Read A Convenient Husband for Free Online Page B

about his physical perfection without her joining the fan club! She looked up anxiously to see if he’d noticed her drooling display and saw his eyes weren’t on her face at all.
    â€˜A lot of things have changed since then.’ His deep voice was warmly appreciative as he continued to stare at the up-tilted outline of her small breasts.
    He lifted his head and his eyes were slumberously sexy. Her breasts responded as though he’d touched the soft mounds of quivering flesh with his warm mouth. The startling image banished all rational thoughts from her head for one long, steamy moment. Nostrils flared, cheeks burning, she fought her way back to sanity.
    â€˜Some things don’t change—things like your complete disregard for other people’s feelings.’ It was a whopping big lie, so to justify it she began to feverishly search her memory for some example to prove her point. Triumphantly she discovered one. ‘Your family must have worried like crazy about you when you went missing all those times…?’ Looking at it now through adult eyes, she saw aspects to Rafe’s frequent nocturnal wanderings that her childish eyes had never seen.
    â€˜If concern is expressed by the vigour of the punishment, they were deeply concerned.’ Something in his cynical voice made her search his stony face.
    The memory of the bruises she’d once seen on his back when they had all gone swimming popped into her head. Suddenly all those times he’d refused to take off his heavy, long-sleeved sweater on a hot summer day made horrible sense. Everything clicked into place and she felt sick.
    Tess forgot her throbbing head; she jerked herself upright.
    Outrage glowed in her eyes. ‘He hit you!’ She thought of Guy Farrar with his mean little mouth and big meaty fists and her skin crawled. ‘You never said!’ she began angrily.
    Nobody, not her dimly remembered parents or dear gran Aggie had ever laid a finger on her. Her chest felt tight and her eyes stung. She knew now what should have been obvious to her ages ago: their efforts to force Rafe to fit the mould of a perfect Farrar had gone beyond the verbal chastisements she’d heard often enough for herself…they’d tried to beat him into submission!
    â€˜Leave it, Tess,’ Rafe said curtly.
    â€˜But—!’
    â€˜You’re hyperventilating,’ he told her, studying with clinical interest the agitated rise and fall of her small but shapely breasts. So, he’d noticed she had breasts! It was no big deal. However, noticing was one thing, staring was another. He firmly averted his eyes.
    Tess wasn’t about to apologise for her emotional response; she couldn’t understand his lack of it! ‘I’m not!’ she denied breathlessly. ‘Doesn’t it make you mad?’ she persisted incredulously.
    For a long time it had, but Rafe had no intention of explaining how much effort and determination it had taken him to finally shelve the resentment that had simmered for years.
    Her firm jaw tightened and her smouldering eyes narrowed. ‘I’d like to—!’ she began hotly.
    Rafe took hold of her hands and, inserting his thumbs inside her clenched fingers, slowly unfurled her white-knuckled fists. ‘I can see what you’d like to do…’ he remonstrated softly.
    Rafe frequently thanked his lucky stars that his only personal legacy from a father who’d automatically raised his fist on the frequent occasions when his troublesome younger son had annoyed him was a deep revulsion for violence and individuals who used it to control those who were weaker and more vulnerable. He was well aware that all too often the pattern repeated itself in each successive generation.
    There had only been the one occasion when he’d used his physical strength to punish someone else—actually there had been three of them, sixth formers who had been making the life of another