His Bride for the Taking Read online

  Lexie returned her attention to Clayton. But still she was aware of Rafe as he strolled to the side table where breakfast was laid out and picked up a plate. She’d expected, hoped, he would sleep in. Wasn’t that what indolent playboy princes did? Except she was having a difficult time seeing him fit so neatly into that role anymore. There was something about the ease with which he’d found her in the darkness and the steel of the body she’d twice been pressed against, the uncompromising strength of the arms that had held her. Something about the standards he wanted her to uphold, and his discomfort and displeasure when she’d mentioned his scandals.

  Clayton wiped his mouth with his napkin. “I’ll thank you lovely ladies for your hospitality.” He addressed both her and her mother.

  “You’re not going?” Lexie asked, appalled.

  “I’m afraid so.” He smiled as he pushed back his chair, flattered by her clear disappointment.

  Jackson stood too. “Likewise, ma’am.”

  “Surely you’ll have another cup of coffee.” Lexie tried to keep the desperation from her voice. She wasn’t ready to face Rafe again, and if there were vacant seats at her table she just knew he’d sit there.

  “Love to,” Clayton said, “but the doc’s told me to cut back. Thanks again.” And then they were both gone, and the housekeeper, always efficient, swept in and cleared away their plates.

  Lexie, atoning for her early exit from dinner, had promised her mother she’d stay till all the guests had breakfasted. Otherwise she would have been hot on Clayton’s and Jackson’s heels.

  She looked down at her barely touched bowl of fruit salad and yogurt and began a mental countdown. Ten, nine…almost exactly as she hit zero the chair opposite her was drawn out. By the time she’d readied herself and looked up, Rafe was seated and watching her.

  “How was your run?” her mother asked him.

  He’d been for a run already? Lexie hid her surprise. She often ran in the mornings herself, but not when she’d had only a few hours’ sleep. This morning she had barely dragged herself out of bed in time to dress properly for breakfast, and had done it only because it was so important to her mother. She stabbed a cube of melon in her bowl. Who’s the indolent one now? a little voice taunted.

  “Pleasant,” he said in that deep, cultured voice. “You have lovely grounds, especially that wooded area that the driveway cuts through.”

  He was looking at her mother, but Lexie couldn’t pull her gaze from him. What was he going to say next? Why bring up the scene of their midnight cat-and-mouse game? An incident that now, in the broad light of day, seemed almost surreal.

  “Thank you. And you slept well last night?”

  Lexie held her breath. Would he feel compelled out of a misplaced sense of either responsibility or mischief to mention what had happened last night, how and where he’d found her? She was leaving today. She didn’t need a lecture from her mother as a parting gift.

  Rafe’s knowing gaze met hers before transferring back to her mother. “Deeply.”

  But briefly, she thought, as she let her breath out on a sigh of relief and begrudging gratitude. She took aim at a strawberry with her fork. Even without going for a run, she’d managed only a few hours’ sleep. In response to the thought, her jaw tensed with the beginnings of a yawn.

  “I’m afraid you must find our country ways quite dull?” Antonia smiled at Rafe, and Lexie cringed. If only her mother would stop fishing for compliments.

  Lexie looked up and caught the gleam in his dark eyes, and the urge to yawn disappeared. The fork stilled in her hand as she waited for his answer.

  “On the contrary,” he said easily, just as her mother would have expected. “Last night was fascinating. Far more interesting than I could have anticipated.” Double meaning laced his words, and Lexie waited for her mother to pick up on it and probe further.

  If only she would go and chat with some of the other guests. Lexie hadn’t thought that after last night she could want to be alone with Rafe, but it would undoubtedly be better than this agony of trepidation.

  “I’m delighted you thought so. I do have a reputation for the best dinner parties.” Fortunately, her mother, while socially astute, could also be shallow. And for once Lexie found herself grateful for that fact. Her mother had no idea that Rafe could be talking about anything other than the dinner party and truly had no idea how dull the dinner had been in the first place. If people complimented her, which they always did, it was usually because of her wealth and status. She had to know that, it was how she thought, too. Her mother just couldn’t quite believe it worked in reverse.

