves enough to make her want to sleep with him. Only once. But she wasn’t even going to think about that.
‘You do and I’ll throw you both out,’ he rasped, interpreting her remark exactly as he wanted to. ‘No part of this house becomes yours until the necessary documentation’s drawn up to say that it does.’
‘So you’ll use strong-arm tactics? Like you did before. Sheer brute strength just so long as you could exercise Page’s every last whim in trying to separate Shirley from the one thing she cared about most—her daughter!’
His face appeared to turn savage beneath the raven sleekness of his hair. ‘Shirley didn’t care about anyone but herself—so don’t lay it on that thick, dear child. And never—never—breathe a denigrating word to me about my uncle in this house again. And if I’m not too mistaken—’ his voice was more controlled and, like his expression, suddenly coolly derisive ‘—I don’t think it would have taken very much persuasion on my part to induce her hot little daughter to stay.’
‘God! You’re conceited!’
‘Am I? Perhaps we ought to put it to the test.’
‘Don’t you dare!’
She didn’t know what happened next, only that he had caught the hands that flew up instinctively to fend him off, securing them behind her back, and primitive sensations rushed through her as she found herself locked against his hard body.
‘Let me go!’ She could barely drag the words past her lips, panic rising in her as he laughed harshly.
‘Why? Because it’s there now—that attraction, isn’t it…cousin dear?’ His words mocked, cruelly, relentlessly. ‘Is that why you’re putting on such a marvellous act of being affronted? Or is it the thought of sex between cousins? That never worried you before. But if Shirley didn’t make it clear enough—we’re only connected by marriage. Page and my father were only stepbrothers, so if the thought of any blood ties between us bothers you you can stop worrying about that right now.’
‘I’m not worried!’ she tossed up at him unthinkingly, her face defiant, though the startling reality of his hard strength was making her senses swim.
‘In that case—’ his mouth took on a sensual curve ‘—I don’t believe I exactly welcomed you the way a cousin should.’
She couldn’t have prevented what happened next if she had wanted to—the way his mouth suddenly covered hers, both gentle and yet shockingly erotic, those hands splayed across her back, holding her loosely but ready to turn hard and show their determined power if she dared to resist.
She sensed enough about that to stand still and take it, her mind struggling to reject the sickening excitement that was suddenly rising in her blood, a raw stirring of primitive needs she hadn’t anticipated or been prepared for, every cell tensing with her body’s acknowledgement of his hard power and his musky male scent beneath the subtle aftershave as his mouth played with leisurely insolence over hers.
His eyes were hooded, veiled by the thick sable of his lashes when he eventually lifted his head.
‘No response? And yet no resistance either.’
‘What did you imagine?’ The hard rise and fall of her breasts was the only indication of her shattered selfcomposure. ‘That if I was who I said I was there would be?’
He started to say something, but Celia’s voice in the corridor, exclaiming, ‘Oh, there you are!’ pulled them apart.
The woman came in, commenting to Alex, ‘I trust York’s doing everything possible to make you comfortable.’
‘Everything,’ she heard him drawl meaningfully, when she was still too shaken by his kiss to answer, and she was relieved when his mother, promising to see her downstairs, asked if she could have a word with York about her travel arrangements, which left Alex mercifully alone.
She didn’t have to take this! she thought, wiping the back of her hand across her mouth. It smelt of his aftershave lotion and her lips were still tingling from his calculated humiliation. She could go home. Forget about why she had come. It was a long shot, anyway, that she would find those letters. She could go now. Pick up her case and get the train straight back to London. But that would be letting York Masterton get the better of her. And for Shirley’s sake—for her own sake—she wasn’t going to allow him to do that.
He was dangerously attractive, a threat to any healthy woman’s equilibrium, but she just had to make sure that she didn’t fall into the trap of succumbing to any tricks he might try and use to get her to weaken before that devastating and shockingly confident sexuality. If she did, she’d be courting trouble, she assured herself chasteningly, reminding herself of how York and his uncle had both played their part in driving Shirley away.
Well, she wasn’t going to let a Masterton man drive her away until she was good and ready! she resolved, with such vehemence that she scarcely noticed the jaded practicality of the en suite bathroom she finally found, or the lack of any really homely touches in this late millionaire’s home.
The red stone of the quarry gaped like an ugly mouth on the undulating Somerset landscape.
‘When my step-grandfather—Page’s father—started
