A glint appeared in his gaze as it imprisoned hers. ‘Ah, but that’s where you come in.’
Something dropped in Clem’s belly like a book falling off a shelf. Three books. ‘H-how so?’
‘You’re coming with me to help track her down.’
Clem’s heart climbed up her throat with fishhooks. ‘I’m not going anywhere with you.’
A line of implacability rimmed his mouth like steel. He took out his phone, holding it pointedly. ‘One phone call to the police and your brother will be behind bars quicker than you can blink.’
Clem swallowed. This was bad. Capital B Bad. Capital B and italics Bad. ‘You’re blackmailing me?’ She injected every bit of disgust she could into the word.
That annoying lip-curl appeared again. So too the mocking I’ve–got-you-where-I-want-you gleam in his eyes. ‘I prefer to call it enticing you into my company.’
‘I’d rather spend a week chained to a tiger shark.’
‘How long will it take you to close up shop?’
Clem put her hands on her hips. ‘Did you hear me? I said, I’m not coming with you.’
His gaze leisurely took in the floor-to-ceiling shelves, the rows and rows of books with their ancient spines and the boxes on the floor beside her from the latest shipment from a deceased’s estate. ‘How long have you been working here?’ he asked.
‘Two years.’
‘Where did you work before that?’
‘In a municipal library. In Kent.’
His eyes did a slow appraisal of her face before moving south. Clem knew she wasn’t classically beautiful. She wasn’t anything beautiful. She was plain. Her mother was the one with the looks. Clem had been handed the intelligence, the wild hair and the bad eyesight instead. But that didn’t make her wish she had the sort of looks that would make a man’s eyes flare with interest. She was used to being passed over. Ignored. Disregarded as a piece of generic furniture. But something about Alistair’s gaze made her feel as if she was standing there stark naked. Her flesh prickled. The hairs—the ones she hadn’t paid a fortune to wax off her body—stood up. Her breasts shifted against the lace cups of her bra, as if to say, look at me!
‘Is this your own shop?’
Clem resented the question; he was only asking it because he knew for a fact it wasn’t her shop. The Dougal McCrae Rare Books sign above the door was a dead giveaway. He was turning the screws on her self-esteem. Reminding her she was never going to be anything more than an employee who could be sacked without notice. Her dreams of owning her own shop were exactly that—dreams. Silly little fantasies that would never come true, not while she had the responsibility of her half-brother to contend with. ‘My boss owns it,’ she said. ‘Dougal McCrae.’
‘Can you clear some leave with him?’
‘No.’
His finger hovered over the phone. ‘You sure about that?’
Clem ground her teeth. Just as well she liked yoghurt and fruit smoothies because at this rate she would be living on them for the rest of her life. ‘I don’t have any time owed to me.’ Not quite true. She wasn’t the going on holiday type. There didn’t seem much point paying heaps of money to go away by herself to read. She could do that at home.
‘If money is a problem—’
‘It isn’t.’ Clem would rather die than admit she was sailing a little close to the wind this month. So close to the wind she was practically living on air.
He put his phone into his trouser pocket. ‘I’ll give you twenty-four hours to get your affairs in order. I’ll be here this time tomorrow to collect you. Bring what you need for the next two or three days. A week at the max.’
A week? In Alistair Hawthorne’s brooding company? Not going to happen. ‘But where are you going? If you don’t know where your stepsister is then where will you start looking for her?’
‘I have reason to believe she’s travelling through the French Riviera.’
‘As you do when you’re sixteen and have money to burn,’ Clem muttered.
‘She is currently burning her way through my money, with able assistance from your brother, which I intend to bring to a stop as soon as possible.’ He gave her a brisk nod. ‘See you tomorrow.’
Clem strode to the door after his tall figure. ‘Did you hear what I said? I’m not going with you. Not for one minute, let alone a week.’
