One Night: Red-Hot Secrets: A Secret Disgrace / Secrets of a Powerful Man / Wicked Secrets
One Night of Consequences…A Secret DisgraceCaesar Falconari can’t believe the woman who almost ruined his precious reputation after their night of unadulterated passion still fiercely fires his blood. Discovering that their union created more than memories, the Sicilian Duke demands that Louise wears his band of gold!Secrets of a Powerful ManSalvatore Castallano is haunted by the accident that left a blank in his memory. His young daughter is the one bright light in his dark existence and he’ll do anything for her… Even if that means moving Darcy Rivers under his roof! But Salvatore is getting closer to uncovering Darcy’s secret…Wicked SecretsFormer pilot Mia Brandt is stranded on the same island as Tag Johnson – who's distractingly handsome…and Mia's unforgettable one-nighter from four years ago. But when Tag blurts out that they're engaged, their no-strings arrangement is out! And an even bigger secret has taken its place…
Читать One Night: Red-Hot Secrets: A Secret Disgrace / Secrets of a Powerful Man / Wicked Secrets онлайн беплатно
One Night: Red-Hot Secrets
A Secret Disgrace
Penny Jordan
Secrets of a Powerful Man
Chantelle Shaw
Wicked Secrets
Anne Marsh
Table of Contents
PENNY JORDAN, one of Mills & Boon’s most popular authors, unfortunately passed away on December 31st, 2011. She left an outstanding legacy, having sold over 100 million books around the world. Penny wrote a total of 187 novels, including the phenomenally successful A Perfect Family, To Love, Honour and Betray, The Perfect Sinner and Power Play, which hit the New York Times bestseller list. Loved for her distinctive voice, she was successful in part because she continually broke boundaries and evolved her writing to keep up with readers’ changing tastes. Publishers Weekly said about Jordan, ‘Women everywhere will find pieces of themselves in Jordan’s characters.’ It is perhaps this gift for sympathetic characterization that helps to explain her enduring appeal.
‘YOU say it was your grandparents’ wish that their ashes be buried here, in the graveyard of the church of Santa Maria?’
The dispassionate male voice gave away as little as the shadowed face. Its bone structure was delineated with strokes of sunlight that might have come from Leonardo’s masterly hand, revealing as they did the exact nature of the man’s cultural inheritance. Those high cheekbones, that slashing line of taut jaw, the hint of olive-toned flesh, the proud aquiline shape of his nose—all of them spoke of the mixing of genes from the invaders who had seen Sicily and sought to possess it. His ancestors had never allowed anything to stand in the way of what they wanted. And now his attention was focused on her.
Instinctively she wanted to distance herself from him, to conceal herself from him, she recognized, and she couldn’t stop herself from stepping back from him, her ankle threatening to give way as the back of her pretty wedged shoe came up against the unseen edge of the gravestone behind her.
‘Take care.’
He moved so fast that she froze, like a rabbit pinned down by the swift, deathly descent of the falcon from which his family took its name. Long, lean tanned fingers closed round her wrist as he jerked her forward, the mint-scented warmth of his breath burning against her face as he leaned nearer to deliver an admonishment.
It was impossible for her to move. Impossible, too, for her to speak or even think. All she could do was feel—suffer beneath the lava-hot flow of emotions that had erupted inside her to spill into every sensitive nerve-ending she possessed. This was indeed torture. Torture … or torment? Her body convulsed on a violent surge of self-contempt. Torture. There was no torment in this man’s hold on her, no temptation. Nothing but self-loathing and … and indifference.
But her whispered, ‘Let go of me,’ sounded far more like the broken cry of a helpless victim than the cool, calm command of a modern and independent woman.
She smelled of English roses and lavender; she looked like an archetypical Englishwoman. She had even sounded like one until he had touched her, and she had shown him the fierce Sicilian passion and intensity that was her true heritage.
‘Let go of me!’ she had demanded.
Caesar’s mouth hardened against the images her words had set free from his memory. Images and memories so sharply painful that he automatically recoiled from them. So much pain, so much damage, so much guilt for him to bear.
So why do what he had to do now? Wasn’t that only going to increase her deserved animosity towards him, and increase his own guilt?
Because he had no choice. Because he had to think of the greater good. Because he had to think, as he had always had to think, of his people and his duty to his family line and his name.
The harsh reality was that there could be no true freedom for either of them. And that was his fault. In every way, all of this was his fault.
His heart had started to pound with heavy hammer-strokes. He hadn’t built in to his calculations the possibility that he would be so aware of her, so affected by the sensual allure of her. Like Sicily’s famous volcano, she was all fire, covered at its peak by ice, and he was far more vulnerable to that than he had expected to be.
Why? It wasn’t as though there weren’t plenty of beautiful, sensual women all too ready to share his bed—who had, in fact, shared his bed before he had been forced to recognise that the so-called pleasure of those encounters tasted of nothing other than an emptiness that left him aching for something more satisfying and meaningful. Only by then he’d had nothing he could offer the kind of woman with whom he might have been able to build such a relationship.
