Lucy's Liberation [Elk Creek 2] (Siren Publishing Ménage Everlasting) Read Online Free

attraction for him. He needed a new mountain to climb, another crusade to champion, a cause célèbre to accomplish and slake the unremitting craving inside. His desire to be greater, go ever faster and ever higher never waned. As long as he lived, he didn’t think he’d ever tire of the pursuit or the thrills.
    “Don’t insult my intelligence, feeding me such drivel.”
    Ki chuckled and stood to meet his mother in the middle of the room. He wrapped his arms around her for a brief hug, then pulled away to grin down at her. “I can never pull the wool over your eyes.”
    She playfully poked him in the ribs. “And don’t you forget it.”
    Ki watched as her teasing mood suddenly turned serious again.
    “Hezekiah, I am concerned about your motives and what you hope to accomplish while you are out there besides falling prey to another pretty face and sob story.”
    “Mother—”
    “Now hear me out…”
    Ki sighed, already knew what was coming. He hated to sound like a little boy being castigated for a misdeed, but since his mother insisted on treating him like a boy, he felt perfectly entitled to show his annoyance in kind. He did stop short of rolling his eyes though.
    “Are you sure you’re not letting your heart guide you in this matter?”
    “Mother, give me a little credit.”
    “I give you much more than a little credit, Ki. You’re my son and I know your strengths better than anyone, but in matters of the heart and loin you can be, shall we say, imprudent.”
    She had learned about one indiscretion, one of many he might add, and his mother had yet to let Ki hear the end of it. If she only knew about all the other peccadilloes he had committed in boarding school and college, she would probably swoon against her favorite mauve silk-upholstered chaise longue with the back of a wrist to her forehead like some hapless southern belle or Victorian lady suddenly struck with the vapors. If she knew that not all of his indiscretions had been with women, well then she might blame herself for his sexual proclivities and he could not have that, so he would never allow her to know.
    “You have to admit you have a penchant for picking up strays, darling.”
    “I have nothing of the sort. Besides, Lucy isn’t exactly a stray.” Ki barely stopped himself from wincing at the slip, hoping his mother didn’t notice how easily the woman’s Christian name had sprung from his mouth.
    He clutched her letter against his side as if he could gain strength from its tenuous white fibers, like it was a talisman that could conjure an image of the woman to give him strength.
    “You don’t really know that much about her to make that assertion, now do you?”
    When had his mother become so cool and calculating…so logical? Granted, she had always been an intelligent woman, but one cosseted from the Machiavellian intrigues of polite high society by his father. Not until his father’s death and her remarriage had she acquired this predilection for chess-like, general-on-the-battlefield manipulation and strategizing.
    “Lest I hark back to that Ferrari woman, Exhibit A.”
    Ki groaned. “I’d rather you didn’t.”
    “Then I shall refresh your memory.” His mother took him by the elbow and led him across the plush Persian rug to sit back down as she took the seat adjacent him. “If I had not intervened on your behalf, that girl could have ruined your future.”
    It was an intrusion for which he had yet to forgive his mother.
    Ah, sweet Mirabella Ferrari, an exchange student from Argentina, whose parents had been foreign dignitaries residing in America. She’d had no idea what she was doing when she approached his mother with her pregnancy tale. The chit of a girl actually thought to pull one over on Margaret Peyton Benjamin-Sachs when better men and women and a wily child like himself had never been able to.
    Her mistake had been going to his mother instead of directly to him. Ki might have given her story some credibility.