He turned before she had stopped walking, which meant she cannoned right into the hard wall of his body. Oomph. The shock of his hands on her arms as he steadied her was like being shot through with an electric current. The sensation of his touch travelled from her forearms to her toes and back again. Fizz-whizz-sizzle. She had never touched him before. It felt strange...excitingly strange...to have her hands pressed flat against that rock-hard chest, his smoothly ironed business shirt the only barrier between her flesh and his.
Clem brought her gaze up to his to find him looking at her with a frown. ‘You can let go of me now.’ She was annoyed her voice sounded so husky. As if she was unnerved by his closeness or something. Well, maybe she was. A little bit. He was so...so arrantly masculine. Not in a brutish, knuckle-dragging way, but in a cultured man-about-town way that was disturbingly attractive. The clean-shaven skin, the casually styled hair with those finger-mark grooves in amongst the dark brown strands, the alluring cologne with the enigmatic base notes and the freshly laundered clothes were a potent package of metropolitan, made-it-big-time manhood.
His fingers tightened on her forearms for a moment and then fell away. He stepped back as if she had suddenly emitted a skin-melting radiant heat. ‘I won’t take no for an answer, Clementine. I want you with me tomorrow otherwise the police get involved. Understood?’
Clem had a thing about her full name. She hated it. Loathed it. Resented having been labelled with it for the past twenty-six years. She had suffered years of people singing Oh My Darling Clementine within her hearing until she’d wanted to stomp and scream with frustration and embarrassment. But, whenever she made a fuss, invariably people insisted on calling her by it. She had thought about switching to her middle name but that was even worse. She told no one that. No one. Which was another reason she didn’t travel abroad. No immigration official could resist commenting on the name on her passport.
She fixed Alistair with a look. ‘Call me Clem or Ms Scott.’
His brows lifted ever so slightly. ‘Very well then, Ms Scott.’ He gave her a mocking salute. ‘I’ll see you tomorrow. Ciao.’
* * *
Alistair pulled down the seatbelt on his hire car, clicking it into place. While he resented the time off work, there was something eminently appealing about taking Clementine Scott with him on this wild goose chase. She had changed. A lot. He almost hadn’t recognised her...apart from those flashing brown eyes and pertly set mouth. At sixteen she had shown a faint promise of future beauty—a beauty that had stirred him back then much more than he wanted to admit. But he had been unprepared for just how beautiful she had become. Not the sort of beauty that was in your face, but a quiet, understated beauty. A beauty that snuck up on you and completely stole your breath.
Gone was the awkward, overweight teenager with the bad skin and bad temper. She still had the temper but her body more than made up for that. Lush curves her dark, conservative clothing couldn’t hide. Skin that glowed, wavy, honey-brown hair that was styled and artfully highlighted. She hadn’t worn much in the way of make-up but for some reason it made her all the more fascinating to look at. Those tawny-brown eyes with their frame of thick lashes and prominent brows reminded him of pools of honey dusted with tiny iron filings.
But it was her mouth that had kept drawing his gaze. Her lips were rosy and full, the Cupid’s bow arch of her top lip and the soft pillow of her bottom lip making every male hormone in his body heat and hum and honk with lust.
Getting involved with Clementine Scott was not on his agenda. Not in this lifetime or the next. Why would he get involved with the daughter of the woman who had destroyed and
desecrated his mother’s last months of life? Brandi whatever-her-last-name-was-now had hooked up with his father ten years ago while Alistair’s mother had been in a palliative-care hospital. Brandi had brazenly moved in with her two children and sponged off his father during a vulnerable time. Not that he didn’t hold his father largely responsible for his behaviour, but Brandi and her badly behaved brats had caused Alistair enough grief without inviting them to dish out more.
Do. Not. Go. There.
Even if Clementine was far more attractive than he’d been expecting. Even if she’d made his body light up like a furnace when she’d looked at him with that scornful arch of her brow and those flashing eyes. Even if he had to call on every bit of willpower he possessed and then some.
He was going to get his stepsister back and packed away to boarding school where she belonged. Harriet was not his responsibility. She wasn’t—strictly speaking—his father’s either. But, until her mother came back to claim her, Alistair was left holding the baby, so to speak.
