is one of Mills & Boon’s most popular and bestselling novelists. Her writing was an instant success with readers worldwide. Since her first book, Bittersweet Passion, was published in 1987, she has gone from strength to strength and now has over ninety titles, which have sold more than thirty-five million copies, to her name.

In this special collection, we offer readers a chance to revisit favourite books or enjoy that rare treasure—a book by a favourite writer—they may have missed. In every case, seduction and passion with a gorgeous, irresistible man are guaranteed!

LYNNE GRAHAM was born in Northern Ireland and has been a keen Mills & Boon® reader since her teens. She is very happily married, with an understanding husband who has learned to cook since she started to write! Her five children keep her on her toes. She has a very large dog, which knocks everything over, a very small terrier, which barks a lot, and two cats. When time allows, Lynne is a keen gardener.

Indecent Deception
Lynne Graham

www.millsandboon.co.uk

Chapter 1

Chrissy leapt off the bus and splashed straight into a puddle. Dirty water spattered the pristine overall she wore beneath her unbuttoned coat. With a groan of exasperation she fled on down the road, frantically checking her watch. She was late for work.

As she dived across a narrow side-street, the screech of brakes almost deafened her. Jerking round, she had a brief blurred image of the car bearing down on her before she lost her balance and landed with her behind and her two hands braced on the wet tarmac. Winded and shocked, she just sat there dazedly appreciating that she was still in one piece. The glossy black bonnet of the luxury sports car was less than a foot from her face.

A car door slammed. A pair of male feet shod in hand-stitched Italian leather entered her vision. ‘You stupid, crazy little idiot!’

There was something disorientatingly familiar about that clipped well-bred drawl that voiced abuse with lacerating cool. Her wide green eyes climbed up the long straight length of masculine legs sheathed in the mohair blend of bespoke tailoring.

‘Well,’ the same objectionable voice continued, ‘what have you got to say for yourself?’

Chrissy’s dilated gaze swept over a flat, taut stomach and mounted a scarlet silk tie that lent flamboyance to a superbly cut navy suit, and there her head tipped back on her shoulders, impatience spurring her on to confirm her suspicions.

‘Maybe I ran over your tongue...’

Her tongue did have a problem. Disbelief had glued it to the roof of her mouth. Blaze Kenyon. Breathtaking, unforgettable and utterly unmistakable for anyone else. He was incredibly good-looking and soul-destroyingly unattainable unless, Chrissy had once noted, your beauty was on a par with his. Once long ago, in a purely philosophical mood, Chrissy had wondered why beautiful men were invariably attracted only to equally beautiful women.

Indeed, until Blaze parted his lips and actually spoke, he was so dazzlingly perfect that you were tempted to pinch him to see if he was real. As his luxuriant black hair ruffled in the breeze, Chrissy was briefly inspected by brilliant sapphire-blue eyes.

Hitching his knife-creased trousers, he crouched down to run a pair of excruciatingly thorough hands over her extended limbs in search of injury.

‘I suppose you do realise that you’re sitting in a puddle.’ Suddenly he smiled, brilliantly, blindingly. He had the sort of charisma that switched on like a high-voltage searchlight, targeting a victim. When he switched it off again, it was a little like being plunged into outer darkness.

Careless long brown fingers were still anchored to her slim thigh. Chrissy unfroze and thrust the over-familiar hand violently away. It was not a reaction Blaze was accustomed to receiving. A slight frownline was etched between his winged dark brows as he sprang up again.

She stumbled clumsily upright on knees that didn’t feel strong enough to support her entire weight.

Blaze didn’t even recognise her. Sudden bitter resentment thrust Chrissy’s chin up. ‘You could’ve k-killed me!’ she condemned. ‘You were driving f-far too fast.’

‘Good God,’ Blaze breathed softly, studying her truculent, defensive face. ‘It’s Chrissy.’

‘C-Christabel,’ she corrected coldly, cursing the stammer that often dogged her in moments of stress.

Blaze ran a measuring scrutiny over her, taking in dirty hands, laddered tights and curling mahogany streamers of flyaway hair descending forlornly from an inexpert topknot. ‘You haven’t changed,’ he said.

Scarlet to her hairline, Chrissy squashed an embarrassing urge to point out what she felt should have been obvious even to the most disinterested observer. Over the past three years, she had shed almost three stone. ‘N-neither have you,’ she countered with fierce sincerity.

His forefinger flicked the Peter Pan collar of her overall. ‘Are you a nurse now?’ His tone was dubious.

‘Why should you be interested?’ she slung between clenched teeth, fighting her stammer with all her might, and that generally made it worse.

‘Mere curiosity? I wasn’t expecting to meet a Hamilton today,’ Blaze supplied very, very coolly. ‘Are you sure you’re not hurt?’

‘I doubt if you’d care whether I was or not.’ Chrissy clung to her hostility as though it were a suit of armour.

‘You’ve only bruised your pride and your backside.’ A teasing edge had softened his clipped vowels.

A second earlier she had been wondering at the icy edge to his tone when he voiced her surname, but now that was forgotten as her teeth ground together. It might have been three years since she last saw him, but Blaze Kenyon still affected her much as a whip would laid across her sensitive flesh. ‘I have to get to work,’ she enunciated with stiff dignity. ‘N-nice meeting you again.’

Blaze roared with laughter. ‘Nice meeting me? I damned near ran over you! You should think twice before you throw yourself beneath my wheels.’

‘I did not throw myself—’ Chrissy began furiously.

‘Fortunately I have fast reflexes,’ Blaze murmured reflectively, choosing to concentrate on that aspect of the episode rather than the shock she had sustained.

‘I have to get to work,’ Chrissy repeated with wooden emphasis, and without another word she walked away with a ramrod-straight back, seethingly conscious of the amused sapphire eyes following in her wake. She ached to massage a certain throbbing portion of her anatomy, but she fought the need until she had entered the exclusive apartment block several yards away and knew herself safely out of sight. Her coat was sodden. She was soaked to the skin.

‘What happened to you?’ A slender blonde, clad in a matching overall, answered her urgent knock on the door of one of the ground-floor apartments and gaped at her bedraggled appearance.

‘I fell,’ Chrissy gasped, open prayer on her feverishly flushed features. ‘Have you got anything I could borrow?’

‘Sorry...you’re supposed to carry a spare overall of your own,’ Glynis reminded her, looking superior.

‘I just can’t afford to buy another one this month. I wash this one out every night.’

‘Working a lying month is the pits,’ Glynis remarked without great interest as she cast herself down on a richly upholstered sofa and switched on the television with a flick of the remote-control.

‘Did Mr Cranmore phone?’ Chrissy was dabbing ineffectually at the stains on her overall with a handful of tissues. It would be just her luck if this was one of the days their mutual employer decided to do a spot check on one of his newest workers.

‘Relax,’ Glynis groaned. ‘You worry too much.’

‘Shouldn’t we be getting started?’

‘Run a vacuum over the place. That’s all it needs,’ Glynis advised, lighting up a cigarette and showing no sign of movement. ‘I don’t know why a couple as clean as this bother to use a cleaning agency...’

‘Do you think you should be smoking here?’ Chrissy prompted uncomfortably on her passage to the cupboard where the vacuum was kept.

‘I deserve a break like anybody else.’

If Martin Cranmore found anyone else slacking on the job, it would mean instant dismissal. But he had a soft spot for Glynis. Glynis had baby-blue eyes and fluffy blonde hair and they licensed her to get away with murder. The other cleaners hated her. None of the other women wanted to partner Glynis. The blonde never did her share of the work and, if there was a complaint, Chrissy had already been warned that it would not be Glynis who took the blame for it.

Chrissy had been employed by the Silent Sweep agency for just three weeks and she was desperate to hang on to her job. The cleaning agency had a rulebook a full half-inch thick, and within the space of one working day Chrissy had watched the blonde break every rule in it. The ultimate sin was to make oneself at home in a client’s apartment. There was a strictly regimented list of tasks to be carried out on every visit...and those tasks were to be done even if they did not appear to be necessary. That was what the client was paying for. Silent, unseen service.

Blaze Kenyon. As Chrissy whizzed about with the vacuum, he leapt into her mind the instant she was free to think about him. He exploded out of her carefully blocked subconscious with the shock value of an evil genie. In his wake came a tidal wave of homesickness and a surge of very painful memories.

She was able to suppress the homesickness. After all, she no longer had a home worthy of sentimental recall, she reminded herself. Not only was her mother dead and her siblings married, but Chrissy herself was all too wretchedly aware that, no matter how bad things got, she could never expect her father to house her again.

