Reckless Territory Read Online Free PDF

she had landed in the depths of hell itself.
    Then, remarkably, it was over.
    A thick haze of smoke lay over everything when she slowly opened her stinging eyes. Cole still held her, his clasp reassuring. “Easy,” he murmured, but there was soot on his face, she saw through the watery tears from the acrid aftermath of the raging fire. “We’re fine now. The worst is past.”
    It was true. She could vaguely see Robert and Jace struggling to hold their panicked horses, their wet kerchiefs draped over the animals’ eyes. Bits of burning debris floated everywhere, and the pall of smoke was like a thick, choking mist, but that horrible roar was gone.
    “She all right?” Robert called out, his voice ending in a cough.
    “She’s fine.” Cole still held her close against him, and Victoria realized to her mortification he had one hand cupped around her bottom and her breasts were flattened against his hard chest. He lowered his head so his mouth brushed her ear. “I’ll be damned if you don’t even look beautiful covered in ash and soaking wet. No wonder we’re all going a little bit crazy.”
    He looked beautiful too, his sleek dark hair clinging in silky wet strands to his strong neck, those high cheekbones and midnight eyes evidence of his heritage, and pressed up against him as she was, she could feel the honed strength of his very male body.
    Then he kissed her.
    The sensual journey of his mouth was slow and beguiling. It trailed from where his lips had been pressed against her ear across her cheek, following the line of her jaw until his mouth covered hers. His lips were warm and firm, and the probe of his tongue shocking but not unpleasant. Clinging to him, Victoria closed her eyes again, but for an entirely different reason, and gave a small gasp he swallowed as he teased and stroked. Their lips clung, and somehow the near-catastrophic primal force of the fire seemed to fuel the heat between them. She parted more. He accepted and slanted his mouth over hers more fiercely…
    “Hey, damn you Cole, I can see you’re kind of enjoying yourself over there, but mind giving us a hand here?”
    Her savior lifted his head, grinned in a flash of white teeth and obligingly waded to a shallower spot and set her down, letting her slowly slide down his body. Victoria felt a flush in her cheeks that wasn’t just the residual heat from the fire as he went to help Jace and Robert with the spooked horses.
    We’re all going a little bit crazy…
    For that matter, her own body tingled at the moment in some interesting places.
    She’d noticed them watching her, of course. She was used to male attention; it was part of why she’d left England. Once the scandal of her father’s financial disaster broke, men who might have offered for her hand offered something else entirely. The idea of being mistress to some haughty aristocrat who no longer thought she was good enough to marry but certainly desirable enough to bed held no appeal whatsoever. What was more, she had come to despise the falseness of a society that held wealth and social status in such high regard that her friends had turned their backs on her simply because she was suddenly poor.
    The three men who had just saved her life yet again owed her nothing. They could care less about her aristocratic bloodlines, her social status, her fortune or lack of it. They’d been kind, generous and respectful at all times, and truthfully, more gentlemanly than most of the bluebloods she knew back home. From some of their remarks she’d guessed that maybe all three of them were in trouble with the law in some way, but she’d stake her life—and had in an ironic sense, since she was so helpless—they were all three good men.
    Her pampered background hadn’t given her one single skill to help her survive in the wilderness. She couldn’t cook, saddle a horse or shoot a gun. She couldn’t even recognize the signs of a giant fire bearing down on them. They gave her everything and