Free Bartering Her Innocence by Trish Morey Page A

She’d offered herself as a conscientious objector instead of him taking her as an unwilling sacrifice. And she remembered a desk and the feel of him inside her.
    How could she ever forget the feel of him inside her, the sense of fullness and completion and the exquisite side effects of friction?
    In three years she hadn’t forgotten and nothing, it seemed, had changed. Her memories were true.
    But she couldn’t for the life of her remember a bed. Luca’s bed, she recognised, not only by his lingering scent and the presence of a jet-black hair on the pillow, but the sheer masculinity of the room, as if he’d stamped his personality on it by the sheer force of it. She’d slept in his bed and he’d slept alongside her and, surprisingly, that act seemed even more intimate than the one they’d shared on the desk.
    But where was he now?
    A robe lay on the coverlet. Silky and jade-coloured. She snatched it up and wrapped it around her in case he suddenly appeared. Strange, to feel shy after what she’d done last night, but she wasn’t practised in negotiating a deal while taking off her clothes. She’d never expected to seal one in such a way. But last night fury had given her courage to do what she had done; rage had given her purpose. This morning she was still angry with both her mother and with Luca, but now there was wonderment too at her brazen behaviour. Not to mention a little fear, for what she might have let herself in for.
    One month of sleeping with Luca Barbarigo. Thirty nights of sex with a man who knew how to blow every fuse in her body and then some. Thirty whole nights after three years of abstinence—she shivered—it was almost too much to think about. It was almost, so very almost, delicious .
    The silken robe whispered against her breasts. Her nipples tightened into buds. She could not let him see her like this. He’d think she was primed and ready for a second course. He might even be right to think that.
    But Luca didn’t arrive and the only sounds she heard were the sounds of Venice coming from outside the windows. The only movement she felt seemed to come from the very foundations, the gentle sway of time and tide.
    And only then did she notice the clock on a mantelpiece. Three o’clock?
    She’d slept the entire day?
    She padded from the bed and located the bathroom, and then found the study through another door with no sign of her pack and no trace of anything that had happened last night, the floor cleared of abandoned clothing, the desk restacked with pens and phones and files and so neat that she wondered for a moment if she’d dreamed it all. But no, there was no dreaming the tenderness of muscles rarely used. No dreaming the sense of utter disbelief—wonderment—at what had occurred.
    For her hastily concocted plan—a plan made in fury and rage—a plan that in the cold light of day seemed impossible and unimaginable—had come off.
    She’d come to Luca Barbarigo not as his victim, but as his seducer. Laying before him her own terms, not being forced blindly to accept his. And she seemed to recall it working. Or so she’d thought before sleep had claimed her. Some seductress she’d turned out to be.
    She was still searching when there was a knock on the door, and Luca’s manservant swept in a few seconds later, bearing a steaming tray laden with both coffee and tea, together with an assortment of rolls and pastries. If he was unfamiliar with finding women in his master’s bedroom, it didn’t show.
    She clutched the sides of her robe more tightly around her. She needn’t have bothered. His eyes avoided landing anywhere near her. She shoved aside the niggling thought that this wasn’t the first time, but there was no point dwelling on it. Her deal was for one month. She didn’t care who filled his bed all the other nights of the year.
    ‘Would the signorina like anything else?’ he asked, putting down the tray and moving towards the window. ‘Signore Barbarigo said you