Part-Time Father

She stared at it, trying to view it objectively. It was just a face, after all. The features weren’t particularly even—the eyes were too cold and the jaw much too harshly defined ever to be called handsome. The photographer had caught him smiling, but it wasn’t a sunny, happy smile. It was nothing but a cynical upward curve of those hard, sensual lips.

Kimberley turned away from the photo, removed her coat, and set to work immediately. She’d tied her hair back and was wearing a pair of ripped jeans with her oldest T-shirt, which seemed to have shrunk slightly with repeated washing. Once black, it was now a sort of washed-out grey colour, and it revealed about two inches of her midriff.

She couldn’t find a mop, so she filled up a bucket with hot soapy water and set about cleaning the floor the old-fashioned way—on her hands and knees!

There was something curiously relaxing about seeing the floor clean up beneath her cloth. Her busy life in London meant that she employed someone else to clean her house, but actually it was really quite satisfying to do it yourself, she decided—if you had the time.

She was just about to wring out her cloth when she heard the kitchen door open. Kimberley looked up, expecting to see Mrs Nash, her smile of greeting fading into frozen disbelief as the longest pair of legs she had ever seen swam into her field of vision. She let her gaze wander up into a hard and cruel face.

And the cold grey eyes of Harrison Nash.

CHAPTER TWO (#ulink_b8faba94-720b-5e4f-a57c-997fe63d43be)

‘WELL, well, well—how the mighty have fallen,’ came the sardonic drawl.

His voice sounded exactly the same—-rich and deep. And as contemptuous as it had ever been. Kimberley dropped the cloth and it splashed water on to the front of her T-shirt.

‘Do you know,’ he continued, in that same, silky tone which sent prickles of excitement and dread down her spine, ‘I rather like to see you in such a subservient position, Kimberley? Rather fetching. And, funnily enough, I was never particularly turned on by wet T-shirt competitions—but I can now see that I’m going to have to revise my opinion.’

His cool grey gaze had travelled to her sopping T-shirt, where the water had cruelly outlined the rounded swell of her breasts with detailed precision. Under his gaze she felt the nipples tighten immediately into those exquisitely painful little peaks, and she felt a hot weakness kick at the pit of her stomach. She saw the flash of hunger which darkened his eyes and he moved the tip of his tongue over his lips in a gesture which shrieked pure provocation.

Remember what he did to you.

‘What the hell are you doing here?’ she demanded as she flung the cloth back into the bucket and scrambled to her feet.

‘I really should be asking you that question, don’t you think? Are times hard for merchant bankers? Supplementing your income with a spot of charring——’

‘My mother happens to do the charring in this house,’ she cut in icily. ‘God knows why she does it, but she does—and I will not have you insulting her.’

‘I wouldn’t dream of insulting your mother, whom I both like and respect.’ His eyes narrowed; she could barely see them. ‘Unlike her little madam of a daughter. Tell me, did you hatch a plot to get back into this house, somehow—anyhow? What are your intentions—to try to ruin Duncan’s life a second time?’

Kimberley stared at him, wondering genuinely if his memory was defective. ‘You’re mad! What are you talking about?’

‘I’m talking about your motives for being here.’

‘My motives? You really aren’t making yourself at all clear, I’m afraid, Harrison.’

‘Then allow me to elucidate,’ he said softly. ‘My brother is returning from America, where he went after you dumped him, and he’s bringing with him his new fiancée. And now you’re here. Again. I’m just interested to know what you’re up to. Do you want him back? Or do you just want to rub in what’s he’s been missing all these years? Are you planning to flaunt that beautiful, hot, rapacious little body around him?’

‘You are mad,’ she said scornfully. ‘If your memory serves you as well as mine, you will recall that you were the one determined to break our relationship up.’

He gave her a ruthless little smile. ‘You think so? If you’d really loved him you’d have told me to go to hell! As a matter of fact, that’s what I expected to happen.’

Kimberley’s eyes narrowed suspiciously. ‘Expected? Are you telling me that you were calling my bluff? That it was some kind of little test which I had to pass to be allowed to marry your brother?’

He inclined his head. ‘If you like. When a rather wild young man—who stands to inherit the kind of money Duncan will one day have—announces he’s about to marry, it’s wise to put the commitment of both partners to the test.’

It was unbelievable! The man was living in the Dark Ages! Kimberley shook her head slowly and incredulously. ‘Did your mother know this—that you were conducting this barbaric little experiment?’

