Breath of Desire Read Online Free PDF

hunted for signs of them to please you. Everything Alex did was to please you.”
    That shut him up for a long moment. Eventually he replied, slowly and carefully, “Everything we did was to please you . The expedition would have been for all three of us. We had a spot on the team for you already guaranteed. It was strange going without you, at first, but by then I didn’t know where else to go. I couldn’t stay.”
    She watched him in silence for a moment, then gazed back out the window, seeking that bright hope she’d grasped at earlier. A cloud must have crossed in front of the sun, because the day somehow seemed dark again.
    “It was better that you left, I think. You seem happier now.”
    “If you had come with me, maybe…”
    “Dimitri, no,” she said, cutting him off. “It wouldn’t have mattered where we were. We were spinning our wheels at that point. Staying together would have only made things worse.”
    He nodded and sighed, cutting the wheel of his small car hard to the left to descend into the shadows of an underground parking garage. She glanced up in time to view the pale walls of a stately and meticulously maintained apartment building before the shadows overtook them.
    His subsequent brooding silence made her regret snapping at him. But she couldn’t exactly tell him everything was okay, because that would have been a lie. She was far from okay, though if she could manage to not think about Alex for more than a ten minute stretch, she might at least pretend.
    Soon enough his dark demeanor dissipated into one of agitated eagerness. He fidgeted with his keys on their way to the lift at the far end of the garage. A few paces from the shiny doors he clenched them tightly in his fist and stopped short.
    “Fuck! Aurin wanted me to stop at the market on the way back.” He dug into his pants pocket for a second and produced a folded piece of steno paper. He held it up sheepishly. “She gave me a list.”
    Thea quirked her mouth. “You forgot. That is so…” So Dimitri.
    “So, we’re here…” He hesitated, glancing between the lift and his car. “You can come with me and we can collectively avoid her wrath, or you can go on up and run interference for me?”
    “You go. Just tell me which apartment and I’ll introduce myself.”
    “You can’t miss it. It’s the penthouse.”
    When he kissed her goodbye that time, she just smiled after him. His excitement had always been infectious, and to see that certain things about him hadn’t changed a bit was more a comfort than a worry. Perhaps the casual kiss was really just his way of showing she fit in his life regardless of their relative level of intimacy.
    The elevator opened a few moments later into an airy foyer with a bright skylight. Another set of closed double doors were before her. She rang the bell.
    A lilting laugh greeted her through the opening door, followed by a teasing voice, “Did you forget your key, love? Oh!”
    The young woman couldn’t have been any older than Thea. She was petite, with striking golden eyes almost too big for her face. Haphazard tendrils of blond hair fell around her bare, tan shoulders, mingling with the artfully crinkled silk of a sheer summer dress. The dress itself was cinched high, just beneath the girl’s small breasts, and the skirt just brushed the tops of her thighs.
    Thea stammered a greeting, suddenly self-conscious about her own darker appearance in the presence of this golden beauty. She had almost forgotten the undenied suggestion that Dimitri had a new lover. Somehow she’d developed the impression that today was merely about meeting her new employers. It had never occurred to her that they might be one and the same.
    Or two, come to that.
    A wave of dizziness came over her when a much larger, male figure came into view. He could have been the woman’s twin, with his identical golden eyes and mane of thick, almost unkempt hair. She caught herself staring between the pair, with an odd sense