The Billionaire Affair (5 page)

Remembering the catering-size kitchen equipment, the extra, functional bathroom that had been made in
what had once been a bedroom next to her own, she began to put two and two together. But a country house hotel didn't make real sense. Everything was too basic.

Hearing the double doors behind her open she stiffened, holding her breath, praying that it was Linda doing the investigating, not Dexter.

But her luck was out, as it always had been with him, and he walked into her line of vision, dressed in black, a soft V-necked sweater over well-worn jeans, his feet bare, as were hers.

Her heart thumped, a bolt of electricity zapping through her bloodstream. He looked so unfairly sexy, his dark hair rumpled, his jaw shadowed, his black eyes glinting beneath heavy, brooding lids. How well she remembered that look, the promise it offered—and delivered.

‘You couldn't sleep? I wonder why,' he uttered silkily, his eyes sweeping the length of her body, lingering on the soft curves and hollows that the tightly belted, slithery robe did precious little to conceal. He made her so aware of how little she was wearing.

‘Something I ate at dinner. Indigestion,' she lied, desperately trying to ignore the quivers of sexual response that were careering right through her. She didn't want this to happen to her, to feel anything for him other than utter contempt.

And, the pity of it was, no other man had ever had this effect on her. She'd dated, of course she had; she hadn't turned into a man-hater. But no one had
ever come near to invoking the intense emotions, the devastating physical needs Ben had awoken within her.

The notebook she was holding shook in her hands. She made herself open it, remove the pen that was clipped inside the spiral of metal that bound it together, and said, ‘As I couldn't get to sleep I thought I might as well do some work. I hadn't meant to disturb you.'

‘Meant or not, you did. And do,' he responded drily. ‘And did you? Work?'

Wildly, she cast her eyes round the room that was now so different from how she remembered it, gathered her scattered mental resources and said, ‘There used to be a serving table. Father probably sold it, unless you've moved it somewhere else.'

‘Nope.'

She wasn't looking at him but she had the distinct impression he'd moved closer. Much closer. Her skin prickled. She said, her voice thickening deplorably, ‘The dresser's still here. Georgian. Valuable. Hang onto it if you're looking for an investment.'

‘At the moment all I'm looking at is you.'

Caroline gulped, her breath fluttering in her throat. What he'd said was true. She could feel his eyes on her, burning her flesh. She wanted out of here. Now. But her legs wouldn't move. Then she felt his hand on her waist, searing through the fine layers of silk, sending flickers of fire to her pulse points, each and every one of them. Don't, she wanted to say. Don't
touch me. But her tongue was cleaving to the roof of her mouth.

‘You're cold; the central heating's turned down to the minimum. Let's go. Warm milk should settle your—indigestion.'

The pressure of his hand increased, she could feel the exact placement of every fingertip. Now was the time to tell him she didn't want his hot milk, or his manufactured concern, to take herself back to her room. But she didn't. She simply went where he led, appalling herself by her mindless regression to that summer all those years ago when she would have followed him to purgatory and back if he'd asked her to.

‘You haven't asked why I found it impossible to sleep,' he said as they entered the warmth of the kitchen. ‘Don't you think that would be the correct response in the course of polite conversation?'

The dark rub of irony in his voice touched a raw nerve. What lay between them precluded normal polite conversation. But then, she remembered, he'd always had beautiful manners, despite his wild ways, always seemingly highly tuned into the feelings of others.

Seemingly.

She said nothing, just hovered, her slender body as taut as a bowstring, watching as he poured milk into a pan and reached for two mugs, a bottle of brandy. She knew she should walk out of the room, break this strangely prickly intimacy but some dark compulsion kept her where she was, just as much in
thrall to his male vitality, his smouldering sexuality as she had ever been.

‘Then, I'll tell you, since you don't seem inclined to ask.'

The mere sound of his voice made her catch her breath, her teeth sinking into the soft flesh of her lower lip. If she'd had her wits about her she would have said, Don't bother, I'm not interested. But her wits had gone on holiday, along with her common sense.

And he told her, ‘Thinking of you, sleeping under the same roof, wasn't conducive to a peaceful night's rest. I needed something to read to take my mind off it. That was when I saw the strip of light under the dining-room doors.' He shot her a brief, frowning glance. ‘I thought it would be easy, but it isn't.'

He poured the hot milk into the two mugs and Caroline drew her fine brows together.

