The Secret Pearl by Mary Balogh Read Free Book Online Page B

retired gratefully to her room. She was feeling somewhat overwhelmed by it all—by the events of the past two months, by the great good fortune of finding such a post when she had not been to that employment agency for a week, by the unexpected discovery that the post was no ordinary one at all. The journey had been long and exhausting.
    And she had just that morning had one of her great fears put to rest—she was not with child.
    Altogether, she thought, sitting by the window of her room, enjoying the peaceful scene outside and the gentle breeze that lifted the curtains and fanned her cheeks, she was far more well blessed than she could have expected to be just two months before.
    She might have hanged. She might still hang. But she would not think of it. Today her new life had begun, and she was going to be happier than she had been at any other time in her life—since the age of eight.
    She removed her dress, folded it neatly over the back of a chair, and lay down on top of the bedcovers in her chemise. How different from her room in London, she thought again, looking up to a silk-covered canopy over the bed, and looking about at neatness and cleanliness and hearing nothing but silence about her, except for the distant chirping of birds.
    She closed her eyes to float on blissful drowsiness. And saw him again—his face dark and angular and harsh, the scar a livid slash across it from the corner of his eye to his chin. Bending over her, his dark cold eyes looking directly into hers.
    His hands on her, first between her thighs and at the most secret place and then beneath her. And that other part of him searing its red-hot and relentless path into her very depths. She could feel it tearing her apart.
    “Whore,” he said to her. “Don’t think ever again to escape that label. You are a whore now and will be for the rest of your life, no matter how far or fast you run.”
    “No.” She shook her head from side to side on the bed, braced her feet more firmly on the floor, tried to pull back against his powerful hands so that he would not push so deeply into her. “No.”
    “This is not rape,” he said. “You have sold yourself to me of your own free will. You are going to take my money.”
    “Because I am starving,” she said, pleading with him. “Because I have not eaten for two days. Because I must survive.”
    “Whore,” he said softly. “It is because you enjoy it. You are enjoying it, aren’t you?”
    “No.” She squirmed to release herself from the strong hands that held her while he worked his pleasure in her. “No.”
    No. No. There was nothing of herself left. No dignity. No privacy. No identity. Deprived of her clothes. Held wide by his knees and the powerful muscles of his thighs. Invaded to the very core of her being. No.
    “No. No. No!”
    She was sitting up on the bed, sweating, shaking. The familiar dream. The dream that was haunting her nightly. One would have thought that it would be Hobson’s dead face that would come to her as soon as she released her hold on consciousness, she thought, but it was not. It was that of the gentleman with the ugly scar who had hovered over her, taking the very last possession that had been hers to give—or sell.
    Fleur got up wearily from the bed and stood before the window to cool her face. Would she never forget him? The sight of him? The feel of him?
    Had he really said those words to her? She could no longer remember. But his face and his body had said them even if he had not uttered them aloud.
    There surely could not be an uglier, more evil man in the world, she thought. And yet, memory reminded her, he had bought her food and insisted that she eat it. And he had paid her three times what she had asked for outside the theater. He had not done anything to her that she had not freely consented to.
    And he had brought her a cold cloth with which to cleanse away the blood and soothe herself.
    She rested her face in her hands. She must forget. She must