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Alex drew in a breath, colour rising in her cheeks. ‘I don’t have to prove anything to you!’
His eyes were astute, missing nothing. ‘Spare me the indignation, lady,’ he advised. ‘It’s going to take more than that to convince me…Alex. And my uncle’s solicitors are going to need more than just a sultry smile and that sexy New Zealand accent before they agree to grant you the half-share of the house.’
‘Half the house? Is that what he left…?’ Me, she had been going to finish with, but stopped herself short. She had no right to it. Nor did she want it-any of the Masterton money.
‘Over my dead body,’ he whispered, the venom in him causing a slick of fear to infiltrate her blood.
Hadn’t she learned from everything she had read about him—from his hard-nosed business acumen down to the hidden forces of his personality—how tough he was? Hadn’t Shirley warned her? Why, then, had she imagined she could come here like this?
‘If I’d been Page I would have disinherited you entirely.’
‘But he didn’t.’ Unexpectedly, something stirred in Alex—something she banked down before it could manifest itself into anything more concrete as she uttered, ‘And you resent that like hell, don’t you?’
The hard glitter in his eyes confirmed it, but it was resentment born solely out of his contempt for Shirley and whoever he thought she was, she was surprised to find herself acknowledging, rather than any sort of greed on his part.
‘Wouldn’t you,’ he returned, ‘if you’d seen a man virtually destroy himself because of the total disregard by his only daughter, and when her avaricious, alleged little offspring turns up to get her hands on the only thing Shirley didn’t already bleed him of—his money?’
She doubted if Page Masterton had ever cared enough about his daughter to suffer any sort of emotional trauma over her desertion, but all she said was, ‘“Alleged”, York?’ From beneath her lashes she slanted him a glance that was both challenging and watchful. ‘Are you still insinuating I’m not who I say I am?’
They had come to a standstill on the path. Beneath the bare trees York’s face was criss-crossed by shadows.
‘Are you?’ he demanded, his eyes narrowing with cold calculation.
Alex’s breathing stilled beneath the stylish cut of her coat. How Shirley’s intimidated little daughter would have savoured seeing him in such a state of ambivalence—so undecided—ten years ago!
She laughed, the sound easy on the cold, clear air. ‘You really don’t know, do you? And that’s what’s really bugging you, isn’t it, York? The fact that you aren’t really sure. Just for once you aren’t completely in control and you can’t stand it, can you…cousin dear? Well, you’ll just have to accept my word for it, won’t you?’ she finished, with bitter irony twisting her mouth.
His smile was slick, without warmth, cold as the day. ‘Accept the word of anyone who calls herself Shirley’s daughter? Hah! That’s laughable in itself! But whatever you are—freeloading little tramp or total charlatan—I’m warning you now, I’m a very dangerous man to cross. Make one false move—just one mistake—and I’ll…’
‘You’ll do what?’ she retaliated, undeterred by his threatening tone. ‘Clap me in irons?’
His eyes mocked her response, her whole defiant stance. ‘Is that how you like to play? Bound and begging for mercy? Not quite the little innocent who came to my bedroom expecting chaste kisses.’
A heated flush stole into the translucent sheen of her cheeks. Oh, stupid, stupid fool! What was she letting herself get into? Why had she imagined she could come here without inviting a whole heap of trouble? Yet—from another life, it seemed—reluctantly she was aware of how his body would feel beneath her hands, of the hard, burning arousal of his kisses. Because Alexia had known. But that Alexia was dead. And all she had to do was play the part until her purpose here was accomplished…
‘Unlike you,’ she said softly, refusing to be swayed by the power of his sexuality, ‘I’ve always been rather particular with whom I play.’
He chuckled at that. Perhaps he didn’t mind being reminded that he had once been photographed with an actress who’d later become mixed up in a pretty hairraising scandal. ‘An unfortunate liaison,’ he said dismissively.
‘Very,’ she said pointedly, although she knew that his integrity had emerged unscathed.
‘Nevertheless, until I’m satisfied as to exactly who you are, you’ll be coming back to Moorlands with me where I can keep an eye on you for however long it takes.’
For however long what took? Proving her false identity? Was that what he was hoping for?
