Summer Sins. Julia James

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      ‘Lissy, you’re home.’ The voice that spoke out of the darkness was soft, and very slightly slurred.

      Lissa walked into the bedroom. Her life closed around her. Familiar, loving, but cruel and bleak.

      Xavier stood by the uncurtained windows of his hotel suite and moodily nursed a cognac glass between his fingers. He looked down at the silent street below.

      He should go to bed. Go to sleep. But he didn’t feel tired. There was a restlessness pacing in his veins. A question circulating in his head.

      What was he going to do about Lissa Stephens?

      He’d thought it would be cut and dried. That the trashy casino hostess gushing over him was all the evidence he needed that she was the last person he should allow his brother to marry. The carefully orchestrated offer of a lift was merely supposed to have given the girl the opportunity to do what any of her co-workers would surely have done.

      But she hadn’t.

      Why not?

      The cynical answer was that a woman with sufficient—if unexpected—intelligence to have learnt a foreign language was also one that was too smart to jeopardise what she had going with another wealthy man—his brother—to risk a fleeting interlude with anyone else. And maybe that was the reason she hadn’t given him the come on.

      But maybe it was for a quite different reason. Logic demanded that he consider that possibility. One that was at odds with the woman he had thought she obviously was. Maybe Lissa Stephens simply wasn’t the kind of girl the evidence said she was.

      The slow, unconscious swirling of the cognac in his glass halted abruptly.

      He had to know for sure.

      And there was, Xavier knew, with a sudden clenching of his stomach, an obvious way to find out.

      Spend more time with her.

      Conflicting emotions flashed through him as he articulated the thought—and neither was welcome. Emotion seldom was. But he had to recognise it, all the same. One was extreme reluctance—reluctance for a reason that was troublingly evident in the second emotion flaring in him. An emotion that was completely and absolutely inappropriate to the situation. But it was there, all the same—and he could do nothing about it.

      Anticipation.

      With a sudden lift of his hand, he raised the cognac glass to his lips and took a mouthful of the fine, fiery liquid. He might as well face it—he wanted to see the girl again. Wanted to spend more time with her.

      And it was not just to check her out for his brother.

      The kick of the cognac to his system seemed to release something in him. A hot pulse through his veins.

      He wanted to see her again all right.

      Danger prickled on his skin.

      He shouldn’t do this.

      The cool, analytical voice of reason spoke inside his head. It was the voice he always listened to. The voice he ran XeL with, ran his life with—the voice he listened to which had advised him to disentangle his brother from his previous mésalliance. It was the voice with which he selected the women for his bed. Suitable women, appropriate women, who moved in his world, who were part of it, and knew the rules by which he conducted his affairs. Women quite unlike the likes of Lissa Stephens, with her confusing double image—one moment a cheap casino hostess and the next.

      He shouldn’t have thought of Lissa Stephens. Shouldn’t have remembered that second image of hers, the one that had come like a blow out of nowhere in a rain-wet London street in the bleak fag end of the night.

      But it was too late. It was in his head, etched like a diamond against murky smoke. The pure, bare, unadorned beauty of her profile turned away from him. The long fall of pale hair from its high plume. The upturned collar of her cheap jacket that nevertheless framed the crystal contours of her face.

      Of its own volition his hand lifted the glass to his mouth again, and he took another mouthful. He wanted to see that image again. Wanted to look at it. At her.

      He needed to know.

      The words formed in his mind.

      He needed to know. Was she, against all evidence, a fit woman to marry his brother? That was what he needed to find out.

      Nothing else. That was, after all, the only question on the table. The only question that could be on the table.

      Sharply, he turned away. There was nothing else he needed to know about Lissa Stephens.

      As he deposited, with a jerkier movement than was necessary, the cognac glass on a table as he passed it, by heading to his bedroom, he screened out the word that had formed in his consciousness.

      Menteur.

      Liar.

      Lissa lay, staring at the ceiling unseen above her. From time to time, through the muffling of the bedroom door, she could hear a train rattling along the tracks that ran past the rear of the poky flat. From beside her, on the next pillow in the double bed, came the rhythmic rise and fall of slightly stertorous, drug-induced breathing.

      She gazed upward into the dark.

      For all her extreme weariness she could not sleep. Even though she knew she had to be up again in a few hours, her mind was wide awake.

      Thinking. Remembering.

      And—worse still—imagining.

      About one single face. One single man.

      Angrily, she tried to force the image from her mind.

      What was the point in thinking about him? None—none at all. So why was she doing it?

      Because her mind would not go anywhere else.

      Would not even think about the one thing that, above all else in her life, she always thought about. The one person she always had to think about.

      Guilt drenched through her. Oh, God—how low could she stoop? Even thinking it with a note of resentment, however faint. Automatically, as if to assuage her own guilt, she reached out a hand to let it rest lightly on the sleeping form beside her. A wave of love and pity welled in her.

      If only she could wave a magic wand. If only she could make it somehow instantly better. If only she could …

      But she couldn’t. Bleakness chilled in her throat. There was no magic wand. Nothing like that. Only a tiny sliver of hope. And even to seize that meant that all her waking hours had to be dedicated to one thing and one thing only—earning money. Saving money. Little by little. Slowly, oh, so slowly.

      Unless Armand …

      The chill intensified.

      He hadn’t phoned. She had hoped against hope that tonight he would, but there had been nothing. That made it three nights in a row, not hearing from him.

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