In Bed With a Stranger Read Online Free Page A

narrow gap in the curtains gleamed on her smooth bare shoulder and cast a halo around her hair. Picking up a silken strand, he wound it lazily around his finger, thinking back to one of the last times he had lain here beside her and asked her to marry him.
    What a fool. What a selfish, stupid fool.
    Anything could have happened. He thought of Lewis’s girlfriend; her terrified eyes and her swollen stomach. We don’t even know each other that well … If he’s … injured, I’m stuck with it, aren’t I? What if it had been him instead of Lewis? They’d only had three weeks together. Three weeks. How could he have expected Sophie to stand by him for a lifetime when he barely knew her?
    The gleaming lock of hair fell back onto her creamy shoulder, but he left his hand there, holding it in front of his face and stretching his fingers. They shook slightly, prickling with pins and needles, and he curled them into a fist, squeezing hard.
    Harder.
    The bones showed white beneath his sun-darkened skin and pain flared through the stretched tendons, but it didn’t quite manage to drive away the numbness, or stop the slide-show that was replaying itself in his head again. The heat shimmering over the road, the hard sun glinting off windows in the buildings above. That eerie silence. The way everything had seemed to slip into slow motion, as if it were happening underwater. His hands trembling uncontrollably; the wire cutters slipping through his nerveless fingers as the voice in his earpiece grew more urgent, telling him that a sniper had been spotted …
    And then the gunshots.
    He sat up, swearing under his breath. Dragging a hand
over his face, he winced as he caught a scab that had begun to form on one of the cuts across his cheekbone.
    He was home, and back with Sophie. So why did it feel as if he were still fighting, and further away from her than ever?
    Sophie stopped in the kitchen doorway.
    Kit was sitting at the table with the pile of letters that had come while he’d been away, drinking coffee. He was wearing jeans but no shirt, and his skin was tanned to the colour of mahogany. Sophie’s stomach flipped.
    ‘Hi.’
    Oh, dear. Having leapt out of bed almost as soon as she opened her eyes, brushed her teeth like a person on speeded-up film and even slapped a bit of tinted moisturiser onto her too-pale cheeks before running downstairs, it was ridiculous that that was all she could manage. Hi. And in a voice that was barely more than a strangled whisper.
    He looked up. The morning light showed up the mess of cuts and bruising on his face, making him look battered and exhausted and beautiful.
    ‘Hi.’
    ‘So you are real,’ she said ruefully, going across to fill the kettle. ‘I thought I might have dreamed it. It wouldn’t be the first time I’d done that while you’ve been gone—dreamed about you so vividly that waking up was like saying goodbye all over again.’ She stopped, before she said any more and gave herself away as being a terrifying, crazy, obsessive fiancée. To make it sound as if she were joking she asked, ‘Did they let you off a day early for good behaviour?’
    ‘Unfortunately not.’ He put down the letter he was reading and pushed a hand through his hair. It was still wet from the shower, but she could see that it had been lightened by the sun, giving the kind of tawny streaks only the most expensivehairdressers could produce. ‘A man in my unit was badly injured yesterday. I flew home with him.’
    ‘Oh, Kit, I’m so sorry.’ Filled with contrition for thinking such shallow thoughts, Sophie went over to stand beside him. ‘How is he?’
    ‘Not good.’
    His voice was flat, toneless, and he looked down at the letter again, as if the subject was closed. On the other side of the kitchen the kettle began its steam-train rattle. Sophie touched his cheekbone with her fingertips.
    ‘What happened?’ she said softly. ‘Was it an explosion?’
    For a moment he said nothing, but she saw his