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

a small boat; he rowed across the canvas of a dying sun and

rippling water.

No one would ever know his name.

Perhaps he had no name. Perhaps he was a figment of the artist’s imagination.

A man who had no life outside of the painting.

Inexplicable emotion welled up inside Victoria: humiliation, excitement; anger, fear.

Her hair plunged down her back, a thick, heavy blanket that hid her nakedness and tickled the valley

between her buttocks.

It did not stop the coming reality.

“Now turn around and face me.”

Hairpins biting into Victoria’s right palm, she slowly turned around.

The warmth of the room was not reflected inside the silver eyes that watched her.

This was it, she thought—this was the moment when she would lose the last vestige of her girlhood.

This was what the last six months had built up to. That the frenzied bidding below had led to.

The future yawned before her.

She did not know what lay beyond this moment, this night.

She did not know who she would awaken to the next day—to Victoria the woman or Victoria the

prostitute.

The fear Victoria had held at bay during the auction swelled over her in a black wave of pure,

unadulterated panic.

She had lied when she told herself that a woman who sold her body retained control—Victoria was not

in control: the silver-eyed man was.

And he knew it.

“I do not know your name,” she blurted out, hair a heavy anvil that weighted her body.

“Do you not, mademoiselle?” he asked softly, seductively.

Victoria opened her mouth to reply that she could not possibly know his name: women such as she did

not move in the same circles as men such as he.

“Do you find me desirable?” she asked instead.

Tomorrow she would be horrified, remembering her question. But not now.

No man had ever told her she was desirable.

For eighteen years she had plainly dressed her hair and her body in order to avoid a man’s attentions lest

she lose her position.

Only to lose it anyway,

Her position. Her independence.

Her self-respect.

She was giving this man her virginity, no matter that he was paying for it.

She needed to hear that he found her desirable.

She needed to know that a woman possessed value in her sex as well as her virtue.

The overhead chandelier flickered and flamed inside silver eyes, a mirror to the bleakness inside her own

soul.

Victoria’s heartbeat counted the passing seconds. . . .

If he denigrated her. . .

“Yes, I find you desirable,” he said finally.

And he lied.

Pain swiftly blossomed into anger. “No, you do not,” Victoria rashly countered.

He wanted what the other man wanted: a piece of flesh instead of a woman.

The silver lights glittering inside his eyes stilled. “How do you know what I feel, mademoiselle?”

Blood drummed inside Victoria’s breasts and thighs, spurring her on. “If you desired me, sir, you would

not sit there and stare at me as if I were infested with vermin. I am as clean as you are.”

As worthy as he was.

The stillness surrounding him expanded until it sucked up the very air.

“Why would I bid upon you if I didn’t desire you?” he asked softly.

“You did not see me,” Victoria pointed out, trying to rein in her galloping emotions, failing. She had not

ask ed for this. “How can you desire what you cannot see?”

How could she yearn for what she had not experienced?

But she had.

She had secretly dreamed that a man would love the woman that she was and not the paragon of virtue

that she had modeled herself after. And now that dream was gone.

No man would ever love her: men did not love whores.

The man before her sat statue-still, gaze unblinking. Had he ever loved? Been loved?...

“Why do you think I bid on you if I do not want you?” he asked, voice a beguiling caress.

There was no tenderness in his eyes.

But Victoria wanted tenderness to be there. She wanted him to care. . .

She would not be the same after this night, and she needed someone to mourn the old Victoria Childers

and welcome the new.

“Some men believe that the pox can be cured by taking a virgin,” she stated baldly, wanting to provoke

some emotion—some response—out of this man who had never known a day’s hunger in his life.

She succeeded.

His silver eyes narrowed. “I do not have the pox, mademoiselle.”

Victoria did not retreat from the threat inside his voice and eyes.

“Nor do I, sir,” she said stridently.

Danger shimmered in the air.

“What do you want, mademoiselle?” he asked softly.

She wanted what any woman wanted.

“I want a man to want me instead of my virginity,” Victoria said rawly.

“You want me to desire you rather than your virginity?” he reiterated, as if the thought that a woman

would want to be desired for herself rather than her innocence had never, ever occurred to him.

The time for lying had passed. “Yes. I do.”

Light. Shadow.

Silver. Gray.

Victoria refused to look away from his eyes that alternately reflected light and darkness, silver fire and

gray steel.

This was the woman she was. This was the woman she had always been.. . .

“And how would you have me show my desire?” he asked, gaze holding hers, swallowing hers...

Victoria thought of the man who had demonstrated his desire by having her dismissed from her position.

“You paid two thousand pounds for the privilege of touching my person,” she said, heart cramming her

throat.

“You want me to touch you?” he asked in that soft, seductive voice that was neither soft nor seductive

but danger pure and simple.

“I do not want to be taken like a woman on the street.”

The truth rang out harshly over the roar of the fire and the blood thrumming inside Victoria’s ears.

For