The Captain of All Pleasures by Kresley Cole Read Free Book Online Page A

gruffly, as he bent to untie and pull off her filthy boots. Obliged to place her hands on his wide, solid shoulders, she had to resist moving her fingers over the firm bunching of his muscles.
    When he removed the first boot, his eyes narrowed. He held it up to the lantern, where they both saw that the scuffed brown leather had soaked up splattered blood like a sponge.
    â€œAre you hurt?” he barked as he dropped that one and rushed to remove the other.
    â€œThat’s not—that’s not my blood.” Merely thinking about where that blood came from, about the falls and the running enervated her.
    His eyebrows rose in amazement, and he studied her face before returning to his task. Nicole felt foolish when he took off her socks, leaving her to furrow her toes in the cabin’s plush rug. But she stood unresisting, knowing she needed his help just now. He strode to his bureau and brought back a pair of thick woolen socks. She hadn’t realized her feet were cold, but when she spied those socks her body cried for them.
    He jerked them over her feet, and her eyes closed in blissful comfort. “That feels so good,” she breathed. She opened her eyes and frowned at the sound of her husky, sensual voice. When had she ever sounded like that?
    He looked at her curiously, then stood abruptly. As if he needed to explain, he said, “Your feet were like ice.”
    Nicole nodded slowly, overwhelmed with fatigue. She took such a deep breath that her head moved with it. Her eyelids opened more sluggishly with each blink.
    With something like resignation in his eyes, he placed a huge hand on her lower back and began guiding her to his bed. “Come on. You’re exhausted.”
    â€œOh. No, I can’t. I couldn’t.”
    When she resisted, he said, “I won’t hurt you.”
    She focused on his face to tell him she absolutely could not be in his bed, but no words came. Her legs shook. She must have gone soft in the rich surroundings of her last school, because a second later they simply gave out. She sank onto his bed, bewildered by her weakness.
    â€œWill you be all right?”
    â€œYes. No?” she whispered. “I’m just so tired.”
    â€œThe night is catching up with you, so rest for a bit. Then we’ll talk about who those men were,” Sutherland said, his voice neither menacing nor kind as he lightly grasped her shoulder and pushed her down. He squeezed it firmly once, letting her know without words that he wanted her to stay put, before releasing her to walk over to the basin. He brought back a soaked cloth and began washing her scraped hands.
    Nicole looked up at him one last time as he brushed at a smudge on her face, trying to decide if she could trust him, knowing she didn’t have much choice. She couldn’t tell anything. His face could have been made of marble for all the emotion it showed. Nicole unwillingly drifted to sleep and dreamed that Sutherland said in disbelief, “Her eyes are blue.”

    Derek didn’t make as large a dent in his bottle as he’d intended while he sat and watched over the girl curled in his bed. He’d definitely not predicted his first night with her to be like this. Usually he was impatient to bed a woman and get her gone, but she had been afraid and possibly hurt. Still, he wasn’t resigned to having her sleep here the whole night.
    He was, he had to admit, proud that tonight he’d overcome his natural selfishness in order to do something considerate. Why he was being so charitable to a prostitute, he had no idea. It must have been the liquor affecting his brain, because the girl could be prickly and rude, and he certainly did not get involved with women for more than purely physical reasons.
    That’s just what he needed to be doing, taking on the troubles of a young prostitute. As if he didn’t have enough weight on his shoulders.
    Even more remarkable, he was experiencing the