Not a choice.
A duty.
And of course there was the little matter of his car. He’d only had it a couple of months. There was no way he was letting Clementine’s wayward younger brother destroy anything of his. He could have called the police straight up. He wasn’t the hand-out-a-second-chance type. But he had to concede Jamie Scott hadn’t had the best upbringing in the world. There was no way Alistair was going to let his stepsister be corrupted by a prison stat waiting to happen.
Not on his watch.
He had considered going alone to collect Harriet but he figured he might achieve more by taking Clementine. She could take charge of Jamie while he sorted out Harriet.
It was a win-win.
Besides, he had an old score to settle with Clementine.
He gritted his teeth in determination and pulled out into the traffic. If these next few days achieved nothing else but to teach that young lady a lesson in manners and decorum, then he would be happy.
CHAPTER TWO
‘BUT OF COURSE you must take time off, my dear,’ Dougal McCrae, Clem’s boss, said when he came into the shop an hour later. ‘When do you want to leave?’
‘Now.’ Clem straightened the pens on her desk, each one exactly a centimetre apart. ‘It’s...kind of an emergency.’
His bushy brows came together in a concerned frown. ‘Not your mother again?’
‘Yes and no.’ Clem mentally crossed her fingers at her little white lie. ‘It’s hard to explain.’
He patted her on the shoulder like he was patting a pet of which he had grown terribly fond. ‘You’re a good girl, Clem. Always doing the right thing by your mother when as far as I can see she’s never done the right thing by you.’
Clem hadn’t told Dougal much about her background but her mother had come into the shop a number of times. Needless to say, he’d figured everything else out for himself. He was an excellent judge of character and each time her mother left he would look at Clem with an empathetic grimace and hand her the packet of chocolate digestives without saying a single word.
‘I’ll only be a week at the most,’ Clem said, slinging her bag over her shoulder and snatching up her coat off the back of her chair. ‘If there’s any change, I’ll let you know.’
‘Take all the time you need,’ Dougal said. ‘You deserve a holiday.’
Some holiday this was going to be.
* * *
It took Clem way too long to pack. That was another reason she rarely went away. She could never decide what to take and ended up taking too much. It came from years of having to pack at short notice when her mother would get sick of her latest lover and announce they were leaving. Now. Clem had flown in a heart-flapping panic every single time. She’d always packed Jamie’s things first because that was what big sisters did, especially when you had a mother who couldn’t spell, let alone understand, the concept of organisation. But it had often meant she hadn’t got to pack her own things in time for their mother’s theatrical flounce out the door.
But these days Clem was too organised. She didn’t have a crooked knife or fork in her drawer. The cups and mugs were all perfectly aligned, the handles turned to the right. The plates and bowls were in neat stacks in neat rows. The glasses were lined up like soldiers ready for an inspection parade. The clothes in her wardrobe were positioned according to colour—not that she had a lot of it in her wardrobe. That was the problem with having been fat as a teenager; she had got used to wearing dark clothing to disguise her shape and had never really thrown the habit.
Deciding what clothes to take and what to leave behind was a problem. What if it was hot? What if it rained? The French Riviera had a much warmer climate than London in July but that didn’t mean it wouldn’t throw up some inclement weather now and again.
Then there was the issue of shoes. She had different pairs for each day of the week. Some people didn’t step on cracks in the footpath. Clem didn’t wear the same pair of shoes two days running.
Then there was her favourite mug, Jamie’s first ever present to her when he was eight years old. She had her first cup of tea in it every morning. Without fail. It was part of the structure of her day. She needed it to feel secure. If she didn’t have tea in her special mug, then who knew what might happen?
It wasn’t worth the risk.
There was still no word from Jamie in spite of Clem leaving further messages, including one she left on his voicemail that bordered on her begging pitifully. Not something she was prone to do under normal circumstances, but nothing about this situation was even remotely normal. Ever since Alistair had told her he had information the teenagers were in the French Riviera, her mind kept going back to a memory of a brief holiday she and Jamie had been on when they were young.
