Robin Schone Read Online Free PDF

do you want, mademoiselle?” he asked softly.
    She wanted what any woman wanted.
    “I want a man to want me instead of my virginity,” Victoria said rawly.
    “You want me to desire you rather than your virginity?” he reiterated, as if the thought that a woman

    would want to be desired for herself rather than her innocence had never, ever occurred to him.
    The time for lying had passed. “Yes. I do.”
    Light. Shadow.
    Silver. Gray.
    Victoria refused to look away from his eyes that alternately reflected light and darkness, silver fire and
    gray steel.
    This was the woman she was. This was the woman she had always been.. . .
    “And how would you have me show my desire?” he asked, gaze holding hers, swallowing hers...
    Victoria thought of the man who had demonstrated his desire by having her dismissed from her position.
    “You paid two thousand pounds for the privilege of touching my person,” she said, heart cramming her
    throat.
    “You want me to touch you?” he asked in that soft, seductive voice that was neither soft nor seductive
    but danger pure and simple.
    “I do not want to be taken like a woman on the street.”
    The truth rang out harshly over the roar of the fire and the blood thrumming inside Victoria’s ears.
    For one disorienting moment the pain she felt shone in his eyes.
    Immediately, the pain was gone.
    From his eyes, but not from hers.
    “Yet you came here, selling your virginity”—there was no emotion in his voice, no life in his eyes—”like
    a woman on the street.”
    Victoria would not cower from the truth. “Yes.”
    “How do you want to be taken, mademoiselle?” he asked abruptly.
    With passion. With tenderness.
    But they both knew she had sold that right.
    Victoria’s breasts shimmered with the force of her heartbeat. A steel pin pierced her palm.
    “With respect,” she said tautly. “I want to be taken with respect... because I am a woman.”
    Not because she was a virgin. She wanted to be respected because she was a woman. Because she
    was not pure.
    The gathering tension squeezed the air out of Victoria’s lungs.
    “ ‘All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players,’ “ he recited unexpectedly.
    Watching her. Silver gaze sharper than the steel pin pricking her palm. “Are you a devotee of Shakespeare,
    mademoiselle?”
    Victoria blinked at the sudden change of conversation. It did not slow down the race of her heart.
    “I am not particularly fond of that particular play by Mr. Shakespeare, no,” she managed.
    “Which play is that?”
    “As You Lik e It, ” Victoria said . “The play you just quoted from.”
    The air vibrated—a door opening somewhere in the building, perhaps. Or closing.
    “Do you enjoy the stage?” he asked in that tantalizingly seductive voice that no man had a right to
    possess.
    It danced on her skin like St. Elmo’s Fire.
    Teasing. Tantalizing.
    Taunting her with what she could not have.
    She forcibly concentrated on his question and not her need and her nakedness.
    Victoria had only once been to a play.
    “Yes,” she said. “I enjoy the stage.”
    Again there was that subtle vibration—a chord of response.
    But to what?
    “Come here, mademoiselle.”
    The soft command did not lessen the pressure constricting Victoria’s chest.
    Now he would take her. Fully dressed, while she wore sagging stockings and worn half boots.
    Leaning against the wall or bent over the desk.
    Lik e a whore.
    Victoria realized how ridiculous she must look—a former governess who possessed no elegance and
    whose sole redeeming value was her hymen. How comical he must have thought her, demanding respect
    when her clothes would be sneered at by the lowest of drudges.
    “My shoes—“ she stalled.
    “Leave them on.”

    “That is not . . .” Victoria’s voice trailed off.
    “Dignified, mademoiselle?” he offered, mouth twisting cynically.
    The knowledge of other nights and other women was indelibly etched on his face.
    How many