Her Christmas Fantasy & The Winter Bride by Lynne Graham, Penny Jordan Read Free Book Online

voice shaking under the weight of her suppressed emotion. ‘I came here—’
    â€˜I know why you came here,’ he interrupted her with unexpected sternness. ‘You came to be looked over as a potential wife for Mary Hanford’s precious son.
    â€˜Where’s your pride?’ he demanded scornfully. ‘However, a potential bride is all you will ever be. Mary Hanford knows quite well who she wants Henry to marry, and I’m afraid it isn’t going to be you…’
    â€˜Not now,’ Lisa agreed shortly. ‘Not—’
    â€˜Not ever,’ Oliver told her. ‘Mary won’t allow Henry to marry any woman who she thinks might have the slightest chance of threatening her own superior position in Henry’s life. His wife will not only have to take second place to her but to covertly acknowledge and accept that fact before she’s allowed to marry him. And besides, the two of you are soobviously unsuited to one another that the whole thing’s almost a farce. You’re far too emotionally turbulent and uncontrolled for Henry… He wouldn’t have a clue how to handle you…’
    Lisa couldn’t believe her ears.
    â€˜You, of course, would,’ she challenged him with acid sweetness, too carried away by her anger and the heat of the moment to realise what she was doing, the challenge she was issuing him, the risks she was taking.
    Then it was too late and he was cutting the ground from beneath her feet and making a shock as icy-cold as the snow melting on the tops of the Yorkshire hills that were his home run down her spine as he told her silkily, ‘Certainly,’ and then added before she could draw breath to speak, ‘And, for openers, there are two things I most certainly would do that Henry obviously has not.’
    â€˜Oh, yes, and what exactly would they be?’ Lisa demanded furiously.
    â€˜Well, I certainly wouldn’t have the kind of relationship with you—or with any woman who I had the slightest degree of mild affection for, never mind being on the point of contemplating marrying—which would necessitate you feeling that you had to conceal anything about yourself from me, or that you needed to impress my family and friends with borrowed plumes, with the contents of another woman’s wardrobe. And the second…’ he continued, ignoring Lisa’s quick, indrawn breath of mingled chagrin and rage.
    He paused and looked at her whilst Lisa, driven well beyond the point of no return by the whole farce of her ruined Christmas in general and his part in it in particular, prompted wildly, ‘Yes, the second is…?’
    â€˜This,’ he told her softly, taking the breath from her lungs, the strength from her muscles and, along with them, the will-power from her brain as he stepped forward and took her in his arms and then bent his head and kissed her as Henry hadnever kissed her in all the eight months of their relationship—as no man had ever kissed her in the whole history of her admittedly modest sexual experience, she recognised dizzily as his mouth moved with unbelievable, unbeatable, unbearable sensual expertise on hers.
    Ordinary mortal men did not kiss like this. Ordinary mortal men did not behave like this. Ordinary mortal men did not have the power, did not cup one’s face with such tender mastery. They did not look deep into your eyes whilst they caressed your mouth with their own. They did not compel you, by some mastery you could not understand, to look back at them. They did not, by some unspoken command, cause you to open your mouth beneath theirs on a whispered ecstatic sigh of pure female pleasure. They did not lift their mouths from yours and look from your eyes to your half-parted lips and then back to your eyes again, their own warming in a smile of complicit understanding before starting to kiss you all over again.
    Film stars in impossibly extravagant and highly acclaimed,