His Mistress for a Million by Trish Morey Read Free Book Online Page B

seen as available.’
    ‘Maybe you should just put out a press release.’ She lookedlongingly at the door again. ‘When is my bag supposed to arrive? I want to go.’
    ‘At least think about it, Cleo. It’s a lot of money to throw away. Can you afford that?’
    ‘You’re crazy. Just look at me.’ She held her arms out at her sides, her heart jumping wildly in her chest, her words tumbling over her tongue. ‘I’m a cleaner. I muck out bathrooms and rubbish bins and have the split nails and red hands to prove it. I’m short and dumpy and have never once in my life been called so much as pretty, and you’re suggesting I could pretend to be your mistress? Who’s going to believe that for a start? They’ll think you’ve gone mad and they’d be right.’
    He answered her with a raised eyebrow and a half-hearted shrug as he eased closer. ‘I think you underestimate your charms.’
    Charms? What planet was this man from? ‘Why me ? You could have any woman in the world. You probably already have.’
    He turned her implied insult to his advantage. ‘Exactly. Which is why I don’t want just any woman in the world.’ He was close now, so close she could see the individual lashes that framed his dark eyes, close enough to see his pupils flare as he held out his fingers to her cheek. She flinched but he kept coming, tracing the line of her cheek with the backs of his fingers. ‘I want you.’
    Her heart missed a beat or two. She tried to shake her head but still his fingers remained, his touch feather-light and yet bone-shudderingly deep in effect.
    ‘I don’t…I can’t…’
    And he pulled his hand away, concern muddying his eyes as if something had just occurred to him. ‘You’re not a virgin?’
    The intimacy of the question threw her for a moment. She could feel her cheeks burning up as she fought to find ananswer. ‘I thought this was about pretending. Why should whether or not I’ve ever slept with anyone even be an issue?’
    He shrugged. ‘Because there will be nights we are forced to share a bed to keep up appearances. And it’s not beyond the realms of possibility that as a man and a woman, together, we might wish to seek mutual pleasure in each other’s bodies.’
    Help! ‘So you expect sex, then, as part of this deal?’
    He frowned and drew away, as if the very idea of her asking offended him. ‘Not necessarily. Just that it may well be a by-product of our arrangement.’
    Sex as a by-product of our arrangement?
    How formal that sounded. How impersonal. It sounded more like a business deal, which she supposed it was. Not that she’d been involved in too many business deals, especially where they included a sex clause.
    ‘I don’t want it,’ she ventured, not entirely sure if she meant just the contract or the sex or both. Because there was something about Andreas’ touch that sent her senses into overdrive, something about his touch that made a secret part of her ache in ways it shouldn’t, especially not for a man she’d only just met, a man she knew nothing about.
    ‘It’s a good offer,’ he continued, as gently and convincingly as a parent trying to get a child to drink its milk. ‘It’s a fixed-term contract and in one month you go home. All expenses paid. First-class travel naturally.’
    He watched her face, searching for the crack in her resolve. ‘And no sex, if that’s what you want. Though if it did happen, I can guarantee it wouldn’t mean anything.’
    His words blurred. “It wouldn’t mean anything.” And all she kept hearing was the echo of the words Kurt had said to her when she’d told him she loved him. And he’d just laughed as he’d yanked up his jeans. “What’s your problem? It didn’t mean anything. You really are stupid.”
    And all she had felt was the bottom falling out of her world as her newly discovered heart had lain shredded. She’d made a pointless journey, thrown what she’d always believed to be special away on a deadbeat who’d