Read Online Knightley's Tale by Destiny D'Otare - Free Book Online Page A

come in?” she cooed.
    A professional.
    Knightley turned away. Definitely not his Emma.
    Annoyed and semi-hard, he resumed his urgent pace out the door and into the cool spring night air. Reaching the front gate, he folded his arms across his chest and settled in.
    “Go to the pleasure gardens,” Emma’s silly friends had bandied about earlier this evening at a dinner party. “Return with the cap of the gondolier and tell us all that you see and hear.”
    Fools, the lot of them.
    And he was the biggest fool of all, because here he stood, sentry to the gates of what very likely would be his own personal hell tonight.
    As if the devil harkened, an unmarked carriage lumbered up the street and stopped in front of the gardens’ quiet entrance. Alighting without assistance, a young woman sprang to the ground. The hazy moonlight reflected a willowy outline dressed in a cream-colored lace evening gown.
    Instantly, he recognized the long, lithe body, the same one he’d often seen leaping, graceful and unladylike, from carriages and trees and whatnot. But it was just recently that the figure’s soft curves and long limbs had started leaping atop him. Naked. Undulating.
    In his dreams.
    He shook himself, mentally and physically, from a long sigh. This was not the time, and definitely not the place, to dwell on his private fantasies.
    Receding into the shadows, he prayed for her to lose her nerve and return home.
    Emma, being Emma, did not. Taking a quick look around and seeing no one, she reached back into the carriage, snatched her cloak, and waved off the driver.
    “I shall be ready in one hour,” she called to the servant as he urged the horses down the lane. Knightley couldn’t help but feel irritated. Did she have everyone wrapped around her finger?
    Alone on a deserted London street, she approached the gardens’ front gate and stopped, surveying the grounds. The moon chose then to escape a cloud. Emma, of course, radiated in moonlight.
    His breath held.
    But this was not Emma. Not his Emma, at least. Not the neighbor girl whom he continually chased out of his library. Not the girl who would tease him into ridiculous debates over Sunday dinners. Not the girl who was set on mismatching everyone in the parish into marriage.
    This girl—this woman—was someone you awoke next to after a night of lovemaking and loved her again and again.
    Her hair, normally springy blond curls pinned atop her head, was brushed out in long waves draped over her shoulders. Even though he was a dozen feet away, his memory filled in the distance with the smell of those locks: honey and lemon. How many times had he leaned over her during supper tonight just to fill his breath with her perfume?
    What heaven it would be to have the scent envelop him in a curtain of gold as she lay atop him, her velvety opening bringing him deeper and deeper inside…
    STOP!
    He commanded his dick to back down. It was a constant battle these days: sparring with his sex. Every match required the right balance of thrust and parry. In Emma’s presence, he was the master of restraint.
    Through the wrought-iron gate his beleaguered gaze followed her as she shook out her cloak and wrapped it around her shoulders, taking care to clasp it at the base of her neck. Nimble fingers—ungloved—traced two paths along her neck, fanning out at the nape. Slowly, as if she were Venus inviting a lover, she released the mass of hair trapped within the cape. Golden strands rippled through her hands. Arching her neck, she languished in the feel of it, a soft smile curving at her lips.
    All that was missing were his lips tasting the sweet spot just below her ear.
    The next moment, however, was completely ruined when two revelations struck Knightley.
    He could not see her eyes.
    Her cloak was inside out.
    The first realization came when he noticed that a gold-and-red half mask completely obliterated her features. Hidden from him were her sky-blue eyes, long blond lashes and the high