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Just For Her. Katherine O' NealЧитать онлайн книгу.

Just For Her - Katherine O' Neal


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something on the floor by her bed and bent to pick it up. When he rose, he had in his hand the nightgown the Panther had ripped and used to bind her wrists. She’d been in such a tizzy that she’d completely forgotten she was naked beneath the sheet.

      “I see we’ve had a bit of an accident, Highness. Moths, perhaps? I shall see to it that it’s disposed of at once. And instruct Denise to be more careful when inspecting your attire.”

      He was folding the shredded gown in such a serious way. He knew very well moths had nothing to do with its condition, but he would never ask.

      Suddenly, she laughed. Pulling the silk sheet to her chin, she said, “I’ve been a naughty girl, Hudson.”

      “Have you, Highness?”

      “I’ve done something outrageous. Something so scandalous, you’ll never believe it.”

      “Have you, indeed?”

      “I’ve had a visitor in the night. A man I invited in a cunning sort of way. A most spectacular man.”

      “Ah, Highness, I see we’ve been reading Lord Byron again,” he said with a twinkle in his eye. “Who was it this time? Childe Harold or Don Juan?”

      “No, Hudson, this was real. It happened. A daring thief was actually here, in this room, last night.”

      “My mistake, Highness. You’ve been reading stories about the Panther, then?”

      She sat up in bed, careful not to let the sheet slip. “Yes, the Panther! He came here last night, looking for my jewels.”

      He pretended to look around the room. “But of course the jewels aren’t here. Did he take anything else?”

      “Only me.” She giggled, hugging her knees.

      “Am I to infer, then, Highness, that the theft was not unwelcome?”

      “More than welcome, it was glorious! It was beyond anything I’ve ever imagined. It was…” She stopped abruptly, lifting a brow. “You don’t believe me, do you? You think we’re playing our game.”

      He lowered his gaze so she couldn’t see the look in his eyes. “I believe everything Her Highness tells me. And I believe Her Highness deserves whatever happiness comes her way, no matter how it may appear.”

      Did he still think she was relating a fantasy? Or was this his sly way of acknowledging her truth?

      “You’re the most exasperating butler there ever was, Hudson.”

      With a bow he said, “I don’t doubt it, Highness,” and left the room.

      She wasn’t remotely hungry, so she left untouched her breakfast of tropical fruits and fresh-baked croissants and, grabbing the first thing she could find in the line of closets between her bedroom and sitting room, she slipped into a butter-cream summer frock with a low back and a fringed skirt that came to just below her knees. It was a contemporary, flirty creation, very much a product of the Jazz Age in which she lived, strikingly at variance with her elegant eighteenth-century French furnishings.

      Eager to be away from the morning household bustle, she left her private apartment on the second floor and went out into the arched columned gallery that ran at mid-length on four sides between the reception hall below and the trompe l’oeil ceiling above, painted to look like a blue summer sky.

      Peering down, she could see the maids polishing the vast mosaic Pompeii-style floor, dusting the statues and priceless paintings on the walls.

      She exited through the two-story staircase enclosed within a half-circular wall of glass that looked out over the green hills and the sea.

      Cap Ferrat was a narrow peninsula on which the Riviera’s most exclusive homes were located. Once mostly owned by Belgium’s King Léopold II, it was the showplace of old money and the long-standing winter abode to Europe’s highest ranking aristocracy. Rêve de l’Amour was the largest of its villas and the most spectacularly situated. It was the creation of her grandmother, a Bavarian princess, who’d loved the Mediterranean and had constructed on twelve hectares of barren land atop the highest, narrowest point of the peninsula a sprawling terra-cotta and white evocation of an Italian Renaissance palazzo. The views from this luxurious perch were breathtaking, with the Bay of Beaulieu and its wedding-cake casino on one side and the Bay of Villefranche with its charming port and fleet of ships on the other. The gardens spread out from the back of the house over four hectares of land, a harmonious counterpoint to the modern hectic world. It had taken her grandmother’s workers seven years to dynamite and cart away the original rock and create an oasis of peaceful opulence and exquisite taste.

      To visitors who called, her house struck them as a sumptuous, paradisiacal mansion on a grand scale. But to Jules, who’d spent her childhood in palaces with more than a thousand rooms, Rêve de l’Amour was simply a country villa, so named by her grandmother because she’d used it for clandestine meetings with the lover she’d cherished and lost.

      Skirting the maids, Jules made her way back through the house to the terrace overlooking the lawns, where no fewer than twelve gardeners toiled to maintain the aura of tranquil retreat. The French garden, the largest of seven with different themes, stretched before her in the morning sun, the cypresses and Aleppo pines and palms swaying in the ever present breeze from the sea that kept the property cool, even in the most scorching summer heat.

      Going down the steps, she passed between the smaller fountains on either side to the large central fountain, where a row of water sprays shot up and danced twenty feet in the air. From there, a rectangular pool extended some two hundred feet between the manicured lawns, like the pool at the Taj Mahal, where it met a stepped waterfall spilling into it from the high hill on the far side. She made her way alongside the pool, climbing the stone steps of the hill, the sounds of gently rushing water and birdsong sweet in the morning air. At the top, she came to the Temple of Venus, a circular columned open gazebo with a domed roof fashioned from marble, in the center of which stood a graceful statue of Venus, Roman goddess of love.

      This focal point could be seen from the house, but the trees and luxuriant plants that surrounded it on three sides gave it an air of privacy, a sanctuary Jules had always loved. She’d come up here as a young girl to read her treasured books of heroes and their lady loves, to dream her own personal dreams, away from prying eyes.

      But today, as she sat on the marble bench facing the temple from the side, she drank in the familiar surroundings with a new sense of wonder. However briefly, she’d lived her secret fantasies for one enchanted night. She was no longer merely the barren, bartered wife of an insufferable fiend. As she hugged herself, her body tingled anew with the memory of what his hands and tongue had done to her, and she blushed like a new bride. It seemed that she could still feel him inside, so large and hard that he’d fit her like the last missing piece of a puzzle. She smiled dreamily, feeling altogether different than she had the day before. She’d been swept away by a man who in her mind was not a wanted thief, but who’d taken on the proportions of a reckless hero, casting the world’s conventions aside. A man who was like no other she’d ever known in her sheltered life. He’d taken her girlish dreams and given them a raw sexual edge that was far more thrilling than her own arid notions had ever been. Because he’d forced her to face an aspect of herself that she hadn’t known was there, she felt strangely stronger, capable of handling whatever came her way.

      It didn’t even matter that the Panther had turned down her proposition. It was a desperate idea, born of panic upon learning of her husband’s intention to reenter her life. She probably couldn’t have gone through with it anyway. Despise DeRohan as she did, she didn’t have it in her to be a party to his murder, however cloaked it might be by the pretense of a duel.

      No, she would have to think of another solution. But in some mystical way, the Panther had made her feel she could. As if she’d absorbed some of his courage and audacity and made it her own.

      She wondered suddenly who he was. He’d given her no clue. He spoke Italian in a whispery tone surely meant to disguise his true voice. His Italian was perfect, but it was a vernacular


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