Unforgiven Read Online Free PDF Page B

left-handed.
    Delaney smiled, but it didn’t reach her eyes. “Thank you again for allowing me to use your house,” she said.
    “My pleasure,” Marissa said. Delaney thought of it as her wedding. Marissa thought of it as Brookhaven’s redemption, the final act in her father’s lifelong dream, and hers.
    Delaney let herself out. Marissa locked the door behind her, then walked around the house, turning off the lights, plunging the room into blackness. As her eyes adjusted, she could see in the distance the cottonwood trees lining the riverbed at the bottom of the pasture that sloped away from the house.
    She’d kissed Adam for the first time against one of those cottonwoods. They’d been barefoot and muddy after a mile-long water fight along the creek left her white top clinging to her skin and her hair in dark tendrils on her shoulders. Weak from laughter, turned-on from the newly discovered sensation of being prey to a boy’s predator, she’d leaned against a big tree, wrung water from her hair, and found him watching her with the same expression on his face he’d worn in the kitchen tonight. The intensity scared her then, but now he had the body and the demeanor to go with the eyes, and she had the experience to deal with it.
    He still left her weak, but not from laughter, and despite the rumors flying around town, he wasn’t staying. That dream died long ago, and she of all people knew sex didn’t change it.
    Now, alone in the house, she pushed through the swinging doors into the kitchen. The whiskey bottle and two shot glasses sat in plain view on the kitchen counter, something neither Delaney nor Stacey commented on while they discussed foot-traffic flow into the great room. She ran water in the sink and washed the glasses and wiped down the counter. Then she carefully tightened the cap on the bottle and put it back in the pantry she used because the servants’ quarters had a bare minimum of cabinets in the kitchen.
    When the door opened, the slightest hint of Adam’s skin and sex wafted past her to dissipate in the kitchen’s cool air. Nerves awakened, and barely satisfied, lit up like Brookhaven’s porch light on a clear winter night. She set the whiskey bottle in its accustomed place, then stepped out and carefully closed the pantry door—like the proverbial barn door—too late. She wasn’t known for playing hard-to-get, but they’d gone from
Hello, Marissa
to the shocking, stretching glide of his cock into her body, with his ex-fiancée right outside, in less than twenty minutes.
    Why the hell did you do that?
    Because it’s been forever and a day since you had a new experience.
    She stepped out to the white-painted planks of the tiny porch. Rain dripped cold and steady from the overhang covering the servants’ entrance to the house her great-grandfather built when he arrived in the Dakota territory, flush with his inheritance from the Brooks shipping fortune. Succeeding generations ran through the inheritance in true Brooks-dreamer fashion. She and her father had lived in the house until they moved into a rented house in town, taking with them boxes of artifacts from Brookhaven’s glory days, memories not of his childhood but his father’s, passed down to him, and from him to Marissa.
    Her father taught her to dream. Life taught her dreams don’t always come true. Her first time with Adam fell more in the realm of fantasy fulfilled.
    Why the hell did you do that?
    Because for the first time, he clearly wasn’t going to say no.
    The flashpoint memory of his body pounding into hers sent an aftershock rippling through her.
    Her heart had stopped when he walked into the room. Alana was there not as one of Delaney’s attendants but as Marissa’s friend, and even the smooth, composed librarian faltered when Adam walked on the scene.
    Isn’t that . . . ?
    Yes.
    Oh my.
    Marissa had no response to that, because Adam wasn’t supposed to be there. He’d caught her off guard—that was a handy