by: Cynthia St. Aubin
Series: The Kane Heirs
Genre: Contemporary Romance
Release Date: October 25, 2022
Publisher: Harlequin Desire
An ice queen meets her fiery match in the latest installment of The Kane Heirs series by Cynthia St. Aubin!
“I’m the kind of bad your mother warned you about.”
To grow the business he owns with his brothers, rough, rugged Law Renaud must impress hoity-toity heiress Marlowe Kane so she’ll tell her father to invest. Which shouldn’t be impossible—4 Thieves distillery is Law’s pride and joy, plus he can throw a mean axe. But when a storm strands Marlowe on-site, suddenly seduction is on the table. Even as Marlowe becomes a craving he can’t resist, she remains the daughter of the tycoon he needs on his side. And she’s got a little secret that could upend Law’s entire world…
From Harlequin Desire: A luxurious world of bold encounters and sizzling chemistry.
“I’ve been looking for you,” a voice said just behind her.
Marlowe’s body stiffened out of reflex. She wasn’t entirely sure when this had become her default reaction to her former fiancé but knew it predated the business with Charlotte by several months.
“Hello, Neil.” Fingers wrapped tightly around her champagne flute, she turned to face him.
He had always looked his best in a suit and tonight was no different. This evening’s ensemble was deep blue, beautifully cut and undoubtedly expensive. But something about the juxtaposition of her once-fiancé and the arrogant, unpretentious masculinity of the man across the room made Neil look...fussy by comparison. His hair was a little too neatly styled, his eyebrows slightly overgroomed, his crisp white shirt too pristine.
“Surprised to see me?” Lines of amusement crinkled the corners of his eyes as he lifted a martini to his lips and suppressed a slight grimace.
Marlowe had long suspected Neil didn’t like them so much as he liked how he looked holding them.
“I’m not sure surprised is the word I would have chosen,” she said, taking another sip of her champagne.
“Well, you haven’t been answering my calls, so I had to resort to more creative measures.” His easy smile revealed a row of perfectly straight white teeth.
“So you decided to crash a client event?” Marlowe began to walk, knowing he would fall into step beside her.
“Who’s crashing? I came as my father’s guest.”
Henry Campbell, London-born, painfully posh and senior partner of Campbell Capital, had proved a significant stumbling block when it came to disentangling herself from her engagement. While Parker Kane’s approbation could be fickle where Campbell’s son was concerned, his devotion to the investment banker and the significant funds he controlled remained ever ardent and unfailingly faithful.
“Then maybe you should keep him company,” she suggested, cutting her eyes toward the bar, where Henry Campbell could reliably be found.
Neil took a quick step and turned to block her path. “I need to talk to you.”
“No,” Marlowe said, slipping past him. “You don’t.”
“Marlowe, please.”
It was the please that caught her. Urgent and spoken with more sincere emotion than she’d heard from him in at least a year.
“Five minutes of your time,” he said, eyes earnest and empty of his usual expectant surety. “That’s all I’m asking.”
She hesitated, glancing toward the wall where she’d spotted the mystery man, oddly disappointed when she found it empty. “All right.”
Neil led them away from the main hall and down a side corridor to a balcony off the family’s private dining room. Not the precise place where they’d first met, but an obvious and somewhat cringey attempt at re-creating the mood.
He swung open a French door and waited for her to walk through before shutting it behind them.
Marlowe moved to the waist-high brick wall and leaned her forearms against the gritty surface, her drink still clutched in her hand as she looked out on the gardens below. Built by her great-grandfather in the late 1800s, Fair Weather Hall had acres of sprawling green lawn encircled by a thick border of trees that kept it stubbornly secluded from the world beyond.
“Isn’t it beautiful?” Neil stood several paces away, gazing at the stars overhead as if to encourage her to do the same.
“Why did you want to talk to me?” she asked, a pin aimed at the balloon of his hopeful, romantic interlude.
“Us, of course.”
A heavy sigh deflated her chest. “Neil, there is no us.”