The painful memories were far more resilient. Out there on the street, Blaze had committed the ultimate sin of seeing her as she used to be. The Hamilton family misfit. Elaine’s overweight, socially inadequate kid sister. Did he even remember his last encounter with Chrissy Hamilton? She shuddered at the very idea of him remembering. No, he wouldn’t remember. A bottle of whisky on top of a recent family bereavement had made him more than usually callous and indifferent to the feelings of others. Humiliating Elaine’s kid sister had cost him not a pang of conscience. He had been incredibly cruel, so cruel that Chrissy still carried the scars.

Glynis screened a yawn as they entered the third-floor apartment next on their schedule. Chrissy headed straight for the kitchen and stopped dead on the threshold. ‘Oh, hell!’ she muttered in dismay, absorbing the devastation before her.

Glynis swore at the sight of the abandoned dishes piled high on every surface and the smell of stale food. ‘She’s had a party and left us to clear it up. Well, she can forget that!’ she said aggressively.

‘We’re down for two hours extra here. Now we know why.’ Chrissy opened a window to air the room. ‘I’ll start in here, shall I? You can take the lounge,’ she suggested.

Glynis said something rude and stalked off. Chrissy worked quietly and efficiently, hoping that just for once Glynis was in the mood for work. Their schedule had to be strictly followed. Clients always specified hours when their homes were empty.

‘What do you think?’

Chrissy spun and her eyes widened incredulously. Glynis was doing a twirl in a fancy cocktail dress.

‘Couldn’t resist it...gorgeous, isn’t it? And she’ll never notice. The bedroom’s a tip. This was lying on the floor—’

‘For heaven’s sake, take it off and put it back!’ Chrissy gasped in horror.

‘Don’t be such a pain!’ Glynis groaned. ‘I’ve done the lounge. I’ll finish up in here if you like. I hate doing corner baths...’

‘Take it off!’ Chrissy repeated.

Glynis gave her a filthy look. ‘OK...OK. I can’t say you’re a barrel of fun to work with, can I?’ she snapped.

Chrissy had just entered the bathroom when she heard the front door open and the sound of voices, male and female mingling. She sprang upright, wondering frantically if Glynis had had time to change back into her overall. A brunette appeared in the doorway and frowned. ‘Aren’t you finished yet?’

‘I’m sorry, no.’ Chrissy made no attempt to point out that they had been booked for a specified time and were indeed still half an hour within that period. ‘Do you want us to leave?’

The elegant brunette pouted. ‘How long will it take you to finish up?’

‘About twenty minutes...’

‘I suppose I’ll have to put up with you, then, or I won’t be getting what I paid for,’ the brunette said witheringly.

‘Who are you talking to?’ a dismayingly familiar drawl interposed.

Blaze Kenyon strolled into view.

‘What are you doing h-here?’ Chrissy demanded in stark disbelief, her faith in the impossibility of two such glaring coincidences in one day severely shaken.

His brilliant blue eyes narrowed. ‘I was about to pick Leila up when we ran into each other earlier. What are you doing in her bathroom—?’

‘She’s supposed to be cleaning it!’ his female companion cut in thinly. ‘Are you telling me that you know this girl?’

‘You’re a cleaner?’ Blaze did not conceal his astonishment.

Leila curved a hand round his arm. ‘Come on, darling...the sooner she finishes, the quicker she’ll be out of here,’ she purred suggestively, but she eyed Chrissy with grim annoyance.

Chrissy felt utterly humiliated. She was not ashamed of what she did for a living. The hours suited her and the agency paid a reasonable rate. Three years ago she would never have dreamt that she would be cleaning other people’s homes to survive, but a lot of things had changed in those same three years. She had no false pride about her work, had indeed been grateful to have paid employment...until Blaze Kenyon surveyed her with well-bred amazement and suddenly made her feel like the lowest of the low.

‘Hell, that was close!’ Glynis whispered from the doorway. ‘I’ll finish the kitchen. You dump those flowers in the hall and we’ll get out!’

Chrissy was gathering the fallen petals off the carpet when she heard Blaze speaking. The lounge door wasn’t closed and he had a deep, carrying voice. Every word was crystal-clear.

‘When I say nouveau riche I mean nouveau riche. The Hamiltons were into spotlit bonsai trees and floodlit oils. Jim Hamilton is one of the most vulgar loudmouths one could meet...’

Chrissy straightened and froze, her facial muscles clenching painfully tight as she moved closer to the ajar door, the sound of her own ruptured breathing loud in her eardrums.

‘The mother was the worm that turned,’ Blaze drawled smoothly. ‘Belle was quite incapable of furthering Hamilton’s social aspirations. She drank too much and dropped the most frightful clangers with the happiest smiles. When the good life got too much, she ran off with a freezer salesman, who turned out to be a bigamist. Hamilton thought it was the funniest thing he had ever heard. Night after night he dined out on the story with glee—’

‘What are you doing?’ Glynis demanded from behind her as Chrissy thrust the door wide.

Chrissy had the vase of wilted flowers in her hand. Blaze was indolently sprawled on the sofa several steps inside the door. Raising the vase, Chrissy up-ended the contents over Blaze Kenyon’s gleaming dark head.

Leila shrieked as though she had plunged a knife into his back. The vase contained a surprising amount of water. A deluge descended on Chrissy’s victim.

Blaze sprang up, scattering flowers, and spun round.

‘You p-pig!’ Chrissy shouted.

Blaze clawed wet hair off his brow with one hand, his glittering ice-blue eyes smouldering threat at Chrissy.

‘You are a p-pig!’ Without warning her bravado was punctured.

‘Are you crazy?’ the brunette screamed at her shrilly.

‘Angry,’ Blaze murmured drily.

‘I’m going to have you fired for this!’ Leila promised, grabbing up the phone and punching out a number.

Glynis came running with a towel and fervent apologies.

Chrissy stood there blinking in bewilderment. But inside her head she was still hearing Blaze slice her parents to ribbons, serving up her poor mother’s heartbreak as a grotesque source of entertainment. He was a filthy, rotten snob! Born with the proverbial silver spoon in his mouth, grandson of an earl, Blaze had grown up against a background of rich, inherited privilege. His arrogance was that of an aristocrat, who had never known what it was to try and measure up to the expectations of a higher social class.

‘Your boss wants to speak to you!’ The smiling brunette extended the receiver like a hangman extending the noose.

On wooden legs, Chrissy stepped forward. Martin Cranmore was practically sobbing with rage at the other end of the line. What he said was short and sweet. White-faced and trembling, Chrissy looked at no one as she turned and walked out of the room. She gathered up her coat and bag.

Glynis caught her arm, oozing morbid fascination. ‘What the hell did you do it for? Do you know who that gorgeous hunk is?’

Pulling on her coat, Chrissy said nothing.

‘He’s that racehorse trainer! He’s the one with all the women, practically a harem from what you read in the papers!’ Glynis gushed excitedly.

The sheer incredulity on Blaze’s sun-bronzed features swam before her afresh. In retrospect, she could barely believe what she had done. He had probably never been assaulted by flowers before. Nervous husbands and protective fathers avoided his company. Around thirty most men settled down. Blaze hadn’t. Scandal still shadowed his every step and no doubt he reacted with sublime insouciance to all rumour and report. His hide was tough. She would not have embarrassed him. And an hour from now he would be cracking a joke about it in that mocking, sardonic way of his.

But Chrissy would not be laughing. She had just sacrificed her job, and her job had been the one little bit of security she had left. The last piece of her mother’s jewellery had been sold three months ago. The proceeds were long gone. She was stony broke and behind with her rent. She had practically pleaded with Martin Cranmore to give her the job. Desperation had overcome pride. That job had given her hope. She had seen it as a first basic foothold on survival.

And now it was gone, and with it the wages due to her for the past three weeks. Loyalty was all very well when you could afford it, Chrissy conceded painfully, but she hadn’t been able to afford the cost of emptying that vase over Blaze Kenyon’s arrogant head. A sense of utter desolation crept over her. Dear God, what was she going to do now? How were they to survive?

It was raining heavily. With a bent head she crossed the street and began walking. Digging her hands into her pockets, she didn’t even try to avoid the puddles. When a car door shot open in front of her, she recoiled in alarm.

‘Get in!’ Blaze instructed abrasively. ‘And take off that filthy coat first!’

Chrissy gaped in at him across a divide of palest cream leather upholstery. ‘W-what do you want?’

A groan of impatience greeted the tremulous demand.

Tears mingled with the rain on her cheeks. She was glad he couldn’t see them. ‘G-go away. I’m not going to apologise.’

‘I’m offering you a lift home.’

‘That’s crazy,’ she muttered. ‘Why w-would you want to do that?’

