She wouldn’t have thought so.
A sudden memory pierced her of his intense concentration on the spindly rosebush that morning. His hands had been so deft, their very sureness breathtakingly beautiful. Her wayward heart dipped into an unsteady dance at the thought of those hands on her skin.
Grace, stop it! You’re in enough trouble as it is.
Heavens, she must regain self-control and quickly. The last thing she needed was an infatuation with her fellow captive. She hadn’t thought about a man touching her for pleasure in years. Certainly not since her marriage and the collapse of her girlish fantasies.
She stepped up to stand beside him. The window faced the darkening woods. The day had been clear. Now the first stars shone in the cloudless sky. It could have been a landscape by Claude. If one didn’t know an unscalable wall circled the trees or two homicidal devils guarded the gate to this perilous Eden.
The silence allowed her to say something she was guiltily aware she should have said earlier. “Thank you, my lord. If you hadn’t come…”
“Don’t think about it.” He focused those uncanny eyes on her. Except that after a day and a half, she noticed their strangeness less and their beauty more.
“I can’t help it.” She’d been frightened and wretched for so long, even before her abduction. But nothing matched the horror that had gripped her when Monks stared into her face and promised rape and death. Compared to that, the mad marquess was a bastion of security. The clinging ghost of today’s panic made her speak more freely than usual. “You were magnificent.”
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Claiming the Courtesan
The Duke of Kylemore knows her as Soraya, London’s most celebrated courtesan. Men fight duels to spend an hour in her company, and only he comes close to taming her…Dire circumstances have forced Verity Ashton to barter her innocence and change her name for the sake of her family. All she wants is her freedom, but with a notorious rogue determined to possess her in every way possible, can Verity ever escape the man who claims her both body and soul?
I thank Your Grace for your continuing kindness.” Soraya stepped toward Kylemore and kissed him on the mouth.
They rarely kissed, and a kiss as a gesture of affection was an unprecedented event.
But that was what this felt like to Kylemore. She wasn’t trying to seduce him. After a year, he would recognize seduction. And he’d already given her the extravagant pendant. Even greedy as she was, she couldn’t hope to coax another maharajah’s bauble from his pocket.
No, he could only assume she kissed him because she wanted to.
That revolutionary idea had just taken hold when she drew away. The soft pink lips that had clung so sweetly to his, and sweetly was the only word he could bring to mind, curled into a faint smile. “Good day to you, Your Grace.”
He snatched at her hand and, still lost in the memory of her kiss—which was absurd given the debaucheries they had indulged in all afternoon—raised her slender fingers to his lips with the reverence due a princess.
When he lifted his head, he caught a bewilderment that matched his own in her silver eyes. “Good day to you too, madam.”
He released her and strode from the room, down the stairs, and out of the villa he’d bought her a year ago. But no matter how far he went, he couldn’t quite banish the memory of her mouth on his in a kiss that was almost…innocent.
His infamous, dangerous, enigmatic Soraya. And he was no closer to understanding her now than he’d been six years ago.
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If you love Anna Campbell and are looking for more scintillating passion in a contemporary setting, you won’t want to miss rising star Toni Blake!
Turn the page for a sneak pee
k at the latest installment in Blake’s Destiny series…
Sugar Creek
When Rachel Farris ran from Destiny, Ohio, fifteen years ago, she had no intention of returning. But with her grandmother in danger of losing her apple orchard to a family enemy, Rachel decides to head back long enough to save the day…and then leave just as quickly. Gruff, by-the-book police officer, Mike Romo, wanted the land stolen from his family decades ago, but he wasn’t prepared to contend with shapely trouble in tight designer jeans. And neither sexy cop nor prodigal hometown girl anticipated the snapping electricity that threatens their most carefully laid plans.
The first thing Rachel noticed was the way he scowled at her from behind typical mirrored cop sunglasses.
And the second was…oh dear. Oh my. Her throat went dry.