A Delicious Deception (15 page)

Seriously, though, she couldn’t help thinking about how shattered he had looked when he had returned from the clinic last night, after what had been an obviously gruelling day. Shattered, not just from worrying about Mitch, but by the things Mitch must have told him. Realising he’d been wrong about her, too, probably hadn’t helped lessen the load.

‘If that was taking advantage of me, then I can’t wait for the next time,’ he drawled, and pretended to double up when she gave him a gentle nudge in the ribs with her elbow.

‘You’re right. Enough of this or we’ll starve,’ he said, laughing, as she took the flowers and stood them in the centre of the dining table that curved around its seating area next to the galley. ‘And then I do have an hour or so’s work to do,’ he apologised. ‘But first …’

She hadn’t realised it until then, but in his other hand he had been clutching the strap of a square insulated cooler, which he lifted up now onto the counter beside the cooker.

‘Oysters in Madeira with cheese sauce for starters,’ he told her, opening the bag and looking very pleased with himself. ‘Fresh tuna steak—to be seared, of course—with salad and crusty bread and fresh raspberries and passion fruit coulis to follow.’

‘Goodness!’ Rayne laughed, realising she’d been expecting something far less exotic. ‘When you go to town—you go to
town
!’

But of course he would, she thought, watching those long deft hands unpacking the carefully selected items. A man like Kingsley Clayborne would never do things by half measures.

‘Oysters
and
passion fruit? Aren’t oysters supposed to be an aphrodisiac?’ she remembered with a sidelong provocative glance up at him. ‘As for passion fruit … what sort of afternoon are you planning?’

‘If you keep looking at me like that, not a very productive one,’ he responded with a feral smile.

‘And don’t tell me …’ she laughed again, thinking how wonderful it was to feel so at ease with him ‘… Clayborne’s shares will drop like a stone and the whole global workforce will be on the dole because the company’s CEO stopped to enjoy himself for a while.’

‘That’s about the size of it,’ he replied dryly, although there was a hint of seriousness in his voice that made her realise how hard he worked and how dedicated he was in what he did, which helped provide a living for so many thousands of people across the globe.

‘So how did you come by all this stuff for such a gourmet meal?’ Rayne asked. After all, he hadn’t been gone
that
long.

‘The owner of that restaurant over there …’ this with a sideways toss of his head towards the quayside ‘… is a very good friend of mine. I rang him earlier and told him to expect me.’

‘You …’
dark horse
, she finished silently, warmed by the knowledge that he’d been planning all this even before they had left the clinic. Probably even the roses too.

She couldn’t remember much of what they talked about during the meal, which they ate out on the lower deck under the awning. Their conversation was light and casual and surprisingly easy. Then afterwards, with the dishwasher humming away in the galley and King working in the salon on his laptop, she lazed on the upper deck in her burgundy satin bra and panties because she didn’t have her bikini with her.

Listening to the deep resonance of his voice, hanging on every word he uttered as he conducted his international business over the phone and arranged meetings, her gently tanning body pulsed from the memory of their lovemaking, and throbbed in reckless anticipation of what might be to come.

Her cellphone rang while she was lying there. She didn’t recognise the caller as anyone she knew, answering it rather uncertainly.

‘Hello, Lorrayne,’ Nelson Faraday began. ‘I got your number from an old associate of ours …’ He named a mutual colleague with whom they had worked on the same paper and with whom Rayne still sometimes kept in touch. ‘He told me your mother had been ill. I hope she’s feeling better.’ Preliminaries over with, he dived straight into the reason why he was ringing her. ‘I understand you were seen looking more than chummy with Kingsley Clayborne. Want to tell me about it?’

A trickle of unease ran through Rayne like a paralysing poison. ‘No.’

‘Just good friends, eh? Or is there far more to your being here with him than meets the eye?’

‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ she said tremulously, knowing this man could spell trouble for her.

The journalist chuckled softly, without a trace of humour. ‘Don’t you? You have a short memory, Lorrayne.’

‘If you think I’ve forgotten the methods you use to dig up your stories, then trust me—my memory’s as long as an elephant’s!’

