The Bride Thief Read Online Free PDF

desire would be just a fortunate bonus.
    After he’d replaced the torn dress over her shoulders, Rose gripped the gaping front bodice together with her hand and glared as him with hostility.
    “Don’t think that you can bully me into being afraid of you, because I will never—”
    Her words ended in a gasp as Xerxes seized her in his arms. Lowering his mouth to hers, he brutally kissed her.

Chapter Five
    H IS lips were hard and hot against hers, overwhelming Rose’s senses in a ruthless assault.
    She stiffened, pressing her hands instinctively against his chest. He leaned her back, deepening the kiss, forcibly pressing her lips apart. As he plundered her mouth with his tongue, she felt a shock of sudden pleasure so sharp and raw that she gasped. As his lips moved against hers, forcing her to respond, she was swept beneath the waves of sensation. He held her tightly and she felt the world swirl and twist around them, lost in a spinning current of desire she’d never experienced before.
    She tasted the sweetness of his breath, the taste of Scotch on his tongue. She felt the roughness of his jaw against her skin, the heat of him against her body.
    Overpowered by her captor’s strength and the intensity of his commanding embrace, she surrendered. She’d never been kissed before, truly kissed, and her brain shut off abruptly. She was briefly lost in the stroking touch of his fingers against her bare back, in the feeling of his muscular thighs straining against hers. He held her in his strong arms, keeping her from falling to the floor.
    Without her mind’s permission, her lips moved against his. She had no idea what she was doing, but pleasure such as she’d never felt before ripped through her body with sweet agony, making her tremble and shake. She reached her arms around his neck, as if to pull him closer, as if she knew that he and only he could provide the air she needed to breathe…
    Then she realized what she was doing. With a choked gasp, she ripped herself away from him. Staring up at him in horror, she sucked in her breath.
    Drawing back her hand, she slapped his face.
    Xerxes stared at her with surprise, his hand on his reddening cheek.
    “How dare you kiss me!” she shouted, her hand still throbbing with pain from the strength of her blow. “I am a married woman!”
    His lips twisted lazily as he suddenly relaxed. “You are not,” he said calmly, lifting a dark eyebrow. “And I weary of this discussion. But I’m finished. The kiss was merely to obtain the answer to a question.”
    Which made no sense at all! “What question?”
    He shrugged. “You did not know Växborg was married, or you would have tried to seduce me, to win me to your side. Which, with that clumsy kiss, you assuredly did not.”
    Clumsy? Her cheeks became red as she sucked in her breath. She was clumsy?
    It had been her first kiss. As a teenager, she’d been determined to wait for her idealistic vision of love’s first kiss; later, in her twenties, she’d felt too awkward to force it. A twenty-nine-year-old virgin was bad enough, but a woman that age who’d never even been kissed?
    She had absolutely no intention of explaining that to Xerxes Novros, however, leaving herself open to his mockery!
    “I see now that you’re not guilty of any crime,” he said carelessly, “except being gullible and naive.”
    Gullible and naive. Rose stared at him. Well, maybe she was. Her lips still felt bruised where he’d kissed her. What was wrong with her? How could she have kissed him back, even for an instant? How could she have let her body utterly overrule her brain—and her heart?
    “Don’t touch me again.”
    “I won’t.”
    Swallowing, she looked away. The electricity that had coursed through her body when he’d kissed her had been nothing like she’d ever felt before. She’d certainly never felt that way with Lars, not even when she’d allowed him to give her a single brief peck as the minister pronounced them man and