‘Do you think it could possibly be a belated attempt to make amends?’

‘No.’

‘Oh, Chrissy, how I have missed the delights of dialogue with you. If you don’t get in, I’ll get out and throw you in. The upholstery’s getting wet.’

‘I don’t w-want a lift!’ she gasped. ‘You th-think this is funny, don’t you?’

‘Actually, it’s incredibly depressing.’ Blaze sighed from the interior. ‘If a branch came out to you when you were drowning, you’d push it away and sink like a stone.’

Chrissy was perilously close to another breakdown. ‘I h-hate you.’

‘And I love you for it, sweetheart. You’re unique,’ he mocked. ‘You see that policeman heading towards us?’

Her head lifted. A uniformed figure was approaching them.

‘Stay where you are,’ Blaze encouraged. ‘This should be fun. He doesn’t like the look of us at all. Either you’re soliciting or I’m kerb-crawling. The next time we do this, at least run a comb through your hair. At this moment, you’re not doing a lot for my image.’

Absorbing the frowning attention they were receiving, Chrissy shot into the car and slammed the door.

‘Try not to drip on my CDs.’

She hunched over inelegantly, wet hair screening her pinched profile.

‘How is Belle these days?’ he enquired, sending the powerful car shooting away from the kerb.

At the reference to her mother, her slight shoulders reared back up, her hair whipping back from her damp cheeks, over-bright eyes raw with pain and condemnation.

‘I liked your mother,’ Blaze said evenly.

‘In so far as you ever noticed her!’ Her clogged lashes dropped on her aching eyes. The silence went on and on and on and then she cleared her throat gruffly. ‘She’s dead.’ It was bald, bitter.

‘When?’

‘Last year.’

‘How did it happen?’

She tautened. ‘Pneumonia,’ she conceded.

‘I’m sorry. That must have hurt. You were very close,’ he responded with an amount of apparent sincerity that astonished her.

But Chrissy almost laughed out loud. How close had she really been to her mother? Belle Hamilton had fled her husband and family without a word of advance warning. Chrissy had once found her chatting cosily in the kitchen over a cup of coffee with Dennis Carruthers but she hadn’t thought anything of it. Belle had always happily offered hospitality to workmen, tradesmen—indeed virtually anyone ordinary who entered the house. She had been far happier entertaining them than she had ever been trying to entertain their grandiose neighbours. Nobody had known about Dennis until it was too late. Her mother had burnt her boats with a vengeance.

‘Why didn’t you go home again?’

Chrissy turned even paler. ‘I couldn’t.’ And then she regretted even saying that much. But there was something so dangerously unreal about being in Blaze Kenyon’s company, something so disturbingly hypnotic about receiving his full attention.

‘Where do you live?’

Still in a daze, she told him and then suggested he drop her at a bus-stop. His mouth hardening, he ignored the invitation. From below feathery lashes, she stole a glance at him. He really was quite spectacular. Even immune as she was to his physical allure, she could not resist the urge to look again. Every chiselled line of that strong bone-structure spoke of bred-in-the-bone self-assurance. What could he possibly know about the traumas that had finally torn her family apart when she was sixteen?

Chrissy had stood on the sidelines of her parents’ crumbling marriage, helpless to do anything more than offer her unhappy mother sympathy. Her father had been the reasonably contented owner of a hamburger takeaway when he won the pools. Overnight their lives had changed out of all recognition. And not for the better. Initially her father’s ambitions had been sensible, even modest. He had expanded in the catering trade. But, in the grip of entrepreneurial fever, his ambitions had grown as fast as his bank balance.

When the thrill of flaunting his riches before relatives and friends had worn off, he had bought a fancy house in Berkshire without even consulting her mother. Divided from lifelong friends, her mother had been lost. Worse, Jim Hamilton, always a domineering, short-tempered man, had become more and more aggressive as his wealth and importance grew. When their new and more far-flung neighbours had demonstrated a dismaying reluctance to welcome the Hamiltons into their select social circles, Belle had received the blame.

Even when the locals had finally drifted in to gape, if not to admire, the gulf between her parents had been insurmountable. The damage had been done. Treated with complete contempt by her husband and two eldest children, Belle had been an easy mark for a smooth-tongued younger man. In striking out to find happiness with Dennis, her mother had made an appalling error of judgement. But Chrissy believed that Belle had been driven, not least by her husband’s blatant infidelity, into making that final choice.

‘I thought most of this area was up for redevelopment,’ Blaze mused. ‘The demolition squad is practically parked on your doorstep.’

It was a dirty little street of narrow terraces, set on the edge of a gigantic building site. Some of the houses were already boarded up.

‘Not quite Buck House, is it?’ Chrissy snapped in an artificially correct voice, calculated to annoy.

Blaze filtered the car to a smooth halt, carefully avoiding the spill of rubbish from a tumbled dustbin. ‘What a little snob you are,’ he murmured drily. ‘I was only initiating conversation.’

Opening the door with desperate fingers, Chrissy flung him a look of incredulity. ‘N-no, you weren’t. You can’t open your mouth without being superior!’

Without a further word, she skidded out on to the pavement. Rifling in her bag for her key, she hurried down the street to an end terrace and unlocked the door.

‘Is that you, Miss Hamilton?’

Swallowing convulsively, Chrissy stilled in the act of closing the door. Her landlady was barring her passage to the stairs. ‘You’re back early.’

‘If you’ll excuse me, Mrs Davis—’

‘What about the rent? You got it yet?’ the older woman interrupted bluntly. ‘Because if you haven’t you can get out of here today. Give me that key!’

‘Mrs Davis, you will get—’

‘Nothing ever seems to come of your promises, luv. I must’ve been mad to take you in. Girls with kiddies in tow aren’t reliable. I should have known better,’ Mrs Davis fumed. ‘But I felt sorry for you, didn’t I? Well, I’ve got my own bills to think about and—’

A crisp, cool voice intervened. ‘How much does Miss Hamilton owe you?’

Her landlady spun in amazement. Chalk-pale with mortification and shock, Chrissy’s head twisted on her shoulders. Blaze stood in the doorway, not one whit perturbed by the scene he had interrupted. He was pulling a wallet from his jacket.

‘Three weeks, she owes,’ Mrs Davis retorted truculently, and added the amount.

A handful of notes changed hands faster than Chrissy could part her lips. ‘You can’t take his m-money!’ she protested.

‘Oh, can’t I? I don’t care who pays as long as it’s paid.’ Mrs Davis directed a grim smile of approval at Blaze. ‘And don’t you forget that you’re to be out of here by Saturday. I’ve got a removal van booked for the morning.’

Chrissy was so profoundly embarrassed as her landlady disappeared back into her ground-floor flat that she couldn’t bring herself even to look at Blaze. ‘I’ll post it to you,’ she promised shakily. ‘W-when I can,’ honesty bade her admit.

‘No hurry.’

She was quite nauseated by the knowledge that she was now in his debt. But she could do nothing but accept his charity. Mrs Davis wouldn’t give up the money and Chrissy was in no position to offer repayment. On the other hand, it was thanks to Blaze that she was not now being thrown out on the street. It took immense courage to rise above her sense of humiliation. Raising her bowed head, Chrissy collided with impenetrable sapphire eyes in one brief, stricken connection. ‘Thanks,’ she forced out with difficulty. ‘Maybe I’ll see you around some time,’ she concluded with awkward finality.

Without awaiting any further response, she started up the stairs, fast. On the first landing, she pressed open the door of her bed-sit with raw relief. She simply couldn’t have borne another second of his company.

‘What on earth are you doing back?’ her babysitter, Karen, demanded, rising from the single armchair with a frown.

‘It’s a long story.’

Rosie threw herself at Chrissy’s knees with a whoop of delight.

‘Bloody hell!’ a very male voice ejaculated.

Chrissy spun as though she had been jabbed in the back by a hot poker. She hadn’t heard Blaze follow her upstairs. He had to move like a leopard on the prowl. With Rosie planting an enthusiastic kiss on her cheek, she was paralysed to the spot, devastatingly conscious of Blaze’s stunned and silent scrutiny.

Chapter 2

There was a horrible hiatus. Karen hovered the way impressionable females usually did in Blaze’s vicinity. Possibly she recognised him. Rarely out of the society pages and the gossip columns, Blaze was very well-known. His life in the fast lane was notorious.

‘I’ll see you later, Karen,’ Chrissy said hurriedly.

As the other girl left with visible reluctance, Blaze strolled deeper into the room, scanning the sparse, worn furniture and the few shabby toys littering the cramped floor space. With a grace of movement that was inbred, he swung back to look at Chrissy, a wry twist to his expressive mouth. ‘I suppose I should have been prepared for this scenario,’ he drawled. ‘But I wasn’t. I was still thinking of you as a kid.’