He took several steps closer, his eyes darting to her hand. “If that’s true, why are you still wearing the ring?”
Shit.
Marlowe had been so shocked to see him, she’d completely forgotten she was wearing it. She’d kept it on when attending social gatherings to fend off unwanted advances from would-be suitors.
“Here,” she said, setting aside her champagne glass to wiggle it off her finger and hold it out to him on an open palm. “You can have it back.”
Neil brushed Marlowe’s hair from her cheekbone. “It’s not the ring I want back. It’s you.”
Jerking away, she shook her head in disgust. “How can you even think I would consider getting back with you after what you did?”
“You’re going to throw everything we had away just because I sent your father’s assistant a few anonymous texts warning her about Mason?” He chuckled as if what he’d said represented the most negligible of complaints.
“One of which you sent while parked near her home over an hour outside the city,” she reminded him.
Neil drained his martini and set the glass on a stone planter. “I’m not saying what I did was right. I’m saying I was only trying to look out for someone in a vulnerable position.”
Marlowe suppressed an eye roll. “It may shock you to know that I’m amply familiar with the tactics of gaslighting and mansplaining, so if your plan for convincing me to take you back involves either, I would strongly urge you to reconsider.”
Arms folded across his chest, Neil leaned against the railing next to her. “Weren’t you the one who came to me because you were worried about Mason?”
This part had been true.
She and Mason had always been closer than she and Samuel, and Mason’s sudden retreat from her had set her sisterly antennae twitching. When he started showing up to work with the occasional subtly concealed bruise, she’d begun to worry. When she’d noticed large withdrawals from his personal checking account, she had begun to worry a lot.
“Sharing my concerns about my brother isn’t tantamount to giving you permission to access private, family financial information or to warn Charlotte about becoming involved with him.”
“I know that.” He placed his hand over her wrist, a part of her he had always claimed to admire. “What I did was invasive and stupid. I just got too...involved.”
She stretched out her fingers, once again offering him the ring. “So did I.”
Desperation dug a crease between his dark eyebrows. “Marlowe, this is our dream. A family dynasty. The Kanes and the Campbells, just like we always talked about.”
“Just like you always talked about.” And for a while, she had listened. Buying into his lush narrative of the life they would build together. Their dream wedding. Travel. And eventually, children.
As soon as he ascended to his rightful place within Kane Foods with the help of his father’s investment.
Only, the wedding date seemed to retreat further and further into the distance, taking her hopes along with it. Now, with her brother’s nuptials careening toward her like a freight train, Marlowe realized how gullible she had been to wait all this time.
“Take it,” she urged.
Neil looked at the diamond-studded ring twinkling like a miniature star in her outstretched palm. The hopeful light in his eyes blinked out, leaving something flat and cold in its place. “How about a goodbye kiss, then? For closure.”
The first filament of fear sizzled in Marlowe’s stomach as she realized just how alone they were on this side of the house. With the din filling the great hall, she could scream at the top of her lungs and not a soul would hear her.
“No, Neil.” She took a step backward.
“Remember you used to tell me how much this turned you on?” His hand flashed out and buried itself in the hair at her nape, tightening until she felt her scalp prickle.
Marlowe shoved her hands against his chest as hard as she could. “Neil, I said—”
The kiss was as brief as it was brutal. His mouth crushed against hers hard enough that she felt the shape of his teeth against her lips, then was gone abruptly as a low, pained grunt doubled Neil in half.
Marlowe’s heart pounded in her ears as she pressed her fingers to her lips, half expecting to find them smeared with blood. When they showed clean, she looked beyond them and saw what had happened.
Him.
The man who had stared at her.
Here, on the balcony. He had a hold of Neil by the front of his shirt, his massive fist gripping the no-longer-pristine fabric as he towered over him.
“She said no.” His words were not spoken but hewed. Pried from a throat rusty with disuse. “You understand consent?” he growled, hauling her former fiancé upward, only the tips of his mirror-polished loafers making contact with the balcony tiles.
Neil glared at him through eyes made reptilian by spite. “Yes.”
