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...
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