At No Man's Command. Melanie Milburne

      CHAPTER TWO

      AIESHA LEANED BACK against the door of her bedroom and let out a long ragged breath. Her heart was still flapping like a loosely tied flag in a gale force wind. This couldn’t be happening.

      James Challender wasn’t just a press magnet. He was press superglue. Where he went the press followed, especially if anyone got a heads-up on his upcoming engagement. He was one of London’s most eligible bachelors—the epitome of the Prize Catch. Every woman under the age of fifty panted after him. He was suave, sophisticated. Not a playboy like his father, but a classy specimen of modern sexy corporate man. Before she knew it, her sanctuary would be invaded by hundreds of journalists and prying cameras, hoping to get the latest scoop on him.

      She would be hunted down. Found. Exposed. Mocked. Shamed.

      The scandal she was trying to distance herself from would arrive on the doorstep. The shame of being at the centre of something so sordid wasn’t new to her. She’d spent most of her life attracting scandals, encouraging them, relishing in them for the attention they gave her, which made up for the lack of attention she’d received as a child.

      But that chapter was supposed to be over.

      She wanted to put that part of her life behind her and move forward. The meeting with Antony Smithson—aka Antony Gregovitch—was supposed to have been her big break. The chance to get out of the club scene and nail the recording contract she’d longed for since she was a little kid singing into her hairbrush in front of a mottled mirror in a council flat. Instead, she’d found out he wasn’t a music producer at all. He’d lied to her from the moment he’d sat down to listen to her sing through her shift. He’d come night after night, staying to talk to her between breaks, buying her drinks, telling her how beautiful her voice was, how talented she was. Fool that she was, she had sucked it all up and basked in his praise.

      That was what angered her the most—the fact she hadn’t seen through him. How could she have been so gullible, especially the way she’d been dragged up by a bunch of tricksters and sham artists? He hadn’t been the handsome prince to rescue her from a life of singing to people who were too drunk to even listen to a word of her lyrics. He was a married man with a wife and family who was looking for a bit of cheap fun on the side.

      Now she was painted as a heartless home-wrecker and her chance to prove she was so much more than a nightclub one-trick pony was over. She had no recording contract. She didn’t even have a job. Antony’s wife’s smear campaign had seen to that. There wasn’t a club in Vegas—possibly in the entire world—that would take her on now.

      And now she had to deal with James High-and-Mighty Challender.

      In spite of everything, Aiesha couldn’t help a tiny smile of self-congratulation. She knew exactly how hard to tug on his chain. She had practised her moves on him when she was fifteen. He had a little more self-control than his sleazeball of a father, but she hated him just as much. But then she hated all men, especially superrich ones who thought they could have anyone they wanted just by fanning open their wallet. Sexually they were OK, quite useful for a bit of fun now and again, but as people? No. She hadn’t met any she respected as a person. The men in her life had always let her down. Tricked her. Betrayed her. Exploited her.

      James Challender might think he could control her but she wasn’t leaving Lochbannon on his say-so. His mother had given her permission to stay for as long as she liked. She wasn’t going to be pushed around by a stuffed shirt whose vocabulary didn’t possess the words fun or spontaneity. He was a nitpicking, timekeeping workaholic who got antsy if the cushions on the sofa weren’t neatly aligned.

      And as for his so-called fiancée...what a joke! They deserved each other. Phoebe whatever-her-name-was did nothing but smile inanely at the cameras, showing off her perfect toothpaste-commercial smile and her perfect clothes and her perfect figure while her equally pampered and perfect parents pumped up her trust fund.

      Bitch.

      Aiesha tapped her fingers against her lips. Maybe there was a way for her to get this unexpected little speed bump to work in her favour. Why would anyone think she was hooking her claws into a boring old married politician back in Vegas when someone as staggeringly gorgeous as James Challender was spending the week cloistered with her up here in the Highlands?

      She reached for her phone with a mischievous grin. Twitter, here I come!

      * * *

      James hadn’t been able to get through to his mother but he left a message. A rather stern one, lecturing her on the pitfalls of harbouring a headline-grabbing harlot who was sure to pilfer the silver or trash the place with a wild party in her absence.

      He rubbed a golf-ball knot of tension in his neck as he looked at the steady fall of snow outside the library window. For once the weather forecasters were spot on. It was snowing a blizzard and any chance of leaving now—let alone in the morning—was well and truly out of the question.

      He dropped his hand back down by his side with a whooshing sigh. Thank God no one knew he was here with Aiesha. Yet. He’d checked on his phone earlier to see if anyone had tracked her down but so far they hadn’t. The Vegas scandal was still generating plenty of comments, most of them unflattering to her on her part in destroying a perfectly respectable man’s career and marriage. Personally, he thought some of the comments were a little harsh. Surely the man in question had to take some responsibility?

      But then he thought of her little seductive moves downstairs. She was one hell of a temptation even the purest of monks would find hard to resist. His body was still reverberating with shockwaves of unbridled lust. She did it for the sport of it. It amused her to tempt and tease. It was a game, a competition to see who had the most willpower. He’d won that battle a decade ago. He’d been proud of his strength of will, but back then she’d been a kid. Now she was an adult and twice as dangerous. She’d had years to perfect her art of playing the courtesan.

      James clenched and unclenched his hands. His skin was still burning from her sizzling touch and nothing he did would quell it. He had never thought of himself as a hedonistic sensualist. He enjoyed sex but there was an element to it that had always disturbed him. The closeness that came with sex and the out of control aspect made him uneasy. The idea of being vulnerable and at the mercy of another unnerved him and meant he always kept his passion on a tight leash. He was by no means prudish but he was uneasy with the thought of giving in to primal urges without thought of the consequences.

      Like his father, for instance, moving from one relationship to another with a series of totally unsuitable women. His latest mistress was barely legal, yet another wannabe starlet looking for a sugar daddy to give her a good time. The shallowness of his father was a constant irritation to him. A constant embarrassment. A constant source of shame. He hated the assumption he was like his father because they shared the same features.

      He wasn’t the same.

      He had drive and ambition where his father had none. He had focus and discipline. He cared about the company. He cared about the people who worked in the company.

      Hard work and responsibility weren’t words James associated with his father. Born to wealth, which he’d proceeded to dispense with as soon as it was bequeathed to him, Clifford Challender had all but destroyed the coffers and the reputation of the architectural empire James’s grandfather had worked so hard to build.

      Now the baton was in James’s hand and he wasn’t going to let it go until he had the company back where it belonged, up there with the top ten architectural firms in the country.

      The Sherwood project was a pivotal step towards that dream. The multimillion-pound redesign of Howard Sherwood’s London home and his Paris townhouse was small change compared to other projects the influential and well-connected businessman could send James’s way. If James secured this contract then his dream of designing luxury environmentally friendly accommodation in select wilderness areas across the globe would be one step closer. It wasn’t just the money that motivated