Tempting Fate by Kerrigan Byrne (best free ereader .TXT) 📕

in his native language, he shrugged her away, only to rip his coat down his shoulders and thrust it around hers. It engulfed so much of her, it might as well have been a cloak.

“It’s not safe.” He jerked away once she was swaddled. “Don’t you understand? Thirty years. Thirty years I’ve never— I’m simply not meant for a girl like you.”

“Woman,” Felicity corrected. “I’m a woman. I want you to acknowledge that, Gabriel Sauvageau. I am a woman, and just because I’m innocent does not mean that I am incapable of desire. Of understanding and expressing it just as well or better than you.”

She swallowed as a familiar shy mortification crept into her cheeks, and she fought the instinct that screamed for her to sink into the coat and disappear.

No more.

She was tired of being invisible. Insignificant. Silent. If she didn’t say her piece now, she might never get another chance. “I— I think about you often. In that way. All the time, in fact. And… when I’m in a room with you, I can look at no other man. For none compare.”

She ventured forward on feet threatening to go numb, encouraged by the answering color of his own drenched skin. “When other men gleam brilliantly in the light, I look for you in the shadows. I yearn to join you there. Because you are beautiful.”

He whirled away from her, giving every indication of a stallion about to bolt.

Rushing around him, she reached up and cupped either side of his jaw in her hands. Forcing him to face her, extraordinarily aware that he could toss her aside and disappear into the night should he take it in his mind to do so.

It didn’t matter, she had to bare her heart to him or she’d never forgive herself.

“I am not being kind,” she insisted, reading the admonishment in his eyes. “To me, you are the only creature worth looking at. Yours is the only body I want to discover. The only touch I’ve ever truly desired.”

His nostrils flared.

His jaw flexed and shifted beneath her hands, and his entire enormous frame shook as he stared over her shoulder at the door to Cresthaven.

“I’m not like them,” he spoke in a tight whisper, barely audible over the rain. “I’m not like the men in your books.”

“You are better,” she insisted, caressing at his scars with the tender pad of her thumb. “You are real.”

Finally becoming a casualty to the cold, she shifted on her bare feet, the numbness giving way to pain as a violent shiver overtook her.

He blinked down at her feet, then with several dark and foul curses, he swept her into his arms and carried her inside. He didn’t stop until he’d climbed all three flights of stairs and shouldered into her bedroom.

Appointed in white and gold, the only other color in the room was that of the massive blue Persian rug in front of the fireplace. Gabriel took her there in three long strides, and she slid down his body as he set her on her feet before the roaring fire.

It was like standing on a bed of pins and needles at first, and she gritted her teeth against chattering as he disappeared into the adjoining washroom.

Working quickly, Felicity dashed the down coverlet from her bed and settled it before the fire. Then she shrugged out of his coat, peeled away her sopping wrapper and grappled with the buttons of her nightshift, struggling to tug it over her head in time to discard it before he returned.

Naked, she turned and bent to stretch them on the warm stones of the hearth.

Mrs. Pickering wouldn’t likely get to the wash soon, what with her maids gone, and she shouldn’t want them to go sour in the laundry basket.

“Jesus fucking Christ.”

The blasphemy was spoken like a prayer, and Felicity straightened and turned to find Gabriel in her doorframe, his eyes peeled wide in abject disbelief and two clean bath towels pooled at his feet where he’d dropped them.

Still shivering, she stood as close as she dared to the fire, her hands tucked under her chin and one knee bent in modesty she was trying not to feel whilst attempting a seduction.

“How thoughtful of you,” she prompted, offering him a shy smile.

“Wha’? Oh.” He opened his hands as if surprised not to find the towels gripped there, and didn’t peel his gaze from her as he bent his knees and groped at the floor for the discarded offerings. Approaching her like he would a dangerous animal, he offered her one from as far a distance as his arm span would allow.

When she took it, he retreated back to the door. “You don’t know what you’re doing,” he warned, valiantly trying, and failing, to avert his eyes.

“You’re right,” she admitted as she took the towel and ran it down her shoulders and arms, her breasts, her belly, her thighs.

His gaze followed her motions, his tongue moistening his lips as he drank in the sight of her with an odd expression of disbelief. Like a man who’d been walking for days in the desert and didn’t believe the oasis in front of him to be anything other than a mirage.

Unused to such a vulnerable silence, Felicity cleared a gather of nerves from her throat. “You see, I haven’t the first idea what I’m doing, but… I was hoping, if you were to see me like this, you’d forget all the reasons you shouldn’t make love to me.”

He blinked. Twice.

A muscle in his hand twitched. As did one in his neck.

Then he was simultaneously advancing upon her and rending both his shirt and vest down the front.

Buttons made little plinking noises as they scattered across the floor in chaotic directions. He peeled the sleeves from his shoulders and abandoned the wet shirt to the carpet.

Before she could take in a proper look at him, he’d engulfed her in his arms and claimed her mouth with a kiss more primal and potent than any described in