‘I’m doing no such thing! I’ve got a very adequate hotel room in town, thanks!’ she snapped, deciding that staying under the same roof with this man could lead her into nothing but trouble. ‘Naturally I’ll want to—’ she started, but he cut in, his expression inexorable, his mouth grim.
‘You’ll do exactly as I say.’
She wanted to argue against it, but that overriding determination in him—that tyrannical streak that she knew very well was characteristic of the Masterton men—was too strong. It was the reason why Shirley had left home, why she had struggled for an existence on her own with only her child after Page had prevented her marriage, why she’d been dragged down into the unfortunate lifestyle that had led to her overdose. Accidental, the coroner had said, brought about by a lethal blend of booze and barbiturates.
Something speared through Alex—something cutting and deep. Oh, to find some skeleton in the impeccable Masterton cupboard! Particularly in the high and mighty, unimpeachable York’s!
But refusing to do as he said, insisting on staying at the hotel, wouldn’t help her in trying to convince him that she was his cousin, nor to find those letters which, suddenly, had become the most important things in her life. And so, feigning sweetness, with a totally false smile, she uttered, ‘As you put it so hospitably, how can I refuse?’
CHAPTER TWO
MOORLANDS stood in its own grounds on the fringes of a small Somerset resort, a beautifully grey-gabled, Cotswold-style house with fields rising to woodland on one side and the town stretching away to the sea on the other.
As they came up the long drive in York’s powerful saloon Alex was relieved that the journey from the church had been a short one, so that she hadn’t had to engage in much conversation with him.
‘The beech hedge was planted courtesy of Edmundo, our long-standing gardener,’ he commented about the copper-leafed boundary fence hung with cobwebs of frost on their right. ‘But then you wouldn’t remember him, would you?’ he breathed derisively, bringing the car around a triangular grassy island with an old and gnarled maple tree at its centre, testing her again—as he would continue to test her, she realised, every step of the way.
‘As a matter of fact I do,’ she shot back. ‘Portuguese, isn’t he?’ And the only person at Moorlands whom Shirley had spoken of with any affection, she remembered. ‘Didn’t he come to work here the year my mother was born?’
York slanted her a look that said it would take more than that to impress him. ‘Very good,’ he drawled. And then he added, ‘How old is his son?’
‘What?’
He had brought the car between two ivy-covered walls onto the deserted, cobbled forecourt, the look he gave her hard and inquisitorial when she didn’t immediately respond.
‘He didn’t have a son—just two daughters,’ she assured him after a long moment’s deliberation, colour swamping her cheeks as she went on heatedly, ‘If you think I’m going to spend my time here indulging in some sort of question-and-answer game with you, you’re very much mistaken, York Masterton! Either you accept me for who I am or you throw me out and let me go back to the hotel, which I’d be more than happy to do!’
He smiled knowingly. ‘I’ll bet you would!’ he said, cutting the engine of the BMW and turning towards her with his eyes anything but friendly. ‘Why didn’t you come here straight away instead of turning up at the funeral like some fugitive if you’ve got nothing to hide? Or would that have been too complicated? Did you imagine I’d be at more of a disadvantage meeting you in the churchyard like that, too unsettled by the occasion to think about much else, rather than if you’d faced me here, on my home territory?’
She hadn’t reckoned on his being quite so resolute in not believing her. But she had all the papers, so why was he managing to make her feel so unnerved?
‘This isn’t your home,’ was all she could think of to say at that moment. From what she had read in the papers, she’d thought that these days he lived in a luxury apartment in London.
‘It is now.’ Disconcertingly, his arm came across the back of her seat, and she almost hated herself for the small tingle that ran through her as he leaned across and murmured in a voice of mocking sensuality, ‘Mine and yours.’ She had to make a conscious effort to desist from inhaling the subtle, tangy spice of his aftershave. ‘That should make a very…interesting partnership.’
‘A partnership—with you?’ she choked, despising her body’s totally unwelcome awareness of him. ‘I’d rather go into business with a gorilla!’
He laughed without humour, that strong, masculine jaw hardening. ‘You’ve certainly come with some pretty well-conceived opinions about me, haven’t you…cousin?’ His tone derided the title. ‘Well, for your information, they’re all true. But who said anything about business?’
Alex felt her throat working nervously. Whoever he thought she was—his estranged cousin out for all she could get, or a total impostor—he had no qualms about using that powerful masculinity to try and scare her off.
