down at her. But that was nothing new. He had always looked down at her, both literally and figuratively. He was six-foot-four to her five-foot-six so looking down was his only option unless she wore vertiginous heels. Or stilts. Not exactly the sort of thing Clem wanted to wear while going up and down a bookshelf ladder in search of a rare edition of Dickens or Hardy or Austen.
Come to think of it, stilts could work...
‘Where’s your brother?’
As opening gambits went, it wasn’t flash. Or friendly. Not that Clem had been expecting friendly. Not after the Bedroom Incident. Looking back, it had been a dumb move to hide there after coming back from that humiliating party date. But the room Alistair had used as a child had been the only quiet space in the house and it had its own bathroom no one else used. The perfect place to lick wounds still raw with shame. A place to curl up in the foetal position and self-flagellate for being so gullible as to fall for a teenage boy’s puerile dare to ‘sleep with the fat chick’.
Grrr. Not that she had explained any of that to Alistair. He hadn’t given her a chance. When he’d found her curled up on his bed, after her punishing shower that had failed to make her feel clean, he had assumed she was the one making a play for him. ‘Just like your sluttish mother.’ The words still rankled. No one had ever spoken to her like that, not even some of her mother’s creepy boyfriends. Those words had burned a brand of bitterness into her soul. Those words had ground shame into her bones until they’d ached with it.
‘Why do you want to know where Jamie is?’ Clem asked, trying not to be distracted by how he looked. How he smelt. He was standing half a metre away and yet she could pick up an intriguing trace of citrus. Sharp citrus with a note of something else. Something dark and mysterious. Unknowable.
His jaw shifted as if he was biting down on his molars hard enough to crack a brazil nut. Or a bolt. ‘Don’t play the innocent with me. I know you two have colluded for weeks over this.’
Clem arched one of her brows. She was quite proud of how posh it made her look—a combination of stern librarian and haughty aristocrat. The glasses she wore for reading made it even more authentic. ‘“This”?’ Even her voice had just the right amount of ‘are you for real?’ inflection.
His grey-blue eyes flashed with a warning, a don’t-mess-with-me warning that for some reason made the backs of her knees tingle. ‘My stepsister, Harriet, has run away with your brother.’
Clem’s mouth dropped open wide enough to take in the complete works of Shakespeare. How could that be? How had Jamie come into contact with anyone even remotely connected to Alistair? It was impossible. It was unthinkable. It was a disaster. ‘What?’
Alistair’s eyelids gave a disdainful flicker. ‘Nice show of surprise but you don’t fool me. I’m not leaving here until you tell me where they are.’
Clem looked at his stiffly crossed arms and firmly planted legs. Shouldn’t have looked at his legs. Even though they were covered in Tom Ford she could see the strength and power in the thighs. She had to stop herself imagining those muscle-packed thighs wrapped around hers. Naked and sweaty. Sexily tangled.
Which was kind of weird, because she rarely thought of sex. It wasn’t even on her radar. Growing up with a mother who’d had orgies like other mothers had Tupperware parties had put a damper on Clem’s sexual development. Not to mention the shame-inducing encounter when she’d been sixteen that had made her body image issues even further entrenched. But looking at Alistair’s thighs made a traitorous beat thrum between her legs like a plucked cello string. Hum. Hum. Hum.
She looked at his mouth instead. Eek! Even bigger mistake. It was set in a line so flat you couldn’t have slipped a piece of the finest paper between those marble-hard lips.
Eyes?
Oh, dear God, his eyes. Eyes that were blue one second and grey the next. Eyes that were frost and ice, swirling smoke and shifting shadows. Eyes that could slice you like a scimitar or scorch you with the blistering blaze of belittlement.
‘Well?’
His curt tone cut through the silence, making her jump as if he had poked her with a skewer. Which made her hate him all the more. She had fought long and hard to stop being intimidated by people, particularly men. Powerful men who thought they could treat her like crap and get away with it. Men who only had sex with you because you were fat and then laughed about it with their friends afterwards. Clem inched up her chin, doing her best to ignore the little buzzing sensation deep and low in her belly when his gaze clashed with hers. ‘You’re in for a long stay as I have absolutely no idea what you’re talking about.’
His lips pressed together again, so hard they became bloodless. Clem realised, with a strange little jolt, she had never seen him smile. Not once. Not that he’d had a lot to smile about ten years ago, with his mother terminally ill and his father running off with another woman during his wife’s chemo treatment. Clem’s mother. Cringe. Clem couldn’t think about her mother without her whole body going into a convulsing spasm of shame.
‘He lives with you, doesn’t he?’ Alistair said.
Clem didn’t think it would reflect well on her to admit she hadn’t seen Jamie for the best part of a week. He hadn’t responded to any of her texts or returned her numerous calls. That could be because he’d run out of credit. Again. But it also meant he didn’t want her to interfere with his life. She was trying to keep an eye on him while their mother was MIA but since he’d turned eighteen a couple of months ago he had not taken kindly to her rules. Any rules. ‘You seem to know rather a lot about my living arrangements,’ she said. ‘Are you keeping tabs on all your father’s cast-offs’ kids?’
His jaw did that clamping thing again. ‘Tell me where he is.’ He said each word as if spitting out bullet points. Tell. Me. Where. He. Is.
Clem curved her mouth in an I’m-enjoying-rattling-your-chain smile. ‘You seem a little uptight, Alistair. Not getting our needs met, are we? What’s wrong with the young women of London, hey? I hear uptight, nerdy workaholics are all the rage just now.’
Something flashed at the back of his eyes like a miniature bomb exploding. The muscles around his mouth tightened even further as if trying to contain the flying debris. ‘You’re still the snarky little wildcat you always were, even if you’ve managed to scrub up to look halfway presentable.’
Halfway? What did he mean, ‘halfway’? It cost Clem a flipping fortune to look this good. Sure, she could have done even better with some nicer clothes, but she had to save her money. For bed and board and her brother’s bail. Not that she’d needed money for bail yet, but she suspected it wouldn’t be long. Jamie was an apple that had fallen so close from his father’s tree he was hugging it. But there was no way Clem was letting her half-brother go down the same criminal path as his pond-scum father. Not that her father was anything to crow about. She told everyone he was dead so she didn’t have to explain why he was pacing the exercise yard in one of Britain’s maximum security prisons.
Clem decided a subject change was her best line of defence. If she let Alistair know he had upset her it would put him at an advantage. She was giving no points away for free. Not to him. ‘I didn’t know you had a stepsister.’
He gave an almost imperceptible wince, as if the reminder of having a stepsister was still something completely foreign to him. Uncomfortable, even, like wearing an ill-fitting shirt. ‘Harriet is a new addition. Her mother left her with my father when she took off with another man.’
‘How
