Laurey Bright - The Heiress Bride

“Alysia?” Chase turned to her, the perfect picture of courtesy.

“Thank you,” she said precisely, “but I have a headache, and the music is a bit loud.”

“Perhaps you’d rather go to bed,” he suggested, his tone all concern, but his eyes held a wicked challenge.

She kept her own face schooled to a polite mask. “I’ll see our guests off first,” she told him. “You said you were going?”

Her father looked at her with surprise, but Chase gave her an appreciative grin and said, “If you’re not going to partner me after all.”

The grin was amazingly attractive. He seemed to have forgotten his flare of temper in the garden and the devastating way he’d expressed it. Now he regarded it as some kind of joke.

Alysia said, letting her eyes show her angry contempt, “I know you’ve enjoyed yourself.”

“Even more than I anticipated,” he assured her. “Thank you for making the evening so—stimulating.”

Her eyelids flickered and she fought the impulse to look at her father to see if he was catching any hint of the undercurrents.

To her relief, Chase turned to him, shaking his hand. “A great party.”

Spencer beamed. “Alysia did a wonderful job.”

“Really, all I did was hire the caterers,” she protested mildly. But pleasure at her father’s rare praise warmed her cheeks and a spot somewhere in her midriff.

Verne Hastie came to say goodbye, and Alysia fixed a hostess smile on her face, turning from his beery breath as he kissed her cheek, his big hands squeezing her bare shoulders.

“We should entertain more often,” Spencer suggested when he’d closed the door on the last of the guests. “The Clarion’s a family paper—the staff needs to feel a part of it.”

“Of the family?” Her father was proud of the Kingsley tradition, of his ancestry and of the Clarion’s long—by New Zealand standards—history, but tonight was the first time she’d heard him claim the paper’s staff as family.

“The younger ones,” he said vaguely, “need to feel they belong. I lost two good people this year. Moving on.”

But he was gaining another in the New Year—Alysia. Who wouldn’t be leaving. She said, “Not many people nowadays stay with a company for life.”

“Pity. No sense of continuity, of loyalty.”

Chase ought to be held for a time by loyalty, by gratitude for the fast series of promotions he’d enjoyed under Spencer’s patronage.

But didn’t Spencer see that the very ambition he had admired and fostered in the younger man must inevitably lead to his desertion?

Alysia said, “Chase Osborne can’t rise any higher at the Clarion, can he?” The Kingsleys always retained the top positions. It was one of the few truly family newspapers left.

Her father’s gaze was penetrating while at the same time she had the impression his mind wasn’t fully on their conversation. “I didn’t train up a man like Chase to lose him to some big city corporation. He knows I’ll see him right.”

Had Chase already been looking elsewhere? Alysia wondered later as she prepared for bed. Was that what was behind the promotion, the creation of a prestigious new position for him?

But in a year or two would that be enough to hold him, in a job where he could go no further?

She turned on her pillow and told herself it didn’t matter if he left for better prospects, except that her father would be disappointed. And probably furious.

Chase Osborne was an opportunist by nature. Witness the way he’d climbed the ladder of success from lowly agricultural reporter to his present position, while older and more experienced staff remained stuck in the newsroom.

He was her father’s blue-eyed boy—except that his eyes were actually an uncomfortably knowing hazel-green—and she gathered that his meteoric rise had created some antipathy among other employees. Chase apparently cared for the criticism no more than Spencer did. Those who were jealous or aggrieved either accepted the changes or left.

As she began to drift into sleep she found herself reliving the kiss under the pepper tree, vividly recalling every detail.

With an effort she opened her eyes, and restlessly turned on the pillow.

Chase Osborne believed in making the most of his chances. In the darkened garden he’d acted true to type—stung by her less than enthusiastic reaction to him and his promotion, and perhaps aided by a certain amount of alcohol which might have blunted some natural inhibition about kissing the boss’s daughter. He’d wanted to make her succumb, to assert the most primitive kind of male power because she’d shown him how little the other kind impressed her.

Maybe he was regretting it now. If she’d complained to her father he might have found himself less in favor. That would have been a setback to his flagrant ambition.

Contemplating the thought briefly, she quickly discarded it. Spencer would tell her she was making a mountain out of a molehill—if he believed her at all. Bitter memory rose to haunt her, and she determinedly pushed it away.

Put the kiss down to an excess of Christmas spirit and forget it.

Surprisingly difficult. She lay wakeful for ages, plagued by images of a dark head bowed over her, a glint of laughter in moonlit eyes, a warm masculine mouth confidently moving on hers, hard arms holding her firmly but not cruelly.

And she woke in the morning with the scent of the pepper tree still in her dream memory.

The traffic light changed from red to green. Alysia turned the snappy little blue Toyota and it moved forward, then inexplicably stopped, stranding her in the middle of the intersection.

Other cars maneuvered around the stationary vehicle as she vainly pumped the accelerator and switched the key off and on.

Clenching both hands on the steering wheel, she gave vent to an expletive that would have shocked her father, before getting out and gratefully accepting the help of a couple of hefty male passersby who pushed the car to the side of the road.

“Want me to take a gander at the engine?” one asked.

“Thanks, but no.” Amateur tinkering might void the guarantee.

The other Samaritan, a blond young man with a cocky air, offered hopefully, “I can give you a lift. My car’s over there.”

Alysia shook her head and brushed back a strand of hair escaping her ponytail. “I’ll be fine,” she said firmly. “My father’s office is quite close. Thanks for your help.”

He stood by as she took her purse and shopping bags from the car, locked the doors and walked away. When she glanced back he was still watching. Damn.

The late-afternoon sun beat hotly on her shoulders, bared by the tiny, sleeveless pink top she wore with a short denim skirt. Scientists had been warning of ozone depletion over New Zealand for years now. And summer was early this year. Christmas was still two weeks away.

At the Clarion Building she paused, and unconsciously took a slightly deeper breath before ascending the worn marble steps into the dim chill of the imposing old building. Next year she’d be doing this every day. Working in the newsroom with other reporters, she reminded herself. Not in the print room with its huge machines, echoing spaces and hidden corners.

She left her keys and purchases with the receptionist, then went up the brass-edged stairs and along a corridor to the office suite at the end.

A word processor hummed on the desk in the outer office, but there was no sign of Glenys Heath, her father’s longtime secretary. The inner door was ajar. Tapping on the panels, Alysia pushed it wide and walked in.

Spencer was rummaging in a drawer behind the desk while Chase Osborne lounged against one side of it, his hands in his pockets. He looked up, giving her a faint, questioning smile, and straightened.