Sweet: A Dark Love Story by Kit Tunstall, R.E. Saxton Read Free Book Online

lifted his shoulder. “That’s mostly true, but I never said anything about marrying you. I don’t expect you to say ‘I do.’”
    For some reason, that offended her. “So now you expect me to be an unwed mother and your slut. I’m so glad we cleared that up.”
    He laughed softly. “I can’t marry you, because I can’t trust you to leave the island yet. Someday, when you’ve completely accepted you’re mine, we’ll consider it. In the meantime, there’s no reason to delay starting a family just for an old-fashioned concept. You won’t belong to me anymore with a piece of paper saying you’re mine than you do right now, sitting across from me in your virginal little nightgown.”
    His eyes darkened to a steel-gray. “That pleases me, by the way, because that’s the one I’d hoped you would wear on our wedding night.”
    She frowned, pausing in the process of bringing a forkful of fish to her mouth. “You just said there wasn’t going to be a wedding night.”
    Declan’s eyes smoldered. “No, I said there wasn’t going to be a marriage for a while. We’re definitely having a wedding night.”
    “Over my dead body.”
    He laughed, looking entirely too confident. “Just wait and see. You’ll come to me.”
    “You’re out of your mind, Mulgrew.” She finished bringing the fork to her mouth and briefly closed her eyes at the explosion of flavor on her tongue. For a psycho man with a fetish for abduction, and apparently for performing sex acts in the outdoors on dirty ground, he could certainly cook very well.
    “Tell me about your life, Kat.”
    “I thought you knew everything about me,” she said sullenly before scooping up another bite of fish.
    “I know the general details, but fill me in on the day-to-day. What do you do?”
    Feeling ridiculous, but deciding it was a safer topic of conversation than the others they had tackled, she dabbed her mouth with a linen napkin before replying. “Until last week, I attended college and lived in a dorm room, which my foster parents paid for.”
    He shook his head. “No, Claire and Clay didn’t pay for all that, sweet Kat.”
    She stiffened when he said her foster parents’ names. “They had to have. I was only in their care through the state for a couple of years, and they took on the expenses after that.”
    He laughed, and it was a dark sound that sent chills down her spine. “No, they’ve done exactly what I instructed them to do for the last four years. When I realized you were the key, the only link left to Joseph Evans, and that I could get what I wanted from you, I focused all my attention on you. When your term in foster care was almost up, I approached the Blakes about keeping you financially in their care.”
    She drew in a ragged breath as pain rippled through her. “You mean Claire and Clay didn’t want me? They were just going to let me leave when I turned eighteen? They only kept me for money?”
    Kat wanted to refuse to believe it, remembering how insistent they had been that she stay with them after she’d graduated and turned eighteen, and then helped her get settled in her dorm room right before college started. They had visited her every week, or she had gone to their home to do laundry and all the other “family” things that she had started to take for granted over the past six years. And he was telling her none of it had been real?
    He shook his head. “No, I doubt that. I think they were determined to keep you either way, but I simply made it possible for them to do so more comfortably.”
    She was still wounded, Raw pain flared inside her as though someone had abraded her nerves with an emery board. “I don’t understand. They didn’t want me until you paid them to keep me?”
    He sighed, sounding exasperated. “No, as I said, I simply made it easier for them to do so.”
    She shook her head, her mind whirling with confusion. “But why would you do that, and why would they allow it?”
    He wore a strange