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‘It’s not going to work, Clementine. Save your seduction routines for someone else. I’m not interested.’
Clem let out an incredulous snort. ‘You think I’m trying to seduce you? You? Don’t make me laugh.’
Alistair opened the hotel suite door, impatience, frustration, irritation etched in every muscle of his face. ‘We’re wasting valuable time. Out.’
She hitched up her chin. ‘You can’t order me about like I’m some sort of serf. I’ll walk out that door when I’m good and ready.’
His eyes hardened to chips of grey-blue ice.
‘If you don’t walk out this door on the count of three then—’
‘Then what?’ Clem leaned up close, placing her hands on the steely frame of his chest, where she could feel his heart pounding. Boom. Pitty. Boom. Pitty. Boom.
His eyes darkened until they were more pupils than irises. His hands encircled her wrists, the fingers digging into her flesh in searing hot fingerprints that made her blood race. It made his blood race too, for she could feel the tension in his lower body where it was touching hers thigh to thigh.
‘Then this,’ he said, and crushed his mouth to hers.
An avid romance reader, MELANIE MILBURNE loves writing the kind of books that gave her so much joy as she was busy getting married to her own hero and raising a family. Now a USA TODAY bestselling author, she has won several awards—including the Australian Romance Readers Association’s most popular category/series romance in 2008 and the prestigious Romance Writers of Australia Ruby Award in 2011. She loves to hear from readers via her website, melaniemilburne.com.au, or on Facebook (Facebook.com/melanie.milburne) and Twitter: @melaniemilburn1.
www.millsandboon.co.uk
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Contents
COVER
INTRODUCTION
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
TITLE PAGE
DEDICATION
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER TEN
EXTRACT
COPYRIGHT
CHAPTER ONE
CLEMENTINE WAS ON her hands and knees and covered in dust motes and mouse droppings when he came into the shop. She knew it was a ‘he’ because years of listening to her mother’s dodgy boyfriends coming and going at night had turned her into an expert on footfalls. There was a lot you could tell about a person by the way they walked. Whether they were confident or shy, furtive or open. Friend or foe.
This man had a firm, purposeful tread. A don’t-get-in-my-way-I-mean-business tread that made the hairs on the back of Clem’s neck stand up on tiptoe and shiver. She had heard that tread before. Ten years before.
He won’t recognise you. You’ve changed so much. The self-talk didn’t help because Clem knew that, even though she had shed the weight, got control of her skin, and tamed and highlighted her hair, inside she was still that mousy-haired, clumsy, awkward and pimply sixteen-year-old blimp.
The one with the home-wrecking, trailer trash mother.
Clem got to her feet and dusted her hands on her black trousers. ‘How may I help you?’ She had got rid of the northern accent as well. But not the attitude. Or the chip on her shoulder. Well, maybe not so much a chip. More like a tree. A forest.
Alistair Hawthorne looked 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 old is she?’
‘Sixteen.’
The same age Clem had been when her mother had taken up with Alistair’s father in a lust-driven whirlwind affair that had blown his parents’ once-stable marriage to smithereens. Clem remembered all too well the feeling of being shunted aside. The feeling of being in the way. The oversized baggage no one wanted. She hadn’t made it easy on anyone because of it. She had been a seething, snipping, snarling, surly heap of horrible hormones.
Double cringe.
‘So why isn’t your father out looking for her instead of you?’
A muscle near the corner of his mouth tapped like a hammer. Tippity-tap. Tippity-tap. ‘My father left her with me because he has better things to do. Apparently.’
Clem shifted her lips from side to side as the silence echoed with his bitterness. Freakishly weird to find she was in exactly the same position with her brother. ‘Well, I hate to be a dead end, but I know nothing about your stepsister’s whereabouts.’ Or my brother’s.
His dark brows were so close they formed a bridge over his piercing eyes. ‘Are you seriously telling me you knew nothing about their involvement? Nothing at all?’
Clem slowly shook her head. ‘Nothing. Zilch. Nada.’
His eyes travelled back and forth between each of hers like a searchlight looks for something hiding in the dark. The searing heat of his gaze made her body tingle all over, as if every one of her nerves was standing to attention and quaking in its boots. No one ever looked at her like that. Really looked at her. Not for so long and so intensely, as if they wanted to peel back the carefully constructed layers of her take-no-prisoners façade to the insecure wallflower beneath. But then he let out a whistling breath of scorn. ‘I don’t buy that for a picosecond.’