Well, he wasn’t going to succeed!
Ignoring his innuendo, she uttered nonetheless unsteadily, ‘I told you—I didn’t come here for the money.’
‘Then what for—if you’re who you say you are?’ he demanded, allowing her to breathe again when he moved back, absently taking his keys out of the ignition. ‘And you haven’t answered my other question. Why were you talking round the graveyard instead of coming here to see me first?’
Alex bit her tongue to stop herself retorting that she hadn’t been ‘stalking’, as he had put it, advising herself that it would be in her best interests not to antagonise him deliberately.
‘I thought you’d answered that yourself. Why, I’m positively terrified of you, aren’t I, York?’ she couldn’t, however, resist tossing back sarcastically with a pale, beautifully manicured hand against her chest ‘The truth is, I didn’t get into Heathrow until breakfast time yesterday morning. It was a twenty-four-hour flight and I’m lucky if I slept for two. Consequently all I was fit for was to book into the nearest hotel and fall into bed, and I didn’t wake up until nine o’clock yesterday evening. I only found out then, when I picked up a paper someone had left in the lounge, that Page had died. How do you think I felt, finding out that his funeral was today?’
‘Immensely relieved, I would have thought.’ His own sarcasm was unrelenting.
‘You don’t have the slightest sympathy for how I might feel, do you?’ she breathed, her teeth clenched as she struggled to control her temper. At least that was one advantage she had over the fiery-natured adolescent he had known. She was more in control.
He would never have a good word to say about Shirley—or anyone connected with her. She should have expected it. ‘My mother was born here-even if I wasn’t—even if she was regarded as being outside the socially accepted circle for having me. And whatever Page did to her—he was my grandfather. You’re not the only one who’s been blessed with the ability to feell’
He waited patiently while she finished. She wasn’t going to add that she had strong doubts about the last point—doubts about whether he could feel at all—which only increased as he drawled cynically, ‘Congratulations on the performance. Do you expect me to believe that you didn’t wait until Page was safely out of the way before you risked coming here? Were you hoping I’d be less of a problem to manipulate? Because, if you were, you’re in for a pretty rude awakening, Alex Johns—or whatever your real name might be. So what is it if, as you say—’ his chin jerked roughly upwards ‘—it isn’t the money?’
Those grey-green eyes were penetrating, causing Alex’s tongue to stray across her top lip. Fortunately, though, another car was coming up the drive, drawing York’s attention mercifully away from her. What would he have said if she’d told him? she wondered as she opened her door and stepped out into the cold, glittering day.
Half of Moorlands. A generous allowance and a few shares in the business.
As the solicitor and his clerk left, Alex stood numbly by the long leaded window, her arms folded, watching the dark saloon drive away.
‘How does it feel—getting things the easy way?’
Alex swung round, her gaze skittering across the plush, classically furnished lounge.
Jacketless, York was standing in the doorway, his hands on his hips, his long, powerful legs astride beneath the tailored trousers. Not many people had come back to the house, but those who had had gone. All except Celia, who was upstairs somewhere getting changed.
‘If you need to ask any more questions, why don’t you have it out with your solicitor?’ she recommended, with a toss of her head towards the window. ‘He seemed perfectly satisfied that he was dealing with the right woman.’ She felt her throat contract as he came into the room, an animal of such impressionable strength and forcefulness that inevitably her pulses started to quicken.
‘I’m not surprised—when you had him eating out of your hand from the word go.’
‘That’s hardly true,’ she reminded him. In fact the solicitor had been a very pleasant but astute middle-aged man. ‘And I thought you said he couldn’t be charmed by my winning smile.’
His gaze flicked cursorily over her slender figure beneath the pearl-grey silk blouse and straight navy skirt—all that she had been able to find that morning amongst her possessions suitable for wearing to a funeral.
‘Maybe I was wrong.’ His gaze lifted to assess the creamy smoothness of her complexion, the darkly fringed sapphire of almond-shaped eyes, the wide, sensual mouth, all framed by the intriguing silver of her hair—and in a voice that was dangerously soft he said, ‘Is any man immune?’
The tightening in Alex’s throat became almost painful and she took an involuntary step back, only to feel the soft cushions of the window-seat against her leg.
