Jess Michaels Read Online Free PDF Page B

over her eyes as her heart rate slowed to a normal rhythm and her breathbecame deeper and less erratic. Although she was warm and flushed with pleasure now, allowing herself release through her toy hadn’t done what she desired.
    She had hoped that bringing herself to orgasm would release the tension that Nathan’s demands…no, not just his demands, the man himself had created. Instead, she now felt more tightly wound than ever. Pleasure had turned to fantasy. And soon, no matter how much she tried to pretend she didn’t want it to happen, fantasy would become reality.
    As she drifted off into fitful, erotically charged sleep, she mused on how she couldn’t wait for that moment.
     
    Nathan stood in Cassandra’s parlor. It was not the one he had intruded upon the previous day, the room she had converted into a studio for her work, but a different place. He gazed around with a frown. He preferred the cluttered disarray of her workroom, where her personality and passion invaded every corner. This chamber revealed nothing about Cassandra’s life. It was plain and pretty and it looked like any other parlor in any other rich person’s home in London.
    But Cassandra wasn’t like anyone else. She was tempting and frustrating. She was a seductress, a liar, not to be trusted. He couldn’t forget that, no matter how much this unwanted, driving, angry need to touch her overwhelmed him.
    She was the enemy.
    The door to the room opened and Cassandra stepped inside. As she quietly closed the door behind her, Nathan straightened up and stared at her. When he last saw her allthose years ago, her red hair had been tangled down around her shoulders, she had been wearing a half-unbuttoned gown, well made by her tailor father, but not fancy. She had been laughing and making false promises about meeting him that night, running away with him to Gretna Green.
    She had looked like exactly what she was, an upper middle class daughter of a man in trade.
    Today she looked like a queen. Her green gown was the finest silk money could buy, draped perfectly over her form in what would surely be the grandest style of the Season. The cut of her bodice accentuated her full breasts, despite the fact that a more boyish figure was the current rage. And her hair was bound up in a complicated, layered and curled arrangement on the top of her head. Something that would require at least one servant to assist in creating.
    Her clothing and her hair and everything about the way she held herself said that she was a lady of quality. A lie. But a well-told one.
    “Good morning,” Cassandra said, intruding upon his reverie with a thin-lipped, humorless smile. “I did not expect you to return to my home so soon.”
    “Hoping for a reprieve?” he asked. “That I might forget about yesterday’s conversation?”
    She sighed. “If you did not forget about me during the four years we have been apart, I think it would be foolish to hope you would forget me in the span of less than twenty-four hours, especially when you are so determined to follow through with your plans.”
    He turned away, hating how he had made his obsession with her so clear. His angry kiss had told her as plain as words that he had spent some part of every day while he was away from England thinking of her. Dreaming of her. Hating her and the fact that she had convinced him that she loved him.
    She who loved no one but herself.
    “Why should I stay away?” he asked, as he looked out the window at her small but tidy garden. “Why should I make this more comfortable for you?”
    “No reason,” she said, and her voice was brittle enough that he turned. “No reason at all. Let us set the terms of this…arrangement then, shall we?”
    His lips parted. Her hands were clenched behind her back and she looked for all the world like she was marching toward the guillotine rather than his bed, but the fact remained that she didn’t appear to be preparing to fight him.
    “You are agreeing to my