Always a Temptress Read Online Free PDF Page A

don’t understand,” she said, stepping closer to him. “Bea can’t simply be abandoned. She isn’t strong. She’ll fret herself to flinders worrying about me.”
    “Don’t be melodramatic, Kate. She was with your staff. Nothing’s going to happen to her.”
    “All violence isn’t physical, Major.”
    “You don’t leave till I get what I want. Your hand is bleeding, Duchess. You might want to see to it.” He smiled. “And consider the consequences of your own violence.”
    Kate clenched both of her hands. “Diccan will kill you for this.”
    He stopped, his stare implacable. “Diccan told me to take you.”
    Kate wondered whether shock really had a sound. She thought she heard a whirlwind; she thought she heard the echo of a cold void. “Don’t be absurd.”
    Diccan would never do this. He would never threaten her with imprisonment. He knew…no, she realized, he didn’t. Only Bea knew. But Bea wasn’t here.
    She snapped out of her reverie just in time to see Harry step through the door. She grabbed him by the sleeve. “Damn you, at least get a message to Bea.”
    “I told you,” he said, his voice cold as silence. “Give me the verse and we’ll see.”
    She bit back a sob of frustration. “You’d torture an old woman just to get back at me?”
    It was as if she’d snapped some restraint in him. Suddenly Harry spun around and advanced on her, forcing her across the room until her back was pressed against the peeling, dingy wall. He kept crowding her with his body, battering at her with the fury in his eyes.
    “ I’m not the one doing anything,” he snapped. “I’m certainly not betraying my country.”
    “And you immediately assume I am.”
    She was trembling, the cold wall damp against her back. Her first instinct was to cower, to throw her arm up to protect herself. She knew too well, though, that cowering only made it worse. She held perfectly still.
    “Yes,” he all but snarled, too close. Too angry. “I do.”
    She had nowhere to go. Harry loomed over her, heating the air between them. She wanted to spit at him, to laugh and walk away. But inexplicably, caught like cornered prey, her body suddenly remembered. It wouldn’t move; wouldn’t fight. It began to soften, to open, to want , and she hadn’t wanted in so long she’d forgotten the feel of it.
    Even if she didn’t want Harry, her body did. It remembered how she’d hungered for the scent he always carried, horses and leather and strong soap. It remembered how he’d touched her with the raw wonder of an explorer. It remembered how it felt to trust those guileless blue eyes enough to offer him her virginity.
    It only lasted a moment, that sense of elation, before she remembered exactly what it was she had once wanted. Before she found herself fighting the urge to curl into herself and hide. And that made her angrier than ever.
    Somehow she must have betrayed her momentary weakness, because suddenly he was smiling like a wolf. “On the other hand,” he murmured, leaning even closer, too close, only small inches away, “maybe you want me to find it myself. Shall I look for it? Should I strip you until I can see every inch of the skin you bared for that painting? Should I search you, slipping my hands under your breasts to make sure you haven’t tucked it inside, where it would be warm and damp?”
    She couldn’t think. She couldn’t tell if it was fury, fear, or arousal, even though her nipples tightened with his words and a light flared in her belly. She couldn’t breathe because he was taking the last of her air.
    “I could do it,” he whispered, his mouth next to her ear. “All I’d have to do is kiss you, right here behind your ear. You’d let me do anything, then. Wouldn’t you, Kate?”
    Reaching out, he pulled a pin from her hair, loosing a thick curl. Kate shivered, frozen with memory. Suddenly she was fifteen again, balanced on the edge of womanhood. Trembling with possibility, with wonder, with hunger.