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

sinuous back. And his green, green eyes…
    No! Resolutely she swung her legs out of bed and strode to the door.
    It was bitterly, bitterly cold, but she kept going, too nervous and jumpy to want to take the time to retrace her steps and retrieve her clothes. Silver light flooded the corridor, and passing window after window she saw a full moon, swathed in diaphanous drifts of cloud trailing languidly across the star-spiked sky. Rachel slipped noiselessly down the stairs and stopped, suddenly disorientated and wishing she had paid more attention earlier, instead of concentrating on Orlando Winterton’s bloody hands…
    Bloody hands. The words made images she was trying to forget come flooding back, and again she experienced that painful fizz inside her, as if someone had just pressed an electrode to her heart.
    Blindly she stumbled in what she thought was the right direction for the kitchen. But there were so many doors. She opened one door and hesitated on the threshold, trying to get her bearings. The room was huge—surely running the whole length of one side of the house—and in the silver-blue shadows nothing looked familiar. The walls were high and dark—possibly black—the furniture a mixture of beautiful antiques and startlingly modern pieces. But all of this faded into the background as her eye was drawn to a curved bay window in the middle.
    In it, bathed in moonlight as if spotlit on a stage, stood a piano. A grand piano.
    Without thinking she found herself crossing the room towards it on cold, silent feet, tentatively reaching out a finger and running it gently down the keys, so that a soft rattle was the only sound that resulted. They felt smooth, solid, expensive…everything that a good piano should be.
    She let her finger come to rest on Middle C. And pressed.
    The sound was rich and mellow, and it flowed right through her, reverberating against her tautly stretched nerves. Her stomach tightened, but her hunger was forgotten. Suddenly all that mattered was this instrument and the need to lose herself in its exquisite familiarity. Heedless of the biting cold, she sat down, placing her bare feet on the chill metal pedals, letting her fingers rest deliciously on the keys for a second and closing her eyes in relief.
    After a day of confusion, this, at last, was something she could understand and control. This was her way of interpreting the world, expressing emotion—the only way she had ever been shown and the only way she knew.
    The moonlight turned her hands a bloodless blue as they began very quietly, very tentatively, to play. Without thinking she found the piece that was flowing from her fingers was Chopin’s Nocturne in E Minor, its haunting notes flooding the night and filling her head with memories.
    Memories she hadn’t allowed to surface before, but suddenly wouldn’t be suppressed any longer.
    Closing her eyes, she gave in to them. Gradually she became aware that the keys were slippery with wetness and she realised she was crying, her tears dripping down onto her hands. She played on, not feeling the cold.
    Compared to the ice inside her, it was nothing.
    Sitting at his desk in the library, Orlando rubbed a hand over his tired eyes and leaned back in his chair. Apart from the soft red glow of the dying fire, the computer screen in front of him was the only source of light in the massive room, and he had been looking at it for too long. His eyes stung.
    Thankfully, much of his business was conducted internationally, so the long hours of the night when sleep would often evade him could be usefully spent working. His computer was state-of-the-art, fitted with the very latest in screen-reading software, which he had always refused to use, preferring instead to type by touch and magnify the words to a size that made it possible for him to read them.
    Technically.
    Tonight they seemed to slide across the edges of his vision and dissolve without penetrating his mind.
    The Middle Eastern border