‘You’ve got all the charm of a beautiful woman plus a cool, level-headed intelligence. That’s a dangerous combination. The Alexia I knew was guileless, passionate, impulsive…’
‘She was a child!’
Light played across the rich ebony of that arrogant, tilted head.
“‘She”?’ he repeated in a voice like soft, suffocating silk.
‘So now you’ve got me doing it!’ Impatience coloured her voice. ‘What do you think I did with her? Killed her off and stole her identity?’ she argued, barely able to keep her mind on what she was saying. He was so dangerously attractive, had such a fascinating lure for the opposite sex that she might have melted under the blaze of that powerful magnetism if she hadn’t been so aware of how insensitive he was. ‘You saw all my papers!’
‘Yes.’
And he had had little choice but to accept them, as the solicitor had—to accept them as authentic, she thought, with a small twist of satisfaction. ‘So why are you still insinuating I’m not telling the truth?’
‘Why indeed?’ He moved a disconcerting step closer, that aura of potent male energy about him as unsettling as his uncomfortable nearness. ‘Perhaps it’s because under that oh, so cool-as-a-cucumber faąde you’re remarkably edgy. Unless, of course, by some stretch of the imagination you’re telling the truth and it’s something much more basic than the need for circumspection that’s making you so uneasy in my presence.’ Cold mockery
gave an upward curl to his mouth. ‘Still find me sexy, Alex?’
Despite the bitter frost that seemed to have got through to her bones, even though the house was centrally heated, Alex felt herself grow sticky beneath her blouse.
‘Is your conceit innate? Or has it been specially cultivated?’ she challenged stiffly, hiding the nervousness that her voice could so easily have revealed.
He laughed. ‘All right, if that’s the way you want it,’ he said. ‘I suppose if I’d been Alexia I’d probably have wanted to conceal the more intimate details too.’
Alex swallowed. She knew what he was talking about. She just didn’t want to think about it, and for a moment she longed to blurt out what he wanted her to say—that she wasn’t Alexia Masterton, she was someone else entirely. But that would have been self-defeating as well as stupid, and, striving for that outward calm he had mentioned, she murmured wearily, ‘Have you quite finished?’
A muscle twitched in his jaw and she thought for a moment that he was going to slap her down—metaphorically at any rate—for that little display of audacity. But all he did was stoop to pick up a tissue—hers, she realised—that was lying on the carpet, and, handing it to her, he said, ‘You can freshen up upstairs and then we’ll drive down into town so that you can pick up your luggage. Then I’ll take you round and show you what I’m going to do all in my power to stop you getting your hands on. That’s, of course, if you aren’t still too jetlagged.’
So he’d noticed that weariness in her. As he’d notice everything, she couldn’t help deciding with a little shudder.
Refusing to be baited into any more arguments with him, though, all she said was, ‘No.’ And, when he didn’t give her any indication of where she was to go, uttered pointedly, ‘Could you at least show me where it is—the bathroom, I mean?’
An emotion—impossible to read—flitted across his face. ‘You’re supposed to have been here before. I would have thought in the circumstances you would have been able to tell me.’
‘Very funny,’ she returned. ‘That was ten years ago. People change their homes. Knock down walls. Build extensions…And anyway, my room had an en suite.’
She could see the question in those shrewd, perceptive eyes: was she guessing, or had she simply been informed?
‘In that case…’ With a gesture of exaggerated politeness he indicated for her to precede him out of the room, guided her across the sunny, tastefully furnished hall and up the curving staircase to the floor above.
‘This will be your room.’ He threw open one of the doors off the long landing. Sunlight streamed in from the leaded casement windows, spilling across the cream and floral duvet on the double bed.
This room overlooked the back of the house. Outside, the manicured gardens and the sweeping fields rising to the woods still glittered under a silver veil. A picturebook landscape. Lifeless, Alex decided, until she spotted a wisp of smoke drifting upwards from the chimney of a farm building in the distance.
‘The bathroom,’ she guessed, moving towards a door.
‘Wrong.’ His voice came, deep and relentlessly testing, from behind her. ‘My room. It might seem a little too cosy to you, but at least this way I can keep account of exactly what you’re doing.’
Alex’s feet pivoted on the pale, patently expensive carpet ‘Is that how you get your kicks?’ she breathed accusingly. ‘Listening to what your guests get up to?’
