Undeniable Rogue (The Rogues Club Book One) Read Online Free

connection.
    Sabrina stepped from his reach. “You speak foolishness. I know first hand that life can be got through without love, but it cannot, believe me, without money.”
    She was right, of course. And what the bloody devil was ailing him? Why talk her out of marrying his more desirable persona—that of the Duke, rather than the pauper—when, if he would but be honest with himself, he would take her any way he could have her.
    Did he? Did he want this siren of a goddess at any cost? As in, purchasing her, fidelity and all, the way he purchased his servants? Or, as in...love at first sight?
    Gideon stopped himself from scoffing outwardly. Either way, he was an idiot deserving of nothing but her scorn. Gad, but he was more like his grandmother than he expected, except that he did not even know the meaning of love.
    He did not think he could do love .
    He could do like , definitely lust . He could even throw in courtesy and respect to make things comfortable. But love?
    For the life of him, Gideon did not understand what was ailing him. From whence had come this perverse need to believe a woman he had known for less than a day would take him as a pauper?
    What he should do, is ride to Drury Lane tonight, find a willing wench, purge Sabrina Whitcomb from his blood, forthwith, and cancel his ill-advised wedding.
    Pertinent notion notwithstanding, he wanted nothing more than to continue doggedly in pursuit of a woman he felt duped into marrying, a woman he wished would want him as much as he wanted her.
    Tomorrow, Bedlam and a straightjacket.
    Tonight, pursuit.
    “Let us examine the possibility of like and attraction or lust between us,” Gideon suggested, his voice a croaking rasp. He stepped a hair’s breadth nearer, and promptly fell into the shimmering violet depths of her eyes, once more.
    Minutes—or hours—later, when he recovered, barely, he fought good sense and grazed her cheek with the back of a hand.
    Sabrina swallowed, she trembled, but she did not seem able to turn away, and neither did he. In that moment, Gideon fancied that they were adjoined by some hot, invisible current flowing from one to the other of them and back, like heat lightening, sizzling without sound. “Though I have no right,” he whispered, awed and encouraged by the openness in her countenance. “I felt those things. I felt them the minute I saw you.”
    Like a doe in lantern light, Sabrina stilled.
    Silently denying his statement? Or rejecting a similar admission?
    “Frivolous sensibilities have no place in my life,” she said, after another tension-fraught span and with no conviction. Then she moved again from his reach. “I am engaged to marry another. And what you felt this afternoon was hunger.”
    “Yes,” he said, taking now one step forward for each of hers back.
    When the wall stopped her retreat, Gideon placed tentative hands on her shoulders, and when she made no attempt to shrug him away, he slid his hand upward to cup her face and contemplate her full, ripe lips.
    “As you say,” he whispered. “Hunger, pure and simple.”
    While he waited for a subtle invitation to touch her lips with his own, Sabrina stood still as stone, cold, hard and unyielding. Yet he caught her inner struggle in the pulse at her throat and in her fists clenched tight and trembling against his chest.
    Only when he flattened her hands over his hastening heart did she begin to thaw. But she pulled away, nevertheless, breathing as if she could not get enough air, leaving him disconnected and floundering.
    “No wonder you have had no luck making your fortune,” she said, soothing her unkissed lips with her tongue and bringing his body to erect and rigid attention. “You believe in fairy stories.”
    No one had ever accused him of that before. “I was not speaking of happily ever after, my dear Sabrina, but of physical hunger.” Was he, really? “Women are the romantics in this world, not the men,” he said for his own benefit.
    “Not