  Lexie took a bite of her strawberry and forced herself to chew, pretending to concentrate on a breakfast that she was too anxious and too tired to really be interested in. She watched with something like envy and a little irritation as Rafe started on a plate of bacon and eggs.

  She ate enough that it wouldn’t look as if she was running from him before she pushed her bowl away a little. She was about to stand when her mother beat her to it, saying, “I really must have a word with Bill before he leaves, I’ve been sadly ignoring him.” And then she was gone. Lexie could hardly go now, too, and leave Rafe sitting alone at the table. Gritting her teeth, she reached for her orange juice.

  “Don’t stay on my account, Precious,” he murmured, apparently aware of her conflict. His knowing eyes watched her over the rim of his coffee cup. A hint of a grin taunted her.

  Lexie folded her hands in her lap. “Thank you for not mentioning the nightclub to my mother.”

  He sat back a little. “You didn’t seriously think I would? What you do or don’t tell your mother is no concern of mine.”

  “Thank you anyway.”

  As he shrugged off her thanks his cell phone rang. He pulled it from his pocket and, frowning, glanced at the caller ID. “Excuse me. It’s my brother. I need to take it.” He stood and strolled off the terrace.

  What she told her mother might be no concern of his, but what he told his brother was surely an entirely different matter. She hadn’t done anything to be ashamed of, but it would still be better if she was the one to mention it to Adam.

  If it needed mentioning at all.

  She could hear nothing of his conversation as he walked away. He passed Stanley, who stood to one side of the terrace overseeing the proceedings, and disappeared from sight behind a manicured hedge.

  Grasping what was possibly her last opportunity to talk to her old friend, she picked up her coffee cup and made her way over to the butler. If she was also closer to Rafe, it was purely coincidence.

  “Pleasant evening last night, miss?” he asked, a twinkle in his eye.

  “Not you, too?” Stanley was the only one in the household who knew about her love of dancing and her occasional nightclub escapes.

  “Meaning?”

  “I got busted.”

  “By?” His concern showed in that single syllable.

  “The Frog Prince.”

  The concern deepened. “He wasn’t impressed?”

  “Ah, no, that’s not how I’d describe his reaction.”

  As Stanley allowed a smile, her mother’s laughter reached them, and they both looked in her direction. “Clearly, he didn’t feel obliged to mention it to your mother.”

  “No. Thankfully. At least not yet, anyway.”

  “I’m sure he’s the last person who would.”

  Stanley, too, knew of Rafe’s reputation. But despite Rafe’s assurances, and his own not infrequent misdemeanors, Lexie wasn’t one hundred percent certain that Rafe wouldn’t use his information to her detriment if he felt it served his purpose, either here or in San Philippe. “You’re probably right,” she said, at least partially to reassure herself.

  “One other thing,” Stanley said.

  “Yes?”

  “You might want to stop calling him the Frog Prince, if he’s to become your brother-in-law.”

  “I know,” she said on a sigh.

  “You don’
t have to go.”

  Lexie looked back at the breakfast table, the assembled guests, her mother presiding over it all, and quashed her own doubts. “I know you think what I’m doing is crazy. And sometimes I think that, too, because it doesn’t always make sense. But I want to go. I love San Philippe. I can’t explain why, but I’ve always felt welcome and at home there. And of course there’s Adam.” Maybe he shouldn’t have been last on that list.

  “Dammit, Adam,” Rafe’s voice carried suddenly to her. “Shouldn’t you be the one to do that with her?” His pacing had brought him to the other side of the topiaried hedge. She couldn’t see him because the hedge made a dense screen, but it was far from soundproof. “Logically, yes, but—” He walked a little farther off. “I have a life to get back to.” Lexie still heard his words, and she was fairly sure she was the topic of conversation. “I have better things to do with my time than babysitting or running your errands for you.” Now she was definitely sure, and a weight settled in her stomach. “This whole situation is ludicrous.” Rafe’s disdain for her was clear. “I can’t imagine what sort of scheming or hopelessly naive woman would—”

  Stanley cleared his throat. “On the other hand,” he said, talking over Rafe’s voice, “the Frog Prince has a certain ring to it.”

