Vendetta by Susan Napier Read Free Book Online

hinged on his never finding out that she was a willing self-sacrifice.
    ‘You lured me here under false pretences. You drugged me and took off my clothes!’ she hissed at him goadingly.
    ‘Only the ones that were superfluous to requirements,’ he replied blandly.
    ‘What in the hell do you mean by that?’ She bristled like a spitting ginger kitten, all kinds of wild scenarios exploding through her scandalised imagination.
    ‘What do you think I mean?’ He stretched the arms behind his head languidly, expanding the impressive structure of his chest as he murmured tauntingly, ‘Are you wondering whether those sexy emerald-green panties are a tribute to my gentlemanly honour…or to my sexual ingenuity?’
    Since it happened to be exactly what she was thinking, Vivian reacted furiously. ‘In the circumstances, I hardly think the question of honour arises,’ she said scathingly.
    ‘You may be right,’ he stunned her by replying. He came up on one elbow and Vivian reflexively jerked the covers more securely around her.
    Unfortunately, her hasty movement tugged the coverings away from the other side of the bed, exposing Nicholas’s long, muscled left flank, lean hip and rippling abdomen. The skin was slightly darker on his half-raised leg and thick torso than on his hip, the naked swimsuit line jolting her with the knowledge that, while she might be semi-nude, he was totally naked!
    Thankfully his modesty was preserved by a vital fold of sheet, for Vivian’s wide-eyed attention lingered for a startled moment before being hurriedly transferred to his face.
    ‘Some parts of me are fortunately still extremely functional,’ he purred, his undamaged eye glinting with a predatory amusement. ‘Especially in the mornings…’
    ‘ Mornings? ’ Vivian’s hot face swivelled gratefully away from him towards the soft yellow-pink glow at the window. ‘But…it’s sunset,’ she protested in weak confusion. ‘It’s just getting dark…’
    ‘Actually, it’s getting light,’ he corrected. ‘That window faces east, not west.’
    Vivian sucked in a sharp breath as the full implication of what he was saying hit her. She hadn’t just lost a mere hour or two. She had already spent half a day and a whole night entirely at his mercy!
    ‘Quite so,’ he said softly. ‘This is the morning after, Vivian. Which, given the fact that we’re in bed together, naturally poses the deeply intriguing question: the morning after what? ’
    Vivian stared at the thin, sardonic curl of his mouth that hinted at depths of degradation she hadn’t even considered.
    ‘Oh, my God, what have you done?’ she whispered fearfully, her body shivering with the disgraceful echo of a half-remembered thrill.
    ‘More to the point, what haven’t I done?’ he murmured wickedly, pivoting on his elbow in a fluid flow of muscle to retrieve something from the bedside cabinet behind him.
    He offered it to her and, when she refused to let go of her flimsy shield of bedclothes, let a cascade of coloured rectangles spill on to the rumpled fabric between them. Her back glued protectively against the wall, Vivian frowned stiffly down, afraid to move, and frustrated that the surface of the bed was just beyond the range of her near-sighted focus.
    ‘Here, perhaps these will help.’ He sat up in a flurry of bedclothes, ignoring her automatic cringe as, moments later, he pushed her spectacles on to her wrinkled nose. ‘Better?’
    It was a hundred times worse! Vivian stared, appalled, at the photographs scattered like indecent confetti over the bed.
    ‘Oh, my God…! ’
    ‘It’s a little too late for prayers, Vivian. Your sins have already found you out. Quite graphically, too, wouldn’t you say?’
    ‘How…? I… You—’
    He interrupted her incoherent stammering smoothly. ‘I would have thought that the how was self-evident. There’s this clever modern invention called photography, you see…’
    The sarcastic flourish of his hand made Vivian utter