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Watching as her beloved dog was strangled to death in front of her had destroyed her belief in humanity. Archie had only yelped the once but his cry had haunted many a sleepless night since.
Aiesha blinked the distressing scene out of her head as best she could. She wasn’t that powerless young girl any more. She was the one in control now. She allowed no man to have an advantage on her.
Clifford Challender might wear bespoke clothes and speak with an upper-class accent but underneath he was no different from her brutish, despicable, drug-dealing stepfather. She had proven it. It had only taken five minutes alone with him in the study to set it up. She had planned it to the last detail. They’d agreed to meet at a hotel in London’s West End to ‘begin’ their affair. Clifford had taken the bait—as she had known he would—with the press waiting to capture the moment, but, looking back now, she regretted that Louise had been hurt in the process.
Although she had never told Louise, or indeed anyone, how deeply traumatised she had been from that last interaction with her stepfather, over time she had been able to understand why she had behaved as she had. She had been so angry, so viciously angry, at the injustice dished out to her and to poor little Archie that she had come into the Challender household with the sole agenda to cause as much mayhem as she could. Like a wounded animal, she had scratched and bitten at the hand that was trying its best to comfort and feed her.
Aiesha had apologised to Louise since and they had never mentioned it again by tacit agreement. But if Louise was bitter or still held any resentment she certainly gave no sign of it. If anything, Aiesha got the impression that Louise was much happier without the shackles of a marriage that had limped along for years for the sake of appearances.
But James’s bitterness was another thing entirely.
He hadn’t forgiven her for the attention she had drawn to his family. Drunk on the power of payback, Aiesha had sold her story to the press. Although no crime had been committed, for Clifford Challender hadn’t done anything other than agree to meet her, the press had run with the Lolita angle and run wild. Selling her story hadn’t necessarily been about the money—although it had come in very handy at getting her set up until she came of age—but about showing the world she would not be ignored or silenced just because she was from the wrong side of the tracks.
The impact on the Challender name in the architectural sector had been catastrophic. At the time she hadn’t thought or cared how her actions would impact on James, but impact they did. Along with his father, he’d lost current and potential clients, and it had only been in the last year or so that he had been able to redress the effects of the fallout of the scandal.
No wonder he hated her.
And no wonder he couldn’t understand what possible reason his mother would have for staying in contact with her, even sporadically, much less invite her to stay in her home for as long as she wanted.
Aiesha wasn’t sure she understood it herself.
‘Your mother isn’t one to bear grudges,’ she said. ‘Unlike someone else I know, she’s prepared to let bygones be bygones.’
His glittering eyes, his knitted brow, his flared nostrils and his iron-hard jaw visibly quaked with contempt. ‘My mother’s a fool to be taken in by you again. You haven’t changed an iota. You’re still a smart-mouthed, conniving little gold-digging tramp on the make. The fact that you want money to pose as my fiancée proves it.’
Aiesha tossed her head in a devil-may-care manner. ‘Take it or leave it, James. It’s your reputation on the line, not mine. I don’t have anything to lose.’
His hands balled into fists as if he didn’t trust himself not to reach for her and do her an injury. A perverse part of her was excited to see him teetering on the cliff edge of the iron-strong self-control he so prided himself on possessing. It made her want to push and push and push until he fell into sin. It was why she goaded him so shamelessly. She wanted to prove he was no different from all the other men she’d had dealings with throughout her life. He might have been surrounded by silver spoons and salvers, and slept on silk and satin sheets, but behind that stiff, upper-lip, straitlaced demeanour was a brooding, simmering passion that was as primal and earthy as any other sexually mature man.
His eyes nailed hers like blue darts, his mouth so tightly set it looked physically as well as morally painful for him to get the words out. ‘How much?’
Aiesha pictured the cottage in the country she had dreamed of since she was a little girl living in council flats with walls as thin as diet wafers. She had dreamed of a place surrounded by flowers and fields and forest, of peace and calm instead of shouting and swearing and fighting. No pimps. No drugs. No violence.
