SARA WOOD - The Unexpected Mistress

‘Don’t you criticise my family!’ she cried hotly. ‘It’s none of your business how we lived! I don’t care what you think of me…!’

She gulped. Because she did care. It upset her that he saw her as such a wimp. An obedient, colourless, cowering mouse! That was an awful description. Was she that pathetic?

Muddled, she stood there, her chest heaving, wondering why he was so angry and why she kept losing the composure which had always been such an integral part of her.

That was because he’d flung her into her worst nightmare. He was knocking away all her props. Leaving her with nothing. Perhaps she could plead with Tony herself…

‘Tony,’ she reminded him, her voice thin with panic. She sat down, shaking. ‘Just tell me what’s happened to him!’

Cassian felt like shaking her. She still saw justification in the way she’d been treated as a child. And yet cracks were beginning to appear in her armour. Rebellion simmered inside that tense body. She might have been taught to abhor passion but it was there, nevertheless and the thought excited him more than it should.

Inexplicably he’d wanted to press his lips on her pink, pouting mouth and her unavailability had only made the urge stronger. He couldn’t understand his reaction. He’d been celibate for a long time and many women had tried to steer him from his chosen path, using all the tricks in the book and then some.

Tricks he could deflect. This was something else. Whether he liked it or not, Laura was reaching something deeper in him without even knowing what she was doing.

Curbing his rampaging instincts, he set about hurrying her departure before her temptations proved his undoing. Women could be dynamite at the best of times. He dare not get tangled up with someone like Laura. That would be dangerous in the extreme for both of them.

Pity, he found himself musing recklessly. It was such a luscious, kissable mouth… And he hungered for it more than was wise.

Grimly Cassian subdued his lurching passions. He could be hard on himself when necessary. And this was essential.

‘I met Tony in Marrakesh—’ he began at a gallop.

‘Marrakesh!’ she exclaimed, as if it were the planet Mars.

He gave a faint smile. To her, it probably was.

‘Stupidly he’d swindled some thugs and they’d beaten him up. I got out the sticking plasters, let him stay for a while—’

‘You have a house in Marrakesh?’ she asked, wide-eyed.

Cassian perched on the table again. ‘No, I rented rooms. Tony hotbedded with Fee, a stripper, who I—’

‘What?’ Her eyes were even wider, her mouth now joining in the amazement. She was wonderfully transparent. ‘You…lived with a…stripper?!’

‘Two, actually.’ Before her jaw dropped any further and she did herself an injury, he added, ‘We weren’t cohabiting, I hasten to add. Same house, different rooms. Loads of space, no obligations to one another, come and go as you like…a perfect arrangement. No commitment, company when you want it, solitude when you don’t.’

‘But…strippers?’

Disapproval came from every line of her body. He decided she needed to have her judgement shaken up.

‘Don’t let the job fool you. Fee’s a sweetie, with a very strict moral code. Comes from Islington. You’d like her. Runs a shelter for sick animals in her spare time.’

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