He gave her a bored smile as he ignored her question. ‘As I said—I expected to be sent away with a flea in my ear. Instead of which you went out of here clutching a big, fat cheque in your greedy little hand. But that was nothing to what you very nearly gave me. Was it, Kimberley?’ he mocked.

Kimberley blushed scarlet. Only someone as hateful as Harrison Nash would take such pleasure in reminding her of her behaviour that day.

He moved a little towards her and instinctively she stiffened, her head held proudly high, her eyes slitted into glittering blue shards.

‘So what did you spend the money on, hmm? Easiest bit of money you ever made in your life, wasn’t it, Kimberley?’ He gave an empty-sounding laugh. ‘My God—you stand there so cold and so damned beautiful, as though ice were running through your veins instead of blood, and yet I only have to touch you and you go up in flames—don’t you? Tell me, Kimberley, do all men have that effect on you, or is it just me? It could prove quite embarrassing, surely?’

She fixed him with a frosty smile, though her heart was beating like a bass-drum in her ears. ‘I rather think you overestimate your own attraction, Harrison.’

He gave a half-smile. ‘You think so? Perhaps I do, but I’m pretty confident in your case. Maybe we should put it to the test.’

She saw the hungry intent on his face, and understood his meaning immediately. ‘Don’t you dare try!’

He came one step closer, totally ignoring what she was saying. ‘But you want me to, don’t you, Kimberley? We both know that. You hate me, yet you want me…’ He pulled her into his arms, not roughly but not gently either.

‘If you dare continue, then I’ll scream as loudly as——’

There was no scream. Not even the smallest attempt at resistance, which would have left her with some dignity. But there was no resistance, and no dignity. Just an overpowering reaction to him which took all her will away, sapped her strength and her resolve and left in their place the swamping, unbearable cocktail of desire and frustration as she let him kiss her.

And, as she’d done once before, she opened her mouth wide beneath his—so wide because she wanted to eat him up, to lick him all over. She gave a little moan as she found her hands winding themselves around his broad back, and she clung on to him as though she were clinging to life itself.

‘Oh, baby,’ he murmured into her mouth. ‘Yes. Show me. Show me just how much you want me…’

She didn’t know what he wanted her to do. She was responding through pure instinct, kissing him back with frantic fervour as though she had never before been kissed. As indeed she hadn’t.

Not like this.

‘Or shall I show you?’ he whispered, and pulled her into him, as close as it was possible to be. She felt his arousal immediately; no garment in the world had yet been designed which could disguise how hard and hot and turned on he was.

Her hips swivelled in instinctive excitement against him, and he gave a low laugh. ‘You want that, don’t you? Don’t you?’ He kissed her again, and one hand slid to her back, underneath her Tshirt, and he rubbed his hand sensually against the silky bareness of her skin, a soft, tantalising caress, a tiny circular movement which cajoled an instinctive response, and she felt as though her veins were being transfused with thick, sweet honey.

‘Oh, baby.’ He dropped his head to whisper against her hair. She felt him shudder—such a wild and uncontrolled shudder of excitement—and it made her realise that he teetered on the very edge of control. She pulled away from him, afraid of what might happen if she didn’t. He stopped kissing her immediately, and she almost gasped as he stared down at her, for she barely recognised him, the stark hunger on his face turning him into a stranger.

But he is a stranger, she thought. What do you know of Harrison Nash, other than the fact that he represents nothing but a wild and elemental danger?

‘You were wise to stop me,’ he said, in a flat, deliberate voice. ‘Because I’m afraid that if we carried on kissing then I would not have been responsible for my actions. Much more of that and I would have been unable to stop myself from removing every single item of clothing from that beautiful body of yours and taking you right here, because all my reason seems to have deserted me.’

And then he shook his head in some kind of despairing disbelief. ‘Dear God!’ he exclaimed. ‘What am I saying? What am I doing? My mother could have walked into the kitchen. The gardener’s outside——’

She’d had enough of his self-disgusted confession, and every word he uttered only added to her own despair. ‘Let me go——’

‘No.’

She stared up at him, her mouth quivering, on the brink of tears. ‘Harrison, please.‘

His eyes narrowed at her trembling state. ‘Kimberley—this thing between us——’

She shook her head distractedly, as if trying to remove a very heavy burden which simply refused to budge. ‘It’s sex!’ she asserted. ‘Nothing but sex! That’s all. Just some unfortunate accident of nature—a chemistry between two people who happen to loathe one another. And I hate it, if you must know.’