Free The Married Mistress by Kate Walker Page A

morning. But she didn’t know how she was going to face him either.
    It took her a long time to force herself to get dressed. Going into the shower was an ordeal that brought hot tears to her eyes, reminding her as it did of the heated scenes she had been recalling only moments before. Not knowing whether it was herself, or Damon, or simply fate that shewas furious with and hated most, she reached up and snapped the temperature control from warm to cold, gasping out loud in shock as the icy current pulsed down onto her exposed body.
    Five seconds was all it took to drive the erotic memories from her mind. Shivering with cold, shaking all over, she turned the shower off again, and grabbed a towel, rubbing herself dry so roughly that her skin glowed pink from the friction.
    But at least she felt more in control, cooler-headed as well as cooler-bodied. And, having pulled on a deep purple long-sleeved T-shirt together with a well-worn and distinctly baggy pair of jeans that had seen much, much better days, she felt stronger too, armoured both physically and mentally. A brisk, no-nonsense brush of her hair before fastening it into a tight pony-tail down her back completed her preparations—no need for fuss and fripperies like lipstick or mascara—and she was ready.
    Head high, back straight, chin up, she marched down the stairs, ready to face any and every sort of sarcastic or caustic comment that Damon might decide to throw at her.
    So it came as something of a shock when she stalked into the kitchen to find that Damon was not at all in the sort of mood she expected. Instead, he was lounging in a chair at the big oak dining table, long legs stretched out in front of him, his head buried in the financial section of one of the thick Saturday papers. He was even more casually dressed than she was, being still in a navy-blue silky robe, his legs and feet bare, and his strong jaw darkly shadowed with a night’s growth of stubble. He might have showered that morning, but he certainly hadn’t shaved or dressed.
    ‘Good morning!’
    She looked as if she was preparing for battle, or some other sort of terrible ordeal, Damon reflected, slanting a swift sidelong glance in Sarah’s direction from under hiseyelashes as she stood hesitating in the doorway. Aggression practically prickled all over her, sending out electrically charged sparks into the atmosphere so that it fizzled with tension.
    And she’d clearly slept as badly as he had. There were blue-grey shadows under her amazing eyes and she had pulled her glorious hair back into a severe, ruthlessly controlled style. He knew that style of old. It declared quite clearly that she was not in the mood for any messing about. She was also, obviously, not dressed to kill.
    ‘Morning,’ he acknowledged easily, his attention apparently still on his paper, as she forced herself across the threshold and into the room.
    What would she think if she knew the way that the print was blurring in front of his eyes, growing worse the harder he tried to focus on it? He could only pray that she wouldn’t guess how much of a struggle he was having not to look at her, not to think of the glorious shape of her body beneath the baggy, unflattering clothes, the scent of her skin as it had surrounded him last night.
    And didn’t she realise that the dragged-back, schoolmistressy way she wore her hair was in fact a silent challenge to any man with red blood in his veins? It just made him want to pull off the constricting elasticated band that bound the red-gold locks into such confinement. To rip it off and release the tumbling silk of her hair so that it fell loose onto her shoulders. He longed to comb his fingers through its softness, feel it fall around his face, stroke across his chest…
    No!
    His hands clenched tighter on the sheets of paper he held and the figures in the report he was pretending to read danced before his eyes.
    Damn it to hell, he must not think like that! He had let such