Claiming the Courtesan (2007) by Anna Campbell

Author:Anna Campbell
Language: eng
Format: mobi, pdf
Published: 2011-03-25T22:00:00+00:00

Kylemore gradually returned to awareness to find Verity lying silent and unresisting beneath him. Tears marked silvery trails across her ivory cheeks and clumped her thick black lashes together around her dazed gray eyes. She didn’t need to tell him she despised herself for what had just happened.

If his goal had been to return their interactions to their simplest level, he’d failed utterly. She still held him in thrall. Every time he took her, hard, fast, or slowly, tenderly, the bonds uniting them twisted tighter.

He was a barbarian, but he’d willingly go through all the turmoil and trouble again just for these precious moments in her arms.

He hadn’t found Soraya in the end. He hadn’t reawakened the daring, uninhibited lover she kept locked within her, the lover he remembered from London.

Yet when he made love to this woman, who opposed him with every ounce of her soul, he touched emotional depths he’d never sounded before.

He broke away from her slowly, reluctantly. She gave a soft grunt of discomfort.

He’d been brutal. But he hadn’t missed, even in his drive to completion, that she’d reached her own peak. It hadn’t been last night’s dazzling explosion, but at the height of the tempest, she’d embraced him. He’d made her confront the truth that she could no more deny him than he could deny her.

Her body had opened to his. While she’d kept her mind and heart closed.

He told himself her body was all he wanted.

The declaration sounded laughably hollow. The feverish encounter had bitten more deeply than the fleeting demands of flesh alone ever could, however much he wished it otherwise.

She took a shuddering breath as he settled at her side. He fought the urge to stroke the damp black hair back from her brow. She wouldn’t welcome his tenderness, he knew with piercing regret.

They lay in tense silence for a long moment. Then, without glancing in his direction, she rose from the tumbled bed, gathering her ruined dress around her.

She looked sad, crushed, used. She looked beautiful and as necessary to him as breathing.

Exhausted as he was, he reached out and caught at her crushed skirts. “Where are you going?”

“To wash,” she said desolately.

“Stay with me.”

“Yes.”

He frowned. Such easy agreement seemed unlikely. “Yes?”

She looked at him fully. Her eyes were flat and lifeless as he’d never seen them before.

He’d summoned passion from her. But at what cost?

“If I run, you’ll only find me. So I will stay.”

“Good.” He let her go, hating himself as she hated him, however tightly she’d clung to him as she’d ridden out her climax.

When she raised her hand to brush back the heavy fall of hair, he noticed a ring of bruises circling one slim wrist.

“I’ve hurt you,” he said, loathing himself even more.

She glanced at the marks without interest. “They’re from last night. They don’t matter.” She turned away, her head bowed under the tumbled mass of hair. “Nothing matters.”

He’d fought like a madman to crush her defiance. Why, now that he’d succeeded, did such grief

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