Read Online Midnight Flame by Lynette Vinet - Free Book Online

leave us alone, Jean?”
    Jean hesitated, but Laurel smiled at him, assuring him she would be all right. After Jean made a reluctant departure, Tony moved in front of her, blocking her view of the inside parlor where people danced to the fiddlers’ music.
    “You should congratulate yourself,” Tony told her. “My cousin Jean isn’t easily swayed by women.”
    “What do you mean?”
    “Let’s just say he’s drawn to young men rather than young ladies.”
    “Oh,” she said, immediately comprehending. “I think he is very kind.”
    “Yes, he is, but then he’s the only man in the room I’d have allowed to escort you outside. If any other man had taken it into his head to bring you out here, I might be tempted to call him out. Every man in the room is half in love with you.”
    “I can take care of myself,” she said, not quite believing what Tony said about the men or the duel. Her gaze turned upward to his, wondering what game he was playing with her.
    Laurel was inexperienced with men, but an awakening of her own sexuality had begun this night, a sense of power. Every man but Tony had complimented her on her beauty, had secretly desired her. She had acted the coquette, the flirt, to rile him and get even with him for bringing her here to humiliate her.
    For some reason he wanted to believe the worst of her and see her in a bad light. She decided she could give as good as she got. Duvalier had dressed her as a creature with no morals, flaunted her before his friends, but she had turned his game to her own advantage by unwittingly making him jealous. And he was jealous. Why he should be, she didn’t know. After all, he was going to marry someone else. Yet she wouldn’t leave for San Antonio until she had gotten some revenge on Tony Duvalier. The perfect way to do that, she realized, was to act the role he had written for her.
    Through long, sooty lashes, Laurel fastened her gaze on Tony’s full, sensual lips. “Are you half in love with me, too?”
    Black eyes measured her for a moment before he said, “You’d like that, wouldn’t you?”
    She shrugged a bare shoulder. Lifting her hand, Laurel ran her fingertips over the deep vee of his red shirt; then slowly, so slowly that she felt Tony catch his breath, her nails stroked the soft down of hair on his chest. She knew her actions were brazen, but dressed in the gypsy costume, she no longer felt herself to be the proper and staid Laurel Delaney, the woman who regally entered a room with her head held high. A shiver at her own daring coursed through her. However, she wouldn’t stop and took perverted delight in knowing that this time she was the one affecting Tony Duvalier.
    “I think I’d be immensely pleased if you were in love with me, but I can have any man I want. I left a pack of drooling men in the drawing room. Why aren’t you drooling?”
    Brazenly, almost as if she were someone else, her mouth lowered to his chest, and she planted a warm, moist kiss on the spot where her fingertip had just been.
    As Tony sucked in his breath, she felt the rapid beating of his heart against his rib cage. His skin tasted slightly salty and was hard and smooth beneath her lips. Delighting in Tony’s rapid breathing, she trailed tiny kisses up the fur-planed expanse to the hollow of his throat.
    A groan of intense pleasure mingled with a sound of pain escaped from Tony. In one motion he pulled her to him, trapping her with an arm around her waist, and with the other hand he grabbed a handful of silky tresses so she would be forced to gaze upward at him.
    “I’m not like the others here,” he ground out. “I’m not so easily taken in by a beautiful face, a voluptuous body. But I know what you are, though you pretend to be virginal and innocent.” He laughed hoarsely. “In fact, I’d probably have let you alone and never touched you again. However, my gypsy temptress, I am only a man, and you’ve ignited the spark.”
    His mouth came down upon hers in a