She pulled her shoulders back, eyeballing him like a boxer did an opponent. ‘Are you calling me a liar?’
One side of his mouth curled up. Nowhere near a smile, more like a the-gloves-are-up-and-waiting smirk. ‘You wouldn’t know the truth if it came up behind you and said boo.’
Clem was not a violent person in spite of the role models she’d had. But right then she wanted nothing more than to raise her hand and give that lean and stubble-coated jaw a good wallop. Punch. Sock. Kapow. And not just with one hand. Two. Bunched into fists. With knuckle-dusters as big as baubles. And then she would kick him in the shins. Whilst wearing steel-toed boots. And spurs, those big, spiky-starfish ones. She would scrape her nails down his cheeks. She would grow them especially, until they were like talons. She would make his nose bleed. Copiously. Gouge his eyes out. Stomp on them until they were a pulpy mess on the floor.
How dared he question her integrity? Telling the truth was her biggest failing. She was brutally honest. It had got her into more trouble than she cared to think about. She narrowed her eyes to hairpin-thin slits. ‘If you don’t leave within the next five seconds, I’m going to call the police.’
His eyes went three shades darker as if the notion of going head to head with her privately turned him on. ‘Go right ahead. It will save me the effort of calling them about my stolen car. The car your brother is currently driving somewhere in Europe.’
Clem’s heart banged against her breastbone like someone had shoved it from behind. With a wrecking ball. Could it be true? How could Jamie do this to her? How could he run off with Alistair Hawthorne’s stepsister, of all people? Surely Jamie knew what would happen? Alistair wouldn’t let this go. A terrier with a bone had nothing on him. He would hold on to the whole rotting carcass and shake and rattle it until the DNA fell out. There would be consequences. Huge consequences. He was rich. Powerful. Ruthless. He would not stop until he had achieved his mission.
Revenge was his mission.
Retribution.
Jamie would end up in court. Clem couldn’t afford to get him a decent lawyer. Her brother would end up in prison in amongst horrible men like his father. Or worse...like her father.
She allowed herself one quick sweep of her tongue over tombstone-dry lips. ‘How do you know Jamie...erm...took your car?’
Alistair’s gaze bored down into hers. ‘He didn’t take my car. He stole it.’
‘Your stepsister might’ve given him permission. She might’ve given him the keys. She might’ve told him you’d given the okay. She might’ve encouraged him to—’
He made a scoffing noise. ‘Listen to yourself. You’re trying to put lipstick on a pig. Your brother is a thief. He stole my car and a large sum of money.’
Clem swallowed a golf ball of panic. Make that a beach ball. With barnacles. ‘How large?’
‘You don’t want to know.’
You’re right. I don’t. ‘Anyway, what sort of crazy fool would leave large sums of money lying around? Isn’t that what banks are for?’ Clem said in an attempt to gain some much-needed ground. Her head was spinning. Her thoughts were running like hamsters on crack. She had to find Jamie before Alistair did. Hadtohadtohadto.
Alistair’s nostrils flared. ‘I want that money back. Every last penny of it. And if my car’s damaged then that will have to be paid for as well.’
‘I find it interesting, but not surprising, that you’re far more concerned about your money and your property than your stepsister’s welfare,’ Clem said.
A glint appeared in his gaze as it imprisoned hers. ‘Ah, but that’s where you come in.’
Something dropped in Clem’s belly like a book falling off a shelf. Three books. ‘H-how so?’
‘You’re coming with me to help track her down.’
Clem’s heart climbed up her throat with fishhooks. ‘I’m not going anywhere with you.’
A line of implacability rimmed his mouth like steel. He took out his phone, holding it pointedly. ‘One phone call to the police and your brother will be behind bars quicker than you can blink.’
Clem swallowed. This was bad. Capital B Bad. Capital B and italics Bad. ‘You’re blackmailing me?’ She injected every bit of disgust she could into the word.
That annoying lip-curl appeared again. So too the mocking I’ve–got-you-where-I-want-you gleam in his eyes. ‘I prefer to call it enticing you into my company.’
‘I’d rather spend a week chained to a tiger shark.’
‘How long will it take you to close up shop?’
Clem put her hands on her hips. ‘Did you hear me? I said, I’m not coming with you.’
His gaze leisurely took in the floor-to-ceiling shelves, the rows and rows of books with their ancient spines and the boxes on the floor beside her from the latest shipment from a deceased’s estate. ‘How long have you been working here?’ he asked.
