The Ultimate Seduction by Dani Collins Read Free Book Online Page B

him deeply conscious of the shape of her Kewpie-doll mouth with its peaks in her top lip over a fat strawberry of a bottom one. Her scent, like Saponaria, somewhere between dewy grass and sun-warmed roses, threatened to erase all thought but making love to her again.
    “I only said what I did because I thought you were married. And you tricked me. I don’t like your trying to take advantage of me. To even the playing field...” He reached for the tailing ribbon that held her mask.
    “Noooo.” The sharp anguish in her voice startled him. She was genuinely terrified, straining into a twist to escape his loosening of the mask.
    He let go of the ribbon and her, horrified that he’d scared her so deeply, but he couldn’t help reaching to steady her when she staggered as she tried to catch the falling mask. Her shaking hands fumbled it before her, turning it around and around, trying to right it so she could put it on again. A desperate sob escaped her.
    It was too late. He’d seen what she was trying to hide, and the bottom dropped out of his heart. He touched her chin, wanting a better look.
    She knocked his hand away and flashed a look of fury at him. With her jaw set in livid mutiny, she stopped trying to replace her mask and stared him down with the kind of aggression that would make him fear for his life if she’d been armed.
    “Happy?” she charged.
    Not one little bit.
    As he took in the mottled shades of pink and red, all he saw was pain. He’d been in battle. He knew what bullets and flames and chemicals could do to the human body. That’s why his world had stopped last night when he’d thought a bomb was landing on the ramparts of the club.
    But these were healed injuries, as well as they’d ever get anyway. The ragged edge of the facial scar followed a crooked line like a country’s border on a map, sharply defining rescued flesh from the unharmed with a raised pink scar. It hedged a patch from over her left eye into the corner of her lid—she might have lost her sight, he acknowledged, cold dread touching his internal organs. Under her eye, it cut diagonally toward her nose before tracing down to the corner of her mouth and under her jawline, and then wound back to her hair.
    The side of her neck was only a little discolored, but the way the color fanned at the base of it made him suspect the scarring went down her arm and torso, too, maybe farther.
    As he brought his gaze back up to her face, he met eyes so bruised and wounded, he was struck with shame at causing her to reveal herself. He hadn’t been trying to humiliate her. This wasn’t meant as a punishment.
    The hatred in her eyes took it as such anyway, stabbing him with compunction.
    “I wouldn’t work for you if your country was knocked back into the Stone Age and we were overinventoried in animal fur and flint. I’m leaving. Now.”
    He didn’t try to stop her, sensing he’d misjudged her on a grand scale.
    She tied her mask into place without looking at him. When she pressed the button to open the doors, they didn’t cooperate, remaining closed while she swore at her watch.
    “Tiffany,” he cajoled, pulling her name from what he’d read, but not sure what he would say if he could persuade her to stay.
    “Die,” she ordered flatly.
    The doors opened and she walked out.

CHAPTER FOUR
    F OR THE FIRST time in months, Tiffany cried. Really cried as she hugged her knees in the shower and released sobs that echoed against the tiles. They racked her so hard she thought she’d throw up. She hated her life, hated herself, hated him.
    She’d still been processing his remark about her efforts being second-rate when he’d yanked back her curtain and looked at her as if she was an object of horror. As though he was repulsed.
    Sex was not worth this. Men weren’t. She was old enough, and educated enough, to know that having a husband and kids were not necessary ingredients to a woman’s happiness. Why then was she so gutted every time she