A Delicious Deception Read Online Free Page A

remember his cruel, icy threat. ‘Believe me, after this you won’t know what hit you if you ever dare show your face at our house or at the office again!’
    Towering over Grant Hardwicke, King had been standing in the hallway of the modern detached home her mother had so prized, while her father had seemed to visibly diminish before Rayne’s eyes. His features blanched and strained, she had seen Grant grab the doorframe as though it was too much of an effort to support himself under the weight of the younger man’s hostile and verbal attack.
    Soaked to the skin, hair flattened by the rain, she’d flown at King like a drenched sparrow as he’d come striding back across the hall.
    ‘Don’t you dare hurt my father!’ she’d sobbed, lashing out at him, her flailing fists ineffectual against the impenetrable wall of his body. ‘I’ll kill you first! I will! I’ll kill you!’
    ‘Calm down, Lorri …’ He had referred to her by name. It was the first time she could remember him using it, much less showing her any attention, but then it had been only to catch her flying wrists and thrust her aside as if she were an unwanted toy. ‘Don’t waste your hysterics and your childish little threats on me,’ he’d warned with particular brutality to her teenage pride. ‘Save them for someone who deserves them,’he’d snarled savagely. ‘Like your father!’ He had slammed out of the door with his hurtful and puzzling words burning in her ears.
    ‘It’s about that software, love,’ Grant Hardwicke had breathed brokenly when she had rushed over to him. He’d looked drained and exhausted as she’d helped him onto an easy chair. ‘Mitchell’s saying it’s company property and King’s backing him up. I’m afraid they’re determined to keep it. I’ve lost everything, Lorri.
Everything.’
She had never forgotten the desperation in her father’s voice.
    ‘But it’s yours, Dad. You wrote it!’ Rayne remembered stressing, as though that had counted for anything where the Clayborne men were concerned. It was software he had written especially for the medical profession. One he had said would benefit a lot of people—because her father was like that—caring and generous. It was something he had produced for the common good. It was his baby. His brainchild, which he’d conceived and worked on and slaved over in his own time before he had ever joined forces with Mitchell Clayborne. But Mitchell Clayborne had stolen the credit for it, launching it under his own company flag with the full knowledge and support of his equally unscrupulous and ambitious son and heir.
    Her mother had been out at a line-dancing class that night and Rayne was glad she had because it was the first and only time in her life she had seen her father cry. Her strong and devoted father, who had always been her rock and the backbone of his family, reduced to tears in losing all he’d worked for. But he had no proof of his copyright for that software he had written, and the Claybornes had gone on to prosper unbelievably because of it, while Grant Hardwicke’s troubles had only increased.
    Because of his age, he had found it impossible to get another position. He’d started drinking, which made him ill, and then he was made bankrupt, which in turn meant her mother having to lose her lovely home.
    Rayne was certain that all her father’s problems had started that night she had walked in on King’s unmitigated venom. A venom that had had a poisoning effect on her family, virtually destroying everything that had been good about it, everything she’d loved.
    What she had felt for him had been unreal, Rayne thought bitterly, mocking herself now. A teenage fancy, as insubstantial as mist, killed off by his pulsing anger and his verbal brutality towards her father, even before she’d realised how unscrupulous he was. As well as defending Grant, she knew now that in striking King that night she had been giving vent to the loss of all her young