‘Two years.’
‘Where did you work before that?’
‘In a municipal library. In Kent.’
His eyes did a slow appraisal of her face before moving south. Clem knew she wasn’t classically beautiful. She wasn’t anything beautiful. She was plain. Her mother was the one with the looks. Clem had been handed the intelligence, the wild hair and the bad eyesight instead. But that didn’t make her wish she had the sort of looks that would make a man’s eyes flare with interest. She was used to being passed over. Ignored. Disregarded as a piece of generic furniture. But something about Alistair’s gaze made her feel as if she was standing there stark naked. Her flesh prickled. The hairs—the ones she hadn’t paid a fortune to wax off her body—stood up. Her breasts shifted against the lace cups of her bra, as if to say, look at me!
‘Is this your own shop?’
Clem resented the question; he was only asking it because he knew for a fact it wasn’t her shop. The Dougal McCrae Rare Books sign above the door was a dead giveaway. He was turning the screws on her self-esteem. Reminding her she was never going to be anything more than an employee who could be sacked without notice. Her dreams of owning her own shop were exactly that—dreams. Silly little fantasies that would never come true, not while she had the responsibility of her half-brother to contend with. ‘My boss owns it,’ she said. ‘Dougal McCrae.’
‘Can you clear some leave with him?’
‘No.’
His finger hovered over the phone. ‘You sure about that?’
Clem ground her teeth. Just as well she liked yoghurt and fruit smoothies because at this rate she would be living on them for the rest of her life. ‘I don’t have any time owed to me.’ Not quite true. She wasn’t the going on holiday type. There didn’t seem much point paying heaps of money to go away by herself to read. She could do that at home.
‘If money is a problem—’
‘It isn’t.’ Clem would rather die than admit she was sailing a little close to the wind this month. So close to the wind she was practically living on air.
He put his phone into his trouser pocket. ‘I’ll give you twenty-four hours to get your affairs in order. I’ll be here this time tomorrow to collect you. Bring what you need for the next two or three days. A week at the max.’
A week? In Alistair Hawthorne’s brooding company? Not going to happen. ‘But where are you going? If you don’t know where your stepsister is then where will you start looking for her?’
‘I have reason to believe she’s travelling through the French Riviera.’
‘As you do when you’re sixteen and have money to burn,’ Clem muttered.
‘She is currently burning her way through my money, with able assistance from your brother, which I intend to bring to a stop as soon as possible.’ He gave her a brisk nod. ‘See you tomorrow.’
Clem strode to the door after his tall figure. ‘Did you hear what I said? I’m not going with you. Not for one minute, let alone a week.’
He turned before she had stopped walking, which meant she cannoned right into the hard wall of his body. Oomph. The shock of his hands on her arms as he steadied her was like being shot through with an electric current. The sensation of his touch travelled from her forearms to her toes and back again. Fizz-whizz-sizzle. She had never touched him before. It felt strange...excitingly strange...to have her hands pressed flat against that rock-hard chest, his smoothly ironed business shirt the only barrier between her flesh and his.
Clem brought her gaze up to his to find him looking at her with a frown. ‘You can let go of me now.’ She was annoyed her voice sounded so husky. As if she was unnerved by his closeness or something. Well, maybe she was. A little bit. He was so...so arrantly masculine. Not in a brutish, knuckle-dragging way, but in a cultured man-about-town way that was disturbingly attractive. The clean-shaven skin, the casually styled hair with those finger-mark grooves in amongst the dark brown strands, the alluring cologne with the enigmatic base notes and the freshly laundered clothes were a potent package of metropolitan, made-it-big-time manhood.
His fingers tightened on her forearms for a moment and then fell away. He stepped back as if she had suddenly emitted a skin-melting radiant heat. ‘I won’t take no for an answer, Clementine. I want you with me tomorrow otherwise the police get involved. Understood?’
Clem had a thing about her full name. She hated it. Loathed it. Resented having been labelled with it for the past twenty-six years. She had suffered years of people singing Oh My Darling Clementine within her hearing until she’d wanted to stomp and scream with frustration and embarrassment. But, whenever she made a fuss, invariably people insisted on calling her by it. She had thought about switching to her middle name but that was even worse. She told no one that. No one. Which was another reason she didn’t travel abroad. No immigration official could resist commenting on the name on her passport.
She fixed Alistair with a look. ‘Call me Clem or Ms Scott.’