What wasn't easy? Having her around? Was his guilty conscience pricking him? Why didn't he say what he meant? He always had before. He'd had deep emotions and he'd expressed them freely, had been totally up front about what he'd wanted. Her.

Just for a time, she reminded herself tiredly. Another notch on his bedpost, the sheltered daughter of the local landowner who had treated him like scum, no less. How he must have been laughing at her father!

And how he had changed. Not an emotion in sight. A puzzling flicker of anger once in a while but nothing else. Watching him rinse out the milk pan and
put it in the cavernous depths of the dishwasher she determined to get at least one straight answer out of him: an answer to the question that had been teasing her mind.

‘What plans have you for this house?'

‘Ah.' His smile was slightly cynical. ‘I wondered when your curiosity would get the better of that aloof mantle you assume for me.' He picked up the steaming mugs. ‘I suggest we drink this in the comfort of the library. And I'll tell you what I have in mind for Langley Hayes. And in return you can tell me what messed up your relationship with—what was his name?—the Honorable Jeremy Curtis, wasn't it? You were due to celebrate your engagement on your eighteenth birthday. Quite a catch for the only daughter of an impoverished local squire. So what went wrong? Did he find out you'd been enjoying a bit of rough trade and call it off? You must have been devastated, especially when you'd been so insistent that we keep our meetings so carefully secret.'

C
AROLINE
couldn't believe he'd said that!

Almost tripping over herself in her rush to catch him up, she followed him to the library, a small book-lined room furnished with the scuffed old leather sofas that had been here for as long as she could remember.

He knew why they'd kept their affair secret, damn him! He knew what her father had been like! And how dared he imply that she'd been using him just for sex!

He'd made space for the mugs on the cluttered top of a low table and now bent to flick on the electric fire. Caroline watched him through narrowed eyes, biting back the scalding torrent of recriminations.

If he'd made that insulting remark twelve years ago she would have responded with passion, hitting out, probably biting and scratching too! But she was older now, a hell of a lot older and in total control.

The angry thump of her heart threatened to push a hole in her breastbone, but she picked up one of the mugs in both shaking hands and sank down into the corner of a sofa.

She was not going to let him see he could still reach her on any emotional level. No way. Unlike
her younger self, she could control her reactions to whatever he did or said.

So, treating his insulting remark about rough trade with the contempt it deserved, she ignored it and said, her voice tight and hard with the effort of masking her angry emotions, ‘Any engagement was in my father's head, and Jeremy's, not mine.'

‘Really? An engagement was arranged without one side of the happy couple being aware of it?'

Plainly, he didn't believe her. He was standing a few paces away, facing her, a straddle-legged stance. The way he'd hooked his thumbs into the low-slung waistband of his jeans drew her riveted attention to the narrow span of his hips, his tautly muscled thighs.

She wrenched her eyes away, fastened them on the mug she was cradling in her hands and lifted it to her lips. A hefty swallow told her that his lacing of brandy had been far more than generous. Nevertheless, it did begin to take the sharp edge off her anger.

She pulled in a breath. For some no doubt nonsensical reason, she wanted him to believe her. What he thought of her shouldn't be important but on some deep, troubled level it was.

One more mouthful of the potent liquid, and then she explained tightly, ‘Dad was at Oxford with Jeremy's father and they kept in touch. After all, they only live twenty-odd miles away. Dad was Jeremy's godfather and when I was young I used to spend school holidays with them. I think Lady Curtis
thought I needed mothering, and Dad was glad to get me out from under his feet.

Then, when I was around thirteen, Lady C. was killed in a riding accident, and my visits stopped. But we still saw Jeremy. He and his father were about the only people we ever saw socially. Dad wanted me to marry him.'

She shrugged slightly, memories clouding her eyes. Marrying Jeremy, and the Curtis fortune, would have been the one and only thing she could have done to actually please her father.

‘Was the poor devil in love with you?' Ben demanded. His voice was harsh, a strand of bitterness threading through the obvious scorn.

It was a question he had no right to ask. Besides, she didn't know the answer. Oh, she'd caught Jeremy looking at her in ways that had made her feel uncomfortable and she'd been the unwilling recipient of a couple of clumsy, slack-lipped kisses. But love—no, she didn't truly think so. Lust was more like it and a willingness to fulfil their respective fathers' wishes in that rather spineless way he'd had.

