Read Online Lone Wolfe by Kate Hewitt - Free Book Online Page B

secrets. Yet even now she didn’t want to. She wanted to
know.
                 ‘It
must have been so hard,’ she whispered. ‘For you,
especially.’ Jacob flinched at her words. Mollie wished she knew what to
say. No words seemed adequate, appropriate, so she said the only thing she
could think of, the only thing she knew she really meant. ‘I’m sorry,’ she
whispered.
                 ‘I
told you, you don’t need to apologise for the truth,’ Jacob told her. His
expression hardened into something unfriendly and even mean. It was hard to
believe that a moment ago he’d made her heart beat with awareness and desire.
Now, taking in his tightened mouth and narrowed eyes, so endlessly dark, it
hammered with something close to fear—yet not for herself .
She was afraid for him. ‘The truth,’ he continued in the same brutal tone, ‘was
that he was an utter bastard. He terrorised his wives and his children, he
drank away the family’s money, and when he died I felt—’ He stopped suddenly,
his face twisted in an agony of grief. He drew a shuddering breath and looked
away, every muscle tensed.
                 ‘Jacob …’ Mollie said, inadvertently,
instinctively, for something deep in her called to the broken-ness she saw in
the man before her. She lifted her arms, reaching out as if to do—what? Hug him? Even though she knew Jacob
Wolfe would probably be appalled by the thought of a hug, she couldn’t help
herself. She wanted to reach him. Touch him.
                 His
face cleared, as if a veil had been drawn across that deeper, darker emotion;
he hid the broken edges, the jagged memories, and coated them with blandness.
‘You asked,’ he said. ‘And now you know.’ His mouth curved in a slow smile.
‘Satisfied, Mollie?’ he asked, touching her cheek with one finger. Mollie
jerked under the caress, for that was surely what it was. Slowly, thoughtfully,
his face still a hard mask, Jacob trailed his finger down her cheek, igniting
sparks of awareness along her jaw, to the sensitive curve of her neck. He
lingered there, his finger touching her pulse, a witness to its frantic
hammering.
                 Mollie
remained rooted to the spot, amazed at how such a simple, little touch could
affect her so utterly. So disastrously. She felt as
she was filled with bubbles once again, bubbles made of the most fragile glass,
and they were popping one by one. She didn’t know what would be left when they
were gone. She didn’t know what would happen, what could happen.
                 What
Jacob wanted to happen.
                 He
watched her carefully, noting her reaction, and in her appalled shame Mollie
wondered how the mood could have changed so suddenly, how the charged
atmosphere of anger and regret had turned so quickly to something just as
dangerous.
                 She
swallowed convulsively as Jacob rested just one finger in the curve of her
neck, stroking that smooth, secretive skin lightly, as if he were learning a
landmark. And she didn’t move away. Didn’t protest. Didn’t do anything except submit, her body yearning for his deeper
caress.
                 After
a long, pulsating moment, the only sound the hitch of her own breath, he
trailed his finger from that curve to her collarbone, pausing to stroke the
hard ridge of bone, the skin stretched so achingly taut over it, and then let
it drop lightly yet quite deliberately to the V of her T-shirt— his T-shirt.
                 Mollie
heard her sharply in-drawn breath as his finger nestled there in the soft dip
between her breasts, stroking the skin softly, as if asking a question.
                 She
felt heat flood through her—and he was touching her with only one finger! She
glanced up and saw the clinical, detached look on his face and shame replaced
that liquefying heat. He wasn’t affected at all.