‘I’m almost twenty-one.’ As she spoke, Rosie was struggling to get down, and reluctantly she bent to lower the wriggling toddler to the floor. She was praying that Blaze would leave, couldn’t imagine what strange quirk had made him follow her upstairs.

‘Still practically jailbait,’ he mused half under his breath.

Her cheeks fired scarlet, her mouth tightening. Did he automatically divide all women into two camps? Those he could sleep with and those he thought he shouldn’t sleep with? The idea revolted her, but it also resurrected cringing recollections of their last encounter. Hurriedly, she buried her mind’s urge to relive the past. In preference she reflected grimly on Blaze’s ‘love them and leave them’ reputation.

He was an unashamed user and abuser of the female sex, she thought in disgust. Once she had believed that her sister, Elaine, was too calculating to be hurt by any man. But Elaine had fallen hard for Blaze. After a brief whirl, he had ditched her again with savage unconcern, devastating her pride and driving her into a face-saving marriage with a man she didn’t love. Her over-confident sister had become just another line in a gossip column, another notch on his bedpost, and for the first time in her life Chrissy had felt sympathy for Elaine.

‘So this is the reason you can’t go home.’ Astonishingly, Blaze crouched down on Rosie’s level and solemnly accepted the scruffy pink rabbit he was being invited to admire.

‘Wosee’s wabbit,’ Rosie told him importantly.

‘I love wabbits,’ Blaze teased, the most natural, utterly breathtaking smile warming his darkly tanned features. The usual chill and cynicism etched there was briefly put to flight. As he ruffled Rosie’s black curls, he straightened again.

Bemused by this totally unexpected display of humanity, Chrissy dragged disobedient eyes from the wide, blatantly sensual arc of his mouth. Her chest felt oddly tight as she sucked in oxygen, suddenly short of breath.

Blaze sighed. ‘It’s probably a very stupid question, but how the hell did you land yourself in a mess like this?’

He had simply assumed that Rosie was her child. But then, everybody did. In the circumstances it was a natural assumption, and she could not possibly trust him with the truth. Rosie was her half-sister, the last pathetic footnote to her late mother’s ‘marriage’ to Dennis Carruthers.

‘I think you should leave,’ she said stiffly.

‘You’re right. I should walk back out of here and forget I ever left the car,’ Blaze murmured grimly. ‘But I have the hideous suspicion that all this would travel with me. Clearly you’re broke, and now you’re also unemployed’

‘And whose f-fault is that?’ she cut in shrilly.

‘I’m not in the habit of censoring speech in private conversation,’ he countered without an ounce of embarrassment. ‘But if I said one thing that was unfounded on fact, you’re welcome to call me to account over it.’

The invitation merely made her turn away in sharp distress. Dear God, how she loathed him! But he had uttered not a single untruth. The bald facts were exactly as he had stated them. Nouveau riche and painfully rough round the edges, the Hamiltons had certainly failed to merge tastefully with the surrounding countryside. Her father had loved putting on vulgar displays of his new-found wealth. He had thought that he needed to impress people to win respect. But all that he had won was derision.

‘I gather that you have to get out of here,’ Blaze prompted shortly. ‘Have you found somewhere else to go?’

‘No.’ The admission was dredged from her. Not that he needed it. He would know as well as she did that she had no hope of finding somewhere else without cold, hard cash to put down in advance.

London was a terrifyingly anonymous place to live in without friends. Those Chrissy had made at college had swiftly drifted away when she was forced to drop out of her teacher-training course and shoulder full-time care and responsibility for her little sister. In one gigantic bound, Chrissy had gone from teenage freedom to adult reality. She had grown up ten years in the first six months.

A succinct and unsuppressed swear word fell from his lips. ‘What are you planning to do this weekend?’ he demanded harshly. ‘Set up home on the street?’

‘We’ll manage,’ she muttered tightly.

‘Like you’re managing now?’ he derided cruelly. ‘Have you asked your father for help?’

‘I haven’t spoken to him in three years,’ she confided unsteadily. ‘He was f-furious when I moved in with Mum down here. He doesn’t know about Rosie and it wouldn’t make any difference if he did. As far as he’s concerned, I betrayed him when I went to Mum—’

‘Your brother? Your sister?’ Blaze cut in. ‘Surely one of them—?’

Chrissy vented a humourless laugh at the ridiculous idea of either Rory or Elaine taking up the cudgels on their behalf or even putting their hands into their pockets. Rory lived in California now with his wife and family and, just like Elaine, he had been appalled by what their mother had done. Neither had been willing to forgive Belle. Even when she was lying in Intensive Care, her life expectancy measured in hours, Elaine had refused Chrissy’s pleas for her to come down to London.

Chrissy had never got the chance to tell them about Rosie and, in any case, the revelation would only provoke horror and disgust. Rosie was Belle’s daughter by another man, the result of an illegal union that had made headlines for days in the tabloids when Dennis was arrested. After all, Belle hadn’t been the only woman he had deceived into a quick trip to the altar. There had been two others, neither of whom he had bothered to divorce.

‘I never got on that well with Dad anyway,’ Chrissy pointed out, eager to close the subject because she didn’t want to tell lies.

‘Who would?’ Blaze breathed with chilling hauteur. ‘He’d sell his granny to cannibals to make a fast buck.’

As he made the grim assurance, cold, clear anger lightened his eyes and tautened his sculpted cheekbones. Chrissy stared, puzzled by his vehemence. What had her father done to rouse his ire? But before she could voice her curiosity Blaze shrugged back a silk shirt-cuff and glanced at his watch. ‘I’ve got a business meeting in an hour.’

‘I’ll post that money to you,’ she said again.

‘Forget it,’ he advised carelessly. ‘Consider it small compensation for the loss of your job.’

A painful flush stained her pallor. ‘I don’t want your ch-charity!’

‘Think of it as conscience money.’ Narrowed very blue eyes lingered on the betraying shimmer of tears below her lashes, the defeat slumping her shoulders. ‘I owe you and right now you need a helping hand,’ he intoned with a faintly scornful twist of his mouth as if he couldn’t quite credit how anyone of intelligence could end up in such a situation.

‘I don’t w-want your helping hand! I don’t want your lousy money!’ Chrissy spat.

‘I’m afraid you’re stuck with it,’ Blaze informed her flatly. ‘If it’s not too rude a question...where’s Rosie’s father?’

‘Behind bars!’ Chrissy told him fiercely.

‘In prison?’ She really had his attention now. For a split-second, he actually looked shocked. Blaze, the unshockable, shocked. Lush black lashes, inherited along with his golden skin tone from his Spanish father, briefly veiled his astonishingly noticeable eyes from her view. ‘When you screw up, you go the full yard, don’t you?’ he murmured.

She couldn’t quite believe her ears, and then she remembered that this was Blaze, who followed few of the rules that governed other people’s behaviour. He was prone to saying exactly what he thought with a brand of devastating honesty that frequently unnerved those around him. He had no time for civilised dissimulation. His raw energy always had an edge of impatience, as if restlessness ran in his bloodstream.

‘I want you to go,’ she said.

He studied her with grim detachment. She was at the end of her rope. He knew it, and she hated him for it. ‘Either you go home and crawl or you fling yourself on the tender mercies of the social services,’ he drawled. ‘You can’t make it without somebody’s help—’

‘Will you get out of here?’ Chrissy wrenched open the door with violence. She was shaking with the force of her emotions.

For a split-second, Blaze stilled. He stared down into her blazing green eyes, and for the first time that day they really connected. She fell into bottomless blue like a novice swimmer and forgot to breathe, her throat tightening, an electrifying tension shooting through her slim body.

He ran a blunt forefinger along the ripe fullness of her soft lower lip, and his touch was a flame dancing provocation on her too sensitive skin. ‘You are extraordinarily intense. You feel, you really do feel. That’s bound to get you into tight corners. Intensity is a passport to pain. Don’t you know that yet?’

Burnt by that near caress and his proximity, she leapt back, staggered and dazed by the sensations she had briefly experienced. If it was at all possible, her hatred intensified to the brink of explosion. His pity blistered into her skin like acid. ‘Go on, g-get out!’ she practically screamed at him.

When he had gone, the room was strangely shrunken in its emptiness. She blinked, shook her head uncertainly, and shivered. Once before he had made her feel like that. Trapped, hypnotised, lost. It was petrifying, overwhelming. Self could not seem to exist when he came too close. But this time, at least, he hadn’t lost his temper.