  Lexie laughed, but the sound was brittle. That was the closest she’d ever heard Stanley come to criticizing anyone, and she knew he’d done it for her.

  She shouldn’t let anything Rafe said cut her; he was surely the last person whose approval she needed or wanted, but still, his words, and the contempt in them, had hurt. Had sullied her dream.

  A few overheard words and suddenly she was questioning not just her plans, but her very nature. Scheming or naive? Was that how Rafe and perhaps Adam saw her? Could she be either of those things? She knew she was idealistic—but that didn’t make her naive, did it? And she was halfway in love with Adam, and wanted to fall the rest of the way and to have him fall in love with her—did that make her scheming?

  She looked again in Rafe’s direction. He’d walked round the edge of the hedge. His brows were drawn together, as though in hearing her laughter he’d perhaps realized that he, too, could be heard. He turned away, and Lexie watched his departing back as, phone still pressed to his ear, he strode in the opposite direction.

  With the sun beating down on him, Rafe waited by the limousine and flicked a glance at his watch. Ten minutes late. Her bags were already in the trunk of the car; it was just Precious herself who was missing. It was hot out here, and though he could wait in the relative comfort of either the house or the car, he had no desire to be cooped up any longer than he had to be. He looked again at the wide stairs to the house and finally, finally, the door opened and the butler walked out. The butler, but no Alexia. Rafe curbed his frustration. “Where is she?”

  “Not in the house, sir.” The butler had been well trained; his voice revealed absolutely nothing.

  “Then where?”

  “Most likely out riding. I checked with the stables and one of her horses is gone, though no one actually saw her leave. I’m afraid she sometimes loses track of time when she’s riding.”

  Rafe shrugged out of his jacket and tossed it into the limo. “Show me these stables.”

  “You can go now.” Rafe dismissed the groom who’d accompanied him this far, then urged his mount toward the woman sitting, hands linked around her knees, on a log at the shore of the lake. Behind her, a tethered bay mare cropped the grass. With the sunlight catching on her hair, she made a picture as beautiful as any he’d seen at any of the hundreds of galleries he’d opened or visited. But something about the stillness with which she held herself and the droop to her shoulders filled him with foreboding. She looked alone and weighted with worry, or sorrow…or regret?

  As he’d ridden he’d been prepared to tear strips off her when he found her. But at the sight of her his anger dissipated. He’d never been any good at holding on to that particular emotion anyway. Life was for living and was too short to waste being angry.

  Leaving his horse tethered near hers, he sat beside her on the log, their shoulders almost touching. He looked at her booted feet, recalled their slender vulnerability as he’d touched them last night.

  “I’m sorry,” she said quietly. Her fingers were so tightly interlaced they were white.

  “Don’t worry. This isn’t the first time I’ve been kept waiting by a woman.” Though he knew that wasn’t what her heartfelt apology had been for. “The third, I think. Although both of the others were by my sister.” A curtain of auburn hair, lusher even than he’d realized last night, partially obscured her face, but he caught a rewarding glimmer of a smile before it vanished. “It doesn’t matter. Private jet. It’s hardly going to go without us.”

  “I can’t go.”

  His foreboding deepened and settled heavily in his stomach. He had to get her back to San Philippe. “Of course you can. Everything’s ready. Your cases are in the car. The pilot’s one of our best. Hardly ever crashes.” He tucked her hair behind her ear and searched for her smile, but found nothing.

  “You were right. This whole situation is ludicrous. No normal person would have agreed to it. I’ve just been so caught up in the dream I never really stopped to think about it.”

  Ahh. So she had heard that. “Alexia, I seldom take anything seriously, so you shouldn’t take anything I say seriously, either.” Certainly his family knew better than to do that. “You’ve had a crush on Adam for years, right?”

  She nodded. “Since I was twelve.”

