Snowbound Seduction Read Online Free PDF

secret of the fact she slept with all her boyfriends and enjoyed sex, and although Susan was a little more choosy, she’d had a few partners too.
    Here again she was the odd one out. She stared at her reflection in the long mirror on the bedroom wall. Jennie and Susan had thought it hilarious in their university days when she had said she was waiting for Mr Right before sleeping with a boy, but back then she had imagined he would come along before too long. And the truth of it was she had never met anyone who had made her pulse flutter and tempted her before Giles, so it hadn’t been too difficult to hang onto the dream. She’d had lots of boyfriends before him and had enjoyed kissing and cuddling and a bit of petting, but whenever they’d pressed for more she had known she would regret it the next morning. It was just the way she was made. She’d long ago come to terms with the fact that she was an oddity in her group of friends.
    Rachel frowned at the brown-haired girl in the mirror. She wanted it to be special with the man she fell in love with, a forever thing, something that meant more than words could explain, but after Giles she was wondering if love as she saw it even existed. And she didn’t want to die an old maid.
    What had kept her from sleeping with Giles? He’dcertainly pestered her enough in the last couple of months before he had proposed, and she had imagined herself in love with him, hadn’t she? Her frown deepened. Hadn’t she?
    Yes, she had thought she loved him but something hadn’t been quite…right. Even then some sixth sense must have been telling her he wasn’t what he seemed, that he had been projecting an image he’d thought she’d wanted him to be.
    She shut her eyes tightly, biting on her lip. Jennie was right and she was wrong. She should have slept with every Tom, Dick and Harry and had fun; sex was just a pleasant pastime between a man and a woman and didn’t have to be an emotional forever thing. It didn’t have to lead to marriage and babies.
    Her eyes opened. But it would need to for her. She simply couldn’t imagine opening her life and her body to a man and then cheerfully waving goodbye to him whenever the relationship ended. Jennie could. She couldn’t. End of story. She didn’t want to go through life alone but if she had to, she would. Loads of women concentrated on their career these days and chose autonomy and had rich and fulfilling lives. She just hadn’t imagined that was the way her life would go when she had been younger.
    She took a deep breath. She could hear Jennie singing a pop song in the bathroom and smiled wryly to herself. The world did indeed ‘rain down men’ on Jennie; no sooner had her friend disposed of one man than another took his place. She envied her. Oh, how she envied her. No heart-searching, no agonising, no emotional baggage. Jennie ate when she was hungry, drank when she was thirsty and slept with a man when she wanted sex. AndJennie never felt that she was a failure and had missed the boat in a hundred and one ways.
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    At the end of the day Rachel still had a job, so she supposed she could count it a success. She’d gone for lunch with a group of girls from the office but although she had joined in the conversation and acted naturally, part of her—annoyingly—had kept repeating a post-mortem of the night before.
    If she analysed it, she couldn’t quite understand why Zac Lawson had got under her skin the way he had. It hadn’t been so much what he’d said or done as the way he’d said and done it, she told herself. A certain inflexion, a tone of voice, a look, and perfectly mundane words could have a whole different meaning. Even simple words like ‘Thank you’ could change according to the way someone spoke or the expression on their face—it could be grateful or sarcastic or wry or a whole host of things. But however much