Seducing the Heiress by Martha Kennerson Read Free Book Online Page A

Pneumonia is nothing to play with at your age, so take your medicine and follow the doctor’s instructions.”
    â€œAt my age,” she huffed.
    â€œYou know what I’m saying. How’s the new nurse working out?” he asked, hoping she’d let that reference to her growing years slide past.
    â€œHe’s just fine, although having a male nurse still seems strange to me, you know.”
    â€œYes, I know.” Robert grinned, checked his watch and settled into his seat. This conversation was going to take a few minutes and he didn’t want to risk losing the connection by leaving the car and going into the building. “But he comes highly recommended.”
    â€œSo did the last one. What happened to that lovely nurse the agency sent over, anyway? Sonya something. She was very pretty and I liked her. I know she really liked you, too,” she said with a smile in her voice that he couldn’t miss.
    â€œAnd that was the problem—she liked me too much,” he murmured, more to himself than to his mother. Robert thought back to the night he’d returned home from a late business appointment only to find lovely Nurse Sonya waiting for him at his townhouse. A major problem since she was supposed to be stationed at his mother’s place over forty miles away.
    â€œWhat are you doing here and how the hell did you get in?” Robert demanded as he stood in the doorway of his bedroom.
    â€œI got the address and key from Momma Penny. I waited for your housekeeper to leave and I let myself in,” Sonya explained, batting her eyes and playing with her hair. “Momma Penny’s fine. Sound asleep, in fact, so I thought I’d come take care of you. Tuck you in, so to speak.”
    Sonya had stolen Momma Penny’s copy of the key to his house and evidently had snooped around to find the security code to his system and let herself in. She was waiting in his bed wearing a short and very sexy nurse costume. Had that happened a few years earlier, Robert would have loved playing games with the pretty nurse—even if she had been duplicitous in her attempt to gain his attention—but these days he had no interest in such behavior. He’d fired her on the spot.
    Robert knew he’d earned a certain reputation when it came to women. He had fallen in love once, only to have his heart battered and tossed back to him with the gift wrapping still intact. He’d found out that his college sweetheart was only after his money and was sleeping with someone he’d thought was a good friend. A friend whom he’d met as a boy after changing schools when he went to live with Momma Penny. Someone that personally knew Robert’s struggles to adjust to the world when his parents died, leaving him with a trust fund and no one, except a woman who wasn’t a blood relative, to give him the unconditional love that his parents were unable to provide.
    When Robert found out that Momma Penny and not his mother had been the one to bring him home from the hospital, and had been the one to stay on with the family just to keep his parents from sending him away to boarding school—the same fate relegated to them as children—things began to make sense. His mother and father’s hands-off approach to parenting and ultimately their deaths had made it hard for him to trust. So the betrayal of his best friend and his sweetheart had cut deep. Their disloyalty took away the one thing Robert had yet to be able to recapture—his ability to trust his heart to another woman.
    Robert promised himself never to enter into another relationship based on anything other than attraction. Lust he could handle; love was a different story. Robert thought that overwhelming feeling and total lack of control were more than anyone should have to deal with. That was, until he’d fallen hard for Farrah Blake. Now the only woman he wanted to be with was her, totally destroying his