  “Wow.” He hadn’t thought it had been that long. He’d realized the night four years ago when she’d kissed him with that odd combination of passion and melting innocence, thinking he was Adam, that she’d imagined she had feelings for his brother.

  “Stupid, huh?”

  Privately, he agreed with the sentiment. Adam had at the time been much taken by the ambassador’s daughter, a woman of sultry beauty with ten years on Alexia in age and a lifetime in sophistication. And even now, as far as Rafe could tell, his brother was agreeing to this “courtship” primarily out of a sense of duty. “You can’t help what you feel.”

  “Although I think it might even have started when I was eight and you threw that frog in my lap, and Adam caught it and took it away.”

  Rafe smiled. “Arthur.”

  “Arthur?”

  “The frog.”

  She turned her face to him, curious. “He was a pet?”

  Fourteen years later and he could probably still tell her a dozen facts about Arthur and his kind. She’d certainly be more receptive to them now than she was when she was eight, particularly given how eager she was not to have the discussion they should be having. “Let’s get back to Adam, your knight in shining armor. Saving the damsel in distress. Rescuing you from evil amphibians.”

  “He doesn’t feel anything for me.”

  “Now this is bothering you?” That earned him a small, sheepish smile. “Give him a chance. He doesn’t know you. I think he’ll like you.” He didn’t add that his father had practically ordered it.

  “Do you really?” She turned toward him, all earnestness.

  He looked at her pale, beautiful face, hair that begged a man to sink his hands into it, a figure he could still recall the imprint of against him.

  Something of his thoughts must have shown. “I’m talking personalities here,” she added. A twinkle of mischief lit her eyes.

  She had strength and humor to go with her beauty. “Yes, I do think he’ll like you. You might even still like him once you get to know him. But neither of you will know unless you give yourselves a chance. You’ll regret it if you don’t go. And if it doesn’t work, you haven’t lost anything.”

  If he went back to San Philippe without her, the blame would be laid squarely at his feet. And the likely punishment would be fighting off his own wedding. Heaven only knew who his father had in mind for him, though he’d undoubtedly have someone. He hadn’
t asked—that would only encourage the old man.

  “Except maybe a little bit of pride.”

  “Pride, schmide, there’s more than enough of that to go round.”

  “I do always enjoy visiting San Philippe. It’s funny, but I feel at home there, I get a kind of déjà vu, like it’s where I belong. More so than here even.”

  “That settles it then. Let’s go.” He was about to stand when she stilled him with her delicate hand on his forearm.

  “Thank you. I’m not usually indecisive. It helped.

  Talking to you.”

  Unaccountably aware of her touch, wanting to take that hand in his own and lift it again to his lips, he instead stood. “Don’t thank me, Alexia. I’m looking out for my interests as much as yours. There’d be no end of drama if I went home without you.”

  “Thank you anyway. It helped.”

  Rafe shrugged off her gratitude. “Anytime.” Unlike with Adam, people didn’t often turn to him for advice.

  And he didn’t often dispense it. Didn’t want that responsibility. But if he’d helped her he was glad of it. It meant he was one step closer to getting rid of her.

  She looked at him, her green eyes bright and innocent and hopeful. “My friends call me Lexie.”

  Sexy Lexie. The epithet slid into his head. And she was sexy, in a way she seemed totally unaware of. It was her hair and those smiling, softly parted lips. And that was without even starting on her body. For the first time he could remember, Rafe almost envied Adam.

  Oh, yeah. He definitely needed to get rid of her.

  Experiencing his own sense of déjà vu, Rafe waited by the limousine. She’d said she needed just twenty minutes to change and be ready. Rafe knew a woman’s twenty minutes, and he was prepared to wait. He looked up at the double front doors just as Alexia—he wouldn’t let himself think of her as Lexie, because he couldn’t help but rhyme it with “sexy”—stepped out, the family’s butler at her side. Together they descended the stairs. She was doing the boring thing again, with her hair drawn back from her face, its auburn lushness fiercely constrained. She wore a cream suit with a beige top beneath the buttoned-up jacket and a single strand of pearls around her neck.