At No Man's Command

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.