At No Man's Command

He closed the fridge to look at her again. ‘So how are you going to earn your keep?’

Her grey eyes glinted as the tilt of her lush mouth went a little higher. ‘Any suggestions?’

A rocket blast of blood slammed into his groin at her saucy look. His mind filled with images of his body rocking against hers, pumping, thrusting, exploding. He clenched his teeth, fighting the demons of desire that plagued him whenever she was within touching distance. She knew the effect she had on him. Knew it and relished it. But he wondered if it was not so much a game now but a tactic to get rid of him.

The more he thought about it, the more likely it seemed. She had hidden herself away from the press in the last place anyone would think to find her. His coming here had jeopardised the safety of her hideout.

He had no time for the press, especially since his father’s exploits had sullied the family name so lamentably, but his own profile had attracted a fair bit of interest over the years. He had been in the gossip pages more than he wanted to be, but that came with the territory of being considered one of Britain’s most eligible bachelors. The announcement of his engagement would bring a storm of interest his way, which was clearly something Aiesha was keen to avoid while she was holed up here with him.

James curled his top lip at her. ‘You think I’d get mixed up with a cheap little two-bit tramp like you?’

She sent her smoky eyes over his body from head to foot, lingering on his groin for a heart-stopping, pulse-thundering pause, before re-engaging with his gaze with a mischievous twinkle of her own. She lifted the smartphone she was holding in one hand, tapping one of her slender fingers on the screen. ‘You might want to check in with your fiancée. Fill her in on your current location and choice of company before she hears it from another source.’

James felt every hair on his scalp tighten at the roots as if being tugged out by tiny elves. But, before he could get his mouth open to speak, his phone started to ring. He took it out of his pocket, his stomach dropping as Phoebe’s image came up on the screen. ‘Hi, Phoebe, I was just about to—’

‘You bastard!’

‘It’s not what you think,’ he said, thinking on his feet and not doing a particularly good job of it. ‘She’s practically my...er...adopted sister. My mother is supposed to be here but she got called away at the—’

‘Oh, for God’s sake. Don’t take me for a complete and utter fool. It’s all over social media. You’re having a fling with a—’ the disgust and incredulity was starkly apparent in Phoebe’s tone ‘—a Vegas lounge singer?’

James blinked. His heart thudded. His brow broke out in a hot prickling sweat. The Sherwood project flashed before his eyes. All the tricky negotiations he’d gone through to nail the pitch, all the work he’d done—hours and hours, weeks and weeks, months and months of his time—would be for naught if the ultra-conservative Howard Sherwood heard about this before he could explain the circumstances. ‘Listen, I can explain everyth—’

‘It’s over,’ Phoebe said. ‘Not that I was going to say yes if you ever happened to get around to proposing to me. Daddy was right about you. He said the apple never falls far from the tree and your family tree is particularly rotten. You’re just like your jailbait-slavering father. I don’t want my name to be dragged down to that level. Goodbye.’ Click.

James curled his fingers around his phone so tightly he was sure the screen would crack or his fingers. Possibly both. He swung his gaze to Aiesha’s smile. Not a cat-got-the-canary one. A cat-got-the-whole-contents-of-the-aviary smile. A red mist of anger blurred his vision. He had to blink a couple of times to clear it. ‘You little game-playing bitch,’ he bit out. ‘What the hell do you think you’re doing?’

She pushed her lips out in a pout. ‘That’s hardly the way to address your brand-new mistress, is it?’

He clenched his jaw so firmly it reverberated inside his skull like a slammed door. ‘No one will believe it. Not for a New York second.’ Mental gulp. I hope.

Aiesha held up her phone again, scrolling through the feed of tweets, and began reading aloud. ‘“WTG! About time. Always knew JC had a thing for you.”’ She looked up at him with that bad girl smile of hers. ‘Guess how many retweets so far?’

James swung away, ploughing a hand through his hair. How would he ever live this down? Everyone in London—everyone on the planet—would be rolling about the floor laughing at his choice of partner. A sluttish club singer who was sleeping her way up the social ladder like a poisonous viper winding its way up a vine.

Everyone would be saying it, the words he dreaded the most: like father, like son.

But wait...

Maybe there was a way he could switch this around. It would reflect badly on him if their ‘relationship’ was viewed as nothing more than a casual fling or temporary hook-up. He would look exactly like his father if he didn’t go into damage control and fast.

Think. Think. Think.

Aha!

What if his relationship with Aiesha was a little more serious?

