Read By His Desire for Free Online

started to reach for her pajamas, and then stopped. She wanted to sleep naked tonight. Keith might have confused her by leaving when he did, but her body still retained the imprint of his touch and she wanted to savor that.
    The lights were off but the candle was still burning. Now she leaned over and blew it out, settling back into the darkness and the softness of her bed, pulling the blankets up to her chin and cocooning herself into them.
    The silk sheets felt wonderful against her bare skin.
     

 
    Chapter Three
    A gentle knock at the door woke her up.
    “Miss Harper?”
    Sarah blinked and sat up, remembering when the blankets dropped to her waist that she was naked. She pulled everything up to her chin again.
    “Yes?” she called out, uncertainly.
    The door opened and the housekeeper she’d met yesterday stuck her head in the room. “It’s just me,” she said with a smile. “I just wanted to find out if you need anything, and if you’re ready for breakfast.”
    Sarah glanced around the room, but didn’t see a clock. “What time is it?”
    “Nine-thirty.”
    “It is? Wow. I never sleep that late. Um…breakfast. Yes. That sounds great.”
    “Would you like me to bring you a tray up here, or—”
    “Oh, no, I’ll come down,” Sarah said quickly. She didn’t want Nancy to think she was some kind of lady of leisure who had breakfast in bed every morning. “I’ll, um, be down in half an hour.”
    “I’ll let Paul know.”
    Paul was the chef, she remembered. “Okay. Great.”
    After Nancy closed the door again she got out of bed and headed for the bathroom.
    * * *
    It should have been a perfect day. Breakfast was delicious—crepes with ligonberries, sausage sautéed with mushrooms, and the best latte she’d ever tasted, with Paul pouring espresso and hot milk from two separate containers into her cup, so they flowed together in one perfectly foamy stream. After breakfast, she brought her laptop down to the library she’d fallen in love with yesterday, settling down at the antique desk between two bays of leather-scented books and preparing to work hard for the next several hours.
    Only she couldn’t.
    When she realized she’d been staring at her screen for ten minutes, she got up and started to pace.
    The library was ideally suited to pacing. It was big and empty and quiet, and with the enormous oriental rug on the floor her footsteps didn’t make any noise.
    She never had trouble concentrating on her work. From the time she was a child, concentrating on books or writing had been her escape from the pressures of social situations. So why couldn’t she focus now?
    Because Keith had invited her into his home so he could have his way with her, and then he hadn’t. He’d pleasured her to the point of levitation without taking his own pleasure.
    And suddenly, out of nowhere, she was angry.
    Was she so undesirable? Or was he deliberately trying to torture her? Was this just a game to him, some kind of—
    Well, of course it was a game. He was a billionaire indulging a whim. Some kind of weird whim of arousing her sexually without getting aroused himself.
    Suddenly she laughed. She imagined telling someone about her dire situation. “So this gorgeous billionaire I had a crush on in high school offered me a deal. He’ll give me the one painting of my father’s I’ve always wanted if I stay in his mansion for a week being totally pampered, with plenty of time and space to work on my book—as long as, at night, I let him go down on me and give me the most intense orgasms of my life without having to do anything for him in return.”
    She wondered how many women in the world would trade their problems for hers.
    It sounded perfect. It sounded like something out of a fantasy.
    But it wasn’t her fantasy.
    In her fantasy about Keith, the one she’d had since she was fourteen, there was some kind of connection between them. They told each other things they didn’t tell other people. They understood