Count Valieri's Prisoner by Craven Sara

Author:Craven, Sara [Craven, Sara]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Romance, Contemporary, Fiction
ISBN: 9780373131419
Publisher: Harlequin
Published: 2012-12-31T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER NINE

IT WASN’T EASY, as Maddie soon discovered, to lie wide awake next to a sleeping man, whom you were desperate not to disturb.

Especially when it was the first time she’d ever shared a bed for the entire night, she thought, wondering what would happen if her imitation of a statue was interrupted by an attack of cramp. Or sneezing. Or if she simply fell asleep and turned over...

Don’t even think about it, she adjured herself grimly. Concentrate instead on the stars you can see through that hole in the roof.

But although her body was still, her mind remained restless.

Wasn’t there some psychological syndrome, she wondered desperately, that caused victims to become physically attracted to their kidnappers?

Surely just knowing that would help her to fight this dangerous obsession. To overcome this bewildering, illogical need to move closer to the warmth of him, and the false security his arms seemed to offer.

Because she couldn’t jeopardise her future—her marriage and all her dreams of happiness for what could only be a brief and sordid fling with a—a serial womaniser. A man, after all, who had spent the last two days and nights with another girl in some love nest in Viareggio.

A man who had surely done enough damage already to the Sylvesters, without enticing her—a promised wife—into this ultimate and disgraceful betrayal.

Think of Jeremy, she urged herself feverishly. Focus on him, and only on him. Think of being reunited with him, when all this will seem like a bad dream. Imagine being in his arms and belonging to him again.

At which point she paused, because, if she was honest, her sense of belonging had occasionally faltered in the past months.

And she found herself remembering unhappily how hurtful it had always seemed when Jeremy had dressed and left immediately after lovemaking, which had also been rushed and quite often less than satisfying—for her at least.

‘You make me feel like a tart,’ she told him one night while he was hurrying into his clothes. She tried to make it sound as if she was teasing rather than complaining, but he’d glanced at her defensively.

‘Don’t, darling. You know how things are.’

‘Well, yes.’ Nigel Sylvester’s shadow seemed to hang over them even in their most intimate moments. She controlled a shiver, again, trying to sound jokey. ‘But surely your father isn’t having you watched.’

‘Of course not, but he expects me to be first into the office each morning. So I need to leave from home.’ He came over to the bed and kissed her. ‘We’ll soon be married, Maddie. We just have to be patient, that’s all.’

And I have been, she thought now as she had then. In all sorts of ways. But for how much longer?

She looked back at the stars, trying, as a last resort, to count them, but always somehow getting the total wrong, and having to begin again. Until, eventually, she closed her eyes against their dazzle, and her mind to the numbers whirling in her head, and let sleep claim her at last.

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