Disrobed and Dishonored Read Online Free PDF

shoulders.
     
    Jonathan found himself stretched over Sarah’s body, her legs cradling him, his hips tensed to thrust. He caught himself, the effort wrenching a groan from deep in his chest. ‘God!’ He rolled off her, forearm flung across his eyes, fighting for control. She had trusted him and he had damn nearly…then her hand took him, sure and generous, and he turned back to caress her, shaking in her embrace as they fell into ecstasy and darkness together.
    Sarah was curled against him, sleeping, he realized, as he came to himself. That had never happened to him before. His mistresses had never shown any inclination to snuggle confidingly against him, and that avoidance of feigned sentiment suited him perfectly. Caroline, his current maîtresse, most certainly never clung. The thought of appearing anything less than perfect sent her from the bed the moment he left it to retreat behind a screen and emerge ten or so minutes later, cool and immaculate. And by then he would be in his robe pouring champagne ready for an uninvolved exchange of civilized pleasantries. All so very sophisticated, all so very…cold.
    This was not cold. Sarah’s body hugged his with the trusting, innocently sensual abandon of a sleeping kitten, her breath tickling the hairs around his left nipple, her right arm flung over his rib cage, her right leg across his thighs. They were both hot and damp, sticky and tousled, and he found that strangely pleasurable.
    Jonathan wondered how long he had slept, then stopped caring and rubbed his cheek against the tangle of brown curls that was all he could reach. After a moment he dropped a kiss on the crown of Sarah’s head and smiled as she stirred, muttering, and caught his nipple between her lips, playing with it in her sleep. It hardened and other parts of his body began to react. Jonathan shifted a little, so she let go with a soft sound of protest and lay still again.
    He had not reckoned on feeling like this when he had let his temper and his pride ride him that morning. He had spent the day tracking her down and the evening finding his way into the house. An unlocked storeroom window had given him access, then he had slipped upstairs to check each bedroom until he had found hers.
    The alcove with its swathe of drapery had been perfect—perfect to wait unobserved as the maid closed the curtains across the windows, and perfect, as he had rapidly discovered, to torment him with first the scent and then the sight of Sarah.
    He had closed his eyes as the maid undressed her: he had not lost all control. But his eyes might just as well have been wide open as he followed every whisper of silk, every rustle of petticoats, the sound of her sigh of relief as her stays were unlaced, the maid’s comments on the pretty clocking at the ankle of her stockings.
    Then there had been the soft sound of a loose nightgown falling over her head to toes that, his imagination was telling him, were bare, and the murmur of their conversation. All so intimate, so feminine, as the two young women shared their joy that the unwelcome suitor had been routed.
    Sarah had not confided how she had achieved that to her maid, he noticed, realizing he would have been well served for his intrusion if he had had to spend long minutes listening to a dissection of his performance.
    But that realization did nothing to dampen the heat of the anger that the discovery of the pearls had ignited. His friends’ teasing had been bearable, rooted more in admiration of his prowess at finding a bedmate so inventive rather than scorn at the predicament he had found himself in. No, it was the fact that she had carelessly left him jewelry worth a considerable sum laced mockingly into his bonds.
    It was not until he had seen the remorse in her wide, gray eyes and understood that she genuinely had not counted their value, had thought only of delaying him long enough to escape, that the hurt pride vanished like smoke in the wind.
    Idiot, he thought now,