Robin Schone by Gabriel's Woman (10 ebook reader TXT) 📕

Holding on to her pain, Victoria stepped back.

Her left heel turned.

She wildly grabbed ... the white cloth.

Hairpins rained down on top of black marble.

Slamming heavily into the desk, she stared down through twin streamers of dark, lifeless hair at a pistol.

The grip was carved out of rosewood, body a dull blue-back. It was the same color as her father’s hair, she

noted numbly. And then there was only the dull blue-black metal visible, wood swallowed up by long,

elegant fingers.

Head snapping back, Victoria dropped the napkin. At the same time she pushed away from the desk.

Light bled into the man’s pupils until the black of his pupils were two tiny pinpricks and his irises turned

into molten silver.

There was no passion inside them. No compassion.

No evidence of the intimate words he had spoken.

Immediately an image of her corpse clothed only in sagging stockings and worn half boots popped into

her mind.

She did not want her corpse to be found dressed in sagging stockings and worn half boots and her hair

tangled about her.

Words pushed up inside her throat; she swallowed them. She had said she would not beg. And she

would not.

“Are you going to kill me?” Victoria asked evenly.

Creaking wood was her answer.

The silver-eyed man lithely stood up; at the same time he slid the pistol underneath the right lapel of his

dress coat into a holster that hung underneath his arm, a flash of brown leather that was immediately

swallowed by the fall of his coat. Turning, he rounded the black-marble-topped desk and strode across the

plush maroon carpet, black coattails smoothly flapping, left, right, left, right. He scooped up her clothes, taut

buttocks straining against black silk trousers.

Silk and wool slapped her chest.

Victoria reflexively caught her clothes.

He was as elegant from the back as he was from the front.

But it wasn’t his back that now confronted her.

Cold gray eyes dismissed her nakedness and her worth as a woman, virgin or otherwise. “Should I kill

you?” he asked imperturbably.

It seemed as if she had lived with the threat of death all her life.

Victoria trembled—legs, hands, stomach.

Not for the life of her would she give him the satisfaction of showing her fear.

Raising her arms, she defiantly jerked worn wool over her head, arms tangling with silk, clearing.

Leaning forward, she stepped into her drawers. Hours passed, fastening the two tiny buttons on the

waistband of her silk drawers. Days passed, fastening the wooden buttons lining the bodice of her wool

dress.

His silver-gray eyes were waiting for hers.

“I am a virgin,” she said evenly. “And I do not have a”—six months earlier she would not have known

the word by which men who lived off the revenue a woman’s flesh brought were called— “pimp.”

Silver ice glittered inside his eyes. “I am fully aware of your virginal status, mademoiselle.”

Victoria sucked in air; it did not still the pounding of her heart.

The desire that only moments earlier had tightened her breasts and pooled moisture between her thighs

continued to pound and throb, a beast that had yet to realize it had died.

Victoria took a calming breath; it did not calm her. “Then I am afraid I do not understand what it is that

you want to know.”

“I want to know why you are here.”

“I thought that was obvious, surely,” she returned, blood throbbing, heart pounding.

“A man sent you here, mademoiselle. I want his name.”

“No man sent me,” she repeated. At least not directly.

But she would not be here if it were not for a man.

“Then a woman sent you.”

“I was not sent here by a woman.”

His voice sharpened. “Who gave you money to bribe the doormen?”

She would not panic.

“I did not bribe the doormen.”

“My house is not a common pub, mademoiselle.” His gaze was implacable. “How did you get past my

doormen, if you did not bribe them?”

My house. My doormen.

Dread premonition mingled with Victoria’s fear and anger and throbbing desire. “Are you the proprietor

of this night house?”

His silver eyes did not reveal so much as a flicker of emotion. “I am Gabriel.”

Gabriel. The House of Gabriel.

Dear Lord. Victoria had said she had come to the House of Gabriel in the hopes that he would be there.

A woman’s first time should be with a man such as you, she had said.

Did he think she had deliberately crashed his house in order to gain his interest?

“Are you French?” she asked impulsively. And wondered if the last six months had addled her brains.

What difference did it make what his nationality was?

A Frenchman could shoot a woman as easily as an Englishman.

“I am French,” he agreed coolly. “One last time, mademoiselle. How did you get past my two doormen?

”

Victoria remembered the two men who had guarded the entranceway: one had possessed hair that

glinted like spun gold instead of the spun silver that the hair of the man who stood before her shone like; the

other doorman had had hair that gleamed like rich mahogany wood.

Their beauty paled in comparison with that of their employer.

“I told them I was in need of a protector,” she said shortly. Wondering if he would believe her.

Wondering why he wouldn’t believe her.

“And they let you in?” he asked caustically, silver eyes glinting a warning.

Victoria squared her shoulders. “I am not in the habit of lying, sir.”

“Are you not?”

There was no mistaking the cynicism in his voice.

What is your