She merely shrugged, took another gulp of the brandy-spiked milk and widened her eyes in shock as he castigated abruptly, ‘Still a heartless bitch!' Then his voice flattened, as if control had been sought and found, and he said, ‘Your letter telling me my services were no longer required was obviously written a little too late. Because by then he must have found out that you'd been having some
fun on the side and the engagement never took place. The man must have been gutted.'

He took a pace forward, bending to thrust his face close to hers, his black eyes brimming with contempt. ‘And all you can do is shrug!'

Anger as hot and sharp as his pulsed through her. How dared he act this way! Putting her mug down on the faded Persian carpet she got to her feet, the tilt of her chin mutinous as she countered scathingly, ‘You're trying to put the blame on me for what happened to hide your own guilt—it's what people do, isn't it? Why should you be any different?'

His dark eyes flared as he took a step towards her. Caroline stood her ground. The situation was explosive but she wasn't going to run away from it. He had been guilty of almost every sin in the book, not she!

The palms of her hands were slick with sweat and the heat of his body consumed her, as if the fire of their anger was pulling them closer instead of pushing them further apart.

His lips curled thinly in a parody of a smile. ‘Is that so? Then you deny writing to tell me you never wanted to see me again? You didn't even do me the courtesy of telling me to my face.'

Of course she couldn't deny it! She wanted to hit him for trying to put her in the wrong. ‘You weren't around.' She spat the words out scornfully. ‘After my father had been to see you, you'd taken off, remember?'

Even now she could hear her father's thin, sarcas
tic voice, ‘You can forget your loutish lover. I offered him money to make himself scarce, and he couldn't take it fast enough. He won't be back and, if that's not enough to cool your ardour, ask young Maggie Pope who fathered that brat of hers.'

Caroline expelled a shaky, emotional breath. She hadn't wanted this bitter confrontation, or the dreadful effect it was having on her body, making her aware of every pulse point, of every inch of burning, sensitised skin. The adrenalin flooding through her was turning passionate anger into a dark and dangerous pleasure.

‘So I wrote you a letter and left it with your mother. What else did you expect?' she said, her voice a low, tortured growl.

She was out of here, she had to be, before she said something that would rob her of her pride, something that would tell him how much, and for how long, his cruel betrayal had affected her.

As if he'd read her intentions, Ben's hand curved sharply round the back of her neck, his black eyes burning into hers. ‘What did I expect?' He repeated her words, his voice thick now. ‘You tell me! But there was a time…' the fingers that had been like talons on her neck gentled with the suddenly lowered tone of his voice ‘…when you more than fulfilled all my wildest expectations. Remember?'

The soft, stroking movement of his fingers on her skin held her far more effectively than that earlier threatening grip. Sensations she had denied for so long were springing to demanding life, making her
head spin giddily when he repeated thickly, ‘Remember, Caro? Remember how we only had to look at each other? How looking was never enough? How we had to touch naked skin, move our bodies in the dance of love, how you couldn't wait to take me inside you?'

‘Don't!' The word was a moan of denial, issued from quivering lips. Her whole body was shaking with all the old dark magic, uncomfortably mixed with the aching sense of loss and betrayal that still echoed through the years. ‘Let me go,' she said thickly, her mind horrified by her body's sensual anticipation.

‘I would if you wanted me to.' His voice purred softly. ‘But you don't. You're as ready for me now as you ever were. Deny it all you like, but these don't lie…' Gently, he rubbed the ball of his thumb over her parted, pouting lips, the soft friction setting up a primal ache deep inside her, making her need to draw his thumb into her mouth take on a forbidden and self-destructive urgency.

He dropped his hand as if he'd read the need in her eyes, his fingers finding their way along the angle of her jaw, sliding down her throat and slipping beneath the edge of her robe where the soft silk trembled with the panicky force of the beats of her pulse.

‘And neither do these,' he added, his voice slow, sultry, infinitely disturbing as long fingers grazed the crests of her blatantly peaking breasts, lingering, easing beneath the insubstantial barrier of fabric.

Caroline couldn't breathe. His caressing fingers
sent shafts of exquisite pleasure through her, just as they always had. Whatever he'd done in the past was obliterated for just this moment when the ties of passion were the only memories.

Her lips parting, she lifted her suddenly leaden eyelids and met the harsh, hungry lights in the narrowed blackness of his eyes. Her breath juddered on a soft whisper of sound, the atmosphere was so emotionally charged it stung—a million pinpricks of sexual awareness; sharp, intrusive, deeply exciting.