Few were aware of it, but a seething black temper lurked behind those stunningly blue eyes and that cool half-smile. Once, just once, she had fallen foul of that temper by accidentally stumbling into the firing line. But he clearly didn’t remember that...oh, no, why should he? It was only little Chrissy he had bitten to the bone with that cruel whiplash tongue, only little Chrissy, offspring of the infamously vulgar Hamilton clan. Why should he remember half frightening her out of her wits?

She was dismayed by the emotion shuddering through her in great waves, could hardly believe that she could still feel so strongly after all this time. Yet she did. Once he had touched her with raw sexual derision, just once, when she was seventeen and stupidly, recklessly naïve. It had been over in seconds but she had never forgotten the humiliation of his drunken assumption that she was throwing herself at his head as so many other women had.

Nor had she forgotten the resounding force of his savage rejection. Without ever issuing the smallest invitation to him, she had been flung away, thrust bodily out of reach as if she was too utterly revolting to be borne. Reeling with shame and confusion at what he had made her feel, she had then been forced to withstand a verbal beating into the bargain.

‘If you don’t watch out, you’ll turn into a tart like that sister of yours!’ Blaze had intoned viciously. ‘I may have been a few times round the block but I do have some standards!’

Nor had the brutality ended there on that unforgivable insult to Elaine. With an explicit lack of inhibition, Blaze had told her what he thought of her and what would happen if she continued on the promiscuous path he had so ridiculously imagined her to be embarking on. If anything, the moral lecture from his immoral corner had been salt rubbed into the wound.

That he could have thought even for a conceited moment that she wanted him...that she was just another bimbo willing to do absolutely anything to get him. The recollection still made her feel sick. She had not had a teenage crush on Blaze Kenyon. She had never, ever denied that physically he was almost unbelievably attractive. But she had never been able to stand him. As a human being he scored nil all the way down the line. Like a chalk scraping down a blackboard, he set her teeth on edge.

Yet the split-second savagery of his mouth on hers had devastated her. She had felt her own response with disbelief and horror. The shame of that momentary self-betrayal had been agonising. And, linked with his derision, the agony had become anguish. He might as well have stripped her naked and tossed her into a crowded street to be laughed at. Endowed with all the sensitivity he lacked, Chrissy had felt suicidal.

‘So what next?’ Karen grimaced, shrugging into her coat and hauling her suitcase on to the landing. ‘You worry me to death.’

‘If I go to the social services,’ Chrissy whispered tautly, ‘they’ll probably put Rosie in care.’

‘Stuff!’ Karen said. ‘They’ll stick you in a hostel or a B and B.’

‘I don’t have any right to keep her,’ Chrissy reminded her painfully. ‘And if they ask Dennis what he wants, he’s sure to say adoption. He never wanted her in the first place.’

‘What’s it got to do with him?’ Karen snorted.

‘He is her father. He’s got more rights than I’ve got...’

‘She’s a sweet kid, but I don’t know why you want to be lumbered at your age,’ the older girl admitted bluntly. ‘I mean, she really isn’t your responsibility. And let’s face it, kiddo...what can you give her?’

‘Karen!’ Chrissy was shaken and hurt by that forthright assessment.

‘Look, this isn’t easy to say, but adoption would give her a good home and two parents. Be practical, Chrissy.’ Karen sighed ruefully. ‘I can’t cut it here without a job. That’s why I’m going back to Liverpool. How do you expect to make it with a child?’

‘Other people do!’

‘They have to. You don’t. Rosie does have other options,’ Karen stressed. ‘You have to face facts some time. Even if you do get another job, you won’t make enough to cover childcare. You just haven’t got the earning power.’

It was a relief when Karen’s cab arrived. Like it or not, the other woman had faced her with certain inescapable facts. Karen had looked after Rosie for a pittance and the arrangement had only been temporary. Sooner or later, Chrissy would have been faced with finding a replacement, and her salary would not have stretched to the going rate. Not if she had wanted them to eat as well.

But Karen also made her see something that she had refused to see before. Was she being selfish in her desire to keep Rosie? Rosie didn’t have enough clothes or toys or stimulation. All those things cost money they didn’t have. Perhaps worst of all was the acknowledgement that she couldn’t even give her sister security. She didn’t even know where they’d be sleeping in forty-eight hours’ time. What sort of life was that to give Rosie? Didn’t she deserve more?

Chrissy was afraid of approaching the social services. She was not Rosie’s legal guardian. Apart from the registration of her birth, the authorities had had no further notice of her sister’s existence. They had moved three times while Belle was still alive, on each occasion to smaller, cheaper apartments. Her mother, stubbornly set on denying Rosie’s existence, had refused to take up her entitlement to child benefit. The very frequency of their changes of address had put paid to any further enquiries from the powers-that-be.

So far they had fallen through the system...but what would happen if they were forced to seek help? Would she lose Rosie? That fear had prevented Chrissy from attempting to put her relationship with her baby sister on a proper legal footing. Furthermore, as she had told Karen, Dennis would be sure to be asked what he wanted, and Dennis, who had been furious when her mother became pregnant, would be certain to opt for adoption.

Chrissy didn’t believe that she could love a child of her own body more than she loved Rosie. Belle had never come to terms with what Dennis had done to her. It was the pregnancy which had killed Belle. Not so much the strain of carrying a baby at the age of forty-five as the shame of all that had gone before. Dennis’s rejection when he’d realised that her mother was running out of money. His arrest, the publicity. The horrific sense of humiliation with which Belle had endured her pregnancy.

After the birth, Chrissy had hoped that her mother would recover. But she hadn’t. Sinking deeper and deeper into depression, Belle had lost all pride in her appearance and had done the barest minimum necessary in caring for Rosie. She had refused to see a doctor. In desperation, Chrissy had approached the doctor herself, begging him to visit. Unfortunately, Belle had put on a terrific act for his benefit, and after his departure there had been the most terrible row and Belle had threatened to throw Chrissy out if she ever interfered again.

Inevitably her mother had neglected her own health, and chest problems that had troubled her in earlier years had returned. A bout of flu had turned into pneumonia. She had been rushed into hospital but it had been too late.

Belle had had no will to fight for survival. She had simply drifted away. At the time of her death, they had been on the brink of moving again, and after the funeral Chrissy had gone ahead with the move. Only the doctor had enquired about Rosie’s welfare, and Chrissy had lied. She had told him that she would take her sister home to her family and, not knowing the circumstances of Rosie’s birth, he had not questioned that story.

At half-eight the next morning, a loud knock landed on the door. Opening it a crack, Chrissy’s troubled eyes focused incredulously on Blaze Kenyon. Taking advantage of her bemusement, he pressed the door wide and strolled in.

‘Have you had breakfast yet?’

‘Breakfast?’ she echoed foolishly.

‘I didn’t want to miss you. That’s why I came early.’ He hunkered down on his knees to respond to Rosie’s rush in his direction. ‘Friendly little scrap, isn’t she? Have you got a sitter for her?’

‘No.’ In a complete daze, Chrissy stared at him, wincing as her little sister flung herself at him with gay abandon. ‘Friendly’ was an understatement. Rosie was all over him like a rash. Men were almost non-existent in her world. Blaze was an object of curiosity.

‘Carry...carry Wosee,’ she demanded.

‘Hold on a minute,’ Blaze drawled as he dug a mobile phone out of the holster on his belt. Calmly holding it out of Rosie’s reach, he punched out a number and ordered a cab to their address.

‘W-why do you want a cab?’ Chrissy enquired.

Blaze swung Rosie into his arms and vaulted upright again. ‘There’s no room for a child in my car.’

Chrissy folded her arms. ‘But we’re not going anywhere.’

‘I’m taking you out to breakfast. Does the scrap need a bottle or something?’ He surveyed Rosie uncertainly.

‘She’s nearly two and a half,’ Chrissy said drily.

A broad shoulder sheathed in a black cashmere sweater moved in a careless shrug. ‘Children are a closed book to me.’

Maybe he thought they were in need of a good square meal. She couldn’t think of any other explanation for his arrival. Her cheeks flaming, she said, ‘Look, we’re not going anywhere. We don’t need breakfast—’

‘You’re so thin you look anorexic. You’re not, are you?’ he prompted with a sudden frown.

‘Of course I’m n-not,’ she snapped in frustration.

A mocking grin slanted his mouth. ‘I couldn’t cope with an anorexic. I’m crazy about food.’

It didn’t show anywhere on that long, lean body. He didn’t carry an ounce of surplus flesh. His black jeans hugged sleek thighs and narrow hips, his sweater delineating a muscular chest and a stomach as flat as a washboard. About there she dragged her gaze away from him, angry with herself.

