LadyClarissasSeduction Read Online Free PDF Page A

again.
    Suddenly, his blue eyes darkened with a familiar heat as his
gaze centered on her lips. He held the berry to her and she nipped the rest
from his fingers, leaving him only the leafy green top.
    “You don’t like sharing, princess?”
    “If you are exceptionally nice to me, perhaps I will let you
have a bite or two.”
    “Aren’t I always kind to you?”
    “You are.” Tenderness swept through her. She reached out to
caress his strong jaw, relishing the scratchiness of his whiskers. “I thank you
for it.”
    He kissed her palm. “You are most welcome, dear lady.”
    “Sometimes I feel as if I’ve entered a dream world, as if at
any second my maid will wake me and I’ll be back in my bed at the Grosvenor
house.” She paused, considering the complexity of her emotions. “You will no
doubt think it bad of me, but I heard such awful tales and believed them. You
are not at all the man I expected.”
    He turned her hand over and kissed her fingers, then her
inner wrist. “You were anticipating a chap with horns sprouting from his head?”
    She laughed at the ridiculous imagery his words provoked.
“However did you come into all this?”
    “The gaming hells, you mean?” He straightened, his face
losing its playfulness and becoming inscrutable. “Either impossibly good
fortune or impossibly bad, depending upon how one views the world.”
    She scooted closer to him, nestling against his shoulder
when he would have perhaps retreated. “Won’t you tell me?”
    He sighed. “Have another strawberry, C.”
    She retrieved one from the small crystal bowl he’d uncovered
and took a bite. “Now won’t you tell me?”
    A chuckle rumbled from his chest. “Persistent minx, aren’t
you? Very well. I was born in the streets. My mother was a maid in a fine
house, a chamber maid, but it was good work, steady income and all that.
Respectable. Until she was ravished by a footman and became with child. The
footman wouldn’t marry her, and when the master of the house discovered he had
a maid with a bastard in her belly, he dismissed her without references.”
    Clarissa gasped at the horrific tale. “Dear God, what
happened to her?”
    “She went to the streets and was forced to earn her living
the only way she knew how, on her back.” He paused as his voice grew thick with
emotion, composing himself. “She had me, took care of me as best she could. I
never wanted for anything. When I was fifteen, she married a much older man,
the owner of a particular establishment, and when they both died, I inherited
it. From then on, I worked my bollocks off—forgive me—for everything you see
around you.”
    His beautiful face looked desolate as he completed his
story. Clarissa knew no other way to comfort him than by drawing him into her
arms. They held one another tightly for a long time, neither speaking, neither
willing to move and break the connection they had impossibly discovered in one
another.
    “I am sorry, Pierce, for the suffering you and your mother
both must have known,” she said softly when at last she could speak. She kissed
his ear, then his neck.
    “No need to be sorry.” He rubbed his cheek against hers.
“I’m nothing more than a gutter rat. Don’t waste your concern on me. The past
is the past.”
    A swift current of emotion passed through her. She had
fallen in love with him. Somehow, unlikely though it seemed. The man who had
once been the source of her downfall was now the source of her redemption. And
perhaps she too was his. Clarissa bracketed his beloved face in her hands,
searching his eyes. “You are a fine gentleman.”
    His gaze sank again to her mouth. “Christ, I hope you’re not
hungry for breakfast.”
    Without another word, he pushed the tray to the floor and
rolled her onto her back. They kissed as if they were finding one another all
over again, breathless and desperate. Her pussy pulsed with the sweet ache of
wanting and with the loving she’d received the night before. Now she