Cheryl Holt Read Online Free PDF

had been unlike anything she’d previously encountered. How she wished she had not been wearing a glove so that he might have touched his lips directly against her skin!
    After arriving in London from the family estate in early January, her only visit since her debut at age seventeen, she had barely been in Jerald’s Town house an hour when she’d heard Mr. Stevens’s name for the first time. Two of the servants had been gossiping about him when they thought no one was listening. Apparently he had been keeping company with a widow for whom one of them had been previously employed. Mr. Stevens had broken off the relationship, and the spurned widow was beside herself, furiously striving to regain his attention.
    Both servants insisted the widow wouldn’t prevail. When Mr. Stevens finished with a woman, he never went back, and rumor had it that he was already seeing another.
    Abigail might not have remembered his name at all had it not been whispered and bandied about on five different occasions during her initial week of social calls. Numerous women appeared to know him quite intimately, and those who did not had no qualms about discussing him at great length. She had been in a retiring room, unseen and unnoticed, when she’d finally gleaned shocking specifics.
    Two giggling women—both were slightly inebriated—had been recalling their previous evening’s entertainments, how the two of them had gone to his bed together. Most of what the pair had uttered was beyond her comprehension, but she couldn’t prevent herself from listening. Long after the women had departed, she remained where she had been standing, aghast and, for some reason, stimulated by what she had learned, though she couldn’t have said why.
    Generally, she was left with questions: Why would two women go to one man’s bed? Why was the experience so thrilling for them? What exactly was it that they had done to him with their mouths? Where did this indisputable joy come from that had them waxing on in such an indiscreet fashion?
    Although she had eavesdropped in the worst way, she was frightfully glad for the sexual tidbits she’d uncovered while hiding behind the ferns. Up until that moment, she had earnestly believed that men and women shared the marital bed in order to breed children—the hows and whats of it still a mystery—and for no other reason. Clearly, she’d been wrong, which made her understand that much had been skimmed over and downright omitted in her limited education regarding procreative matters.
    Obviously, there were people in the world who truly enjoyed the marital act and who engaged in it on a regular basis for the sole purpose of finding pleasure. The women whom she’d stumbled upon were from lofty families, so she couldn’t attribute their delight to their having common natures. They were both highborn ladies who had sought out a man who was not their husband, who had committed unspeakable acts with him, and who couldn’t wait to do it all again at the earliest possible opportunity.
    During their hushed conversation, they had made much of James Stevens’s good looks and broad physique. So, when she had turned to face him in his office, she had been expecting to encounter a comely gentleman. Instantly, however, it was clear that the words used to describe him had fallen far short of their mark. By far and away, he was the most handsome man she’d ever seen.
    He was tall, six feet at least, with dark hair, so dark it had looked black in the dim light of the rainy afternoon. It was neatly trimmed in the front, the back strands curling deliciously over his collar, the style only serving to emphasize his beautiful face, his high cheekbones, his aristocratic nose. And his eyes!
    They were a fathomless blue, a deep striking sapphire that drew her in and held her spellbound. When he had looked at her with those magnificent eyes, his gaze boring into hers, she felt as though he could peer to her very core where all her