Cullen's Bride

Cullen's Bride Read Online Free PDF Page B

Book: Cullen's Bride Read Online Free PDF
Author: Fiona Brand
month.”
    A car barrelled past, breaking the moment. A horn blared, and someone called out, laughing, and with that small interruption, Cullen stepped out into the sweltering stillness of early evening and strode across the road to a dark green four-wheel drive. When the vehicle pulled away, Rachel gave in to the compulsion to step out onto the pavement, under the overhang. The humidity had become unbearable, and it registered somewhere in the recesses of her mind that she needed a long, cool drink. Badly.
    A distant rumble sounded. The unmistakeable smell of rain hitting parched, dusty pavement wafted on a hot gust of wind as the truck accelerated down the main street and out of town. Rachel touched her palms to her cheeks and closed her eyes. She was trembling, her hair clinging damply to her brow and nape. I must be coming down with something, she thought dimly. Or maybe it’s the time of month
    Or maybe it was that she suddenly felt more lonely than she’d ever felt in her life. Lonelier even than when Adam had walked out on her and she’d spent two weeks of the holiday they’d planned to take together staring at a tropical sea, unable to believe her husband didn’t love her.
    She closed her eyes on a familiar burst of pain. Correction. He did love her. That was the supreme irony, and the one fact she still hadn’t come to grips with After three years of what Rachel had considered a perfect marriage, he’d suddenly met someone. She still remembered his exact words. They’d burned into her, sinking to the centre of her being. “I love you,” he’d said, “but I can’t stay with you. I’ve met someone, and I can’t get her out of my mind. I don’t know what it is that I feel, but I can’t bear to be in the same room with her and not touch her.”
    Water slammed onto the tin roof of the covered way. Rachel’s eyes snapped open at the violence of the sound. After only a few seconds the guttering overflowed, and a shift in the wind drove the rain under the shelter, pelting her with big, stinging drops. She knew she should move away, but the pounding rain after the still heat of the day was somehow cathartic. Stepping closer to the edge of the pavement, she lifted her face, tasting the rain in her mouth, the cleansing coolness of it. The salt.
    She wasn’t crying. It was the rain wetting her cheeks, and not the weak, useless tears she’d given up long ago.
    And the tremors moving through her body were from the shock of dealing with Cullen Logan’s uncompromising maleness. Somehow—God knows how, for he’d gone out of his way to be cool and abrasively dismissive—he’d stirred something in her that she’d thought had been burned away for good, a sexual need that was more intense, more overwhelming, than any she could ever remember feeling.
    It shook her that she could feel a sexual response to any man other than the man she’d chosen to marry. Maybe she was reacting naively again, but she knew her own nature. She was naturally intense and single-minded, and her feelings had always run deep. She’d learned to guard her emotions over the years and didn’t trust easily, which was one of the reasons her failed marriage had hit her so hard. When she’d made her vows, they’d been the old-fashioned ’til-death-us-do-part kind.
    Logically, she knew that two years had passed since her marriage had effectively ended, that she was still human, still female. She’d expected to participate in sex in order to satisfy a man she could come to love sometime in the misty, uncertain future. But not now. Not with this burning immediacy. And certainly not with a man—a stranger—who didn’t even like her.
    The rain stopped as suddenly as it had begun. Rachel looked blankly around, finally becoming aware of just where she was and that she was wet through. Thankfully, the street was deserted. Anyone
Read Online Free Pdf

Similar Books

The Stars Will Shine

Eva Carrigan

All For You (Boys of the South)

Marquita Valentine, The 12 NAs of Christmas

She's Come Undone

Wally Lamb

Shades of Earl Grey

Laura Childs

The Rebel Prince

Celine Kiernan

Women of Pemberley

Rebecca Ann Collins