“Good.” He eased his hold slightly. “Now, are you going to leave, or do I need to throw your preppy ass off this balcony?”
“I’ll leave,” he croaked.
The man opened his fist, and Neil staggered several steps before recovering his self-assured posture. He took the time to smooth his shirt and cast a long, meaningful look in Marlowe’s direction before exiting through the French doors.
When he was gone, the man turned to her, eyes moving over her body just as brazenly but with clinical concern. “You okay?”
Marlowe ran a shaking hand over her rumpled hair, a fizzy cocktail of adrenaline, irritation and fear coursing through her body. “I’m fine.”
He took a step closer, looking like he might be on the point of conducting a physical examination. “Are you sure?”
“Yes,” she snapped. “You can go now.”
His jaw hardened as he raised an eyebrow at her. “Is that right?”
A balmy breeze swept through the colonnade, bringing with it the scent of roses and rain. Ludicrously ill-suited to the moment.
“Yes.” She turned from him to retrieve her champagne. “Despite the fact that you clearly don’t belong to my father’s crowd, I’m assuming you have some reason for attending this event aside from lurking on balconies and ogling me.”
As soon as the words were out of her mouth, Marlowe wanted to recall them. Humiliation always sharpened her tongue in ways she didn’t like but could never seem to prevent.
His hulking form shadowed her peripheral vision. “You forgot saving you from your prick of a fiancé.”
“Saving me?” The word triggered a stinging snap of anger deep within her solar plexus. “You basically strip me naked with your eyes, you follow us out here from the hall like some kind of creeper, then you ride in like Rambo without my having asked for your interference or your help. Tell me, am I supposed to swoon or throw you a parade? I’m fairly experienced when it comes to bolstering the egos of billionaires, but I’m a little unclear about cocktail reception vigilantes.”
His dress shirt stretched taut over his mounded biceps as he crossed his arms over his chest, a posture that somehow looked more defensive than defiant. “First, if you don’t think I noticed the way you were looking at me, you’re either blind or high. Second, you’re saying you would have preferred that I leave you alone with Neil?”
He spit the name like it was battery acid on his tongue.
“I’m saying I’m tired of men putting me in situations so that other men can congratulate themselves for rescuing me,” she said, deliberately ignoring the first part of his statement.
Because it had been true.
It still was.
Even as she stoked the engines of her righteous indignation, she fought to keep her eyes from drinking in additional details offered up by his proximity. The thin, silvery scar interrupted the peak of his left eyebrow. The subtle trench in the skin of his cheekbone. The ludicrous length of his dark lashes. The way proximity to his huge, hulking form touched a primal part of her brain devoted to feelings of safety.
Warmth radiated through the fabric of his dress shirt, kissing her bare arm. “I know that isolating a woman from the safety of a crowd is a classic tactic of a predator. I know that shifting blame for shitty behavior is the hallmark of a narcissist. I know that any man who would put his hands on a woman deserves to have his spleen ripped out. And I know that no amount of beauty can make up for being a conceited, dismissive elitist with a silver spoon stuck where the sun doesn’t shine.”
Marlowe blinked at him, her mouth open in shock. A flood of lame rejoinders invaded her mind, each more cliché than the last and all of the how-dare-you variety.
Before she could make any of them exit her lips, he bent and picked up the engagement ring she hadn’t even realized she’d dropped.
Taking her hand in his, he turned it palm up and placed the ring squarely in the center. Large, warm and deliciously rough, his fingers closed over hers, the diamond’s intricate setting gently biting into her fist. He held it a beat longer than necessary, his gaze smoldering into hers.
Tingling awareness traveled up her arm and systematically woke every nerve center in her body until it felt like her heart beat not just in her chest but in her lips, skin and navel.
When he let go, the sudden loss of warmth and compression left her feeling strangely abandoned and cold despite the late-summer heat.
“Enjoy the rest of your evening.”
The rough, low words lingered like smoke long after he’d turned on his heel and left her pulsing in his wake.
