Read Online One Touch of Moondust by Sherryl Woods - Free Book Online

got home, after eating spicy Mexican food in Greenwich Village and drinking far too many margaritas.
    Gabrielle felt just as exhilarated as she had in the morning and slightly tipsy. She couldn’t recall the last time she’d had so much uninhibited, unstructured, spur-of-the-moment fun. Nor was she feeling particularly guilty about it. How extraordinary!
    â€œThank you,” she said as they stood in their darkened living room.
    Impulsively she stood on tiptoe to brush an appreciative kiss across Paul’s lips. In the hushed silence she suddenly heard the pounding of her heart, the sharp intake of his breath. Then she looked into Paul’s eyes and saw the unmistakable darkening of desire, felt her own blood race. As their breath mingled, she knew if she touched the warmth of his lips, even just this once she’d get burned. There were limits, even in the midst of magic. The idea that they could remain simply roommates, that their emotions would remain impassive, fled with the blink of an eye. The sense of destinies irrevocably entwining overcame her again.
    Paul’s well-muscled body, tight with tension, was suddenly too tempting, too overpowering. Shaken, she backed away a step, the friendly kiss abandoned as a very bad idea.
    â€œYou’re running again, Gaby,” he said with heart-stopping accuracy.
    â€œGabrielle,” she said with a touch of her old defiance.
    His lips curved into a faint smile. He ran a finger along her jaw. “Gabrielle,” he said ina whisper so soft it caressed as gently as a spring breeze. Her resistance turned to liquid fire as he moved toward her. Her whole body trembled in anticipation.
    â€œYou promised,” she said with a broken sigh as he bent closer. Still, despite the nervous plea, her lips remained parted for the kiss, waiting, longing. The mere sensation of anticipation was one she’d denied herself for too long. It sang through her veins.
    At her protest, though, a shadow passed over Paul’s features and he straightened slowly, reluctance etched on his face. “So I did.”
    He settled for running his fingers through her tangled, wind-tossed hair, the light touch grazing her cheeks. Her body ached from the tension of wanting more and knowing that satisfaction of that need would be wrong for both of them.
    The expression in his eyes was regretful as he whispered, “Sweet dreams, Gabrielle.” Then he turned and went straight to his room without a backward glance.
    * * *
    Paul’s body was hard and charged with the urgency of his desire to claim the woman whoslept in the next room. In just a few hours curiosity had slipped into fascination and was quickly turning into something much stronger. It wasn’t supposed to have been this way, but he should have known it would be. He’d always wanted things that weren’t his to take.
    It had been hellish for a small boy to discover that the toys his friends took for granted would never be his. His mother had been a housekeeper, his father a gardener. Honest, kind, hardworking people, they had loved him all the more because he had come along late in their lives.
    Because of his parents’ jobs, he had grown up on a huge estate on Long Island. His playmates had been the children of the manor, children just like Gabrielle Clayton. No matter how hard he’d tried to be one of them, though, they were always just beyond his reach. He wore their cast-off clothes and he dreamed their dreams. But for him those dreams were unattainable. At age five, the differences had been insignificant. By twenty they’d torn at his gut. That was when he’d realized with irrevocable and heartbreaking finality that Christine Bently Hanford would never really think ofhim as anything more than the son of the hired help.
    It had taken him ten years away from there to get over the anger, to find his own niche, to become comfortable with who he was and what he wanted out of life. Envy