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

situation he was dealing with was balanced on a knife-edge. Hired as a consultant on aerial tactics and weapons deployment by the government, he was monitoring the situation on an hour-by-hour basis, grimly holding out against sending planes into an area where they had about as much chance of surviving as a pheasant over the Easton beech woods in shooting season.
    As he knew all too well. It had been on a similar raid that Felix had been shot down. Or that was the supposition: they’d never even recovered his plane.
    Sighing, Orlando got up and went to stand at one of the long windows, feeling a gust of cold air as he pulled back the curtain and looked out. Around the relentless blackness in the centre of his vision he could see the courtyard was bathed in moonlight.
    With something that felt almost like a physical blow he recalled Felix’s kindness that last time when he’d come home on leave, at the time when Andrew Parkes had given Orlando his diagnosis. Felix had accepted it with resignation, and for the remainder of his leave had treated Orlando with a horrible gentleness bordering on respect. When he had said goodbye it had almost as if he knew it would be the last time.
    He’d had no intention of their relationship carrying on as before, Orlando realised now. As far as Felix had been concerned, if Orlando wasn’t the big brother he could compete with and look up to, he was no brother at all. Nothing.
    Orlando leaned back against the wooden shutter, tipping his head back and banging it softly, rhythmically, against the paneling. The pain reminded him that he was still alive. Sometimes he felt that he was disappearing, that just as the world was fading before his eyes, so he was fading from the eyes of the world.
    Somewhere in the distance he could hear music. Maybe he’d finally lost it? he thought with savage desolation, striding to the door and pulling it open.
    But he hadn’t imagined it. Music was rippling through the dark rooms of the sleeping house, filling the empty spaces with sweet, sad resonance. With emotion. With life.
    In the doorway of the grand salon he stopped, his breath catching in his throat. The effect of the music in the moonlit stillness was profound—it vibrated through him, smashing down defences he had spent the last year building. The room was inkblack washed with silver, and he turned his head, so that at the edge of his vision he could see her.
    She had her back to him, her head tilted up so that her glowing red hair cascaded down over the thin slip of pale silk she was wearing. He could see with startling clarity the gleam of her bare shoulder in the moonlight, the shadowed drape of silk at the narrow part of her waist, just before it swelled out into sumptuous fullness. Hungrily, helplessly, his eyes sought her, desperate for more; but, as always, the instant he looked directly at her she disappeared into the black vortex in the centre of his vision. He felt his hands ball into fists of frustration as the music tugged invisible chords inside him, reawakening the feelings and needs he strove so hard to annihilate.
    He was hardly aware of crossing the room, was conscious only of the thudding of blood in his veins beneath the soaring swell of music that was flowing with perfect fluency and exquisite grace from her fingertips.
    Her precious fingertips.
    He felt a moan of realisation escape him. Oh, God. He’d been so wrapped up in himself that he hadn’t given her a chance to explain what she’d meant. He’d thought she was some silly, pampered princessy type, who didn’t want to damage her false nails, but she was a pianist …
    Remorse and self-loathing stole through him. His bandaged fingers throbbed and ached as he gripped the table beside him, waiting for this unwelcome, stinging insight into the man he had become to subside.
    The music filled his head, each lovely, liquid note echoing inside the empty spaces of his heart. Until he noticed, above the piano, another sound.
    An