Robin Schone Read Online Free PDF Page A

reality.
    “Now turn around and face me.”
    Hairpins biting into Victoria’s right palm, she slowly turned around.
    The warmth of the room was not reflected inside the silver eyes that watched her.
    This was it, she thought—this was the moment when she would lose the last vestige of her girlhood.
    This was what the last six months had built up to. That the frenzied bidding below had led to.
    The future yawned before her.
    She did not know what lay beyond this moment, this night.
    She did not know who she would awaken to the next day—to Victoria the woman or Victoria the
    prostitute.
    The fear Victoria had held at bay during the auction swelled over her in a black wave of pure,

    unadulterated panic.
    She had lied when she told herself that a woman who sold her body retained control—Victoria was not
    in control: the silver-eyed man was.
    And he knew it.
    “I do not know your name,” she blurted out, hair a heavy anvil that weighted her body.
    “Do you not, mademoiselle?” he asked softly, seductively.
    Victoria opened her mouth to reply that she could not possibly know his name: women such as she did
    not move in the same circles as men such as he.
    “Do you find me desirable?” she asked instead.
    Tomorrow she would be horrified, remembering her question. But not now.
    No man had ever told her she was desirable.
    For eighteen years she had plainly dressed her hair and her body in order to avoid a man’s attentions lest
    she lose her position.
    Only to lose it anyway,
    Her position. Her independence.
    Her self-respect.
    She was giving this man her virginity, no matter that he was paying for it.
    She needed to hear thathe found her desirable.
    She needed to know that a woman possessed value in her sex as well as her virtue.
    The overhead chandelier flickered and flamed inside silver eyes, a mirror to the bleakness inside her own
    soul.
    Victoria’s heartbeat counted the passing seconds. . . .
    If he denigrated her. . .
    “Yes, I find you desirable,” he said finally.
    And he lied.
    Pain swiftly blossomed into anger. “No, you do not,” Victoria rashly countered.
    He wanted what the other man wanted: a piece of flesh instead of a woman.
    The silver lights glittering inside his eyes stilled. “How do you know what I feel, mademoiselle?”
    Blood drummed inside Victoria’s breasts and thighs, spurring her on. “If you desired me, sir, you would
    not sit there and stare at me as if I were infested with vermin. I am as clean as you are.”
    As worthy as he was.
    The stillness surrounding him expanded until it sucked up the very air.
    “Why would I bid upon you if I didn’t desire you?” he asked softly.
    “You did not see me,” Victoria pointed out, trying to rein in her galloping emotions, failing. She had not
    ask ed for this. “How can you desire what you cannot see?”
    How could she yearn for what she had not experienced?
    But she had.
    She had secretly dreamed that a man would love the woman that she was and not the paragon of virtue
    that she had modeled herself after. And now that dream was gone.
    No man would ever love her: men did not love whores.
    The man before her sat statue-still, gaze unblinking. Had he ever loved? Been loved?...
    “Why do you think I bid on you if I do not want you?” he asked, voice a beguiling caress.
    There was no tenderness in his eyes.
    But Victoria wanted tenderness to be there. She wanted him to care. . .
    She would not be the same after this night, and she needed someone to mourn the old Victoria Childers
    and welcome the new.
    “Some men believe that the pox can be cured by taking a virgin,” she stated baldly, wanting to provoke
    some emotion—some response—out of this man who had never known a day’s hunger in his life.
    She succeeded.
    His silver eyes narrowed. “I do not have the pox, mademoiselle.”
    Victoria did not retreat from the threat inside his voice and eyes.
    “Nor do I, sir,” she said stridently.
    Danger shimmered in the air.
    “What