Marlowe wasn’t sure which surprised her more.
That she’d allowed him to have the last word, or that she wanted more of them.
More of him.
Excerpted from Bad Boy with Benefits by Cynthia St. Aubin. Copyright © 2022 by Cynthia St. Aubin and Harlequin Enterprises ULC.
Marlowe’s body stiffened out of reflex. She wasn’t entirely sure when this had become her default reaction to her former fiancé but knew it predated the business with Charlotte by several months.
“Hello, Neil.” Fingers wrapped tightly around her champagne flute, she turned to face him.
He had always looked his best in a suit and tonight was no different. This evening’s ensemble was deep blue, beautifully cut and undoubtedly expensive. But something about the juxtaposition of her once-fiancé and the arrogant, unpretentious masculinity of the man across the room made Neil look...fussy by comparison. His hair was a little too neatly styled, his eyebrows slightly overgroomed, his crisp white shirt too pristine.
“Surprised to see me?” Lines of amusement crinkled the corners of his eyes as he lifted a martini to his lips and suppressed a slight grimace.
Marlowe had long suspected Neil didn’t like them so much as he liked how he looked holding them.
“I’m not sure surprised is the word I would have chosen,” she said, taking another sip of her champagne.
“Well, you haven’t been answering my calls, so I had to resort to more creative measures.” His easy smile revealed a row of perfectly straight white teeth.
“So you decided to crash a client event?” Marlowe began to walk, knowing he would fall into step beside her.
“Who’s crashing? I came as my father’s guest.”
Henry Campbell, London-born, painfully posh and senior partner of Campbell Capital, had proved a significant stumbling block when it came to disentangling herself from her engagement. While Parker Kane’s approbation could be fickle where Campbell’s son was concerned, his devotion to the investment banker and the significant funds he controlled remained ever ardent and unfailingly faithful.
“Then maybe you should keep him company,” she suggested, cutting her eyes toward the bar, where Henry Campbell could reliably be found.
Neil took a quick step and turned to block her path. “I need to talk to you.”
“No,” Marlowe said, slipping past him. “You don’t.”
“Marlowe, please.”
It was the please that caught her. Urgent and spoken with more sincere emotion than she’d heard from him in at least a year.
“Five minutes of your time,” he said, eyes earnest and empty of his usual expectant surety. “That’s all I’m asking.”
She hesitated, glancing toward the wall where she’d spotted the mystery man, oddly disappointed when she found it empty. “All right.”
Neil led them away from the main hall and down a side corridor to a balcony off the family’s private dining room. Not the precise place where they’d first met, but an obvious and somewhat cringey attempt at re-creating the mood.
He swung open a French door and waited for her to walk through before shutting it behind them.
Marlowe moved to the waist-high brick wall and leaned her forearms against the gritty surface, her drink still clutched in her hand as she looked out on the gardens below. Built by her great-grandfather in the late 1800s, Fair Weather Hall had acres of sprawling green lawn encircled by a thick border of trees that kept it stubbornly secluded from the world beyond.
“Isn’t it beautiful?” Neil stood several paces away, gazing at the stars overhead as if to encourage her to do the same.
“Why did you want to talk to me?” she asked, a pin aimed at the balloon of his hopeful, romantic interlude.
“Us, of course.”
A heavy sigh deflated her chest. “Neil, there is no us.”
He took several steps closer, his eyes darting to her hand. “If that’s true, why are you still wearing the ring?”
Shit.
Marlowe had been so shocked to see him, she’d completely forgotten she was wearing it. She’d kept it on when attending social gatherings to fend off unwanted advances from would-be suitors.
“Here,” she said, setting aside her champagne glass to wiggle it off her finger and hold it out to him on an open palm. “You can have it back.”
Neil brushed Marlowe’s hair from her cheekbone. “It’s not the ring I want back. It’s you.”
Jerking away, she shook her head in disgust. “How can you even think I would consider getting back with you after what you did?”
“You’re going to throw everything we had away just because I sent your father’s assistant a few anonymous texts warning her about Mason?” He chuckled as if what he’d said represented the most negligible of complaints.