James took out his phone again and typed a quick tweet and pressed send before he was tempted to think twice. This could work. It had to work. Please God, let it work.

‘What are you doing?’ she asked. ‘You can’t retract it now. It’s too late. It’s gone viral.’

‘I’m not retracting it.’ He gave her a payback smile as he slipped his phone back in his pocket. ‘Congratulations, Aiesha. You just got yourself engaged.’

CHAPTER THREE

ENGAGED?

Aiesha hid her surprise at his countermove behind her trademark screen of streetwise brashness. ‘Do I get a big, flashy diamond ring with that?’

His smile dropped away and his deep blue eyes glittered with disgust as they took in the impudent height of her chin. ‘You’re the last person on earth I would ever consider becoming engaged to and you damn well know it. You’re the one who set this up. Now you can deal with the consequences. We’ll stay engaged until the press loses interest. I give it a couple of weeks, tops.’

Aiesha folded her arms across her chest, the action pushing her breasts up so that a generous hint of her cleavage showed. She enjoyed watching him try to keep his gaze north of her neckline. He was so starchy and uptight, but she knew that inside those crisply ironed trousers with their knife-sharp creases was a hot-blooded man in his prime. ‘How much are you going to pay me for this little pretend gig? You should know by now I’m not the kind of girl to do anything for free...even for...erm...’ she gave him a little wink as she put her fingers up in mock quotation marks ‘“...family.”’

His savage frown brought his brows together over his eyes. ‘Have you no shame?’

She laughed at his schoolmasterish-stern expression because she knew it would annoy him. She liked annoying him. He was always so serious and sober. So grave and so disciplined. It amused her to niggle him, to watch him fight to control his temper. She watched as a dull flush rode high on his sharp aristocratic cheekbones and a muscle flickered in his jaw, on and off, as if it was being tugged by a surgical needle and thread beneath the skin.

Yep. He was furious with her all right. He looked as if he wanted to shake her until her teeth fell out and rolled along the floor like marbles.

But there was something else throbbing in the air and it wasn’t anger.

Aiesha could feel the echo of it pulsing in her own body. She became aware of every one of her erogenous zones as if his steely gaze had burned through the ice that kept each of them in a deep-freeze lockdown.

Molten heat pooled between her thighs as she thought of those clenched hands relaxing enough to reach out and stroke her flesh, for one of those broad, masculine fingertips to brush across the pebble of each of her nipples, to tease the puckered skin until she gasped out loud with the pleasure.

She glanced at his tight-lipped mouth. She had always wondered how it would feel to have that mouth lose its rigidly disapproving lines and soften in passion, to meld to hers in a fiery lock of lust and longing, for his tongue to stab through the seam of her mouth to plunder hers.

Aiesha suppressed an involuntary shiver. She wasn’t interested in being overcome with passion. Unlike most women, she could always separate sex from emotion. She could get down and dirty, but her heart and her head were never in it, only her body. Her body had needs and she saw to them if and when the right opportunity came along.

But something warned her about getting physical with James Challender, like a foghorn sounding in the distance. She couldn’t put her finger on it, or describe it accurately, but she knew if she stepped over the boundary of becoming involved with him sexually then it might not just be her body that would receive him.

No one but no one had access to her heart and she was going to keep it that way.

His slate-blue eyes seared hers. ‘How long have you been in contact with my mother?’

Aiesha held his accusing look with a defiant hoist of her chin. ‘She wrote to me the year after her divorce from your father was finalised.’

His brows snapped together. ‘You’ve been in contact that long?’

‘On and off.’

‘But...but why?’

Aiesha had been surprised by Louise’s first phone call eight years ago. With the benefit of hindsight and a little more maturity, she knew she had acted appallingly to the only person who had ever shown her a shred of genuine affection.

Louise Challender had always wanted a daughter; she was the type of woman who should have had a brood of children to love and nurture, and yet she’d been unable to have another child after giving birth to James. It had put an enormous strain on her marriage to Clifford, but then Clifford wasn’t the type of man who would have been a suitable father for anyone, let alone a brood of kids. He was too immature and selfish, like a spoilt child who had been overindulged and always expected everything to go his way. Aiesha had seen that from the moment she had been introduced to him when Louise brought her home from the streets, where she’d been living since her stepfather had kicked her out a week after her mother had overdosed on heroin. She’d refused to take her mother’s place in his bed so he’d turned her out of the house, but not before committing an unspeakable act of cruelty that still caused her nightmares all these years on. If only she had thought to get Archie out of the house first.

If only. If only. If only...