The Dark Side of Desire by Julia James Read Free Book Online

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    Desire
.
    It was as flagrant as his audacity in letting his long-lashed eyes rest on her like a physical caress.
    Tangible. Intimate …
    She thrust up from her chair, stood up, every muscle taut like a wire under impossible tension. She had to go—right now.
    ‘Do please excuse me. I really must …’
    Her voice was high and clipped and breathless. Thoughts seared through her mind.
    I can’t cope with this! It’s too flagrant, too overpowering, and it’s all far, far too impossible! Impossible to have anything to do with a man from my father’s world! Impossible to have anything to do with any man when my overwhelming responsibility is for my grandmother. So it doesn’t matter—doesn’t matter a jot what this ridiculous reaction to him is, I can’t let it go anywhere, and I have to stop it in its tracks now. Right now!
    But he wasn’t to be evaded. Instead he matched her gesture, getting to his feet in a lithe, effortless movement, towering over her. Too close—much too close. She stepped back, trying not to bump into the empty chair beside her.
    ‘You know …’ he said, and his voice was a deep, dark drawl that set her nerve-endings vibrating at some weird, subliminal frequency. His eyes did not relinquish hers, did not allow her to tear her gaze away from his. ‘I don’t think I
do
excuse you, Ms Lassiter. Not two nights in a row.’ The dark glint in his eye was shot through with something that upped that strange subliminal frequency. ‘This time I think I will just do—
this
.’
    He moved so fast she did not see it coming. His hand fastened around her wrist. Not tightly, not gripping it, but encircling it … imprisoning it.
    He looked down at her, even taller somehow, his shoulders broader, his eyes darker.
    ‘I’d like to dance with you,’ he said.
    He drew her hand into the crook of his arm so that her hand splayed involuntarily on the dark sleeve of his tuxedo jacket, her nails white against the smooth black cloth. She wanted to jerk free, tear herself away, but he was looking down at her still, a taunting smile playing on his lips.
    ‘You don’t want to make a scene, do you, Ms Lassiter?’ he said, and a saturnine eyebrow quirked. The dark eyes were glinting. Mocking.
    Emotion flashed in her eyes. For a wild and impossible moment,she wanted to do exactly what he’d said she could not—tug her hand free of its imprisonment, push away from him, storm off in a swirl of skirts and leave him standing there.
    But there were too many people around. This was a formal function, with people who knew him, knew her father, knew who
she
was. Too many eyes were coming their way. Heads were turning at other tables set too close by.
    He saw her dilemma, mocked it, and started to draw her away, towards the dance floor beyond. He could feel the stiffness of her body, the anger in the set of her shoulders. Well, he had anger of his own. Anger because she had spent the entire meal as if he did not exist, blanking him out, doing her best to ignore him, refusing to see him, talk to him. Refusing to do anything except the one thing she could not refuse.
    She could not refuse to react to him.
    Satisfaction—shot with grimness—spiked through him. That was the one thing she could not do. She could not hide her body’s response to him. A response that shimmered from her just from his presence at her side, despite the tense straining of her body away from his.
    They reached the dance floor. She resisted him every step of the way, but was helpless to do anything about it lest she break that unspoken code of her class—never make a scene, never draw attention to yourself, never break the rules of social engagement. And he would use that code ruthlessly for his own advantage—to get what he wanted. To draw her to him.
    ‘Shall we?’
    The taunt was in his low voice even as he turned her towards him, slipping a hand around her waist. His other hand clasped hers and he started to move her into the