Sinful Seduction by Ann Christopher Read Free Book Online

flashing her breasts at him as she threaded her arms through the T-shirt and yanked it down over her head.
    Her reward? The sharp hitch of his breath.
    Leaning back against the pillows, she risked a quick glance at his openmouthed face. He looked stunned, much to her immense satisfaction. Most likely he was dismayed that someone with such negligible cleavage had the nerve to flash anyone, but still. The reprieve from his nonstop commands felt good. For a millisecond.
    Then the intimacy of his still-warm shirt against her bare breasts hit her in a rush, bringing her far too close to him. Her head was a constant throb of pain and her leg screamed, but she could still smell the clean musk of him, and the subtle scent of leather wrapped in something spicier and more exotic.
    It was almost like being folded into his arms, and that was something she didn’t need to be thinking about. So she focused on overcoming the immediate crisis, which was about to get much worse, pain wise.
    “Let’s go,” she barked.
    Sandro blinked and snapped back to attention. Resuming his position on the sofa at her hip, he gently inserted the scissors’ tip beneath the waistband of both her panties and jeans and began to cut along the seam. His expression was grim, his focus absolute. So careful was each snip that she never felt the cold steel of the blades, not even once.
    At last he came to the bottom, exposing her bleeding calf. He stared down at it, his jaw tightening, and then reached for one of the washcloths and rubbing alcohol that Mickey had provided.
    His gaze flickered up, down the length of her body to her face.
    Whatever he’d seen—it wasn’t good.
    “This will hurt,” he warned, placing a towel beneath her leg. “I need to really clean it. We don’t know how long you’ll be stuck here, and I don’t want to take any risks with infection—”
    “Just do it,” she muttered wearily, closing her eyes and covering them with her arm. “Get it over with.”
    Foolish words. He poured alcohol over the wound and she jackknifed up with a sharp yell of pain. If he’d used a sword to sever her leg below the knee, it couldn’t hurt worse than this.
    Somehow, she choked the agony back, locking it away.
    In that horrible moment, when she wanted to scream and sob with agony, she remembered Tony, Sandro and all the other soldiers who’d fought overseas, endured true hardships and been injured or killed.
    This, on the other hand, was nothing, and she would not cry like a five-year-old.
    So she gritted her teeth, gasping for breath.
    “I’m sorry,” Sandro murmured, over and over again, sounding choked and distraught, and his emotion totally at odds with the cold-eyed raptor’s gaze he’d unleashed on her a minute ago. “I don’t want to hurt you. I’m sorry, Sky. I’m sorry—”
    Sweating now, clammy, she clenched her muscles against the pain and tried not to vomit. She also resisted the urge to check the injury herself and see how much her leg now resembled a lamb shank. Thank God she couldn’t see it. That would probably put her right over the edge.
    Still, she needed to know. “How bad is it? Don’t lie.”
    “You need stitches. A lot of them.”
    “But how—”
    “Mickey was a medic. A very good medic.”
    Well, thank goodness for small favors. There was no anesthetic available, no sterile hospital or qualified surgeon to make sure she didn’t end up with a Frankenstein scar, but at least Mickey knew how to stitch a wound.
    “Get him in here.” Her chest heaved, straining against the twin efforts of talking and managing the pain. “And get me some more scotch.”

Chapter 5
    T he lightning and thunder eventually moved on, but the driving rain stayed behind, lashing against the windows in an endless pinging rattle. Skylar fell into a restless and exhausted doze, her stitched-and-bandaged leg now propped on pillows. There’d been some discussion of carrying her upstairs, to one of the bedrooms, but Sandro and Mickey