Marrying The Enemy!. Elizabeth Power

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.

      He was dangerously attractive, a threat to any healthy woman’s equilibrium, but she just had to make sure that she didn’t fall into the trap of succumbing to any tricks he might try and use to get her to weaken before that devastating and shockingly confident sexuality. If she did, she’d be courting trouble, she assured herself chasteningly, reminding herself of how York and his uncle had both played their part in driving Shirley away.

      Well, she wasn’t going to let a Masterton man drive her away until she was good and ready! she resolved, with such vehemence that she scarcely noticed the jaded practicality of the en suite bathroom she finally found, or the lack of any really homely touches in this late millionaire’s home.

      The red stone of the quarry gaped like an ugly mouth on the undulating Somerset landscape.

      ‘When my step-grandfather—Page’s father—started the company this was where it grew from,’ York stated, bringing the car to a standstill outside one of the Portakabins where all the site’s immediate administration was obviously carried out. ‘Just a small, family-run business he’d mortgaged to the hilt, supplying raw material to equally small local builders wherever he could.’

      ‘And from this he went into construction.’ Small office units at first, Alex remembered Shirley telling her, and, in Page’s time, larger, industrial sites, but only York had given the company the real hard-nosed drive and motivation that had made Mastertons the first name in multimillion-pound developments: sports complexes, inner city expansion, whole housing estates—the best in architectural design. She had found all that out herself. ‘Quite a success story,’ she couldn’t help saying appreciatively, with a little shiver of resentment as she pushed back a thick silver wave behind her ear.

      York made a cynical sound down his nostrils. ‘And one that isn’t going to end with Little Red Riding Hood getting a bite-sized chunk of the apple,’ he promised, with sudden, soft vehemence.

      She grimaced, glancing down at the redundant hood falling softly across her shoulder. ‘I thought that was Snow White—who ate the apple,’ she enlarged, with a tartness nonetheless, as if she had just bitten into some acrid fruit. ‘And my hood’s black. I’m afraid this little heroine isn’t afraid of the big, bad wolf. You’d still despise me, wouldn’t you, York, even if you were sure about me—for refusing to knuckle under to your demands and come back here like the dutiful granddaughter after Shirley died? For not bowing down to you and Page like you both expected me to?’

      He didn’t answer, and, getting out, said only, ‘Wait here,’ his expression as cold as the icy draught through the car that persuaded him to shrug into his thick dark coat before throwing the door closed after him.

      Tight-lipped, Alex watched him, her gaze reluctantly following his hard, arrogant physique as he mounted the steps to the Portakabin and disappeared inside.

      Way down in the quarry she could hear the continual drone of heavy equipment, male voices shouting, could see the red dust cloud as the machinery ate into the hard rock.

      After a while, restless from sitting doing nothing, she stepped out of the car, pulling up her hood and stuffing her hands deep into her pockets to protect them from the freezing air.

      She was attracting a lot of looks from men coming in and out of another Portakabin, she realised after a few moments of pacing up and down, although she was used to being the object of men’s interest. It was fascination, she had convinced herself over the years, because of the uniqueness of her colouring, but in this instance she knew that a lot of the attention was generated by her having been seen arriving with York.

      ‘Hey, that’s nice, isn’t it?’

      ‘Um, very tasty.’

      A soft wolf-whistle followed the rather sexist remarks she knew she had been intended to hear.

      ‘Cut it out, lads.’ It was an older man’s voice this time. A surreptitious glance from under her lashes showed that the ‘lads’ to whom he had spoken were barely out of their teens. ‘We don’t allow that sort of thing on site, and if we did we’d be a bit more particular about who we whistled at. Do you know who that is?’ A moment’s silence. ‘That’s Alexia Masterton. The old man’s granddaughter.’

      ‘Yikes!’

      As surprised as the embarrassed-sounding youth, Alex caught her breath, and over the other sounds rising up into the Somerset hills heard the first youth utter, ‘You’re kidding! I thought she was dead.’

      That carelessly uttered statement sent a cold emotion shivering through Alex.

      She must have been mad to come here, she thought, her feet carrying her swiftly over the dusty ground back towards the car. Alexia Masterton had been dead and buried and she’d been a fool to resurrect her. But news certainly travelled fast! How could anyone have known?

      ‘Miss Masterton?’ She was so lost in thought that the man had to call the name again before she realised that someone was speaking to her. And as she turned he added, ‘Would you like a coffee while you’re waiting?’

      ‘N-no…thanks.’ She offered him a rather wan smile, still regretting what she couldn’t help deciding was a total lack of common sense on her part in coming here at all.

      ‘Come on. He could be some time,’ the man informed her, with a jerk of his chin towards the cabin where York had gone. He was fiftyish, with smiling, weather-worn features, and as she mentally replaced his thick donkey jacket with the suit in which she now vaguely remembered seeing him that morning it dawned on Alex that he must have overheard someone speak her name outside the church. ‘The lads won’t eat you. They might look vicious, but one smile from a pretty girl and they’d probably both run a mile.’