“One of which you sent while parked near her home over an hour outside the city,” she reminded him.
Neil drained his martini and set the glass on a stone planter. “I’m not saying what I did was right. I’m saying I was only trying to look out for someone in a vulnerable position.”
Marlowe suppressed an eye roll. “It may shock you to know that I’m amply familiar with the tactics of gaslighting and mansplaining, so if your plan for convincing me to take you back involves either, I would strongly urge you to reconsider.”
Arms folded across his chest, Neil leaned against the railing next to her. “Weren’t you the one who came to me because you were worried about Mason?”
This part had been true.
She and Mason had always been closer than she and Samuel, and Mason’s sudden retreat from her had set her sisterly antennae twitching. When he started showing up to work with the occasional subtly concealed bruise, she’d begun to worry. When she’d noticed large withdrawals from his personal checking account, she had begun to worry a lot.
“Sharing my concerns about my brother isn’t tantamount to giving you permission to access private, family financial information or to warn Charlotte about becoming involved with him.”
“I know that.” He placed his hand over her wrist, a part of her he had always claimed to admire. “What I did was invasive and stupid. I just got too...involved.”
She stretched out her fingers, once again offering him the ring. “So did I.”
Desperation dug a crease between his dark eyebrows. “Marlowe, this is our dream. A family dynasty. The Kanes and the Campbells, just like we always talked about.”
“Just like you always talked about.” And for a while, she had listened. Buying into his lush narrative of the life they would build together. Their dream wedding. Travel. And eventually, children.
As soon as he ascended to his rightful place within Kane Foods with the help of his father’s investment.
Only, the wedding date seemed to retreat further and further into the distance, taking her hopes along with it. Now, with her brother’s nuptials careening toward her like a freight train, Marlowe realized how gullible she had been to wait all this time.
“Take it,” she urged.
Neil looked at the diamond-studded ring twinkling like a miniature star in her outstretched palm. The hopeful light in his eyes blinked out, leaving something flat and cold in its place. “How about a goodbye kiss, then? For closure.”
The first filament of fear sizzled in Marlowe’s stomach as she realized just how alone they were on this side of the house. With the din filling the great hall, she could scream at the top of her lungs and not a soul would hear her.
“No, Neil.” She took a step backward.
“Remember you used to tell me how much this turned you on?” His hand flashed out and buried itself in the hair at her nape, tightening until she felt her scalp prickle.
Marlowe shoved her hands against his chest as hard as she could. “Neil, I said—”
The kiss was as brief as it was brutal. His mouth crushed against hers hard enough that she felt the shape of his teeth against her lips, then was gone abruptly as a low, pained grunt doubled Neil in half.
Marlowe’s heart pounded in her ears as she pressed her fingers to her lips, half expecting to find them smeared with blood. When they showed clean, she looked beyond them and saw what had happened.
Him.
The man who had stared at her.
Here, on the balcony. He had a hold of Neil by the front of his shirt, his massive fist gripping the no-longer-pristine fabric as he towered over him.
“She said no.” His words were not spoken but hewed. Pried from a throat rusty with disuse. “You understand consent?” he growled, hauling her former fiancé upward, only the tips of his mirror-polished loafers making contact with the balcony tiles.
Neil glared at him through eyes made reptilian by spite. “Yes.”
“Good.” He eased his hold slightly. “Now, are you going to leave, or do I need to throw your preppy ass off this balcony?”
“I’ll leave,” he croaked.
The man opened his fist, and Neil staggered several steps before recovering his self-assured posture. He took the time to smooth his shirt and cast a long, meaningful look in Marlowe’s direction before exiting through the French doors.
When he was gone, the man turned to her, eyes moving over her body just as brazenly but with clinical concern. “You okay?”
Marlowe ran a shaking hand over her rumpled hair, a fizzy cocktail of adrenaline, irritation and fear coursing through her body. “I’m fine.”
