Free Enslaved by Hope Tarr

she’d scrawled her Paris direction on a scrap of paper and left it to be given to him. Once in France, she posted several more letters, this time to him at school, but he never answered with so much as a line. After the second year with still no reply, she’d stopped waiting, stopped hoping altogether. For years now, she planned just what she would say to him, exactly what words she would use, were they ever to meet again. But standing face-to-face with him in the close confines of her dressing room, she hadn’t been able to recall a single carefully crafted retort.
    When she first realized who he was, the shock had nearly dropped her to her knees.
    She was too practical by nature to believe in miracles and too jaded by experience to believe that happenstance could ever work in her favor. She hadn’t really expected to meet him again and certainly not in a song and supper club in a seedy section of Covent Garden.
    In spite of her stage paint and changed hair color, Gavin had seemed to recognize her from the first. But then even as a boy, he had a canny knack for seeing through façades to a person’s very soul, hers especially. She never had been able to pull the wool over his eyes as she had with Harry or Rourke or their teachers.
    At Roxbury House, he’d been her friend, her confidant, and surrogate brother. There had never been anything romantic between them. And yet seeing him again had affected her and in a far from sibling sort of way. If she was honest with herself, and that wasn’t always the case, she would admit that he’d been the object of her secret fantasies for years now.
    She remembered a tall, long-boned boy with the beginnings of broad shoulders, the flesh stretched taut over a fencepost-thin frame. A boy with big, gentle hands and a poet’s soul to whom she’d been able to take all her troubles and share all her dreams. The gangly adolescent of her memory had grown into a wholly splendid specimen of man. The subdued suit was the perfect foil for his stark masculine beauty, his broad shoulders owing nothing to a tailor’s padding, and the worsted wool of his trousers expertly cut to cinch across narrow hips and taut buttocks. When he’d swept her into his arms and carried her offstage, he handled her as though she weighed little more than the feather boa. In the midst of fighting him, she’d felt how solidly muscled he was, how lean but powerfully built. She considered again how easily he’d subdued her and a sigh slipped from her parted lips.
    From the moment she’d seen him sitting so straight-backed and proper at his front row table, she’d wanted to walk up to him and unbutton his suit coat one shiny brass button at a time, slowly slide it off those breathtakingly broad shoulders, and then start to work on the buttons fronting the crisp, white shirt beneath.
    And now all at once he was back in her life, ready and willing to help her achieve her greatest ambition, her heart’s desire. He was offering to help her become a serious actress, an opportunity straight out of her dreams, and the answer to a prayer she’d almost given up on ever realizing. She’d be a fool to walk away, wouldn’t she? When she accepted the current contract, she hadn’t realized The Palace was in the heart of the Covent Garden theater district. To be so close to the theater, the
true
theater, and yet so very far removed from it in all the ways that counted was heart-rending.
    Of course, she wasn’t a fool, at least not entirely. Though Gavin had been her childhood confidante and protector, her big brother in every way but blood, he was a grown man now. She hadn’t missed the telltale tenting of his trousers when she caressed him onstage or how standing inside the dressing room door he seemed to keep finding excuses to touch her. No, the sweet, soulful boy of her memory was a grown man and if her years in France had taught her anything, it was that men were all cut from the same cloth.
    She fully expected