Auctioned Virgin to Seduced Bride by Louise Allen Read Free Book Online

to me.’
    He stared at her, the smile spreading slowly across his face until the joy danced in his eyes. ‘I love you, Laurel Vernon.’ He took off his coat.
    â€˜Patrick? I thought you were going to the bank.’
    â€˜It won’t go away.’ He ripped off the crumpled neck cloth and sat down to yank at shoes and stockings. ‘I want to make love to you somewhere untainted by silks and perfume and money and fear. I want to make love to you on this rather lumpy mattress with the world going by outside the door. No ropes, no feathers, no artifice. Just you and me.’
    â€˜Oh, yes.’ This was no fairy tale, this plain inn room with the sound of post horns and shouting ostlers, the thud of running feet along the gallery on the other side of the thin wall. This was reality. This was the beginning of the rest of her life.
    Laurel pulled off the gaudy silk and threw it across the room. ‘You’ll have to buy me a gown and petticoats, as well,’ she said.
    â€˜Hmm?’ He wasn’t listening to her. ‘Your hair. So long.’ Patrick reached out and touched it and she felt a little gasp escape her lips as though his hand had brushed her breast. Her nipples hardened and she leaned into his touch. He ran his fingers through the heaviness of her hair, lifting it and letting it flow free, his body tense as though he was focused on that one sensation alone.
    He pushed her back onto the pillows, following her down with his weight, one hand still sifting through the tangled weight of her hair. His mouth on hers was gentle but possessive. She knew him now, the taste and the feel; she understood how to answer the probing tongue with little strokes of her own, with tiny nips of her teeth on the fullness of his lower lip, and all the time she let herself sink deeper into the reality of him. So much to learn about him, a lifetime to do it in.
    She was so lucky, she thought hazily. Perhaps her friend Meg was, as well, if she understood Patrick’s cryptic remarks about Lord Brandon. But nothing would make Meg truly happy until she found her sisters.
    Patrick nipped at her ear and Laurel pushed her hands between them, felt the hard, flat plane of his stomach tighten as her hands skimmed down to the waistband of his breeches. She wriggled under him as she pushed them down and he arched up so she could lick and nip at his nipples, fascinated by the way they knotted, as hers did, loving the rough masculinity of the hair on his chest as she ran her fingers through it.
    They tumbled over, off balance as he struggled out of his breeches and, released from his weight, Laurel slid farther until she could take him in both hands, stroke up the satin skin over hot, rigid muscle. Instinct overcame bashfulness and she dipped her head, took him in her mouth, spread her hands up to his chest to hold him and marvelled as Patrick groaned and fell back. Hers senses were full of him, under her hands she could feel his pulse thundering. Such power, she thought hazily, experimenting with tongue and lips as he shuddered.
    Then he twisted, reaching for her, lifting her until she was straddling his hips. ‘Come here,’ he said, his voice husky and she rose and let herself sink onto him, inch by aching inch as he filled her, completed her.
    â€˜I love you, Patrick Jago,’ she said, holding him tight within her. ‘Take me home.’
    â€˜Oh, yes.’ He bore up, lifting them both, driving into the heart of her as her senses unravelled into heat and light and a pleasure that was on the verge of unbearable. And then the world stopped spinning on its axis and they ran out of words or the need to speak and were at peace.

 
    Discover what happens to the Shelley sisters in Louise Allen’s The Transformation of the Shelley Sisters series, available wherever books and ebooks are sold from Harlequin Historical.
    Practical Widow to Passionate Mistress
    Vicar’s Daughter to Viscount’s