Free Seven Years to Sin by Sylvia Day Page B

have been disconcerting if he hadn’t been determined to be completely honest with her. With a nod, the eye closed again.
    “I enjoy the feel of your gaze on me,” she said with surprising candor. “That enjoyment is quite distressing.”
    He hid a smile behind the rim of the bottle. She was an honest drunk. “I enjoy looking at you. I always have. I doubt I could change that. You are not alone in this attraction between us.”
    “It has no place in either of our lives.”
    Stretching out his legs in front of him, Alistair said, “But we are not in our lives now. Nor will we be for the next few months, at least.”
    “You and I are very different individuals. Perhaps you think my paralysis that night in the Pennington woods hints at some deeper, more intriguing aspect of my character, but I assure you, nothing of the sort exists. I was confused and mortified; there is nothing of note beyond that.”
    “Yet here you are. Traveling alone a great distance. Not by necessity, but by choice. I find that very intriguing. Tarley bequeathed you a source of great income. Why was he so determined to see you not merely taken care of, but exceptionally wealthy? In doing so, he provided you with the means to go in any direction you choose, while also forcing you to conduct business on a large scale. He shielded you with one hand, while pushing you into a new world with the other. I find that intriguing also.”
    Jessica drank the last of the wine in her glass and set it on the stool where the bottle had previously been. Sitting up, she wrapped her arms around her bent knees and looked at the door. “I cannot be your mistress.”
    “I would never ask you to be.” He draped one arm over the tabletop, his focus narrowed to the wet curl adhering to the pale curve of her back. He was hard as a poker, throbbing and on display due to the tailored fit of his breeches. “I want no arrangement with you. I do not want to be serviced. What I desire is your willingness, your needs, and your demands.”
    She turned those big gray eyes on him.
    “ I want to service you, Jessica. I want to finish what we began seven years ago.”

Chapter 6
     
    A listair could see Jessica considering his suggestion.
    “I cannot fathom how it is,” she said at length, “that I am having this discussion with you, today of all days.”
    “Is that why Tarley settled Calypso on you? Because he wanted to preserve you as his? Because he wished to leave you with no excuse to turn to a man to look after you?”
    She turned her head and rested her cheek on her bent knees. “He was too dear a man for such selfishness. He told me to be happy. To love again. To make my own choice this time around. But I am certain he was thinking of marriage, not an affair with a man who dallies about promiscuously.”
    Alistair’s hand tightened on his glass, but he wisely held his tongue.
    “Men have so much more freedom,” she said on a long-suffering sigh.
    “If freedom is what you seek, why marry again?”
    “I have no intention of doing so. What purpose would it serve? I do not need the support, and since I am barren, I have nothing to offer men of suitable station.”
    “Financial considerations are valid ones, of course. But what of your needs as a woman? Will you deny yourself the pleasure of a man’s touch forever?”
    “Some men’s hands give nothing but pain.”
    He knew she could not be speaking of Tarley. The rapport between them had been evident to one and all. “Of whom do you speak?”
    She moved. Gripping the rim of the tub, she rose from the water like Botticelli’s Venus. Dripping wet and unashamedly bare. Her hands ran over her full breasts, then across her abdomen, her gaze following her own touch. When she lifted her head to look at him, his breath seized in his lungs. It was a siren’s look she gave him. One full of heat and longing and hunger.
    “By God,” he said gruffly, aching. “You are beautiful.”
    He was in a riot of lust, half mad