The Wildest Heart by Rosemary Rogers Read Free Book Online

Narcissus discovering his own beauty in a pool of water, and could not stop staring at myself.
    I think I was a little mad that afternoon. Not only did I look like a stranger, but even my thoughts were not my own. I remember putting my hand up to touch my face, as if I could not believe it was mine, and the gesture had a strangely sensuous grace I had never possessed before. I was a woman, discovering her own beauty before a mirror—an Indian princess, carefully cloistered from men, and yet born to please them… and then, with a shattering force, the spell was broken.
    I hadn’t heard the door open until it slammed shut behind him, and I whirled around with an involuntary, gasping cry of fear.
    â€œWhat in hell do you mean, treating Tom that way? I tell you, girl, once and for all…”
    He had begun to shout at me in his loud, blustering voice, and I smelled the liquor on his breath as he came closer. And then his words trailed away as his jaw dropped, and I saw the look in his eyes as they slowly widened and then became narrow.
    â€œGood God!” he said, very slowly, and I saw the look of rage on his face replaced by something else. “Are you really the shy little spinster we all took you for? Is this what you’ve been hiding away all these months under those ugly clothes you wear? For what lover are you guarding those treasures I see, little Rowena?”
    For those few moments, while he was talking to me in that strange, thick voice, while his eyes were moving greedily over my body, I remained as frozen as a marble statue, incapable of motion, or of coherent thought.
    And then Sir Edgar began to laugh, and his arms reached for me.
    â€œTo think—to think you had me fooled—all these months, and right under my own roof too. Why, you’re a raving beauty, girl! The prettiest body—”
    â€œNo!” I remember saying. Had I already, without any experience to warn me, sensed his purpose? I had meant to scream the word, but it came out as a choking whisper from my dry throat.
    And then, when he put his hands on me, it was too late. My pride would not let me cry out aloud and beg him for mercy, and nor, I think, would it have done any good, for he had become a man possessed by lust.
    I struggled—I beat at him with my fists and kept on struggling until I was half-swooning with exhaustion. Somehow he had dragged me over to the bed, ripping my lovely sari off my body with his greedy, grasping fingers. His face loomed over mine and I heard him mutter hoarsely.
    â€œGod, you’re a lovely thing! I’ve got to have you, don’t you understand that? You’ve no right to hide such beauty away—no right to wear any clothes at all with a body like yours…”
    He kissed me, his mouth covering mine, stifling me so that now I panted and gasped for breath and heard the strange, whimpering noises that came from the back of my throat.
    The weight of his body pressed me down until I felt my back must surely break. But that pain was forgotten when a worse one took its place—a terrible searing agony like a knife thrust between my thighs. I would have screamed, then, if his mouth had not been pressed over mine. I remember that my body arched with shock as he gasped, groaned, and shuddered against me.
    It was over. He still leaned heavily above me, his sweat dripping onto my still body, but the terrible pain I had felt was gone, succeeded by a sticky wetness that I knew was blood.
    Of course. It’s normal for a virgin to bleed when she first lies with a man. I remember lying there, feeling as if every bone in my body had turned to water. I was no longer a virgin. I had been raped by my own stepfather. I watched his face change, its muscles growing slack as the taut expression of lust was wiped out by the gradual realization of what he had done.
    He suddenly rolled away from me with a groan, and I lay there watching him as he staggered to his feet, fingers