Secrets of Surrender Read Online Free Page A

the moonlight. Mesmerizing. A moment stretched while he forgot what had led to this crude embrace. He only noticed every place where they touched and the softness of the body he held. Thunder rolled in his head.
    Her expression softened. A lovely astonishment widened her eyes. Her lips parted slightly. The fight completely left her and she became all pliant womanhood in his arms.
    She stretched toward the kiss he wanted to give her, and the moonlight enhanced her perfection even more.
    Suddenly it also revealed her bared teeth aiming up at his face.
    He moved his head back just in time. She used the opportunity to try to break free again.
    Cursing himself for being an idiot
again,
he bent down and rose with her slung over his shoulder. Her fists beat his back. She damned him to hell all the way to the carriage.
             
    He dumped her into the carriage and settled across from her.
    “Attack me again and I will turn you over my knee. I am no danger to you, and I’ll be damned if I will let you claw and bite me after I paid a fortune to save you from men who are.”
    Whether his threat subdued her or she just gave up, he could not tell. The carriage moved. He found the frock coat buried amidst his rolls of drawings and handed it to her. “Put this on so you are not cold.”
    She obeyed. Her fear and wariness filled the air for several silent miles.
    “Nine hundred and fifty was a high amount to pay for nothing,” she finally said.
    “The alternative was to let a man pay a lot less for something, wasn’t it?”
    She seemed to shrink inside the frock coat. “Thank you.” Her gratitude came on a small, trembling voice.
    She was not weeping, although she had good cause to. Her pride, so admirable thirty minutes ago, now irritated him. The burning scratches on his face probably had something to do with that.
    He wondered if she understood the consequences of this night. She had dodged a man’s misuse, but she would not escape the ruin coming when the world learned of that party and that auction. And the world
would
learn about it, he had no doubt.
    Perhaps now, in the calm after the storm, she was assessing the costs, just as he was assessing his own. Norbury had been angered by his interference. He had not liked his fun spoiled and his revenge made less complete. The Earl of Cottington might be the benefactor, but his heir now held the purse strings and influence.
    “I apologize for losing my head.”
    “It is understandable after your ordeal.” It still impressed him, how well he had learned the lessons and syntax of polite discourse. They had become second nature, but sometimes the first nature still spoke in his head.
Damn right you should apologize.
    “I am so fortunate that you arrived. I am so glad there was one sober man there, who would be appalled at what Norbury was doing, and immune to his evil lures.”
    Oh, he had been appalled, but not nearly immune. He had paid a fortune, after all.
    A few speculative images entered his head regarding what he would have been buying if he were not so damned decent. That embrace on the lane made the fleeting fantasy quite vivid.
    He was glad for the dark so she could not see his thoughts. He could not see her face, either, which was for the best. She possessed the kind of beauty that left half of a man’s soul in perpetual astonishment. He did not like that kind of disadvantage.
    “May I ask you some questions?” She sounded very composed again. The lady had been rescued as was only her due. She would sleep contentedly tonight.
    “You may ask anything you like.”
    “The amount of your bid was an odd one. A hundred would have been enough, I think.”
    “If I had bid a hundred, Sir Maurice would have bid two hundred, and by the time we were done the amount might have been much higher than I paid. Thousands, perhaps. I bid very high to shock the others into silence.”
    “If he would have bid thousands, why would he not bid one thousand?”
    “It is one