Blaze, at Rosie’s prompting, was obediently retrieving her rabbit from the floor and receiving a beatific smile in reward. Chrissy couldn’t quite believe what she was seeing. There was no sign of irritation or impatience in his dark, mobile features.

‘I’ve got a job offer for you,’ he told her almost in an aside.

Chrissy tensed like a greyhound scenting a hare. ‘Where? Who with?’ she demanded.

‘I talk better on a full stomach. Don’t get excited,’ he warned. ‘It’s not in London and it might not appeal to you.’

So this was why he was here. His conscience had pushed him into further effort on their behalf. She reddened fiercely. It was petty of her but he was the last male in the world she wanted help from. It smacked too much of noblesse oblige and stung her pride. But then what was pride when it came to Rosie? And why was she getting excited? She might not get the job whatever it was and, even if she did, where would they live and what about Rosie? One problem simply led to another.

In the cab, Rosie stayed anchored to Blaze. She sat there very solemn and quiet and on her very best behaviour, but no way would she return to Chrissy.

‘No...no want Kissy,’ she said quite clearly.

‘Kissy?’ Blaze cast Chrissy a sudden lancing look of derision. ‘She’s not Kissy. She’s Mummy,’ he informed Rosie firmly. ‘Mummy. Say it.’

Rosie obliged.

‘What the heck do you th-think you’re doing?’ Chrissy spat at him furiously.

‘I’ve got no time for women who won’t let their children call them Mother—’

‘It’s nothing to do with you!’ Chrissy vented in an explosive response. ‘How dare you interfere—?’

‘I know exactly what I’m talking about.’ He was quite unrepentant. ‘She needs to know who you are.’

Chrissy bit down on her tongue. She was angry, but did it matter? After today, she was unlikely to see him again, and Rosie would soon forget. Since she couldn’t trust him with the truth, she would keep quiet.

He took them to a really fancy hotel where the head waiter treated them to an incredible amount of personal attention. As soon as Rosie was settled, Chrissy unleashed her impatience. ‘The job,’ she reminded him.

‘Live-in. Child not objected to. It’s a big house,’ he volunteered, lounging back in his chair to regard her with clear, cool eyes. ‘One permanent occupant, occasional guests.’

Her brow furrowed. This she had not expected. ‘A private house?’

He nodded.

‘Where?’

‘Your home stomping grounds.’

Chrissy tautened in dismay. That was equally unexpected. ‘How close?’

‘About five miles from Southfork.’

Chrissy reddened. Her father had christened his home The Towers. It hadn’t really matched up with the Spanish arches and the lamp-posts lining the drive. The locals had gone one better.

‘What’s the job?’ she asked anxiously, striving not to think of what it would be like to be working so close to her own home.

Blaze was tucking into an enormous fry-up with gusto. There was silence for several minutes. She could have screamed. He had her hanging on his every word. Finally, he let his knife and fork rest and lifted his coffee instead. ‘Cook...housekeeper...general maid of all work. I’ve got to be honest. The job description would have to be fairly elastic. If you can’t be flexible, it won’t suit you.’

‘Are you telling me that I’m likely to be worked to death?’

‘No. Other staff will be brought in if it’s necessary. Right now, there’s no need for them,’ he asserted. ‘The house is being extensively renovated. It’s in one hell of a mess and mostly unfurnished. The owner hasn’t moved in yet and you would be left to your own devices quite a lot. There is a phone, though, and the use of a car. So what do you think?’

‘Any idea of the salary?’

He came back with a very generous quote. ‘Not a lot, I know, but you wouldn’t have any bills to worry about.’

Chrissy grinned. ‘Are you kidding? I’d be in clover.’ And then she strove to suppress her excitement and be sensible. It was too good to be true. There had to be more drawbacks than he had mentioned. ‘Why am I getting a chance?’

‘Someone else backed out at the last minute. Took one look at the state of the house and said, ‘No way’,’ Blaze revealed.

‘I have no references—’

‘If you can cook worth a damn, you’re in,’ he assured her.

She bit her lip. ‘What’s he like...? The owner, I mean.’

Blaze lazed back in his seat with a reflective air. A satiric brow elevated. ‘He’s not likely to come creeping into your bed in the middle of the night, if that’s what you mean—’

‘Th-that thought hadn’t even occurred to me!’

He raked grimly amused eyes over her pink cheeks. ‘He does have a sex life, though.’

Chrissy studied her plate. ‘H-hardly anything to do with me.’

‘He likes a quiet life in every other way. Prefers horses to people, spends most of his time outdoors. He’s not fussy about his surroundings. You won’t be expected to polish the furniture to a mirror shine—’

‘If he gets married all that will change,’ she mused absently.

‘He’ll never get married,’ Blaze countered with a sardonic smile. ‘No reason to, every reason not to.’

‘How soon could I get an interview?’ Chrissy pressed.

‘You’ve just had it,’ Blaze told her carelessly, his attention switching to Rosie, who was striving hopelessly to stretch a short arm far enough from her high-chair to filch a mushroom off his plate.

‘Stop that, Rosie. You can’t have it,’ Chrissy admonished by rote. ‘Are you saying that I can have the job on your recommendation?’ she said, turning back to Blaze.

Rosie got her mushroom.

‘If you want it, it’s yours.’

‘He must be a very good friend.’ As bait, it failed, drawing no response. Sensing that Blaze was becoming bored with the subject, Chrissy asked, ‘How soon could I start?’

‘As soon as you can get yourself up there.’

Rosie was now casting languishing looks at the fried tomato.

Blaze surrendered and cast Chrissy a look of reproof. ‘You should have let me order her a proper meal. She’s starving!’

‘She just likes eating off other people’s plates.’ She watched him sipping his coffee, the cup cradled elegantly in one lean hand.

If this job panned out, she would probably see him again. Torbald Manor, his late grandfather’s home, would only be about ten miles away. Did he still live there? Her brow furrowed. She wasn’t very well up on the rules of aristocratic inheritance. The title, she was aware, had gone to his uncle, and even if Blaze had been next in line, it couldn’t have gone to him. His mother had never married his father.

‘He’s illegitimate!’ Elaine had gasped when she found out. ‘Would you believe it...? I mean, in a family like that!’

‘Are you finished?’ Blaze regarded her expectantly.

‘Yes.’ She pushed away her cup as though she had finished. She could feel his impatience.

‘I have to be in Brighton by noon.’

In the cab, he got a call on his mobile phone. Something about a horse-box and an accident. His language was choice. Chrissy wanted to cover Rosie’s ears. She sent him a dirty look but he was too intent on the call to notice. The cab dropped them off seconds before he completed the call.

Sending a fleeting glance at his watch, he breathed, ‘Transport...that’s a bit of a problem...’

‘Transport?’ she repeated uncertainly.

‘Can you catch the train to Reading?’

She nodded.

‘Right, make it tomorrow afternoon, OK?’ He unlocked his car, reached in for a notepad and scribbled something down on it. ‘Call that number when you arrive and someone will come and pick you up. Ask for the head lad—’

‘The head what?’

‘Ask for Hamish,’ he rephrased tersely. ‘He’ll ferry you back to the Hall.’

Ten seconds later he was in the driver’s seat. Ten after that, he was gone. Rosie’s bottom lip wobbled alarmingly. They had been dumped without ceremony.

Mrs Davis was hovering in the hallway, quite an achievement in so cramped a space. ‘You seem to have solved your problems,’ she said archly.

‘Sorry, I—’

‘Don’t think I don’t know who he is. Well...well...well, I thought to myself last night,’ she confided. ‘Fancy it being him,’ I said to my Stan. He’s decided to meet his obligations, has he? Not before time—’

‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’ Chrissy was trying to edge past the older woman.

Mrs Davis pursed her lips, her sudden congeniality waning at the lack of feedback. ‘He doesn’t want anyone to know, does he? But anyone with eyes in their head could tell she was his kid. Same hair, same eyes. You should have sold your story to a newspaper. They pay a lot for that sort of stuff...’

As the penny dropped, Chrissy’s jaw dropped with it. She was implying that Rosie was Blaze’s child. ‘Of course she’s n-not his,’ she stammered in horror. ‘She’s got absolutely n-nothing to do with him!’

Mrs Davis stepped back but she had the last word. ‘But he pays your rent when he has to,’ she said with a smirk.

Just because Rosie had black hair and blue eyes! On such slender possibilities to assume... The cheek of the woman! Clearly she spent too much time reading the murkier tabloids. However, Mrs Davis didn’t have the power to hold Chrissy’s thoughts for very long.

She swept Rosie up into an exuberant hug. ‘We’ve got a job, Rosie! Use of a car, did you hear that bit? This man is going to eat as if he’s staying at the Ritz,’ she swore feelingly. ‘Whatever it takes, we’ll stick it out.’