He took a step closer, looking like he might be on the point of conducting a physical examination. “Are you sure?”
“Yes,” she snapped. “You can go now.”
His jaw hardened as he raised an eyebrow at her. “Is that right?”
A balmy breeze swept through the colonnade, bringing with it the scent of roses and rain. Ludicrously ill-suited to the moment.
“Yes.” She turned from him to retrieve her champagne. “Despite the fact that you clearly don’t belong to my father’s crowd, I’m assuming you have some reason for attending this event aside from lurking on balconies and ogling me.”
As soon as the words were out of her mouth, Marlowe wanted to recall them. Humiliation always sharpened her tongue in ways she didn’t like but could never seem to prevent.
His hulking form shadowed her peripheral vision. “You forgot saving you from your prick of a fiancé.”
“Saving me?” The word triggered a stinging snap of anger deep within her solar plexus. “You basically strip me naked with your eyes, you follow us out here from the hall like some kind of creeper, then you ride in like Rambo without my having asked for your interference or your help. Tell me, am I supposed to swoon or throw you a parade? I’m fairly experienced when it comes to bolstering the egos of billionaires, but I’m a little unclear about cocktail reception vigilantes.”
His dress shirt stretched taut over his mounded biceps as he crossed his arms over his chest, a posture that somehow looked more defensive than defiant. “First, if you don’t think I noticed the way you were looking at me, you’re either blind or high. Second, you’re saying you would have preferred that I leave you alone with Neil?”
He spit the name like it was battery acid on his tongue.
“I’m saying I’m tired of men putting me in situations so that other men can congratulate themselves for rescuing me,” she said, deliberately ignoring the first part of his statement.
Because it had been true.
It still was.
Even as she stoked the engines of her righteous indignation, she fought to keep her eyes from drinking in additional details offered up by his proximity. The thin, silvery scar interrupted the peak of his left eyebrow. The subtle trench in the skin of his cheekbone. The ludicrous length of his dark lashes. The way proximity to his huge, hulking form touched a primal part of her brain devoted to feelings of safety.
Warmth radiated through the fabric of his dress shirt, kissing her bare arm. “I know that isolating a woman from the safety of a crowd is a classic tactic of a predator. I know that shifting blame for shitty behavior is the hallmark of a narcissist. I know that any man who would put his hands on a woman deserves to have his spleen ripped out. And I know that no amount of beauty can make up for being a conceited, dismissive elitist with a silver spoon stuck where the sun doesn’t shine.”
Marlowe blinked at him, her mouth open in shock. A flood of lame rejoinders invaded her mind, each more cliché than the last and all of the how-dare-you variety.
Before she could make any of them exit her lips, he bent and picked up the engagement ring she hadn’t even realized she’d dropped.
Taking her hand in his, he turned it palm up and placed the ring squarely in the center. Large, warm and deliciously rough, his fingers closed over hers, the diamond’s intricate setting gently biting into her fist. He held it a beat longer than necessary, his gaze smoldering into hers.
Tingling awareness traveled up her arm and systematically woke every nerve center in her body until it felt like her heart beat not just in her chest but in her lips, skin and navel.
When he let go, the sudden loss of warmth and compression left her feeling strangely abandoned and cold despite the late-summer heat.
“Enjoy the rest of your evening.”
The rough, low words lingered like smoke long after he’d turned on his heel and left her pulsing in his wake.
Marlowe wasn’t sure which surprised her more.
That she’d allowed him to have the last word, or that she wanted more of them.
More of him.
Excerpted from Bad Boy with Benefits by Cynthia St. Aubin. Copyright © 2022 by Cynthia St. Aubin and Harlequin Enterprises ULC.
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Cynthia St. Aubin wrote her first play at age eight and made her brothers perform it for the admission price of gum wrappers. A steal, considering she provided the wrappers in advance. When she was tall enough to reach the top drawer of her parents' dresser, she began pilfering her mother's secret stash of romance novels and has been in love with love ever since. A confirmed cheese addict and aspiring cat lady, she lives in Texas with a handsome musician.
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