Free Mistress: Hired for the Billionaire's Pleasure by India Grey

her chest.
    ‘It’ll be hard without him,’ she murmured.
    ‘Yes.’ Briefly he glanced down at her, and smiled. ‘Though the year before he caused an awful lot of trouble by disappearing upstairs with the wife of a hedge fund manager. I had to give the guy a crate of vintage port to keep the peace. At least I won’t have that to worry about this year.’
    Rachel felt a small stab of surprise. ‘Really? I imagined Felix would be like you, but you must have been very different.’
    ‘No. We were as bad as each other. It’s just that as the oldest I always had the most to lose.’
    They were at the top of the stairs now. No moonlight penetrated the courtyard beneath the windows, and the corridor was in deep shadow. Rachel’s head fell back onto Orlando’s chest. He stared straight ahead, trying not to think about how good she felt in his arms, how right.
    Because it wasn’t right. It was impossible.
    ‘Don’t you ever turn the light on?’
    ‘I don’t need to. I’ve lived here all my life. I know my way around this house with my eyes closed.’
    That, after all, was one of the reasons he’d come back.
    In the bedroom he laid her on the bed and folded the covers over her, then stood back abruptly, his arms falling to his sides. Already they felt empty.
    Turning to go, he had ruthlessly to suppress the masochistic part of his brain that was at that moment taunting him with thoughts of how it would feel to lie down beside her and hold her against him through the freezing hours of darkness, to wake up with his cheek against her hair and know that that red, vibrant, living blaze of colour would be the first thing he would see.
    One night…just one night…
    The agonising irony of the situation hit him like a punch in the ribs, momentarily winding him. He wanted her. He wanted her and the terrible thing was that having her just now had made him want her all the more.
    How very optimistic of him to think that once would be enough.
    But he’d had his chance to be open and he hadn’t taken it, and his punishment was knowing that everything that had just happened between them was based on a lie. He’d deceived her into thinking he was something and someone he could never be. The person she’d just made such glorious, abandoned love to was the old Orlando Winterton. The one who had died a year ago.
    He had almost reached the door when she spoke.
    ‘Thank you.’ Her voice soft and heavy with sleep.
    ‘What for?’
    ‘For having me.’ He heard a breath of drowsy laughter which seemed to caress him in the dark. ‘Not like that. I mean, having me to stay. Although…’ There was a pause. ‘Actually…like that too…’ Her voice was slowing. She was almost asleep ‘It was the first…time…’
    He froze, adrenaline and guilt and remorse hitting him like a tidal wave. ‘The first time?’ He crossed the room again, back to the bedside, where she lay perfectly still.
    He reached out a hand, finding the velvet-soft skin of her cheek. ‘The first time, Rachel? You were a virgin?’
    She stirred and exhaled—deeply, contentedly. ‘No. But…it was the first time…I’ve ever wanted it.’



CHAPTER SIX
    R ACHEL ran lightly down the wide staircase, running her fingers through her wildly sleep-tousled hair as she went. As she’d hurried along the corridor upstairs she’d seen that the courtyard at the centre of the house lay under a covering of white as thick and luxurious as the goosedown duvet which she had slept beneath last night.
    And had, in the end, slept wonderfully well. It was as if Orlando had hushed the storm that had been raging inside her for as long as she could remember. She felt…liberated.
    She had escaped from Carlos, and in the process she had discovered herself. Maybe she wasn’t the incompetent idiot it had always suited him and her mother to make her out to be. After all, he’d said she was frigid, and he’d certainly been wrong about that…
    This particularly enticing train of