Bride in a Gilded Cage Read Online Free PDF

behind them, as if he did it all the time.
    Once they stepped out into the street, the languorous city heat did little to break Isobel from her inertia. Rafael calmly handed her back her keys and bag and indicated a sleek car parked by the kerb. ‘I won’t offer you a lift, as I know you live just a block away from here, but my car will be waiting for you at seven.’
    He reached out and trailed a finger down Isobel’s cheek to her jaw. It left a line of fire in its wake, making her breath hitch, shocking her out of the inertia holding her in its grip. He’d done exactly the same thing that night three years before.
    ‘Don’t try anything silly, Isobel, or I’ll just come for you myself.’
    And then, speechless, Isobel just watched as Don Rafael Ortega Romero got into the back of the car and it pulled away and disappeared into the traffic.
    Isobel was still in a state of shock three hours later. She looked at her reflection in the cracked mirror that lay against a wall in the tiny space the landlord euphemistically called a bedroom. She’d found the mirror one day in a nearby skip and carried it home.
    She knew well the kind of man Rafael was. The world he came from was a place where people didn’t say no to him, so she knew his threat was not an empty one. He wouldn’t stand for being stood up. A disturbing frisson of something she didn’t want to name went through her belly and she quashed it. She hated the fact that she seemed to be caught up in wondering about what Rafael thought of her now.
    In a moment of weakness about a year ago she’d done aGoogle search on him, to see where he was, what he was doing, and she’d seen a picture of him at a premiere in Los Angeles with a veritable glamazon of a woman on his arm. All long, luscious limbs and flowing red hair. The kind of woman Isobel didn’t think she could ever hope to imitate.
    She looked at her hair critically; she’d had it cut when she’d come to Paris on an impulse. It had felt like something rebellious, something cathartic, to distract her from the fact that she couldn’t escape her fate. Sometimes now, though, she longed for length again—something to hide behind. She’d felt acutely exposed today under Rafael’s gaze.
    She gave herself a last, dismissive look, collected her bag and went down to wait for the car. It was only in the car on the way to Rafael’s hotel that Isobel realised that not once since she’d seen Rafael again that afternoon had the thought occurred to her to try and run or escape.
    Rafael sat in the lobby of the Plaza Athénée hotel and waited for Isobel. It was one of the grandest hotels in Paris, but Rafael didn’t notice the trappings of wealth around him, the expensive scents of the women there as they passed by with unconcealed looks of interest in his direction.
    A coil of delicious tension snaked through his body—a sense of anticipation he hadn’t felt in a long, long time. He remembered the moment in that study three years before, when Isobel had stood up to him, taking him by surprise, and he recognised the same sense of anticipation.
    He saw his car pull up outside the main door and stood, grimacing slightly when he felt that tight coil of tension move southwards. With ruthless control he called his body to heel. And then the minute he saw Isobel’s silhouette emerge from the car that control was blasted to smithereens.
    She passed two men as she walked in the main entrance, and Rafael saw how they both turned to look. He was no better, with his eyes glued to the graceful curve of her body. She wore the unmistakable signs of her breeding unconsciously; her dress was most likely chainstore, and nothing more than plain and black…but it could have been a Dior creation the way it hugged her torso and clung softly to her slim thighs, flaring out slightly at the knee. His eyes dropped to see her feet encased in silver high-heeled sandals and his desire escalated. With a burst of pique at his uncontrollable