Notorious Read Online Free PDF

plan. To wed you, learn what I needed from you and then move on to better things.” Her gaze came up to meet his.
    “You were no one, Devlin,” she said gently. “You had no money and precious few prospects. But I could see that you could be useful to me.” Her eyes were bright and hard. “I wanted to be young and beautiful and intriguing enough to lure a very rich man into marriage. It was not good enough to be a courtesan. I had to be respectable enough to catch a husband—” her luscious mouth turned up in a little, private smile “—but improper enough to know how to please him in bed.” She turned away from him sothat all he could see was her reflection in the glass of the window and that lingering smile.
    “I flatter myself that I was rather good,” she said. “I posed as a widow. I had many suitors.”
    Dev could believe it. She was beautiful enough to tempt a saint and there was a knowing air to her, a sensual allure that was provocative enough to make any man want to please as well as possess her. Of course she would set her sights much higher than merely being a courtesan. That would have been a course from which she could never have regained respectability. Instead, as a beautiful widow she would have drawn suitors like moths to the flame. They would have begged for her notice. Only he knew the venal heart beneath her lovely facade.
    “So you killed me off as well as yourself,” he said coldly. “How very tidy of you.”
    “Oh, I never mentioned your name,” Susanna said. “No one ever asked about my first husband. I suppose that if they had I could have admitted to the annulment and painted our marriage as a youthful indiscretion.” She raised her brows as though inviting his congratulations. “Yes, it was a neat plan, was it not?”
    “I’m still having trouble with the difference between a courtesan and a woman who buys herself a rich husband with her body,” Dev said.
    Susanna shrugged, apparently indifferent to his disapproval. “You are too particular. We all use the advantages we are given.”
    She had been given plenty, Dev thought grimly. That angel’s face, that lissome, lovely body—and a grasping nature that cared nothing for the pain she inflicted on others. It was a pity he had not been able to see past the obvious when they had first met but he had been a youth confronted by a beautiful girl. He had not been thinking with his head but with a different and far more basic part of his anatomy.
    He felt cold at the sheer calculating callousness of Susanna’s plan. She had been an adventuress from the first. She had wed him, learned from him the arts she needed to please a man in bed and then left him to pursue bigger, richer prey. Armed with her annulment she would indeed be free to remarry. He could see how much the combination of her youth, beauty, wit, experience and the tiniest hint of a mysterious past might appeal to a wealthy older man. Hell, it was obvious that Fitz was already in thrall to her. Even he could barely look at her without wanting to plunder every inch of that exquisite, perfidious body, and he knew what a lying, conniving strumpet she was.
    “You mistake if you think that you are not a whore,” he said. “You have whored yourself out for money whether it is by marriage or not.”
    The candlelight shimmered on some expression in Susanna’s eyes that was, for one tiny second, utterly at odds with her brazen words. But then it was gone and all that was left was contempt.
    “You should know, Devlin,” she said. “Are you not doing precisely the same thing, catching an heiresswith your good looks and charm?” Her perfect brows arched. “If I am a whore, what does that make you?”
    Dev took a furious step toward her—and stopped when he saw the triumph in her eyes. She was glad she had been able to goad him into near-indiscretion. He drew in a deep breath.
    “You are also mistaken if you think you learned all there is to pleasure a man in one night