Read Olivia Gates Bestseller Collection 2012 for Free Online Page A

her face preparing for the next salvo.
    He couldn’t wait to be blasted to pieces.
     
    Phoebe felt her heart stumbling in her chest like a panicked horse trying to gallop on slippery ice.
    And the source of the turmoil, that huge, criminally majestic and beautiful… rat, was looking at her as she tore into him as if she were showering him with compliments.
    This was far worse than she’d expected. And she’d expected the absolute worst ever since she’d arrived at the same building where she’d last seen Leandro. Then Ernesto had ushered her into the same room. Déjà vu had suffocated her by the time she’d seen Leandro with his back to her. And then he’d turned….
    She’d seen many high-resolution photos and hours of footage of him throughout the years. She’d had film-quality memories. She’d thought graphic effects had touched up his assets, that memories had been exaggerated by the distortion of passion and inexperience.
    They’d been misleading, all right. And mercifully so.
    The brunt of the reality of him had shut down her mind, possessed her instincts. Mate, they’d whimpered. She’d seen herself flying to him, seen him storming to her, felt him snatching her in mid-flight, crushing her in his assuagement.
    She’d stumbled out of that alternate reality, reeling. She remembered, vaguely, what had hurtled out of her mouth. Survival. Like someone lashing out with flailing arms at a black hole.
    Then he’d stalked to her, and with each step, she’d withdrawn into herself to ward off his incursion. But damn him, he’d kept coming, invading her senses, snatching her responses from her self-control’s white-knuckled grip. Then he’d spoken. Teased. Taunted. Pushed and pulled. Until the last anchor of her restraint snapped like an overextended string. She could swear she’d heard that final twang echo throughout her body. And she’d let him have it.
    It was as if she’d let him have exactly what he’d been wishing for. The pleasure flashing across his face singed her, the tension roiling through his body resounded inside hers, spiking when every verbal slash hit home. It was as if she were chafing the exact spot he needed scratched, the very nerve cluster he wanted stimulated.
    Who knew he was into S-M. The verbal kind. Maybe the physical, too. No wonder her “yes, Leandro” persona had been so…peripheral to him.
    She thought she’d expended all her angst in that tirade. But with Leandro all but licking his lips for an encore, another was coming on.
    “Now, to elaborate on what I said as I first came in…” She stopped. Her voice sounded as it once had at the end of the stamina-testing ecstasy sessions he’d exposed her to. Shegulped. “Even if you redeem yourself in some huge way, I think it’ll remain inexcusable that you’re playing games when your kingdom’s future is at stake…”
    “ Former kingdom.”
    His indolent words thrilled behind her breastbone. “What?”
    He leaned closer. Sucked whatever air was left from the universe. “I’m an American now.”
    She grimaced. “Oh, please.”
    Mockery intensified the emerald of his eyes. “Want to see my passport?”
    She waved. “You’ll always be Castaldinian.”
    The wings of his dense, perfectly formed eyebrows rose in mock interest. “Really? A whole kingdom disagreed for eight years. I don’t have one official tie to the place.”
    “Like it or not, you are one.”
    He turned his lip down in a perfect parody of a petulant little boy. Yeah. Sure. As if. “I have no say?”
    She shook her head. “None.”
    “I wonder how you have worked this out.”
    “You don’t have a say in your genes, do you? Same thing.”
    “Oh, but we do rise above our programming.”
    “And you transcended your Castaldinian origins?”
    “I was actually culled out of the Castaldinian pool. But I’ve adapted well to life as another species, thank you for caring.”
    “Oh, please. ”
    He leaned back, the seat dipping under his shifting