Solitude. Safety.
She named a figure that sent James’s brows shooting towards his hairline. ‘What?’ he choked.
She folded her arms in an implacable manner. ‘You heard.’
He frowned at her blackly. ‘You’re joking, surely?’
‘Nope.’
He coughed out a disbelieving laugh. ‘This is ludicrous.’ His hand scored a jagged pathway through his hair. ‘Am I even having this conversation?’
‘Want me to pinch you?’
He quickly stepped back from her, holding his hands up in front of himself like a barrier. ‘Don’t touch me.’
Aiesha smiled as she deliberately stepped closer. It was thrilling to have so much sensual power at her disposal. The air vibrated with electric voltage; she could feel it lifting the skin of her arms in a carpet of goose bumps and wondered if his body was undergoing the same sensual overload. Was his blood thundering through his veins, thickening him? Extending him to full erection? Was he feeling that primal ache that consumed everything but the desperate need to copulate?
Maybe she should ignore that silly little foghorn inside her head. What would it hurt to have a little bit of fun to pass the time? He had always been the subject of her fantasies.
Now she could make them real.
She lazily stroked her fingertip over the thick and neatly aligned Windsor knot of his tie, close to where a pulse was beating like a piston in his tanned and cologne-scented neck. She breathed in lemon and lime and something else that was elusive and yet potently addictive. ‘What are you afraid of, posh boy?’ Her fingers slipped down from the knot to play with the end of his tie like a mean cat with a mouse’s tail. ‘That this time around I might prove to be irresistible?’
She heard his jaw lock. Heard his teeth grind. Saw his pupils flare as his eyes flicked to her mouth for a nanosecond.
‘I can resist you.’ His voice was so deep and so husky it sounded as if it had been scraped along a rough surface and only just survived the journey.
Aiesha looked at the dark pinpricks of regrowth surrounding his mouth and chin. He had a strong, uncompromising mouth, his top lip neatly sculpted, but his lower lip was fuller, rich with sensual promise. Something unfurled deep and low inside her belly, like a satin ribbon running away from its spool.
Suddenly the game she’d been playing turned deadly serious.
The battle of wills she was so sure she could win shifted its power balance. She felt it in the immeasurable beat of time where his gaze grazed her mouth again. It provoked a visceral reaction inside her body, a lightning strike of lust that all but knocked her off her feet.
She sent her tongue out over her lips to try and quell the fizzing sensation that was fast becoming an ache. His warm, faintly mint-scented breath skated over the surface of her lips as, centimetre by centimetre, millimetre by millimetre he ever so slowly began to close the distance. Her own breath felt painfully restricted as she drew it into her lungs, as if the space inside her chest was already taken up by something big and suffocating. She rose up on 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 on one of the velvet scatter cushions, her arms tucked in close to her chest and her slim legs curled up like a child’s. Her hair was tousled and loose about her shoulders, one curly tendril lying like an S on her cheek. In sleep she looked innocent and vulnerable, far younger than twenty-five.
The eight years difference in their ages suddenly felt like a century. Make that an entire geological period.
Should he wake her?
No!
James looked at the fire. It would make too much noise getting that going again. The room, along with the rest of the house, was centrally heated but set on a timer. He could feel the slight chill in the air as the ormolu clock on the mantelpiece ticked its way to 1:00 a.m.
His gaze went to the mohair throw rug draped over the back of the wing chair. Should he or shouldn’t he? He debated with himself for another thirty seconds as he watched her sleep. Her chest rose and fell, her soft mouth opening slightly as her breath came out on a sigh. Her eyelids with their spider-leg-long lashes fluttered and her forehead puckered as if something she was dreaming about had disturbed her. But after a moment or two her forehead smoothed out and she burrowed deeper into the sofa cushions like a dormouse curling up for winter.
James waited another half a minute before stealthily tiptoeing across the carpet like a burglar to get the throw rug—mentally rolling his eyes at the ridiculousness of his caution—and brought it back to gently cover her with it.
