Free Knight 01 Knight And Play by Kitty French

her anger, and left her with only a sense of inevitability and calm, and the weary ache of a satisfied lover. He stroked her hair, and soothed her with whispered, incomprehensible words. She strained to catch them, but they floated away from her on the coat tails of sleep. All except for one.
    Princess.
     

CHAPTER EIGHT
     
    Lucien sat in the chair beside the bed and watched Sophie sleep. She’d been out for the count for a couple of hours, and downstairs the club had come alive. He’d walked the floor beneath an hour back and found himself satisfied by the number of people flooding through the doors, every one of them bold-eyed and expectant. He loved their lack of inhibition, their courage to shun social boundaries and to be whoever the hell they wanted in this place that he’d created.
    The Gateway Club was precisely what it said above the door. A gateway to sexual freedom for anyone brave enough to enter.
    He looked back at Sophie again. She’d frustrated the hell out of him from the moment she’d sashayed into his office in heels she could barely stand up in, and she’d stunned him when she’d turned around and forced words out of her mouth that clearly mortified her. Her embarrassment had lost the battle with her pluck, and it impressed him. The girl was eighty percent kitten and twenty percent lioness, and he considered it his mission to make her roar. Sexual potential shone out of her like a beacon, and her insistence otherwise only made him want to prove her wrong even more.
    Besides, there was the small matter of her husband. If there was one thing that really made Lucien’s skin crawl, it was men who treated women badly. His investigator had dug around and turned up evidence to prove that Dan’s other woman had been a permanent fixture in Sophie’s marriage for some considerable time.
    How could the man do it? How could he tell barefaced lies to the woman he professed to love?
    Darkness settled over Lucien’s heart as long-buried memories of his mother’s heartache swam through his head. Her only crime had been to love his father too much, and she’d died for her cause. Alone, save for a bottle of pills and a scrunched up photograph of her husband. She’d lived her life in the shadows of Lucien’s father’s deception, and for the most part she’d conned herself that she was happy. Right up until the day she couldn’t ignore it any more because it was shoved rudely in her face when she’d visited him at work and found him astride his secretary on the desk.
    She’d been faced with the truth in all its ugliness, and it had broken her.
    Lucien had been too young back then to save his mother, but he was going to make damn sure that Sophie didn’t get sucked down into that same cycle of destruction. She was teetering right on the verge of confronting her husband, and Lucien intended to tool her up for the fight.
     
    In a small hotel room in Crete, Dan slumped in a similar chair next to a similar bed and watched another woman sleeping. What was he doing? This was the first time he’d spent more than twenty-four solid hours in Maria’s company, and the reality of being with someone other than Sophie around the clock had hit home hard. Meetings with Maria for clandestine dinners and afternoon sex sessions had become pleasurable fixtures in his life over the last eighteen months. From the moment they’d met at a work party, she’d made no secret of the fact that she fancied him. She was flirty. Sexy. She was fun, and she didn’t care if he forgot to put the bins out or left his washing on the bedroom floor. She was exciting in her unfamiliarity, and she wanted him. It took no effort at all to separate her in his mind from his marriage vows.
    If anything, he told himself, screwing Maria helped his marriage. Maria did things that Sophie wouldn’t dare. He was a satisfied man, and in every other area than the bedroom his relationship with Sophie was ideal.
    He’d compartmentalised his life in his