She could taste all the old need and raw desire on her tongue, here and now, not something left over from the past, sternly pushed away if it dared to float into her consciousness on the wings of memory. Here, binding her to him as it always had, here in the assured claim of his night-dark, compelling eyes, in the slight, slow smile that curved his undeniably beautiful mouth, a sizzlingly sexy smile that robbed her mind and body of all strength of character.

‘So…' He expelled a long, slow breath, his thick lashes sweeping down as he gazed at her mouth. ‘No denials, Caro?' His dark head bent, his mouth a breath away from hers. ‘Good. That's good.'

Her lips parted in helpless invitation. She could smell the fresh almost savagely male scent of him; it made her giddy. And then his mouth touched the corner of hers and she turned her head, instinctively, urgently seeking the remembered heady magic of his kiss, that total surrender to the ecstatically wild passion that no other man had ever come near to making her feel.

But he merely touched her full lower lip with the tip of his tongue then lifted his head, both hands fastening lightly around her narrow waist, keeping his control where she had lost hers entirely, and she was almost sobbing with cruel frustration as he said wryly, ‘Like taking candy from a baby.'

Ben released her, stepping back, his mouth compressed as his dark eyes swept over the evidence of her body's arousal, from her peaking breasts, her softened, parted lips, the haze of sexual desire that clouded her deep violet eyes. ‘Round one to me, Caro,' he added, then jerked his head towards the door, his voice clipped, impersonal. ‘Get some sleep. You'll need it. At seventeen you could be up all night and still look ravishing in the morning.' He gave a slight, humourless smile. ‘But things change, don't they?'

The implication was that she would look like a raddled hag in the morning, that she was over the hill and, just as shaming, that she had lost everything that had once driven him to wild passion, unable to look at her without needing her with a desperation that had consumed them both.

How she managed to walk in a straight line, get out of the room, she didn't know. The humiliation was so intense it turned her bones to water and filled her head with a fiery red mist that blinded her.

 

When she woke Caroline was mildly surprised that she'd managed to sleep at all and not at all surprised to note the dark rings around her eyes. Her normally
pearly translucent skin was grey and dull in the bright spring light that flooded the small bedroom.

No, she was no longer seventeen. His taunt came back to sting her. She was twenty-nine years old and should have known better than to let a deceitful, lying louse like Ben Dexter rouse her so effortlessly, rouse her to the point of being on the verge of pleading with him to make love to her.

A hot tide of shame raged through her, making her feel nauseous. Her own body had betrayed her as surely as he had done all those years ago.

She shook her head then pressed her fingers to her aching temples. So, OK, she thought wearily, she'd behaved like a fool, like the gullible teenager she'd been when she'd emerged from the cool canopy of the woods on that long-gone, hot summer afternoon to find Ben perched on the top of the drunken wooden gate that led to one of her father's neglected hay meadows.

He'd been wearing cut-off shabby denims and, apart from scuffed canvas deck shoes, nothing else. The skin that covered his whippy frame had been nut-brown, glistening, his dark unruly hair flopping over his forehead, his black eyes dancing with a million seductive lights, his smile dangerous and sexy as he'd dropped to his feet and had walked with slow deliberation towards her.

She'd felt it then, the sizzling chemistry; it had made her breathless, so she could barely answer when he'd said, ‘So school's out. Something tells me it's going to be a great summer.' His eyes told her
he liked what he saw, her slenderness cloaked in soft summer cotton, her black hair tumbling down to her waist.

She'd never been this close to him before. The effect was shattering. Of course she knew that he and his mother lived in the decrepit cottage down by the stream, had done for several years. And she'd seen him in the village once or twice and heard the mutterings about his wild ways. And she could understand them, the mutterings, almost sympathise with the staid village matrons because Ben Dexter was something else: too drop dead gorgeous, too charismatic. An untamed male.

All she could do was give him a wide smile of glorious recognition and take the hand he held out to her. And so it had begun…

Caroline gave a shaky sigh then tightened her lips. She'd been such a gullible fool then, and last night she'd have gone down the same path if Ben hadn't demonstrated that he wasn't remotely interested.

But it was no use brooding about it or wishing it hadn't happened. It had and she had to put it out of her head, salvage some pride, do her job and get out of here as quickly as she could.

A shower helped a little. No way was she going to dress in the old jeans and top Linda had lent her and scrabble around in the dusty attics. Today of all days she needed to have all flags flying, to retrieve some of her pride and somehow try to wipe away the shame.