‘This man’, she repeated to herself. For goodness’ sake, Blaze hadn’t even given her his name! ‘The Hall’, he had said. Her brow furrowed. It didn’t ring any bells of recognition, yet she would have believed that she knew every sizeable house within a ten-mile radius of her former home.

‘I’m sorry that we were so late,’ Chrissy said again, hoping to lighten the atmosphere.

‘Aye,’ Hamish responded dourly and that appeared to be the height of his conversational ability since she had got little else from him since he’d picked them up in a Land Rover at the station. A bomb scare had thrown the trains into chaos. They had been lucky to get on a train at all. But the explanation hadn’t cut much ice with Hamish.

He was a wiry little Scotsman with the build of an ex-jockey. He had taken one look at her and Rosie and his astonishment had been palpable. Evidently they weren’t what he had expected. She had seen him squinting at her naked wedding-ring finger, watched his weather-beaten face go tight with disapproval. The chill in the air was not her imagination.

Chrissy’s nerves were starting to respond to that chill. What if Blaze had taken too much upon himself in hiring her? What if Hamish’s boss was as taken aback by the sight of them as Hamish had been? Rosie was asleep under her arm, a dead weight of toddler exhaustion. Chrissy didn’t feel much livelier. All she wanted was a bed for the night. Tomorrow she would worry herself to death about the future, not tonight.

The headlights illuminated trees and hedgerows and little else, but she knew exactly where they were even if she didn’t know where they were going to end up. Then Hamish turned off the road into the village and up a long, steep lane. In her time, it had been overgrown and pot-holed. Now it was trimmed and surfaced.

‘Mrs Easton’s house!’ she exclaimed involuntarily.

‘Westleigh Hall,’ Hamish corrected.

‘But I thought it was derelict.’ Chrissy had never seen the house because it was so far from the road, but she did recall the old lady in the funny hats in church. She had died and the house had lain empty ever since.

‘Practically. The guv’nor’s got vision.’ Hamish looked as if he might actually have said more, and then he glanced at her and compressed his lips.

They drove past a brightly lit lodge. The Hall was a grey stone edifice, built on irregular lines. That was all she saw in the flare of the headlights because it was in complete darkness.

Hamish took her cases and Chrissy struggled out with Rosie, trying not to wake her. The front door wasn’t locked. He reached for a light switch and then muttered, ‘Electric must still be off.’

‘You’re kidding me,’ Chrissy groaned.

He disappeared and she heard him banging about through cupboards. He returned with a torch and showed her into a vast, cheerless kitchen. ‘There should be some food in the fridge. I’ll be leaving you, then,’ he said.

And he did. She sank down on a chair with Rosie. She wanted to put her head down and cry. There was no heat, no light. Well, what did you expect, Chrissy? she asked herself. You’re not a guest, entitled to expect a three-star welcome. You’re the housekeeper. Rising upright, she settled Rosie into a huddle on a sagging armchair. She covered her with her coat and prayed that she would stay asleep while she searched out a bed for them both.

Climbing those stairs was the creepiest experience Chrissy had ever had. The torchlight cast weird leaping shadows and accentuated dark, forbidding doorways. She shone it into room after room and discovered three sparkling new bathrooms, but there appeared to be only one furnished bedroom.

At the end of the huge landing, a corridor ran off unexpectedly to the left and a narrow flight of stairs disappeared up into the gloom of the attics. At least, she assumed they led to the attics, for her explorations had been forced to a halt by an untidy stack of floorboards. Between her and the remainder of the upper floor stretched a ten-foot-wide chasm of bare joists.

The discovery gave Chrissy quite a start. Just suppose that she hadn’t been looking where she was going? Blaze hadn’t been joking when he’d said that the house was in a state. And presumably the one furnished bedroom was for her.

She lugged up the cases, scanned the room with a sigh and then hauled a battered chaise-longue over to the side of the king-size divan. Opening up their luggage, she made up a bed for Rosie on the chaise-longue. Rosie, who twisted and turned all night long, was murder to share a bed with.

Downstairs the fridge revealed three bottles of champagne, a wizened tomato and an abandoned lunchbox with mouldy contents. She found biscuits in a cupboard but what she really wanted was a decent cup of tea.

Unfortunately the ancient range in one corner was stone-cold. Her mouth tightening expressively, Chrissy surrendered. It was obvious that nobody gave two hoots about her comfort! Lifting Rosie, she carried her upstairs. At least if she went to bed she would be warm.

Naturally there was no hot water in the nearest bathroom. It didn’t surprise her. Shivering with cold, she checked on her sister, cosily snuggled up beneath her blankets, and then she doused the torch and dived into the chilly embrace of the bed. She slept instantly, felled at last by the traumas of the past week.

But once she started having the dream—that dream unlike any other in her experience—it seemed so real that she briefly thought she was awake. Where once she had been cold, she was hot in the grip of an amazingly erotic fantasy where she lay in a shameless tangle of limbs.

It wasn’t she lying there while male hands roamed slowly, expertly over every quivering inch of flesh tantalisingly shielded by a thin layer of cotton. It wasn’t she who arched and moaned when knowing fingers skimmed over the straining mounds of her breasts, her nipples tightening instantly into an almost painful sensitivity. And most certainly it wasn’t she who dragged him hungrily down to her in the darkness and virtually crashed into combustible collision with the hot, hard urgency of his devouring mouth.

The surge of excitement that engulfed her was reassuringly unreal. She was a burning current, a blazing fuse wire hurtling at a breakneck pace towards dynamite, nothing on her mind but the terrible need for that imminent explosion. And then somewhere in the darkness there came a tiny recognisable sound, a faint gurgle as Rosie mumbled in her sleep, a sound so inherently familiar that Chrissy’s eyes shot wide open and then she knew she was awake. Oh, lord, did she know, still trapped beneath the demanding weight of an all-male body.

Tearing her swollen mouth free, she jerked her head away with a rising moan of horror. ‘Get off me!’ she gasped, stricken.

Two things happened almost simultaneously. Suddenly she was free. Suddenly the air was blue with male outrage. No awakening could have been more violent or terrifying. Sixth sense told her who had been taking advantage of her virtually inanimate body while she had believed she was dreaming. But sixth sense was choosing an identity almost more threatening than that of a total stranger, so she refused to listen to it.

A lamp went on, illuminating the scene. Sitting bolt upright, clutching the duvet to her like a protective cocoon, Chrissy was shattered into complete silence by the sight that met her frightened gaze.

‘What the hell are you doing in my bed?’ Blaze raked at her from between gritted teeth.

Chapter 3

Chrissy took one glazed look at him and then closed her eyes. ‘D-don’t you think you ought to put some clothes on?’

‘I want an explanation!’ Blaze grated as though he were the one with the grounds for most complaint.

She could still see him in her mind’s eye. Six feet three inches of lean, all-male virility and not a stitch of clothing to interrupt the view. Embarrassment, bewilderment and incredulity held her in paralysis. What was he doing in this house? What was he doing in the only bed? What, worst of all, had she allowed him to do to her?

‘W-will you get out of here?’ she spat, lifting her lashes too soon and catching a glimpse of his long golden back view as he hauled up a pair of jeans.

‘This is my room!’ he roared back at her.

Chrissy was trembling. ‘You’re going to w-wake Rosie...’

‘Rosie?’ Aghast, he strode round to her side of the bed and stared down in disbelief at the small curled-up shape showing only a fluff of tousled hair above the blankets. ‘She’s in here as well? We might’ve—she might’ve seen— Bloody hell!’

Without warning, he bent down, scooped Chrissy bodily out of the bed and, striding to the door, he deposited her on the landing. Then, practically on tiptoe and with an exaggerated care which would have been sheer comedy in any other circumstances, he closed the door. He needn’t have bothered. Rosie slept like the dead.

‘We’ll discuss this downstairs,’ he bit out fiercely.

‘I’d l-like to know w-what you’re doing here,’ Chrissy dared, shivering with cold and barefoot into the bargain.

‘Downstairs,’ he repeated with arrogant emphasis. ‘And the explanation had better be good.’

Ignoring him, Chrissy went back into the bedroom and crossed the floor to where her case lay open. Pulling out an outsize sweater, she donned it in haste.

‘If you wake that baby, I’ll hit the roof!’ he spat like an avenging angel.

‘Nothing short of an earthquake wakes her when she’s really tired,’ Chrissy muttered.

‘Am I supposed to be grateful for that?’ He took the stairs two at a time.

‘W-well, it’s more than I’ve got to be grateful for,’ Chrissy shot at him shakily. ‘How d-dare you put your filthy hands on me?’

