One Night with His Wife Read Online Free PDF Page B

thoughts. Suddenly he understood why so many unfaithful wives had ended up losing their heads to Madame Guillotine during the French Revolution. Feeling the slight tremor in his hands, he dug them rawly into the pockets of his well-cut pants.
Nobody will ever love you as much as I do.
Such soft words, such empty promises. He was
not
a violent man. But he wanted to remind her who she belonged to. No, she did
not
belong to him, he adjusted at grim speed. He did not
want
her to belong to him. He had meant every word he had said.
    Star moved anxious hands. ‘Could we just talk?’
    ‘Talk?’
Luc growled, not quite levelly, watching the way the flickering candlelight played over her porcelain-fine skin, accentuating the distinctive colour of her eyes and the full, inviting softness of her ripe mouth.
    ‘About Juno?’ Star moistened her dry lips with the tip of her tongue and watched Luc tense, his stunning dark eyes welding to her with sudden force.
    ‘No.’
    ‘No?’ Colour mantled Star’s cheekbones as the raw tension in the atmosphere increased. Her heart skipped a beat and then began to thump against her ribcage. Her mouth running dry, she tensed in dismay as she felt her breasts lift and swell, the rosy peaks tightening into mortifying prominence.
    Luc’s brilliant eyes flamed over her. ‘If you spend the night with me, I’ll let you both off the hook…’
    ‘I b-beg your pardon?’ Star stammered dizzily.
    ‘I won’t put the police on Juno’s trail.’ He gazed back at her steadily, not a muscle moving in his lean, strong face. ‘One night. Tonight. That’s the price.’
    Her soft full mouth fell open. She closed it again, and tried and failed to swallow. She felt as if the ground had suddenly fallen away beneath her feet. ‘You’re not serious…you can’t be!’
    The silence shimmered like a heatwave between them.
    Star trembled.
    ‘Why shouldn’t I be serious?’ Luc angled his well-shaped dark head back, a hard smile slanting his wide, sensual mouth. ‘One night only. Then tomorrow you travel down to London with me to see Emilie. Together we reassure her that she has nothing further to worry about. After that, we never see each other again in this lifetime.’
    Her stomach twisted at that clarified picture. ‘But you don’t want me—’
    ‘Don’t I?’ Luc moved a slow, fluid step closer, dark eyes mesmerically intense as they scanned her bemused face. ‘Just one more time…’
    ‘You don’t want me. You never did! I’m not your type,’ Star argued, as if she was repeating a personal mantra, a fevered, disbelieving edge to her voice.
    ‘Except in bed,’ Luc extended without hesitation.
    Star stilled in astonishment. Then she jerked in reaction to that revelation. He was finally acknowledging a fact he had refused to concede eighteen months earlier. Luc
could
find her desirable. The night the twins had been conceived, Luc had genuinely responded to
her
, not just to the anonymous invitation of a female body in his bed. The following morning, his cold silence on that point had shattered what little had remained of her pride.
    Anger and regret now foamed up inside her in a bewilderingsurge. ‘Couldn’t you just have admitted that to me eighteen months ago?’
    ‘No,’ Luc drawled smoothly. ‘It would have encouraged you to believe that our marriage had a future.’
    The heat still singing through Star’s blood suddenly slowed and chilled. Such cool calculation stabbed her to the heart and unnerved her.
    ‘But that was then and this is now,’ Luc stressed with syllabic sibilance.
    Now, she repeated to herself in reminder. Now, when Luc had knocked her sideways by suggesting that they spend one last night together. Why not? With his customary cool he had already boxed her in with cruel, unfeeling boundaries to ensure that she didn’t misunderstand the exact tenor of his proposition.
    He had told her he wanted a divorce. He had told her that after tomorrow they would never meet