Marrying The Enemy!. Elizabeth Power

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.