Thieves In The Night Read Online Free

thought, and she did smell good, soft and womanly. The scent and feel of her teased his mind with a memory he couldn’t quite place.
    “At a hundred and fifty an ounce, I should smell good,” she snapped. Her aunt Elise always bought the most extravagant gifts. Oh, brother, why did she have to think of her aunt now? Elise would be mortified if she knew what her one and only niece was doing. Not worried, because she was well aware of the depth of the Cochard skill, but just mortified, because she’d never expected those skills to be used on her side of the world.
    Lord, Chantal thought, she wished he would quit breathing in her ear. It was very distracting. Distracting and warm, and she wondered if she was on the verge of hysterics. She couldn’t think of any other reason for her mind to be so bent on straying when she needed every atom of her body to survive. She’d never had this problem before. Concentration was her forte.
    “Real good,” Jaz went on. His leg tightened around hers, drawing her closer. “Too good to pass up,” he drawled huskily, moving his mouth over hers.
    What was he doing now? Her mouth opened in protest, but the words died on her lips, taken away with her breath when he deepened the kiss. His tongue delved into her mouth, and a frisson of pure electricity froze her motionless beneath him. Sometime in the next two minutes Chantal learned two things: Kissing a stranger had an incredible effect on her, and a kiss could block out reality. It wasn’t the silence that warned her the alarm had been turned off; it was the sound of agitated voices coming from the lawn.
    Jaz lifted his head and gently brushed his thumb over her cheek, tracing the curve to her brow. Chantal focused on the shadowed depths of the eyes so close to hers and slowly surfaced from a cloud of confusion. Unconsciously she ran her tongue over her lips, still warm from his kiss. Who was this guy? The thought was persistent, but she refused to give it priority. She didn’t want to dwell on the powerful effect of his kiss. It didn’t make sense.
    “I’ve got to get out of here,” she whispered, barely gathering the energy to shove him away.
    “Me too,” he said, and she would have sworn she saw the flash of a smile behind his blackface.
    Shaking herself free from his mesmerizing gaze, she rolled onto her feet and hazarded a glance over the peak. The first thing she realized was that she couldn’t go down the way she had come up. The second was that she could very well be trapped on the roof. Voices were coming from three sides of the house and she knew the fourth side was a seventy-foot drop over a cliff. Anger tightened her small hands into fists. She was going to kill this jerk for messing her up, no matter how well he kissed. She should hit him for that anyway.
    “You low-down . . .” She didn’t get any further before he grabbed her hand and hauled her over the peak. “Let go of me, you . . .”
    He only moved faster, his grip tightening. Was she never going to get a word in? she wondered, taking two steps for each of his, all of them against her will. The strength that had protected her was now dragging her toward her doom. She was sure of it.
    He stopped a few feet from the expansive library window and dropped to his knees. She followed suit and was gearing up to light into him again when she saw the fluid action of a rope snake out of his hands over the edge. A man with a plan.
    Hope flickered back to life, and she shot him a quick glance. She had done some rappelling before, and although she was by no means an expert, she knew enough. The principle, at least, was simple. The rappeller, safe in a harness, held onto the rope with two hands, one in front of him, the other at his hip. The rope was threaded through a metal figure eight, which provided the necessary friction. Slackening off on the rope allowed it to slide; tightening on it kept it from running.
    He threw her the harness and she stepped into the webbed