Mistress: Hired for the Billionaire's Pleasure by India Grey Read Free Book Online

board and replaced the pepper he’d started to slice. She wondered if he could feel the frantic beat of her heart throbbing through her body, vibrating in the tiny space that separated them.
    ‘Now…take hold of the pepper,’ he said tonelessly. He was standing right behind her, and his voice close to her ear made a shiver run through her. She picked up the pepper in one shaking hand, holding onto it as if it was her last connection with reality.
    ‘Good. Now, in the other hand pick up the knife.’ His tone was carefully blank, but she could sense the tightly controlled frustration behind his words. Biting her lip in shame, she picked up the knife, watching the blade quiver in her uncertain grip until Orlando’s hand closed over hers.
    She gasped.
    His arms encircled her, safe, strong, and she had to muster every inch of self-control she had to prevent her from leaning back into his embrace and letting her head fall on to his chest.
    ‘No, I can’t !’
    She dropped the knife with a clatter and clenched her fists. Instantly he stepped backwards, and she turned round in time to see his uninjured hand go to his head, his fingers raking through his hair in a gesture of wordless exasperation.
    ‘I’m sorry…’ she said lamely. ‘It’s just…it’s my hands. I have to be careful. They’re…precious…’
    He suddenly went very still.
    ‘Precious?’
    For a moment she watched as he half-raised his own hands, gazing downwards at them, at the fingers of the left one held rigidly in place by the bloodstained gauze. And then he turned away.
    Precious. God, her shallowness took his breath away. Her hands were precious. Jeez.
    She was unreal. His hands…His hands weren’t just precious, they were his lifeline. This spoiled little girl would never understand that.
    Not that he had any intention of her finding out.



CHAPTER FOUR
    R ACHEL’S eyes snapped open, and for a moment she felt suffocating fear as she stared into black nothingness. Her hands were twisted in the soft duvet, her fingers cramped, and the darkness was filled with the sickening thud of her heart.
    Whimpering quietly, she unravelled her hands from the bedcovers and held them out in front of her as her eyes gradually adjusted to the gloom. She had dreamed of Carlos—a bizarre, terrible dream, where he chased her down a labyrinth of narrow lanes in her wedding dress, a knife flashing in his hand. And she knew with the terrible certainty that came in sleep that he intended to damage her hands with it, in revenge for humiliating him.
    And then suddenly Orlando was there, naked to the waist and standing between her and Carlos, shielding her, until the next thing she knew her wedding dress was scarlet with his blood. All she could do was hold his lacerated hands, knowing as the blood kept flowing that she had brought this on him.
    Earlier on in the kitchen she had felt dizzy as his bare chest had been revealed…too shocked and too shy to take in what she was seeing. But while her conscious mind had been having a fit of the vapours it seemed her eyes had missed nothing—noting every muscle, every sinew, every inch of delicious flesh. And they had chosen the dead hours of the night to revisit them all in disturbing detail.
    Her pulse raced, and her body twitched and throbbed with strange, uncomfortable sensations. In the thick silence she could hear nothing but the thudding of her heart.
    Until her stomach gave a deafening rumble.
    The sound broke the spell and made her laugh out loud with relief. Of course—she’d eaten virtually nothing all day, which totally explained the bizarre feelings that buzzed through her nerve-endings.
    She was hungry, that was all. So hungry.
    She had no idea what time it was, but food suddenly seemed like an imperative. She longed for the normality of hot buttered toast or a cup of tea. God, a chocolate biscuit seemed like the most desirable thing in the entire world…
    Apart from Orlando Winterton’s chest. And his