The Perfect Mistress Read Online Free PDF

vessel that is clean and holy and virtuous." He looked up at her, reddened, and held his breath as he pushed to his feet. "I can see in your eyes and sense in your spirit, the desire for better! Don't be afraid, child…
    others have made the daunting journey to righteousness ahead of you, and now live lives of dignity and purity and service…"
    Gabrielle sat with a fistful of untouched biscuits in each hand, wide-eyed as her kidnapper towered above her and ranted about the rewards of abandoning her life of sin and the dire consequences of clinging to her immoral ways.
    She had been kidnapped by a reformer , a self-styled rescuer of fallen women! Of all the predatory males who prowled the darkened streets of London, she'd had the luck to be kidnapped by the one man bent on rescuing women from the clutches of immorality. And of all the women in need of moral reform who walked the sordid streets, he'd chosen to "rescue"
    the one female who was still a virgin and struggling to stay that way. She bit her lip, trying to prevent a smile of relief. For the first time in two hours she felt a glimmer of hope. Perhaps she could convince him to send her home…
    "And to think"—he impulsively caught her face between his hands and bent toward her—"you were sold into the clutches of a lust-maddened beast by your own mother. It sears the heart, just to think of it."
    His words struck her forcefully, missing the truth of her situation by the narrowest of margins… the tense of a verb. "But, my child, you must not let that foul betrayal blight the rest of your life. You must not give in to the enslaving notion that her penchant for sin must necessarily taint your blood as well. You have free will—can choose a different life. You need not become the sad and debauched creature that your mother is!"
    She choked on a sharply inhaled breath, and he, thinking her overcome by the shame of her situation, released her. She swayed on the bench, sloshing cocoa on her white voile and watching numbly as he rescued the cup from her. She didn't have to follow in her mother's hedonistic footsteps. She could choose . Gooseflesh rose on her skin.
    "You are wrong about me," she said in a whisper. "I am a virtuous young woman. Tonight I fled into the streets to escape…" She looked up at him, needing to hear it make sense somewhere besides her own head. "My mother is a grand mistress, and she insists that I take a nobleman, without benefit of vows, just as she did years ago. And I… I don't want…"
    "She would make you a rich man's mistress," her captor concluded, reading the confirmation of it in her darkening eyes. "And you don't want to be one."
    He straightened, hung his hands on the lapels of his coat, and seemed to grow in both satisfaction and outrage, as if sensing that here at last was a creature not yet beyond his powers of salvation… a true rescue.
    Suddenly, it was as if another being had taken him over from the inside; he began to pace and gesture wildly. "Harlotry is a loathsome and reprehensible thing to inflict upon one's own child, one's very own flesh and blood! How low can a woman sink? This so-called demimonde is nothing more than degrading prostitution wrapped in a layer of luxury that temporarily smothers the conscience. A cold exchange of ill-gotten pleasures for money… with the souls of unfortunate women forfeit in the bargain."
    His eyes burned as he shoved his face down into hers and demanded, "Tell me your mother's name, my girl. And I shall see her brought up on charges
    —taken to the law and held up to the scorn she deserves!"

    Gabrielle snapped backward so quickly that she nearly toppled from the bench. The explosion of his anger jarred her back to reality and set her mind scrambling. Arrest her mother for peddling flesh? Bring her up before the courts? The duke would be exposed to ridicule, made a public spectacle.
    And with the secret of her origins decried as a humiliating example of degradation, not even the