Free A Delicious Deception by Elizabeth Power Page B

victory for him? She shivered just from the thought of it, although even self-loathing couldn’t temper the excitement that heated her blood every time she considered him being her lover.
    ‘I don’t think you should be doing this,’ Rayne counselled, watching Mitch manoeuvring his chair along the wooded path where he had insisted she bring him today. ‘Getting out so early so as to give everyone the slip is one thing, but persuading me to bring you over such uneven ground as this—’
    ‘Will you shut up?’ Mitch said, carrying on ahead of her, his hard mottled hands on the wheels pushing him stubbornly to his goal.
    The trees thinned out, making Rayne gasp, not only from the sheer danger of the cliff edge just below them, but at thepanorama of nothing but glittering sea and sky that had suddenly opened up in front of them.
    ‘Can you show me anything better than that?’ Mitch challenged, waving a hand towards the view. ‘I used to come here a lot when I was young. It’s where I proposed to my first wife.’
    ‘King’s mother,’ Rayne said tentatively.
    ‘Did you know she left me?’ He gave a harsh bark of laughter. ‘Of course you did. Everybody knows it. Everyone knows I’m not the easiest of men to live with.’
    Rayne glanced down at him, noting something that sounded remarkably like regret in his voice. Did he still miss the woman who had deserted him and their five-year-old child? Miss her still, even though he’d finally found someone else to take her place?
    ‘As a boy, King blamed himself for his mother leaving us. For leaving him,’ Mitch was saying, much to Rayne’s surprise. ‘It hardened him. Made a cynic of him. Especially where marriage and family is concerned. We never could form the bond we should have formed. He was already a man by the time I met Karen.’
    ‘Your second wife?’ A woman half his age, who had died so tragically when their car had come off the road, Rayne reflected, although it was King she was reluctantly thinking of. King, the child who had lost a mother, even though she was still alive. And King the man, who was left scarred by the desertion. Left hard and uncaring. Unable to trust …
    Mitch nodded and started to cough. ‘Here. Help me with this thing, will you?’ he spluttered.
    He was having difficulty opening the zip of a leather pouch he’d brought with him. When she gave it back to him, he swore when he looked inside.
    ‘What’s wrong?’ Rayne asked him anxiously.
    ‘Does anything have to be wrong?’ he wheezed, turning his chair with such angry force that it lurched sideways, lodging one wheel in a grassy hollow.
    Rayne shot over to grab the handles, trying to pull it free.
    ‘I can’t move it!’ she gasped, finding the man’s bulk and the awkward angle of the chair too much for her inadequate strength. To add to that, Mitch’s breathing was beginning to worry her.
    ‘I’m going to ring King,’ she said quickly, taking out her phone when her attempts to dislodge the chair proved ineffectual.
    ‘No! We don’t need him,’ Mitch protested to her dismay.
    ‘I’ll have to,’ Rayne told him, too frightened by the danger of the situation to be intimidated by him, even if every bone in her body rebelled at having to explain to King.
    He answered her call on the second ring, his voice deep and strong, the voice of a man who could take on the world and come out fighting.
    ‘King! It’s Mitch! We’re …’ Quickly she acquainted him with their exact location. ‘He’s got his chair stuck in a rut and he seems to have come out without his medication. It’s for his breathing. I think it’s—’
    ‘I know where it is,’ he rasped, and that was it. He was on his way before she even had time to cut the call.
    Rayne couldn’t have been more grateful when she heard the throb of the Lamborghini’s engine. Through the trees she saw the car practically skid to a halt and she went weak with relief when King leapt out and raced towards them