tiptoe, closing her eyes, waiting, waiting, waiting for that first blissful moment of contact...
Her eyes sprang open when she heard him take a step back from her. His expression was as stiff and formal as the wallpaper on the wall behind him. ‘I’ll deposit the money in your bank account once I have a legal contract drawn up,’ he said.
She arched a brow. ‘The terms being?’
‘If you speak out of turn to the press you’ll have to repay the amount in full plus twenty per cent interest.’
Aiesha pushed her pursed lips from side to side. ‘Twenty per cent seems a bit steep to me. Let’s make it ten.’
‘Fifteen.’
‘Five, or I tell the press right here and now we’re having a tawdry little affair that will be over once this snow melts.’
His jaw worked for a moment before he gave a curt nod of agreement. But she wasn’t sure if he was agreeing because he thought the deal fair or because he couldn’t wait to get away from her. His brusque statement suggested the latter. ‘I’m going to the study to work for the rest of the evening.’
Aiesha hitched one hip higher than the other in her best femme-fatale pose. ‘All work and no play makes James a very dull boy.’
His eyes held hers in a tight little lock that made the backs of her knees tingle. ‘I know how to play. I’m just a little more careful than most over choosing my playmates.’
She curved her mouth in a mocking manner. He might find it easy to resist her now but she wasn’t finished with him yet. She would bring him to his knees before the week was out. He would not be so straitlaced and sure of himself once she had him where she wanted him. She could hardly wait.
‘I bet Phoebe Frozen-Face doesn’t do it up against the kitchen bench or outside under the stars on a hot sweaty night. I bet she’s a bed and missionary girl with all the lights off. Am I right?’
His lips came together in a flat white line. ‘Please spare me the sordid details of your sexual practices. I’m not interested.’
‘Yes, you are.’ Aiesha all but purred the words at him. ‘I bet you’re wondering what it would feel like to do me right here and now. On the rug at our feet. So rough one or both of us gets carpet burn.’
The words were provocative, goading, tempting. The erotic images they triggered in her mind even more so. She knew she was being utterly brazen but something about his steely resistance fired her determination to have him finally admit his desire for her. It was the ultimate challenge.
He was the ultimate challenge.
James gave her a dismissive look but she noticed the hammer was back in the lower quadrant of his jaw. ‘Keep your Vegas-showgirl tactics for someone who actually gives a damn,’ he said. ‘I have far better things to do with my time.’
Aiesha watched as he turned and strode purposefully out of the room, his back and shoulders as stiff as a plank, his hands balled into fists as hard as cannonballs at his sides.
An anticipatory smile turned up the corners of her mouth.
I am so going to win this.
CHAPTER FOUR
JAMES STARED AT his computer screen, but instead of seeing the designs he’d drawn up for the Sherwood townhouse he saw Aiesha lying naked on the Persian rug in the sitting room with him pounding into her. Her hair was fanned out over the rug, her beautiful breasts jiggling sexily, her feline back arching as she came with a primal scream that—
He gave himself a mental slap and refocused on the project in front of him. The plans, which had seemed so brilliant the day before, now looked like a boring set of angles and planes.
He pushed himself back from the desk and stood and stretched the stiffness out of his back. That wasn’t all that was stiff...but the less he thought about that the better.
He stood in front of the window, staring at the moonlit white-out outside. His Highland sanctuary had become a prison of torturous temptation. A temple of sinful longings. He was trapped inside a house with a wanton woman with seduction on her mind. Aiesha was on a mission and he was her target. How was he going to resist her? She was a potent cocktail of sass and sensuality. He was already drunk on looking at her. On smelling her exotic fragrance that seemed to be in every room of the house, following him, haunting him, tempting him. He was mesmerised by those unique eyes, transfixed by that sinfully luscious mouth and that lithe body with its catwalk sway of hips and pelvis. His body throbbed with such raw longing he considered plunging himself in the snow outside to cool off.
Everything about her turned him on. Her wilfulness, her naughty pouts, the way she tossed her hair over her shoulders like a flighty filly tossed its mane. The way her grey eyes looked at him knowingly, smoulderingly, with that come-and-get-me-I-know-you-want-to steadiness as if she could sense his lust for her lurking, thickening him beneath his clothes.
James muttered an expletive and turned away from the window. It was well past midnight and he hadn’t eaten. He would kill for a glass of red wine but bringing alcohol into a situation like this was asking for the sort of trouble he could do without right now. Falling into Aiesha’s honey trap was exactly what she expected him to do. It was what every man she set her sights on did. She collected men like trophies, the richer and more powerful the better. He was just another prize to tick off her list. One she had wanted a long time. It was her unfinished business—the seduction of the son and heir to complete her set—the father and now the son. He would be discarded like yesterday’s news as soon as she proved what she wanted to prove.
James could only hope the fervid interest in their relationship would die away once some other couple was targeted. He loathed being besieged by the press. It brought back the cringeworthy memories of the days after Aiesha had sold her story. The cameras had been set up outside his parents’ London home for over a week. He hadn’t been living at home at the time but that didn’t stop the barrage of attention. He was set upon at his apartment in Notting Hill. Every day microphones were thrust in his face as he left for work, asking him for comments on his father’s behaviour. They followed him everywhere, even during work hours. The intrusion was so bad at one point that one of his most important clients had taken his business to a rival firm.
It had taken him this long to build up trust with a good clientele and now Aiesha was back and up to her usual mischief.
James took Bonnie out for a last pit stop before doing the rounds of turning off the lights downstairs. He came to the sitting room, where the door was slightly ajar, the muted light of the side-table lamps creating a soft V-shaped beam across the floor of the hall.
He pushed the door open to find the coffee table in front of the sofa littered with the remains of a snatch-and-grab meal: an empty wine glass, a side plate with cheese fragments and a browned apple core on it, a scrunched-up paper napkin, an empty yogurt container and a sticky teaspoon, a trail of crumbs. Typical. She was swanning about the place like the lady of the manor, expecting everyone else to pick up after her. He wasn’t running a hotel, for God’s sake. Who did she think she was, leaving his mother’s sitting room in such a state?
His gaze went to the sofa and found...Sleeping Beauty.
That was exactly what Aiesha looked like. She was lying on her side facing the fire that had burned down low in the grate, her cheek resting