One of their mother’s boyfriends had come from a village half an hour out from Nice. His parents had owned a holiday cottage in the hills and Clem remembered being insanely jealous that someone had not one home but two when she hadn’t known whose home she would be sleeping in from one day to the next. Even more enviable to her twelve-year-old mind had been the fact her mother’s boyfriend’s parents only used the cottage a couple of times a year. Two times a year! A caretaker living up the road checked on things in between times.
The muggy July air was like a hot breath against her face when Clem walked to where her car was parked further down her street. Her tiny flat didn’t have its own parking space but one of her elderly neighbours who no longer drove had offered Clem her space. Clem did Mavis’s shopping for her and took her to doctor’s appointments in exchange for the space. It was worth it...sort of. Eighty-four-year-old Mavis could talk. Really talk. If there were any iron pots with legs still on them in this neighbourhood, then Clem would like to see them. Clem was little more than human punctuation whenever Mavis got going. All that was required from her was: ‘Oh?’ ‘Mmm...’ ‘Aha.’ ‘I know.’ ‘Really?’ interjected at select intervals.
Clem kept her back to Mavis’s house as she stuffed her bulging suitcase on the back seat of her car, as the boot was too small. But it was like trying to push a hippo through a letterbox. She shoved and shoved. Swore under her breath. Shoved some more. Swore out loud.
The sound of Mavis’s front door opening made Clem’s heart sink. Shoot me now.
‘Off on holiday are you, dear?’ Mavis called out.
Clem turned and clenched her teeth behind her tight smile. ‘Just a short break. I was going to call in and tell you but I’m in a tearing hurry and—’
‘Where are you off to? Somewhere exciting?’
‘Erm... I’m kind of winging it.’
‘Are you going on your own?’
That’s the plan. ‘Yes.’
Mavis gave a beaming smile. ‘I bet you meet someone. I feel it in my bones. A summer holiday romance would be marvellous for you. I had one of those—did I tell you about it? It was on a cruise to the Mediterranean. I was—’
‘I’ll send you a postcard,
shall I?’ Clem said, giving her bag a shove with her bottom. Might as well put it to some use since it did her no other favours.
‘Mind you, you have to be careful these days,’ Mavis said. ‘You don’t want your identity stolen. A friend of mine had that happen to her. Did I tell you about it?’
I wish someone would steal my neighbour. Clem kept her rictus smile in place. ‘Don’t worry. I’ll be super-careful.’
‘Oh, look,’ Mavis said. ‘Here comes a nice man to help you with your bag.’
What nice man? There weren’t any nice men living in this street. None that she had met, anyway. It was full of little old ladies and cats. Clem looked to her right to see Alistair Hawthorne walking towards her as casually as you pleased. Her heart began to hammer. This could not be happening.
‘Going somewhere?’
Clem knew even her bottom had no hope of hiding her bag. ‘Just...erm...taking my washing to the laundromat.’
‘That looks like a lot of dirty linen to have out in public.’
You have no idea. ‘Why are you here?’ Clem said. ‘I thought the arrangement was for you to pick me up at the shop tomorrow.’
A knowing light shone in his eyes. ‘I thought we should get an early start.’
Her stomach dropped like a mallet on a block of wood. Clunk. She’d hoped to get off by herself. To conduct her own search without the disturbing company of a man she would do anything to avoid. ‘But I told you I wasn’t going with you.’
‘Which is why I’m here now to make sure you do.’
Clem threw him a gimlet glare. ‘You can’t kidnap me. It’s against the law.’
Something in his expression made the floor of her belly shiver like sand being trickled. ‘So is car and money theft.’
She swallowed a double knot of panic. Think. Think. Think. ‘How do you know you’re searching in the right place? You could travel all that way for nothing.’
‘My stepsister sent a text to a friend from a casino in Monte Carlo a couple of hours ago.’
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