Read Online Broken Bonds (Club Imperial Series) by Katherine Rhodes - Free Book Online Page B

crooked embrace.
    Emmy found her breath growing quick. She wanted him, and from the way his kisses were becoming hot, liquid and demanding, he felt the same. She pulled back just a little to disengage them. “Nathaniel.”
    “I know, I know,” he said, with a disappointed growl. “Not until the cast is off and not until we’ve really talked about this.” He looked at her. “This is going to be a very long six weeks.”
    “You have no idea.”

Chapter Six

    After taking another week to sleep, relax and heal, Emmy started to go to and from work with Nathaniel and Victor. Nathaniel would come with her to the soup kitchen and she would wait on the benches during his dance lesson. The following Friday, three weeks after being attacked, the doctor took his cast off. It had been a greenstick splinter fracture, and he was as healed as the cast would allow.
    The doctor had been pleased with her progress as well, and told her that in two weeks they could think about taking the cast off, instead of the three that were originally left. He liked the surgical site as well, and told her to just keep changing the dressing twice a day.
    Every morning at North Hills was like waking up on a cloud. Everything was soft and white and clean. The cast had been hard to sleep in at first, but eventually Emmy found the right pillow configuration—there were enough of them on the bed—to really let her sleep. There were mornings when the room was too good to be true and she didn’t want to even climb out of the bed, lest she wake from a dream.
    Joanne had a full breakfast every morning, and dinner waiting for them every night. The bed was remade perfectly when they all got back to North Hills each night. No matter what Emmy did, she couldn’t get the bed to look so perfect.
    She had started wandering around the mansion, at first to start getting back into shape, but after only a few days of that, she started exploring the rooms. She picked a new room every night and wandered in, checking it out. Emmy found the entrance to the Tower room about four weeks after she first started exploring and was as giddy as a school girl when she pulled the door open and walked up the narrow stairs. The stairs, made of slate with slightly worn divots from feet over four hundred years, disgorged her into a fairly large, but completely empty room. It didn’t need furniture.
    The four sets of three-pane-wide windows, one on each wall, were like nothing else in the building. Two of the panes, one on either side, were made of brightly colored stained glass in a mosaic pattern. In the center pane was clear leaded glass in geometric shapes. The room danced with color and light in the setting early-May sun. She walked up into the room, astonished and amazed.
    La Sainte-Chappelle. That’s what it looks like.
    She walked to the window and touched the glass. It had all the markings of a true Gothic piece that she could drag out of her brain. It had been a tiny passion of hers, architecture, and being in this mansion had poked at the sleeping giant and made it stir. She didn’t touch the leading, because she had the feeling it was truly lead. The mosaics were the figures of saints, and she could see the names at the bottom of each window. It seemed to be a curious mix of men and women. She walked around the room, looking at the windows so closely they lost their forms and became just simple specs of glass alight.
    She sat down on the floor and watched the sun dance through the mosaic windows. Nathaniel and Victor were working on some project that had spilled into the evening after dinner and she didn’t want to impose on them. She was amazed by this room and liked the seclusion it offered. She needed to think, and she was having trouble doing that around Nathaniel.
    Of course he was part of what she had to think about. She knew she was falling in love, but how did she even start to handle the BDSM side of herself in relationship like this? She loved the club. She