Flirting With Forever by Gwyn Cready (new books to read TXT) 📕

pul ed out a blanket and with a flip of his arm covered them both. The cashmere was crimson, like the couch, and the silk edge matched the pil ow under her head.

Tools of the trade.

She’d offered herself shamelessly, and he’d used her just as she’d offered. There would be no more sittings, no portrait, no patient siege. The castle had been breeched with nothing more than a wel -used battering ram. And she herself had hurried to let down the drawbridge.

If she returned, it would not be to be painted or courted. If she came back, they would simply fal into bed, and in a few months the desire, satisfied, would fade. It would be just like the relationship she’d had with every other man in her life.

She was not one to wal ow. She’d had her fun. She’d thought Peter would wait. He hadn’t, but neither had she.

Now it was time to get the information that would help her with her book and get home.

The glow receded, replaced by a familiar emptiness.

21

Part of Peter wanted to laugh or sing or grab her by the shoulders, rol her in the cashmere and tel her how happy she made him. But the other part of him was terrified. He had used her il . His performance had been loutish at best, brutish at worst. He had taken a gentlewoman, an affianced gentlewoman whose feelings for her husband-to-be had been made clear to him, and lowered her to the level of a courtier or worse. However pleasured she might have been, no woman, in the sober light of day, would thank a man for that.

Unless, of course, her feelings for her husband-to-be were not what he imagined.

He stroked the satin skin of her hip and tried to keep his heart from haring off in three directions at once. Already he was constructing the inducements he might offer the Executive Guild to break a centuries-old ban and let him stay.

But she was so quiet, so stil .

Everything depended on the next words from her mouth.

He settled his face into the edges of her hair, trying to lose himself in the gentle, clean smel without disturbing her.

He wanted to kiss her, to seek reassurance in her touch, but he was afraid to move.

She sighed and heaved herself from the blanket. He saw her shoulder rising above the gown, straight and unforgiving.

She did not turn.

She stood and drew the flaps of the silk tight around her.

He watched, feeling the sudden coolness of the room, as she made her way to the fire. She stooped to pick up her purse and fiddled with it abstractedly.

“It sounded like a most amusing story you were tel ing earlier,” she said. “I’d love to hear the end of it.”

“An amusing story?”

“The one about Gisel e … and Van Dyck.”

The hair on Peter’s neck bristled. A question about Van Dyck. Surely this was a coincidence. He thought of Mertons’s warning.

“It was not amusing at the time,” he said slowly. “As I said, it made things difficult between him and me.”

“A bit of an intrigue, I suppose.” She gave him a sparkling look of encouragement. It was the first time she’d met his eyes since they finished. “It would have to be with a woman named Gisel e.”

But Mertons had said the writer was a man, a man named Campbel Stratford—His stomach dropped like lead. Campbell. Cam. She’d said her name was Cam. He was the one who’d expanded it to Camil a. Camil a, the mortal who ran so fast she could be in two places at once.

He could not have been so stupid. Surely she was the woman she said she was. But Mertons had only read the book. He hadn’t met the author. It would be the most natural mistake in the world to assume Campbel was a man.

A thousand thoughts raced through his head, but none of them took him anywhere except right here, to this bed, a witness to the destruction of his dreams.

“Gisel e …” He shook his head, hoping, praying he was wrong and she’d al ow the subject to pass.

“Van Dyck must have been such an interesting character. I’d love to hear a story or two.”

He was glad he hadn’t eaten, for he thought he might be il . He rol ed onto his back and closed his eyes. He thought of the plan to trick