Mistress by Marriage Read Online Free PDF Page A

her pale pink nipples, dipping lower to stroke her drenched bud. His mouth never left hers, their tongues tangling, tasting, promising something more than a farewell kiss. His tenderness tumbled into something else altogether as her hand locked around his rigid cock. Just as he knew every peak and valley of her body, every strength and weakness, she knew his. If only they could just stay abed and never speak.
    He broke the kiss and entered her again in one wonderfully hard thrust, his arms corded on either side of her and his hands bunched on the rumpled sheets, gliding in and sliding out as her hips rose frantically to meet him—to catch him and never let him go. He made her work for it, taunting her each time he withdrew, rocking back into her so completely she thought she would die of pleasure. He stopped for a moment, buried deep within her, forcing her to respond to his power as she spasmed around him. They watched each other, gray eyes to green, until her tears blurred the angles of his face. He bent to lick them away, his tongue cool on her flushed cheeks. He whispered something—she could feel his lips thrum against her temple as the next climax hit, spinning his words away.
    She couldn’t hear. She couldn’t see. She could only feel—when he took a peaked nipple between his teeth, when his fingernail scraped an invisible line down her throat, when the heat of his skin set fire to her own at each point of contact, when he angled himself just so to create exquisite friction.
    He flooded her, collapsed and held her to his beating heart, imprinting himself onto her slick body, every inch of separation between them gone.
    They lay like that until she thought he had fallen asleep. His breathing was even, yet his arms did not relax their hold. She dared not sleep herself and miss a minute of that perfect closeness, his long, lanky body cradling hers. But at the clock’s midnight chime, he rolled away.
    “Where are you going?”
    “Home, Caro. I must. I must ,” he repeated, as if he had to convince one of them. He didn’t glance her way as he rounded up the clothing that had been tossed aside in such haste. The candles still guttered on the mantel, but she couldn’t take one last look as he removed himself from her life. She stared up at the mirror instead, where she was a shadowy forlorn form, indistinguishable from the white mound of bedding.
    “Good-bye.” He said it from the doorway, his voice travelling the miles between them. There was no last kiss, no last caress. The door shut with a soft click, and her heart broke once again.

Chapter 3
     

    “Poison?” The duke clutched at his throat, his long, elegant hand turning into the claw of death.
    —The Dark Duke’s Dilemma
     

    I t was impossible to sleep. Caroline changed the sheets and pillowcases herself, rolling up the traces of Edward’s scent and semen into an unwieldy ball. Lizzie could deal with the laundry pile tomorrow. Wringing out her sponge in the basin of cold water, she scrubbed her body with vicious indifference, barely noting the pink and purple marks Edward’s hands and lips had left. She ran a comb through her tangles and put on a plain navy dressing gown, a far cry from her exotic writing robe. Feeling an urge to banish every shadow, she lit branches of candles in her upstairs parlor until the room was lit like Christmas. The remains of dinner had been taken away at some point—she hoped the Hazletts had not been too horrified by the commotion beyond the bedroom door. They had left dessert behind, two sad puddles of caramel and cream. Caroline ate the entire contents of both parfait glasses without a thought to her hips or her chin, then pulled a book from the shelves and curled up on her purple sofa.
    Unfortunately the words swam about the pages like little black fish. She snapped the book shut and stared into the empty fireplace. Tomorrow she’d cut some pink hydrangeas and place them in the hearth in one of the Chinese pots.