Free Undeniable Rogue (The Rogues Club Book One) by Annette Blair Page B

discovered, to her surprise, that could be harmless, after all. For a time. Perhaps.
    Such a slow sweet warmth had built inside her at his tender touch, she had thought she might burst into flame, almost hoped she would. But she did not. Instead, she simmered until the contented heaviness of half-sleep beckoned. She remembered smiling when she realized she was drifting, wrapped in her new husband’s gentle arms.
    For the first time in a marriage bed, she had reveled in the gentleness of a husband.
    Peace had claimed her then, as it did now in memory. And because she understood already that Gideon St. Goddard just might be that rarest of creatures, a good and gentle man, Sabrina almost wanted to give him what he sought. Almost.
    When she considered the price—herself—she decided that consummation would have to wait. Perhaps, forever.
    She supposed she might someday trust him enough to give herself to him, body and heart, free and clear, but she knew he would have to earn it first. And in this case, earning was a state of mind … hers. Even she did not quite understand the proof she sought. She simply knew that she would recognize it when she found it.
    She wondered, then, about their life, what a future with this puzzling man might possibly hold.
    Gideon St. Goddard, Duke of Stanthorpe, her husband—sweet one minute, tart the next, first hot, then cold. He had frightened her witless and stirred her senses … and they had only just met the day before.
    Tonight, she had drifted to sleep, naked and content in his arms … and left him wanting.

    She would never be able to look him in the eye again.

CHAPTER SEVEN
     
    “Mama? Are you sleeping?”
    Sabrina sat up, clutching her blankets to cover herself. “Damon?” she whispered frantically. “What are you doing here?”
    “It is Rafferty, Mama. Damon is still sleeping, but I cannot, because I am thirsty.”
    “Where is Miss Minchip? Why did you not ask her for a drink of water?”
    “She is snoring so loud, she cannot hear me. I think her ears are too old,” he whispered, all serious concern. “She does not hear very good.”
    Sabrina smiled at her son’s observation. “Go back to the nursery, Sweet, and Mama will be right up.”
    “But, that man, he—”
    “Go, Sweet, I will be up right behind you. Move now.”
    She should have realized right away, if he was quiet, he was Rafe. Damon would have climbed into bed with her and spoken afterward, and he would not have whispered.
    She told the twins, of course, that they could no longer come to her during the night, that they would have to see how this man would deal with two noisy little boys.
    But how could two four year olds, who had already faced the devil in their short lives, understand the appearance of what they must perceive as another fiend, after the first had frightened them senseless?
    Sabrina slipped from her marriage bed, somewhat sorry to be leaving her new husband’s embrace, a circumstance she would not have thought possible a short twenty-four hours before.
    She groped for her nightrail, found it, and slipped it over her head. Two nights before, she had gone to sleep foolishly wishing that the penniless wanderer and the Duke of Stanthorpe were one and the same, and now that she discovered they were, or, rather, he was, she was not certain how she felt.
    Somehow, Stanthorpe had seemed safer as a figment of her imagination, than as a flesh and blood man with wants and needs of his own.
    When she had discovered his perfidy, in company with the others at her wedding, she had experienced relief, gladness, annoyance, any number of new and strange emotions. But right now, she was too comfortably lethargic to examine her careening feelings.
    Besides, she had best see to the twins, before they instigated a midnight insurrection fit to wake the dead, thereby revealing to her new husband exactly how large a family she came with.
    Shivering at the very thought, Sabrina tied her serviceable wrapper over her