The Wedding of Molly O'Flaherty Read Online Free PDF Page A

to say?”
    I nodded. “Yes, we’ve spoken. She knows what to do.”
    Silas was staring hard at me, and I realized that while Castor and Julian hadn’t noticed my small hesitation after the hug, Silas did. I flushed, both with shame and the pressure of his gaze, which was hot and heavy and stirring.
    Stop it , I chastised myself. You left him alone this morning. You were the one who walked away. You can’t have him now.
    But I wanted him. I always forgot how powerfully his presence affected me, his tall frame and his lean body and his dimpled grin. I forgot how much my body could remember, how it could feel every kiss and every caress…
    I ground my teeth together and willed my desire under control.
    “We should go,” the Baron said, consulting his pocket watch. “Molly, we will see you in a couple hours.”
    “You gentlemen go in,” Silas said. “I’m going to make sure Molly gets up to her room without any issue.”
    Julian and Castor made their goodbyes and then trotted up the steps to the front door of the club, disappearing into its gloomy depths. Silas turned back to me, his cerulean eyes appraising.
    “We should go in the back,” he said quietly, and I agreed. He knew that we couldn’t be seen intimately together, not by influential club members and certainly not in Cunningham’s own club. Not while my contract with his cousin Hugh was still in place.
    I let Silas guide me, trying to control my breathing as his hand firmly grasped my elbow—a gesture that reminded me of the way he’d touched me last night, of his hand wrapped around my jaw as he had ejaculated on my face. I followed him as meekly as a lamb. As I never followed anyone, ever. Not even my own father, who’d dragged me to Liverpool kicking and screaming the entire way.
    This was what Silas did to me now. He melted me, molded me, and it made me happier and more content than I’d ever been.
    But what did that say about me? Was I not truly the fierce and independent warrior I’d always imagined myself to be? Was I something more domesticated? Something weaker?
    It doesn’t matter , I reminded myself. You will never be with him again.
    Except the way he led me now, so assertively around the back of the building and through the kitchen entrance, as if he were leading me to a bed and not just a bedroom…well, my cunt responded exactly as my head couldn’t. With undisguised want. With complete and utter acceptance and surrender.
    Maybe Silas could sense this, because he didn’t let go of me as we walked into the room that the Baron had arranged for us tonight. Instead he closed the door and backed me against the wall, slowly, like a predator cornering its prey.
    And then his hands were on either side of me, caging me in, trapping me. My chin tilted up, not in defiance, but in a primally submissive move to expose my throat. He let out a long hissing breath. “You left me,” he accused.
    “You knew I would,” I whispered.
    His expression shifted into something harder. “Yes. I did know. That didn’t make it any easier to wake up to an empty bed.”
    “Silas, I can’t—”
    “Goddammit, Molly!” His hands slammed against the wall next to me, making me jump. But it wasn’t anger coursing through him, it was frustration, and I felt the same frustration, I felt it so much.
    “It can’t be any other way.”
    He leaned in, his blue eyes searching mine. “Not even if tonight takes care of Cunningham?”
    I blinked. “Is that why you’re here? Because you thought this would end his power over the board?”
    “Yes,” Silas said bluntly. “And because you needed to lure van der Sant here, and Julian and I were the best way to do that.”
    I didn’t understand. “Why?”
    Silas took a breath, as if wrestling with whether or not he wanted to explain something to me.
    This hesitation stoked a fire in me. “Hurry the fuck up, Silas.”
    This goaded him as I knew it would, and his eyes flashed. “Because, as of today, Julian and I