Laughter came again, a little more sincerely now. ‘That sounds more like the fiery creature I knew. Look, I think we should talk. How about meeting me for drinks at the Café de Paris?’

The man had to be joking! ‘How about barking up some other tree, Faraday? I’ve got nothing to say to you. Goodbye!’

She found she was shaking as she cut him off and tossed down her phone on the sunbed.

‘What’s wrong?’ King asked, choosing that exact moment to emerge from the lower deck.

His shirt was partially unbuttoned with the sleeves rolled up to the elbows, and with those light beige trousers moulding themselves to his hips and very muscular thighs he looked no less than utterly magnificent.

‘Nothing,’ Rayne fibbed, trying to restore her agitated features into some semblance of order.

‘Nothing?’ He glanced down at her cellphone, dark brows knitting together. Numbly, she wondered exactly what she might have said and how much he might have heard.

‘Just someone ringing up enquiring about Mum,’ she supplied, which was partly true at any rate. She even managed a smile.

‘She’s all right, isn’t she?’

The concern lining his face with that strong hand on her shoulder had the effect of melting her worries like butter over a hot stove.

‘Of course,’ she murmured, tilting her head back, her smile genuine this time, her peach-tinted lips inviting—craving—the pressure of his.

‘Do you think if I kiss you I’ll be able to finish what I’m doing down there?’ he suggested dryly, touching a finger to his lips and pressing that to her yearning mouth instead.

Sensations ignited in her like a bush-fire even from that simple gesture from him as he handed her one of his clean white shirts.

‘You’ve had enough sun for one day,’ he remarked solicitously, doing nothing to quell the fire raging inside her as his fingers brushed her sun-warmed shoulder. ‘Put it on.’

She obeyed as he disappeared below. She’d been thinking of going inside anyway, but she’d been too ensnared by some kind of sensual torpor from imagining doing all sorts of delectable things with him to move.

Perhaps it was true. Perhaps oysters
were
an aphrodisiac, she thought, lounging back and putting Nelson Faraday from her mind. Or perhaps it was just the warmth of the sun on her body. Even so, just the sight of King had rekindled all the outrageously sensual things she had been thinking about him before her cellphone rang, so that it was twenty minutes or so before, aching for his company, she picked up her bag and phone and the suncream she’d found in the shower room and went below.

Now, as she stepped down into the air-conditioned comfort of the salon, she saw him lounging back on the luxuriously padded sofa, having just closed his laptop for the day. There was music coming from the hi-fi system, which was in fact what had brought her in. A plaintive, achingly beautiful melody that was as familiar to her as it was moving.

‘The New World Symphony,’ she identified, smiling broadly. ‘I love this piece!’

‘I know.’

‘What?’ She looked down at him quizzically. ‘How can you?’

‘Because I just happened to be there the morning your father came into the office and said you’d bought this CD with some birthday money you’d been given and that he was glad to get back to work as you’d been playing it non-stop all that weekend.’

‘And you remembered that?’ Rayne marvelled with an amazed little laugh. After all, it was seven years ago!

‘Only because I recall thinking that it wasn’t the type
of music I associated with the half-scarecrow, half-vampire image,’ he drawled.

Rayne laughed again. ‘Was I really that bad?’

‘You were really that bad,’ he admitted, his mouth moving wryly. Yet, strangely, there had been something about her willowy shape behind that glass partition during her short spell in that office that had acted like a magnet on his eyes.

‘I was also a beanpole,’ she remembered. Underdeveloped and rake-thin from always being on an unnecessary diet. ‘No wonder you ignored me!’ And she’d thought she looked so lovely, she remembered self-mockingly. If only she’d known! ‘You weren’t averse to my music, though, were you?’ she reminded him coquettishly, with a toss of her head towards the music system. Then, with a soft pout to her mouth, ‘Even if you would have preferred to spank me than to take me out.’

His lips twisted in mocking censure of what he had said the previous night.

‘I couldn’t be,’ he responded, and smiled then, so warmly it made her heart miss a beat. ‘It’s a personal favourite of mine too.’

