Count Toussaint’s Pregnant Mistress Read Online Free PDF Page B

put her on edge. In her years as a concert pianist she’d seen and experienced her fair share of luxury. No, it wasn’t the room. It was the man.
    He’d casually dropped the key-card the concierge had given him on a side table and shed his suit jacket, the muscles of his back and shoulders rippling under the smooth, silken fabric of his shirt. For a brief moment his body was in profile, his face in shadow. Abby didn’t think she was imagining the grim set to his jaw, or the accompanying shiver that rippled through her body at the sight of him and the darkness emanating from within that beautiful body.
    Yet then he turned to her with a little smile, his expression light and easy, and she wondered if she’d been imagining it after all.
    ‘Aren’t you going to come in?’ he asked, laughter lurking in his voice, and Abby lowered her gaze.
    ‘I…’ She licked her lips. Now was not the time for cold feet, surely? ‘I’m not sure.’
    Luc frowned and strode towards her, his hands coming to curl around her shoulders. ‘Abby…are you afraid?’
    ‘Not…exactly.’ Abby tried to laugh, but it came out wobbly and uncertain. ‘Not of you,’ she amended. ‘More of…the situation.’ She licked her lips again, hurrying to explain. ‘And I’m not afraid. I just…don’t know what to do. I know what I said, but…’
    Luc’s hands relaxed on her shoulders, sliding down her bare arms to leave a wake of goosebumps before he loosely linked her fingers with his own.
    ‘We can simply sit and chat,’ he told her gently. ‘I enjoyed talking to you.’
    ‘I did too,’ Abby admitted. ‘That is, talking to you, not to me.’
    ‘Abby.’ Luc chuckled softly as he brushed her cheek with his knuckles. ‘I understand.’
    Abby gave a little nervous laugh. ‘You must think me incredibly gauche,’ she said and he raised his eyebrows.
    ‘Not at all.’
    ‘Really?’ She laughed again, the sound more normal and easy. ‘Because, listening to myself, I think I sound gauche.’ She met his gaze directly, her own gaze open and candid. ‘I don’t know what to say or do.’
    ‘There’s no script, is there?’ Luc asked. ‘Or did I not get the memo?’
    ‘No script,’ Abby confirmed as, still holding her by the hand, he led her to the sofa. ‘But surely certain things are…expected?’
    ‘Abby, I promise you, I have no expectations. I was amazed to see you in the bar, and I’m even more amazed to see you here.’
    They were sitting on the sofa now, Luc’s thigh nearly pressed against her own. Abby slipped off her heels and tucked her stocking-clad feet under the silken folds of her gown.
    ‘Anyway,’ Luc continued, ‘I don’t think you gauche at all. Refreshing, I would have put it.’
    ‘Isn’t that just a nice way of meaning “different”?’
    ‘Different is good.’
    ‘Different means different,’ Abby insisted. ‘Abnormal, weird.’
    Luc reached out to touch her ankle through the folds of her gown. It was an almost absent-minded caress, his long, lean fingers lingering on the delicate bones even as his eyes, and his smile, never left her face. ‘Is that how you’ve felt?’
    ‘Sometimes.’ Why, Abby wondered, was it so easy to talk to him like this? To admit, confess things, she never had before even to herself? ‘Piano was pretty much my life from about age five,’ she elaborated with a shrug. ‘I stood out.’
    ‘At school?’
    She shook her head. ‘Not really. I was home-tutored from age eight so I could devote more time to music.’
    ‘Those kids on Hampstead Heath, then?’ Luc guessed, and Abby wondered how he knew so much so quickly. ‘Them?’
    ‘Yes,’ she agreed wryly. ‘Them.’
    In the ensuing silence Abby felt herself staring at his leg, at the taut muscle underneath the dark wool, as if fascinated by that one limb, and in truth she was. She wanted to touch it. Him. Wanted to feel the hard muscle underneath, to slide her hand along his hot skin…
    What was she thinking?