Midnight Eyes by Brophy, Sarah (well read books .TXT) 📕

KISSING THE GROOM

“Perhaps you should put me down now,” Imogen whispered huskily, barely able to recognize the voice that shattered the silence as her own.

“Perhaps,” Robert said hoarsely and began to slide her slowly down his body till her feet made contact with the floor. She was not surprised to find that he didn’t let her go. She couldn’t seem to let him go either. Not just yet.

She felt almost dizzy as the dazzling heat rose through her body. She was feeling things she could scarcely identify, wanting things she should not be able to bear, but if her mind struggled to understand this bewildering new world, her body seemed to know of it already. It knew exactly what it sought, and moved instinctively against Robert in the getting of it.

He moaned in the back of his throat and lowered his mouth to claim hers.

She drew in a sharp breath at first contact, then slowly her hands wound themselves around his neck. It was the first kiss she had ever wanted. She whimpered as she felt his tongue move along the seam of her lips. He answered her small whimper with a demanding growl of his own and she opened her lips in eager response to his primitive demand.

Her first true kiss.

It quickly deepened, taking Imogen to a place she had never known existed inside of her…

MIDNIGHT EYES SARAH BROPHY

ZEBRA BOOKS

KENSINGTON PUBLISHING CORP.

http://www.kensingtonbooks.com

Contents

Prologue

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Epilogue

Prologue

Mary’s voice halted abruptly and Imogen turned away from the inadequate fire to face the sudden silence, her eyebrows raised questioningly.

“M’lady, that is all of your brother’s message that is fit for human hearing,” Mary said slowly as she began screwing up the expensive parchment.

Imogen laughed softly. “Oh, Mary, you know you shouldn’t worry about things like that. When Roger visits, he says all manner of things that aren’t fit for human hearing to me. By reading the message in full you certainly won’t be telling me anything that I haven’t heard many times before.”

“Well, I’ve certainly never said such foul things before, and I don’t intend to start now.”

Imogen tried to smile as she turned her face back to the fire, hoping to hide her rising panic.

Roger had started the end game. She had always known that this day would come. On that small piece of parchment, which Mary refused to read out to her, he was giving her formal notice that the real war had indeed begun.

“Burn it, Mary,” Imogen murmured quietly. She shuddered almost imperceptibly when the smell of acrid smoke reached her heightened senses.

“Well, it doesn’t sound all bad,” Mary said encouragingly. “Those bits about your bridegroom sounded interesting anyway. Your brother did manage to say around the vitriol that this…Robert Beaumont is suitably impatient. He seems most anxious to claim his bride if he set out within the week, and I for one think that shows a very pleasing degree of eagerness.”

“But I doubt he is racing all this way just so that he can claim the infamous ‘Lady Deformed’ for his wife, don’t you?” Imogen said dryly.

Mary’s voice sank with embarrassment. “I didn’t know you had heard about them calling you that.”

Imogen smiled. “I’m blind, Mary, not deaf.”

Mary was silent for a second, then said bracingly, “You’re not deformed either, if you don’t mind me saying.”

“I’d be a fool to mind when you’re being nice.” She shook her head with a sigh. “But you seem to be forgetting that Robert Beaumont doesn’t actually know I’m not deformed. He is racing up here, eager to claim his land, not some gargoyle hidden away in a tower.”

Imogen got up and began to pace carefully around the room. Twenty-one paces one way, seventeen the other. Her bedchamber, her world. Sometimes, it felt as if the four walls were pressing in on her, suffocating her with the darkness that had held her so tightly for the past five years. There was a monotony to her days that ate into her, a sameness and isolation that threatened to destroy her.

If it wasn’t for Mary’s loyal presence, her destruction would have been completed years ago.

Imogen would never know what capricious whim had ruled Roger when he let Mary, their old nurse, stay with her when he had taken almost everything else she held dear, but she was pathetically grateful for that one small kindness.

She swallowed hard and tried to ignore the guilt that always rose to the surface when she forced herself to acknowledge that her gratitude meant she was as complicit as Roger in holding the older woman prisoner.

That Mary bore her exile with an admirable fortitude didn’t ease the heavy weight of shame Imogen felt. Abstractly, her acceptance actually added to Imogen’s burden till the pressure of it almost consumed her.

Sometimes she longed for the silence of death; sometimes it seemed like the only way to escape the loneliness and guilt, but at other times she longed for life with every fiber of her being. Especially at moments like now, when Roger and his dark threats were worming their way inside her, whispering of endings. When the threat of the end was so real that she could almost touch it, even her blind life became precious.

And no matter what Mary said, Imogen knew Roger’s threat was very real.

He wanted her, and he was prepared to destroy her completely to get what he wanted. Robert Beaumont was his weapon of choice. On his last visit, when she had been shivering while kneeling in front of him, he had made sure she knew all there was to know about Robert Beaumont, and now she knew why. Now she knew why Roger had gloated as he had told the story of how the bastard son of a Norman nobleman had