Read Online Billionaire Season 3: Summer Ablaze (Billionaire Season Trilogy) by Kimball Lee - Free Book Online

purpose. The first was a sort of gathering room with a white-washed pedestal table surrounded by four tall, brightly slipcovered chairs, an antique French buffet a deux corps held cups, saucers, and dessert plates and on the opposite wall was a state-of-the-art wine and coffee bar. The next room was furnished as a sitting/reading room lined with bookshelves. It boasted a comfortably overstuffed arm chair and ottoman, an antique daybed piled with pillows and the Hermes throw from William’s Maserati, and a deeply cushioned chaise lounge sat in a wide bay window overlooking the garden. The third space was set up as an office with an enormous mahogany partner’s desk with a comfortable desk chair and intricate woven tapestries that were so large they hung from the ceiling and pooled on the floor. In each room there were newly bound manuscripts of the books and letters and miscellaneous correspondence from the Gothic Literary Society.
    Allie lifted one of the bound volumes down from a bookshelf and ran her hand over the smooth leather cover. She was trying to make heads or tails of the embossed monogram— ADW . She reached for several more and leafed through the pages, each “book” contained fine linen paper printed with the words of the authors she had come to New Orleans to study.
    “William,” she whispered, her voice raw with emotion and her eyes brimming with tears as she looked up at him. “You had copies made of every document at the Literary Society? You had them bound so… beautifully and you built this exquisite cottage to hold them all… just for me? My heart might burst now, you know, this is incredible… why did you…?”
    “I thought it might sway you, make you say yes,” he said and he covered her lips with a long, sweet kiss as he slipped the ring on the third finger of her left hand.
    “Oh. My. God.” She said, breathless from the kiss and the cottage and the thought he had put into this charming declaration of love. And then her knees buckled as she lifted her hand and saw the ring. It was indescribably beautiful and HUGE . “Oh my God, ohhhhhhh!”
    “Will you?”” William asked, he caught her as her legs gave way and now he settled onto the antique daybed with her on his lap. “You’re making me sweat, Allie, I’m nervous as hell right now. An answer, any answer, hopefully the right answer….”
    “I do… I will… of course. Yes, yes, yessssssss!”
    They tried to be serious when their lips met again, to make certain they sealed their engagement with the binding agreement contained in a passionate kiss. And they did manage to kiss in short erratic bursts between bouts of smiling and laughing and saying “I love you, I love you” nonstop for at a long, long time. After that they lay on the daybed with Allie twining her slender arms and legs around the solid length of William’s body. They found it impossible to look into each other’s joyful eyes for more than a moment or they would lose themselves to the hunger of the flesh and give in to carnal desire. That wasn’t how it should go, they decided, this was not the time for the simply physical. It was the start of a sacred journey, a combining of all that they were, handing over their hearts with unflagging confidence, trusting the ancient promise: “The two shall become one flesh.”

Chapter Six
     
    Beth Hawkins gripped the steering wheel of her new Fiat so hard that her knuckles had turned white. She drove fast, in love with the way the car hugged each curve along the way to the Bayou Lafourche. The sand and gravel road was fairly new, she’d had to coerce a county official and give several blowjobs to pay for the shitty little path that cut through the thickly tangled woods. They didn’t bother to pave it with asphalt, simply poured a thin layer of cheap aggregate. She knew the way to and from the shack by heart and it didn’t make a good Goddamn that vines and limbs, swamp-muck and gravel whipped and tore and battered