It was as if he had dropped a plank of timber on her.
She suddenly leapt off the sofa and struck out with her fists, catching him on the side of the nose in a glancing blow that made stars explode behind his eyes.
James swore and, stumbling backwards, cupped his hand over his throbbing nose, the blood dripping through his fingers to the carpet at his feet. Pain pulsed in sickening waves through his face, his skull and his stomach. He swayed on his feet as he fought against the dizziness as a school of silverfish floated before his gaze.
Aiesha reeled back from him, speaking through her hands that were clasped over her mouth in stunned horror. ‘Oh, my God! Did I hurt you?’
‘No,’ he said through clenched teeth as he reached with his other hand for his handkerchief to stem the flow of blood. ‘I have spontaneous nosebleeds all the time.’
Her eyes were still as wide as her discarded dinner plate. ‘I’m sorry. I—I didn’t know who it was.’
He glared at her over the wad of his handkerchief. His nose was still pulsating with eye-watering pain as it hosed blood. What was she thinking, swinging at him like that? She was the intruder, not him. ‘Who the hell did you think it was?’
Her teeth chewed at her lower lip, her gaze falling away from his as she backed out of the room. ‘Erm...I’ll go and get you some ice...’
* * *
Aiesha held a hand against her juddering heart as she stumbled to the kitchen. The shock of waking to see a dark shape looming over her had made her react on instinct. Her primal brain hadn’t had time to recognise it was not some predatory lecher after a quick feel. Her instinctive reaction to hit out was something she’d learned from a young age, having to dodge the inappropriate attention from her mother’s collection of unsavoury partners. It was why she never spent the whole night with anyone. Ever. It was too awkward explaining her restlessness...or the nightmares. The last time she’d had a nightmare she’d wet the bed.
Try explaining that to a lover.
Aiesha looked at her reddened knuckles. If the pain throbbing in them was any indication, James was going to have a shiner by morning, if not sooner.
Her heart was not quite back where it belonged when she came back with a therapeutic ice pack she’d found in the freezer.
James was sitting on the sofa she had fallen asleep on earlier, his head tilted back, the strong column of his throat exposed. He opened one eye to look at her. ‘That’s a mean right hook you’ve got there.’
Aiesha averted her gaze as she handed him the ice pack. ‘I took up boxing classes a couple of years ago. It’s great for fitness. You should try it.’
He winced as he pressed the pack to the bridge of his nose. ‘Somehow, the thought of thumping an opponent until they lose consciousness doesn’t appeal.’
She bit her lip again. ‘Does it hurt terribly?’
He gave her a look. ‘That was the intention, wasn’t it?’
Aiesha walked over to the remains of the fire and gave it a futile poke. She could sense his watchful gaze resting on her. He’d found her asleep. Off guard. Vulnerable. Had she given anything away while sleeping? Murmured anything? Revealed anything of the turmoil of her past?
She tamed her body language the way she’d been doing since she was eight years old. Show no emotion. Show no fear. ‘I don’t like people sneaking up on me.’
‘I was trying to make you comfortable. You were lying asleep in front of a dead fire. I was worried you might be cold.’
Worried? Ha. When had anyone been concerned about her welfare? She was invisible unless she made people notice her. She had spent her life as an outsider. Not good enough. Not educated enough. Not posh enough.
The thought of him caring about her comfort disturbed her. No one cared about her. No one watched out for her. Not unless they wanted something.
Aiesha turned and squared her gaze with his. ‘Why didn’t you wake me up? Why creep around and scare the crap out of me? I’m glad I punched you. I should’ve hit you harder.’
He took the ice pack away from his face, frowning at her, but not in anger. There was something measuring about his gaze as it held hers. She looked away, flattening her mouth, locking him out.
He came over to where she was standing in front of the dead fire. ‘You want to hit me again?’ he asked. ‘Come on. Put up your fists and clobber me with your best shot.’
She crossed her arms, flashing him a cutting glare. ‘Stop making fun of me.’