‘Hell’s teeth,’ he seethed. ‘I didn’t know it was you!’

He strode into the kitchen, illuminating lights all the way.

‘I thought the electricity was off,’ she breathed irrelevantly.

‘Switched off. The builders forgot to put it on again.’ Blaze threw himself down on a chair by the scarred kitchen table and fixed smouldering sapphire-blue eyes on her shrinking figure. ‘What were you doing in my bed?’

‘It’s the only bed in the house,’ she protested, wondering how on earth he was managing to make her feel the one most in the wrong.

‘The furniture I had in storage was supposed to arrive this afternoon.’ In the long pause, he studied her intently and there was a new, disturbing light in that all-enveloping gaze. ‘I didn’t check when I came in. I put on the electric, came upstairs and got into bed in the dark. I didn’t want to wake you and the kid up by making a lot of noise—’

‘Your consideration o-overwhelms me.’ Furniture in storage. The truth had been shouting at her from the instant she sat up in that bed. She just hadn’t wanted to believe it. ‘Th-this is your h-house, isn’t it?’

‘Yeah, and I’m a lot like Baby Bear when I find someone uninvited in my bed,’ he drawled sardonically.

He hadn’t denied it. Westleigh Hall belonged to him yet he had hired her without telling her that fact. Indeed he had deliberately deceived her. A deep flush carmined her fine skin. She was so shaken by the realisation that her tongue was glued to the roof of her mouth. This was her employer. Blaze Kenyon. What was he playing at? What was to happen now? Had he offered her the job as a cruel joke?

Dimly she had assumed that her new boss might be a little strapped for cash and that was why he was willing to take on someone without references or any real experience. Blaze’s Ferrari put paid to that idea. She found it hard to believe that Blaze had not been able to find someone more suitable...someone without a child in tow.

‘I didn’t know it was y-your bed... It was the only bed,’ she reminded him in an undertone. ‘We had to sleep somewhere. There was no light, no food, no heat—’

‘Money for food.’ With a flourish, Blaze slapped down a handful of notes and a small sheet of paper instructing her to do some shopping. It had been sitting on the top of the fridge, which was taller than she was. With only the aid of a torch, she would never have seen it.

‘We only got here at t-ten.’ She explained about the bomb scare. ‘I didn’t see the note.’

‘I was expecting food tonight,’ he divulged grimly.

Chrissy understood why women occasionally battered men to death. She thought of their joyless arrival and the complete absence of anyone willing to show them how to settle in.

‘If the furniture didn’t come, Hamish should have taken you back to the lodge to spend the night with him and Floss,’ Blaze mused impatiently. ‘Weren’t you prepared to accept the offer?’

She nearly told him the truth, but that might get the charmless Hamish into trouble. If there was the smallest chance that she could work here...and she couldn’t afford not to fight for that chance...it wouldn’t be a good idea to get on the wrong side of Blaze’s other employees. ‘I didn’t want to bother them,’ she muttered. ‘I think he was busy.’

‘I pay him to be busy at what I tell him to be busy at.’ It was chillingly cold and she suppressed a shiver. ‘Why don’t you put on the kettle? I could do with something warm...considering that the something that was warming me up appears to be out of bounds.’

‘K-kettle?’ she echoed jerkily, naïvely unbalanced by that softly added double entendre.

‘The object with the spout and the flex.’

Mercifully she espied it on the top of the fridge. She filled it although she felt more like throwing it at him. ‘W-why didn’t you tell me that I’d be working for you?’

‘I didn’t want you to turn it down without thinking it through,’ he murmured flatly. ‘You weren’t going to get a second chance. I need a housekeeper without a lot of fancy ideas and you need a job. Basically, that’s all there was to it.’

But she sensed something more. Biting at her lower lip, she glanced across at him. His shirt hung open, framing the muscular brown breadth of his chest and the curling black hair hazing his pectorals before it arrowed down over his flat stomach. In the act of staring, she caught herself up and shut her eyes on an aching sense of chagrin and confusion. Was she becoming like all the rest? Couldn’t she take her eyes off him? Or was it that much harder now since that night all those years ago when he had touched her and the whole world had vanished as though he had pressed a destruct button somewhere deep down inside her?

And if that was true, how did she feel after tonight? She did not feel equal to meeting those fiercely intelligent eyes of his. She might have believed she was dreaming, but she had responded wildly to those intimacies. She had never felt like that before, but then she hadn’t had much opportunity to experiment, she reminded herself. Maybe any experienced male could make a woman feel like that...but only if the chemistry was right.

That shook her rigid. How could she continue to deny that she found him physically attractive? She had melted in his arms. She had been electrified by his touch. And if that was so obvious to her, how much more obvious was it to him? All of a sudden, she knew she couldn’t bear to stay in this house and work for him.

‘The kettle’s boiling.’

He was so cool now. What had happened in that bed might almost have existed only in her imagination. ‘I don’t think I can stay after—’

He expelled a long, laconic sigh. ‘After what? I didn’t know you were there. I turned over and found a female body and reacted on instinct...’

Chrissy was mortified. ‘That’s s-so disgusting.’

Blaze raised a winged brow. ‘You talk like a teenage virgin, but you didn’t find Rosie under any gooseberry bush—’

‘I don’t w-want to talk about it!’ In her distress, her back was rigidly presented to him.

‘You must concede that I have some grounds for curiosity. Did you love Rosie’s father?’

She spun round. ‘No!’ she rebutted with sharp distaste and then abruptly she remembered that she was talking for her mother, not herself. Reddening, she muttered, ‘I thought I did but, when it came down to it, it was j-just an infatuation.’

‘Are you in touch with him...?’ Unusually he hesitated. ‘I mean, do you visit him?’

‘No.’

‘Are you waiting for him?’

Feeling foolish, she shook her head, refusing to look at him.

‘That would appear to bring us back to what happened between us—’

‘Leave it alone!’ she broke in fiercely.

‘Why should I?’ Blaze traded. ‘Another few minutes and I’d have had you—’

Chrissy shuddered. ‘No!’

With veiled eyes, he surveyed her appearance in the sloppy sweater that did little to conceal the slender length of her perfect legs. Tousled dark hair with brighter streaks the shade of autumn leaves cascaded round her triangular face, highlighting luminous green eyes and a wide, generous mouth. ‘You’re incredibly sexy,’ he breathed in a different tone of voice altogether, an almost predatory purr deepening his vowel sounds.

It was like being touched. With difficulty, she dredged her stunned scrutiny from him and doggedly asked, ‘D-do you take milk and sugar?’

There was a pin-dropping silence. She pretended not to notice it. He hadn’t meant what he had said; of course he hadn’t. It was just that certain dangerous boundaries had been breached between them. It was just that it was second nature to him to lapse into that incredibly physical intensity with a woman. Or maybe, having sunk low enough to touch her, even half asleep, he felt he had to justify that intimacy by exaggerating her attractions. Whatever, if she ignored it, it would go away, and sooner or later she would stop squirming with embarrassment.

‘Blaze...’ she had to prompt shakily

‘One sugar, no milk.’

The raw tension visible in her slim shoulders eased. She set a cup and saucer down about a foot from him.

‘I only bite after midnight on request,’ he said softly. ‘Join me.’

It wasn’t an invitation, it was a command. She tensed and it really sunk in then that she was utterly dependent on his goodwill. In a series of stiff movements, she made herself a coffee and sat down awkwardly at the table with him.

‘You don’t like me. Relax,’ he urged as her head jerked up in dismay. ‘It really doesn’t bother me.’

Involuntarily she meshed with those astonishingly blue eyes.

‘It does have a certain novelty value,’ he pointed out smoothly.

‘Good,’ she managed, and hurriedly smothered a yawn.

An odd slanting smile curved his expressive mouth. ‘Start worrying if the novelty value starts to pall,’ he advised.

It was three in the morning. Word games were beyond her. She propped her chin on her hand. ‘Where do I sleep?’

‘Go back upstairs. I’ll stay down here for a while.’

At the door she hesitated. ‘A while?’

He groaned impatiently. ‘Look, I refuse to knock Hamish and Floss up in the middle of the night. That’s a big bed up there. I shall lie down fully clothed on my half—’

‘You can’t!’ Chrissy was livid at the very idea.

Конец ознакомительного фрагмента.

Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес».

Прочитайте эту книгу целиком, купив полную легальную версию на ЛитРес.

Безопасно оплатить книгу можно банковской картой Visa, MasterCard, Maestro, со счета мобильного телефона, с платежного терминала, в салоне МТС или Связной, через PayPal, WebMoney, Яндекс.Деньги, QIWI Кошелек, бонусными картами или другим удобным Вам способом.