Convenient Brides by Lindsay Armstrong, Catherine Spencer, Melanie Milburne Read Free Book Online Page A

said, regarding her thoughtfully. “What aren’t you telling me, Caroline? What’s been eating at you all this time, that you’re still so full of anger toward me?”
    She grew very still, and very pale. “Nothing. Seeing you again, here on this island, just brings everything back, that’s all.”
    “What do you mean by ‘everything’?”
    “You…laughed at me. Made me feel inadequate…hopeless at sex.”
    “Then I should have been horse-whipped. You were a novice, yes, but you were enchanting, too. Ethereal in a gauzy confection of a gown that made you look like a princess.”
    And with skin as fine as purest silk…and flesh so firm and tight that a man would have had to be made of stone not to respond with blind, untempered passion…!
    “Never mind trying to flatter me at this late date, Paolo,” she said coolly. “I know I made a fool of myself.”
    A vicious streak of desire licked through his blood. “What if it isn’t flattery? What if I’m finally admitting to a long-overdue truth? You’re a beautiful woman, Caroline, and I don’t believe for a minute that I’m the first man to tell you so.”
    She blushed and ran the tip of her tongue over her lower lip, drawing his eye to the delicious curve of her mouth, and leading him to wonder how many men had tasted it in the last nine years. She was more than beautiful; she was exquisite. Fine-boned, delicately featured…and seductively feminine, in a refined, understated way. How had he managed to dismiss all that, the first time around?
    She held the collar of her coat close to her throat and shivered, although her color remained high. “I think I’d like to go inside now.”
    “Do I embarrass you by speaking so frankly?”
    “No, but I’m surprised. We’ve been pretty much at odds ever since Paris. In fact, you’ve barely addressed a single word to me in the last four days, and now you’re suddenly full of compliments. Forgive me if I find that rather suspicious.”
    “Perhaps,” he said, “I’m having second thoughts about you. Perhaps I’ve misjudged you. Isn’t that possible?”
    “Possible.” She tilted her shoulder in a tiny shrug. “But not probable.”
    “Then perhaps you misjudge me.”
    “Equally possible, I suppose.”
    “And just as improbable?”
    “I’m willing to keep an open mind on the matter.”
    A curious lightness filled him, blurring the sharp edges ofhis grief. Tucking her arm firmly in his again, he said, “Then I propose we call a truce, at least for now.”
    Thoughtfully she tipped her head to one side, a slight movement only, but it was enough to send her hair sliding over her shoulder in a fall of cool, blond silk. It took all his self-control not to catch it in his hand and let it spill between his fingers. “I guess it won’t hurt to try.”
    He wasn’t quite so sure. All at once, none of the truths to which he held fast seemed quite as absolute anymore.
    “I have decided we shall remain here for another week,” Salvatore announced, when the adults congregated in the day salon for coffee, after dinner. “This is a peaceful place, a place to start the healing.”
    “Another week?” Callie glanced from Lidia, to Paolo.
    Neither seemed inclined to question the head of the household. Typical, she thought. The master speaks, and the other two jump to obey his commands. “I’d hoped to be back home by then.”
    Salvatore inspected her down the length of his aristocratic nose. “We have no wish to detain you, if you’re in a hurry to leave us, Caroline.”
    “It’s not that I’m in a hurry, Signor Rainero. You’ve been more than kind hosts and I’m grateful. However, I have obligations in San Francisco.”
    “And they are uppermost in your mind at this time, are they?”
    How smoothly he managed to shift the context of her words and leave them cloaked in unflattering connotation! “Not at all,” she said, meeting his gaze defiantly. “But I came here in a hurry and left others to take