The Billionaire's Embrace (The Silver Cross Club) Read Online Free PDF Page A

that shook me down to my very bones.
    When it ended, I relaxed against the mattress, too exhausted to move. Carter was smiling down at me, a look in his eyes that I couldn’t identify and was afraid to, and he rolled his hips against me a few more times, almost too pleasurable in the aftermath of my orgasm, and then his face tightened and he shook apart in my arms.
    He rolled off me, and for several minutes we lay together in silence, breathing, sharing space, our hands tangled together between our sweating bodies.
    “I could use a shower,” Carter said at last, and I laughed and said, “I could too.”
    His bathroom was enormous. I had never seen anything like it. His walk-in shower had a skylight, dark now, and two big shower heads that poured down on us like rain. We scrubbed each other, laughing about nothing, and dried off with his plush white towels.
    We went back into the bedroom, and he gave me a bathrobe to wear, and a comb. I sat at his dressing table and combed out my hair. The clock on the wall told me it was only 11—much too early for bed. I usually didn’t fall asleep until around 4. I wondered if Carter would expect me to leave, or expect me to spend the night. He probably had to work in the morning.
    Before I could decide if I should say something about it, he solved the problem for me. He came over to me, dressed in a pair of low-slung black pants and nothing else, and took the comb from my hand. He leaned down and kissed me on the cheek. “If you stay here tonight, we can have fresh bagels in the morning, and I’ll have Henry take you back to your apartment.”
    “I don’t want you to go to any trouble,” I said. “If you have to work—”
    “You could never cause me trouble,” he said. “I don’t want you to think that.”
    I looked down at my hands, overwhelmed. He was one of the most powerful men in the city—probably in the country—and I still didn’t believe that I had any right to his time. Whenever he ate dinner with me, that was time he could have spent contributing to the global economic system, as Sadie would put it. I always felt vaguely guilty, like I was preventing him from finding the solution to world peace.
    “Regan,” he said sharply. I looked up. “I enjoy spending time with you. I want you to stay here tonight, so that I can see you again in the morning. If you need to go home, of course that’s fine, but I don’t want you to leave just because you think you’re—that you’re imposing .”
    “Okay,” I said, and smiled at him, tremulously, to show that I understood.
    I didn’t, not really, but I would try.
    I wanted to be good for him.
    “Okay,” he said. He stroked my damp hair and said, “I never go to sleep this early, and I’m sure you don’t. We could watch a movie, if you’d like.”
    I thought about it: curled together on his comfortable sofa, close together in the dark. “I would like that a lot,” I said.
    That was what we did: some forgettable action flick, and popcorn Carter made on the stove. I fell asleep partway through, and woke to see Carter gazing at me with a soft look on his face.
    “What is it?” I asked, sleepy, rubbing my eyes.
    “I’m happy,” he said. “That’s all.”
    I knew what he meant. I was happier than I had ever been, happier than I thought I had any right to be, and it scared me. I knew that happiness didn’t last.

Chapter 3
    I woke up alone the next morning. Judging from the sun pouring through the windows, it was mid-morning—time for me to get going. I had to work that afternoon.
    Carter had promised me bagels. I splashed my face with some cold water and made sure my hair wasn’t doing anything too strange, and then I padded out of the bedroom, tying Carter’s robe around me.
    I smelled coffee as I made my way down the hall toward the main room of the apartment. Carter, I had learned, was a coffee snob. He ground his own coffee every morning, and I didn’t think he would have set foot in a Starbucks