For some reason that pleased her more than anything else he could have said. It meant that he shared her taste, created a mutual rapport between them.

‘I read that the composer was trying to convey a feeling of homesickness in this part,’ she remembered aloud as the music swelled poignantly through the luxurious vessel. ‘It’s supposed to be about someone who’d gone to America looking for a better life, looking out at unfamiliar mountains and longing for home.’

‘Quite possibly,’ King agreed. ‘I believe Dvorák wrote it while he was in New York—himself a stranger, many, many miles from home.’

‘I didn’t know that.’ There was something so pleasurable in talking with him like this after all the animosity there

had been between them. ‘Don’t you think the feeling comes over well?’

He nodded and said, ‘Brilliantly.’

‘So what does it make
you
think about?’ she pressed, unable to imagine a man like him romanticising and going off into some dreamy fantasy world like she had whenever she had played it.

Pursing his lips, King dragged his gaze from the two scraps of burgundy lace beneath the gaping shirt—which looked a hell of a lot better on her than it did on him, he decided—before considering her question.

Quite simply that music always reminded him of his mother. It had been her favourite piece, too. Her albums were just some of the many personal things she had left behind when she had walked out that day, what seemed a lifetime ago, never to return.

He’d been five years old and nursing homesickness so acute he’d thought he’d die from the ache inside him. Because that was how it had felt when she had left. As if she’d ripped out his heart and taken it with her, or as if someone had robbed him of his home. He remembered standing at the window, day after day, with Mitch constantly playing and replaying that music, waiting for her to turn the corner of the street as if she had just been to the shops, waiting for her familiar smile, her wave—waiting for her to come home.

But Rayne had asked him what it made him think about and he had to give her an answer.

‘Things I couldn’t have,’ he replied heavily, but honestly now.

The rawness in his voice had Rayne searching his face for any clue to his emotions as he leaned back against the cushions, staring out of the oblong window at the sun-streaked water. He looked so distant and so bleak that she wanted to stretch out a hand and touch his cheek, ease the loneliness
she sensed lay hidden inside him, buried in a place too deep for her to reach.

‘What sort of things?’ she whispered, wise enough to realise that he wasn’t talking about anything that money or influence or power could buy.

He smiled then, giving her his full attention, shrugging off what she knew was a moment of regretted weakness.

‘Never you mind,’ he dismissed lightly. ‘So what about you?’ he prompted from behind that impervious shell of his, although the teasing crept back into his voice as he continued, ‘What did you dream about when you drove your family and friends—and probably the whole neighbourhood,’ he said with a grimace, ‘mad with Dvorák’s New World Symphony?’

You.

She couldn’t say it as she met those steel-blue eyes. Couldn’t tell him that she used to imagine him sweeping her up in his arms one day when she had pretended to lose her way and wandered deliberately into his office. Imagined him carrying her off to a luxurious bed somewhere where he would slowly undress her, kissing and stroking each area of sensitive flesh he had uncovered. And all the time this music would be playing, its swelling crescendo the moment he made her his, with his deep voice whispering between kisses the one thing she craved to hear him say.

I love you.

From her wild imaginings, those three words suddenly took on a startlingly new meaning, coming as they did from the depth of her own feelings and shocking her with their intensity.

I love him,
she thought,
which is why I never stopped hurting when I believed how much he had hurt Dad. I’ve always loved him! I love him now! And I always will!

The feeling swelled and grew, the realisation of how little she knew about him, not to mention for how short a time, not mattering one iota. She’d been made for him and she had
known it from the second she had first laid eyes on him all those years ago.

The knowledge held her rigid, every second that she stayed conveying to him how hopelessly ensnared she was, but she couldn’t move or tear her gaze from the mesmerising depths of his.

She knew what a temptation she must look with the shirt he’d lent her hanging open and revealing her scanty underwear. And she knew he obviously thought so too when his mouth compressed with some inner satisfaction as he allowed himself a visual journey of her rapidly rising breasts to the dark triangle of satin at the juncture of her thighs, his eyes flickering with masculine appreciation beneath the dark sweep of his lashes.