Read Online The Italian Duke's Virgin Mistress by Penny Jordan - Free Book Online

her, and stepped back from her, leaving Charley to tell herself that she was glad that he had brought an end to her reckless and unwanted imaginings.
    ‘Very well, then,’ she told him, struggling for normality. ‘I’ll wear the jeans, but that’s all. I don’t need the jacket.’
    Raphael had stepped into the shadow of the window and she couldn’t see his expression properly.
    ‘It is over two hundred years since the garden fell into disrepair,’ he told her coolly. ‘Many parts of it are thick with overgrown plants. You will need the jacket to protect you from thorns. Now, I shall expect you tobe downstairs and ready to accompany me to the garden in one hour’s time. Is that understood?’
    Reluctantly Charley nodded her head.
    As he walked down the corridor from Charlotte’s bedroom there was only one image in Raphael’s head, and one thought on his mind. The trouble was that the image and the thought were at war with one another. The image was that of Charlotte standing looking at him with defiant pride, her breasts rising and falling with the force of her emotions, her long legs going on for ever, making him ache to have them wrapped around his own body as the two of them lay together on the bed, her naked flesh warm and soft to his touch, her hands on his body, her mouth opening to his as he gave in to the aching need of his desire for her—a desire that in his imagination she shared and matched. He had never wanted a woman so much nor so illogically. Logically there was nothing about her that should have appealed to him—not physically, nor mentally, nor in any other way. His taste ran to soignée, elegant and mature women in their thirties, like him—women of the world, not fiercely passionate young women who dressed in ill-fitting clothes and upset and undermined a project of great personal importance to him. His mind told him that he should not want her, but his body told him equally powerfully that it did. In this instance, with something as important to him as the renovation of the garden at stake, it was what his mind was telling him that mattered, and it was on what his mind was telling him that he intended to focus.
    Charley walked slowly over to the mirror and studied her reflection. Tentatively she touched her waist, and then, driven by an impulse she couldn’t control, she pulled off her clothes. She couldn’t remember the last time she had looked at her own naked body. How would she, when she normally avoided looking at it? It must be the sunlight that was giving her skin that soft glow, that sheen that said it wanted to be touched and admired. She lifted her own hand to her body, touching it as and where Raphael had done, trying to see it with his eyes, and then tensing. What was she doing? Wasn’t the situation difficult enough for her already, without her adding even more potential discomfort to it?
    She looked at the bedroom door, reminding herself that she didn’t have much time to get downstairs if she was to keep to the schedule Raphael had given her.
    Ten minutes later Charley looked down at the jeans she was wearing. They were a perfect fit—a far better fit and a far better cut than the ones she had been wearing, their slim shape emphasising the length of her legs and clinging to her hips.
    She was also wearing the new tee shirt and the leather jacket, its fabric soft against her fingertips. When she’d looked at herself in the bedroom’s fulllength mirror she’d been caught off guard by the difference the new clothes made to her appearance. Even the hair clouding round her face looked different. Her reflection was more feminine somehow—but of course that was impossible. She was seeing what she wanted to see because of the way she felt about Raphael. Because, foolishly and dangerously, she wanted him.
    Angry with herself, she used the dark brown ribbon that had been wrapped round the tissue-folded clothes to tie back her hair. She couldn’t stay up here any longer. If she