Read Online Captive Kisses (Sweetly Contemporary Collection) by Jennifer Blake - Free Book Online Page A

satisfying. “I’ve never traveled much
in south Louisiana, never met many true French-speaking people from that
region, but I’ve read a great deal about it.” Before the words had left her
mouth, she recalled one important fact. New Orleans was the center for one of
the best-organized, best-known Mafia families in the nation. A cold feeling
moved over her, and she suppressed a shiver that left gooseflesh along her
arms.
    “I thought you said you were from this state,” he said, his
voice sharpening, “a friend of the judge’s daughter?”
    “I am, but I’ve never had the money to travel. As for Mary,
she lives above here, in north Louisiana. There’s a world of difference.”
    “You’re right, of course,” he said smoothly. “You are
Scotch-Irish, I imagine, staunchly Baptist, and sternly disapproving of the
hard-playing, hard-drinking, but deeply religious Catholics in my part of the
state.”
    “Not at all. I wouldn’t be so stupidly prejudiced.”
    “Then why do you look at me with so much dislike in your
eyes?”
    “I — surely I don’t have to tell you that?”
    He leaned back, his long brown fingers toying with his
coffee cup. “If your feelings are for me personally, perhaps they can be
changed.”
    “I doubt it,” she told him, her voice flat.
    “Is that a challenge?”
    Her head came up and she stared at him. She did not like the
way he was watching her, nor the lazy smile that lurked in the depths of his
dark eyes. “Certainly not!”
    “Too bad. I might have enjoyed making you reconsider.”
    “It would have been a waste of time.”
    “But what else is there to spend it on?”
    She crumpled the paper towel she was using as a napkin and
dropped it into her plate. Gathering her silverware and empty coffee cup, she
set these on top of the napkin, pushing plate and all away from her. When she
glanced up again, the gaze of the man across the table was still upon her. She
looked out the window, then clasped her fingers together, staring down at them.
When she lifted her lashes once more, his attention was fastened on her wrists,
traveling slowly along her arms to her shoulders, brushing her mouth and small
straight nose, finally clashing with the expression in her gray eyes.
    “I wish,” she said distinctly, “that you wouldn’t do that.”
    “Do what?” he asked innocently.
    “Watch me like that.”
    “Like what?”
    She would give anything now if she had never spoken. “You
know very well what I mean! As if you meant to make me self-conscious.”
    “Do I?”
    “Why not,” she cried, “since I don’t know what you’re
thinking, what you mean to do next!”
    He leaned forward, catching her hands in his warm grasp,
speaking her name with a soft, musical inflection it had never had before. “Don’t
do this, don’t tear yourself apart in this way. If you would just accept —”
    He stopped abruptly, turning her wrists upward on the table,
his gaze fastening on the purple bruises that marred the blue-veined fragility
of her skin. Kelly tried to pull her hands away, but he would not allow it.
    “Did I do that?” he asked, his voice low.
    “Who else?” Kelly let her breath out slowly as she gave up
the uneven struggle. “I suppose you are going to say that’s something else I
brought on myself?”
    He shook his head. With his thumbs, he massaged her bruised
flesh with a movement curiously gentle and soothing. “I’m sorry that it had to
be this way.”
    “If you were really sorry, you would let me go,” she said
tentatively.
    “I can’t do that.”
    “Can’t, or won’t?” Her voice was bitter as she read the
finality of his tone.
    He released her, coming to his feet, kicking back his chair.
The shadow of irony overlaying the grimness in his dark eyes, he said, “Both.”
    Kelly sat where she was for some time after he strode from
the room, heading down the hall. She spread her hands flat on the wood-grain
surface of the round oak table, pressing them down to