charity function in New York. After all, King didn’t live here. He had some luxurious pad in London, and she’d heard that he and his father didn’t always see eye to eye.
What he was doing here, she didn’t know, only that it was going to be difficult enough confronting Mitch with who she was and why she was there, but with that six-foot-something of potent manhood thrown into the mix, the prospect was no less than unnerving.
He was hard, ruthless and clever. He was also suspicious, which left her feeling as though every secret she harboured was under threat of being exposed to him, while every feminine cell in her body reacted to his raw sexuality with a strength that left her shocked and ashamed.
She’d thought such wild reactions were the predilection of teenage girls. Because he had affected her then—seven years ago—although he’d scarcely spared more than a passing glance her way. A wheat-blonde, spiky-haired teenager with purple-shadowed eyes and lipstick. An experimental and pathetic Lorri Hardwicke, whose nevertheless deeply buried secret had been an excruciating crush on the firm’s youngest and most dynamic recruit who, not long out of university, was already being primed for directorship.
She had wanted him from the first instant she had nearly collided with him as he was coming out of the office one day when she had been meeting her father for lunch, and from that moment she had woven all sorts of wild fantasies around him.
Young and guileless and between jobs, introduced to him only briefly, she’d jumped at the chance to help out in the office for a couple of weeks when one of the typists was on leave. It had offered her a chance to be near King, after all. But he’d scarcely spoken to her and, like Mitch, he had spent a lot of time out of the office. And when he was there she’d watched him from a painful distance behind her frosted glass partition, imagining a golden future when he would suddenly realise she was there, waiting in the wings for him to notice her, ask her out and initiate her into the sophisticated art of making love. Because with a man like him, she had decided, without any doubt in her fixated young mind, lovemaking would be no less than an art.
Even after she’d left, she still kept hoping. That was until the evening he had come round to the house and shattered all her dreams. Made her hate him with an emotion all the more intense because of what it had replaced.
Bitterly her thoughts drifted back to that night seven years ago. It was just a few weeks after her father had had a row with Mitchell Clayborne and walked away from their partnership—with devastating repercussions.
She had been to the gym and had cycled home in the rain, coming in to hear raised voices, her father’s thin and defensive, King’s deep and inexorable.
‘You’re the thief, Grant Hardwicke! Not my father! Stay away from him. Do I make myself clear? Leave him alone or you’ll have me to deal with!’ It still made her shudder to remember his cruel, icy threat. ‘Believe me, after this you won’t know what hit you if you ever dare show your face at our house or at the office again!’
Towering over Grant Hardwicke, King had been standing in the hallway of the modern detached home her mother had so prized, while her father had seemed to visibly diminish before Rayne’s eyes. His features blanched and strained, she had seen Grant grab the doorframe as though it was too much of an effort to support himself under the weight of the younger man’s hostile and verbal attack.
Soaked to the skin, hair flattened by the rain, she’d flown at King like a drenched sparrow as he’d come striding back across the hall.
‘Don’t you dare hurt my father!’ she’d sobbed, lashing out at him, her flailing fists ineffectual against the impenetrable wall of his body. ‘I’ll kill you first! I will! I’ll kill you!’
‘Calm down, Lorri …’ He had referred to her by name. It was the first time she could remember him using it, much less showing her any attention, but then it had been only to catch her flying wrists and thrust her aside as if she were an unwanted toy. ‘Don’t waste your hysterics and your childish little threats on me,’ he’d warned with particular brutality to her teenage pride. ‘Save them for someone who deserves them,’ he’d snarled savagely. ‘Like your father!’ He had slammed out of the door with his hurtful and puzzling words burning in her ears.
‘It’s about that software, love,’ Grant Hardwicke had breathed brokenly when she had rushed over to him. He’d looked drained and exhausted as she’d helped him onto an easy chair. ‘Mitchell’s saying it’s company property and King’s backing him up. I’m afraid they’re determined to keep it. I’ve lost everything, Lorri. Everything.’ She had never forgotten the desperation in her father’s voice.
‘But it’s yours, Dad. You wrote it!’ Rayne remembered stressing, as though that had counted for anything where the Clayborne men were concerned. It was software he had written especially for the medical profession. One he had said would benefit a lot of people—because her father was like that—caring and generous. It was something he had produced for the common good. It was his baby. His brainchild, which he’d conceived and worked on and slaved over in his own time before he had ever joined forces with Mitchell Clayborne. But Mitchell Clayborne had stolen the credit for it, launching it under his own company flag with the full knowledge and support of his equally unscrupulous and ambitious son and heir.
Her mother had been out at a line-dancing class that night and Rayne was glad she had because it was the first and only time in her life she had seen her father cry. Her strong and devoted father, who had always been her rock and the backbone of his family, reduced to tears in losing all he’d worked for. But he had no proof of his copyright for that software he had written, and the Claybornes had gone on to prosper unbelievably because of it, while Grant Hardwicke’s troubles had only increased.
Because of his age, he had found it impossible to get another position. He’d started drinking, which made him ill, and then he was made bankrupt, which in turn meant her mother having to lose her lovely home.
Rayne was certain that all her father’s problems had started that night she had walked in on King’s unmitigated venom. A venom that had had a poisoning effect on her family, virtually destroying everything that had been good about it, everything she’d loved.
What she had felt for him had been unreal, Rayne thought bitterly, mocking herself now. A teenage fancy, as insubstantial as mist, killed off by his pulsing anger and his verbal brutality towards her father, even before she’d realised how unscrupulous he was. As well as defending Grant, she knew now that in striking King that night she had been giving vent to the loss of all her young dreams. But long after the anguish of that night had receded, it was the physical power of him and those firm hands on her body as he’d put her from him that had lingered in her memory …
She came downstairs now with half a hope that, in spite of what Mitch had said, perhaps his son’s visit might have been a flying one and that he might have been called away on some vital company business during the night.
That was until she saw him striding in through the front door in a short-sleeved white shirt that exposed his tanned, muscular arms and dark suit trousers hugging his powerful hips and her heart seemed to stand still before vaulting into a double-quick rhythm.
‘Good morning, Rayne.’ He was tie-less, she realised, with her gaze instantly drawn to the bronze skin beneath his corded throat. The white T-shirt she had teamed with her jeans suddenly felt too snug for her breasts as that steely gaze burned over her. ‘I trust you slept well.’
She hadn’t, but she said in a tight little voice, ‘Very, thank you.’ In fact she had been waking up all night, going over that scenario with him on the terrace, aware that it was absolutely imperative that she
