Stealing the Bride by Elizabeth Boyle

Author:Elizabeth Boyle [Boyle, Elizabeth]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi, pdf
Tags: Fiction, Romance, General, Brides, Man-Woman Relationships, Love Stories, Historical, England, Regency, Nobility
ISBN: 9780380820900
Publisher: Avon
Published: 2003-06-23T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter 10

S lowly he turned his head, glancing over his shoulder at the entranceway where a lone woman stood.

A barely clad masked woman.

Temple’s jaw dropped.

Now, he considered himself rather jaded. And there was little in the world capable of rendering him speechless. He’d seen too much in his career to be scandalized by the antics of Society. But the costume Diana wore, or rather didn’t wear, stunned even him.

Gone was the fashionable, yet sensible, dress she usually wore.

A gauzy length of silk lay over her shoulders, falling to the floor in a mock Grecian shawl.

Mock in the sense that it concealed nothing.

Then he recognized the gossamer fabric as the draperies from the bed in his hotel room. She’d twined them around her body in imitation of one of those enticing marbles in the British Museum that anxious mothers hurried their impressionable children past, lest they be ruined by such a lewd display.

Diana’s costume would probably give even the enthusiastic curators vapors for a week.

The wrapping wouldn’t have been so dramatic, so scandalous if she’d chosen to wear something beneath it…something other than just her chemise. To make matters worse, she’d pushed the short sleeves off her shoulders, leaving them bare and her breasts nearly exposed beneath the shimmering drapes that had once fluttered in his room.

And his room wasn’t all she’d ravished to obtain her outlandish costume.

Her hair sat piled atop her head in a flurry of blond curls, bound in place by a wreath of ivy. Torn, he suspected, from the walls of the hotel. Willful strands tumbled free from the greenery into a swaying path of temptation down to the fair prospect of her bare shoulders.

For a moment she stood perfectly still, as if she were sculpted of marble, gazing out from behind her mask at the gaping crowd. Then in a slow, precise movement, she turned ever so slightly toward the open door, as if she were waiting for someone to join her on her throne of steps.

It was a calculated move, Temple decided, for the silence erupted once again into a sea of gasps and whispered reactions from behind a bevy of fluttering fans as she revealed the other surprise of her costume.

From the men in her audience, Diana received an applause made up of a hundred or more sighs of longing. Even Stewie’s never ending litany fell into an unearthly silence as the poor man’s mouth gaped and flapped at words that couldn’t get past his rattled wits.

Stewie wasn’t alone in his wordless floundering. Temple’s breath caught at the sight before him.

She’d torn the back of her chemise asunder, so it displayed her flawless skin from the nape of her neck all the way down to that small enticing plane at the bottom of a woman’s back where a man’s palm fits perfectly.

It was as if she’d bared herself in an open invitation for someone to claim that one spot…to put his hand on her, and pull her into his arms for an endless night of lovemaking.

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