York’s mouth pulled down at the corners. ‘Not usually. But then we haven’t exactly established whether you’re a guest or not, have we?’
‘Haven’t we?’ she retorted, his suspicions beginning to test her reserves. And, though she hadn’t intended using it in any way as a defence, she couldn’t help adding, ‘I believe I’m co-owner, which surely gives me rights to come and go as I please, or even to bring friends back here if I so think fit?’
She had no intention of doing anything of the sort—she had said it only to show him that she couldn’t easily be cowed by his infernal arrogance—because although she got on well with people she was very much a loner. As for men, she had never met anyone who could break down her reserves enough to make her want to sleep with him. Only once. But she wasn’t even going to think about that.
‘You do and I’ll throw you both out,’ he rasped, interpreting her remark exactly as he wanted to. ‘No part of this house becomes yours until the necessary documentation’s drawn up to say that it does.’
‘So you’ll use strong-arm tactics? Like you did before. Sheer brute strength just so long as you could exercise Page’s every last whim in trying to separate Shirley from the one thing she cared about most—her daughter!’
His face appeared to turn savage beneath the raven sleekness of his hair. ‘Shirley didn’t care about anyone but herself—so don’t lay it on that thick, dear child. And never—never—breathe a denigrating word to me about my uncle in this house again. And if I’m not too mistaken—’ his voice was more controlled and, like his expression, suddenly coolly derisive ‘—I don’t think it would have taken very much persuasion on my part to induce her hot little daughter to stay.’
‘God! You’re conceited!’
‘Am I? Perhaps we ought to put it to the test.’
‘Don’t you dare!’
She didn’t know what happened next, only that he had caught the hands that flew up instinctively to fend him off, securing them behind her back, and primitive sensations rushed through her as she found herself locked against his hard body.
‘Let me go!’ She could barely drag the words past her lips, panic rising in her as he laughed harshly.
‘Why? Because it’s there now—that attraction, isn’t it…cousin dear?’ His words mocked, cruelly, relentlessly. ‘Is that why you’re putting on such a marvellous act of being affronted? Or is it the thought of sex between cousins? That never worried you before. But if Shirley didn’t make it clear enough—we’re only connected by marriage. Page and my father were only stepbrothers, so if the thought of any blood ties between us bothers you you can stop worrying about that right now.’
‘I’m not worried!’ she tossed up at him unthinkingly, her face defiant, though the startling reality of his hard strength was making her senses swim.
‘In that case—’ his mouth took on a sensual curve ‘—I don’t believe I exactly welcomed you the way a cousin should.’
She couldn’t have prevented what happened next if she had wanted to—the way his mouth suddenly covered hers, both gentle and yet shockingly erotic, those hands splayed across her back, holding her loosely but ready to turn hard and show their determined power if she dared to resist.
She sensed enough about that to stand still and take it, her mind struggling to reject the sickening excitement that was suddenly rising in her blood, a raw stirring of primitive needs she hadn’t anticipated or been prepared for, every cell tensing with her body’s acknowledgement of his hard power and his musky male scent beneath the subtle aftershave as his mouth played with leisurely insolence over hers.
His eyes were hooded, veiled by the thick sable of his lashes when he eventually lifted his head.
‘No response? And yet no resistance either.’
‘What did you imagine?’ The hard rise and fall of her breasts was the only indication of her shattered selfcomposure. ‘That if I was who I said I was there would be?’
He started to say something, but Celia’s voice in the corridor, exclaiming, ‘Oh, there you are!’ pulled them apart.
The woman came in, commenting to Alex, ‘I trust York’s doing everything possible to make you comfortable.’
‘Everything,’ she heard him drawl meaningfully, when she was still too shaken by his kiss to answer, and she was relieved when his mother, promising to see her downstairs, asked if she could have a word with York about her travel arrangements, which left Alex mercifully alone.
She didn’t have to take this! she thought, wiping the back of her hand across her mouth. It smelt of his aftershave lotion and her lips were still tingling from his calculated humiliation. She could go home. Forget about why she had come. It was a long shot, anyway, that she would find those letters. She could go now. Pick up her case and get the train straight back to London. But that would be letting York Masterton get the better of her. And for Shirley’s sake—for her own sake—she wasn’t going to allow him to do that.