The Secrets of a Courtesan Read Online Free

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    items here and you sell them, making him a double profit.”
    She stared at him contemptuously. “That is utter rubbish.” She turned away from him with an
    angry swish of skirts and took a couple of paces away across the room. She could not get any
    farther away from him because the office was so small and he could sense the anger in her, still
    simmering like a pot coming back to the boil.
    “I barely know the man,” she snapped. “And what I do know I dislike intensely. It is both
    insulting and plain wrong to suggest some criminal conspiracy between us.”
    Hawkesbury had suggested that Eve might be Warren Sampson’s mistress, a cozy arrangement if
    they were in bed and business together. And Rowarth was not simply going to accept her word
    that it was not so. Just the thought of her tumbling between the sheets with Sampson made him
    hot with rage and thwarted desire. Madness, when he had sworn he did not care and did not want
    to want her.
    “Shall we sit,” he suggested evenly, “and discuss this calmly?”
    She gave him another look of searing disdain. “If we must. If it will hasten your departure.”
    He bit back a reluctant smile. Never had a woman seemed so anxious to be rid of him. But then,
    Eve had always been different.
    “I shall want to see your accounts in due course,” he said. “I need to trace every one of your
    transactions.”
    “How tedious for you,” Eve murmured.
    “I suppose that they are in order?”
    “Of course not.” Eve glanced at the tottering plies of paper on the desk and the floor. “You may
    have taught me to read and to compute mathematical sums, Rowarth, but you could not make me
    like it.”
    The memory touched him on the raw. It was true that she had been illiterate before he had taught
    her. There was a bitter taste in his mouth as he thought of the sweetness of those lessons and the
    gifts he had brought her, the books she had painstakingly learned to read, the columns of figures
    she had haltingly added up while he had joked that at least that way she would know how much
    money she was giving away to the poor. He slammed the door on such memories. Evidently she
    had moved on and was able to calculate Sampson’s wealth very accurately and certainly well
    enough to profit by it.
    “It was not the only thing that I taught you,” he said harshly. “You may have been a courtesan
    but you were not a tutored one.”
    Color lit her cheeks at his reference to the fact that she had been a virgin when he had taken her
    to his bed.
    “I do not recall you having any complaints,” she snapped.
    He had not. It had been blissful. He recalled the sweetness of Eve’s lissome body stretched
    beneath his hands and the pure physical compatibility that they had achieved. And then he
    thought of her running from him.
    “Such debate gets us nowhere,” he said harshly. “Now, tell me the truth about Warren Sampson
    this time.” He met her eyes directly. “Was he the man you left me for? Are you his mistress?”
    “I do not believe that you have been hearing me,” Eve said wearily. She felt sick to her soul that
    Rowarth, who had once loved her, should now hold her in nothing but contempt. “For the last
    time, Rowarth,” she said, “I barely know Warren Sampson. I am neither his mistress nor his
    business partner, nor,” she added with emphasis, “his associate in any way.”
    Disquiet stirred in her. It was true that for the past couple of months she had been aware of some
    very valuable goods passing through the pawnshop. The silver hairbrush was one such item and
    there had also been some silver plates and a couple of gold snuffboxes. A rather dissolute young
    man whom Eve had recognized as Tom Fortune, younger brother to the squire, had brought the
    pieces in. The workmanship on them had been superb and Eve had given him a good price for
    them. She had asked no questions at the time for she was well aware that people were very
    sensitive about bringing in