The Best Way to Lose by Janet Dailey Read Free Book Online Page A

don’t think I’ll be wanting to celebrate Christmas this year.”
    “I suppose not.” He swirled the cubes in the amber-colored liquor and watched their spinning.
    Pilar looked up to the brilliant chandelier, the dangling crystals multiplying the lightfrom its candle-bulbs. She blinked her eyes in an effort to ease their wretched dryness. There was such an aching void inside her that she wanted to cry.
    “What’s the matter with me?” She murmured the question, then bit at her lip. Turning, she cast a silently beseeching look at Trace, as if he might be able to provide the answer. “I’m a woman who’s just buried her husband. I should be crying my eyes out, yet I haven’t shed a tear—not once.”
    After an initial stillness at her confessional rush of words, Trace set his glass on the table next to hers and slowly approached her. They’d spent the better part of the last three days together, but this was the first time she’d shown that she felt any closeness to him because of what they’d been through.
    “Sometimes it hurts too much to cry.” His gray eyes darkened with a gentle light as he brought his hands up to cup the rounded points of her shoulders.
    For so long, Pilar had been denying herself the physical comfort so many had attempted to offer her, rejecting such contact. Now she was unconsciously seeking it. Her hands seemed to automatically curve themselves to his middle. She felt the life flowing in the hard flesh beneath the jacket material and the heat of a living body.
    “But I want to cry,” she insisted, feeling the many threads of control snapping one by one. A trembling started, the vibrations growingstronger until she began to shake visibly with her pain. “Why can’t I cry for him?” Her breath was coming in little sobs. “Why can’t I cry for myself?” She closed her painfully arid eyes as the dry sobs shook her shoulders. She beat her head against the point of his chin. “Why? Why?”
    There was a sudden collapsing of all the bonds of restraint and she swayed into him, letting her head rest against the side of his jaw. The contents of the soothing words he murmured were unimportant; it was the sound of his voice that mattered, and the human arms that held her close. His hands rubbed and stroked her as if trying to massage away the empty ache within.
    His body absorbed the shuddering force of hex silent crying while the molding pressure of his hands urged her closer. The powerful desire to comfort her was slowly being overridden by the sensation of her firmly round breasts and the slim saddle of her hips imprinting themselves on his flesh. Raw hunger, too long stifled, began to surface with a gnawing strength that ate away at his sense of decency and discretion.
    He turned his mouth into the side of her hair near her temple, moving to seek the intimate feel of her skin. It tasted warm and sweet, scented with some elusive fragrance. Her head was tipped back, making it easy for him to follow the patrician curve of her cheekbones down to the corner of her lips.When his mouth rolled onto them, her lips seemed to soften under the possessive warmth of the contact.
    It was a fleeting response, too casual and too indifferent, not at all what he needed to satisfy the urges that had been with him too long. When she would have turned away from his kiss, Trace spread his fingers into her hair and cupped her head between his hands to hold it still.
    Shocked by the blatant, driving passion of the hard mouth eating at her tips, Pilar tugged at his forearms and struggled to break away. The protesting sounds from her throat were muffled by the smothering pressure of his kiss. Her heart pounded wildly in panic. One minute she had known only comfort in his arms. There had been nothing to warn her of this aggressively sexual assault. On top of all the emotional torment she’d been through, it seemed too much.
    In desperation Pilar clawed at his face with her fingernails. An inch-long set of red