Shipwrecked and Seduced by Amanda McCabe

Author:Amanda McCabe
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: Medieval
Publisher: 0
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter Five

Carlos lay on his side in the rumpled bed, his head propped on his elbow as he watched the play of the sunrise-light on Isabella’s face.

She slept peacefully, a tiny, secret smile on her kiss-reddened lips, as if her dreams were sweet. Her brow was smooth in that serenity of slumber, her hand curled on the pillow palm-up. In sleep, she looked so very young and sweet, free of defenses and secrets.

Free of lies.

He gently touched her hand, uncurling her fingers to examine the pink palm. A ridge of white calluses lay along its base, and there were old, healed cuts along with the fresh wounds of her ordeal at sea. They were the hands of a woman who worked, who scrubbed floors and carried buckets and sliced vegetables, not a lady whose greatest labor was wielding an embroidery needle. Her body, too, was thin and wiry, not soft and pampered, as if she did all that hard work with not enough nourishment.

And she had not been a virgin.

The suspicion that had taken seed when he first met her, the feeling that whoever she was, she was not the Contessa de Valadez, took root and grew. She was an impostor, and as an agent of the king he should clap her in irons at once.

But something stronger supplanted that duty, supplanted all other emotions. He longed to take away all her years of struggle, take away any pain in her past and give her the pampered, luxurious life she deserved.

He raised her hand to his lips, pressing a soft kiss to those calluses, to the pulse that beat so delicately in her wrist. She smelled of rosewater still, and of the salty musk of sex and desire.

When he had invited her to dine with him, making love to her had not been his intention. He’d thought only to ply her with wine, with good food and fine clothes, and slowly peel away the layers of her deception until her true self was revealed. He wanted to know what her game was so he could plan his next move. She was obviously not some typical peasant girl, playing at a crude game of masquerade—she was quieter, cleverer than that. He thought perhaps she could be useful to him.

But as the evening had gone on, he had found that he was the one caught in a web. The flash of her large brown eyes, the curve of her smile, her unabashed sensual delight in her dinner—it had held him utterly spellbound. Enthralled by her in a way he never had been before.

He would find out who she really was, but not by frightening her, not by making her life as hard as it was before she came to Santo Domingo. Just as he was enamored of her, she was not immune to him—he had the scratch marks on his back to prove it. With patience and attention, she would confide in him in her own time.

And then he would know how to act.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.