Nine Months to Redeem Him. Jennie Lucas

St. Cyr was the kind of man who would break your heart without much bothering about it. Casually cruel, like a cat toying with a mouse.

      “So you agree to the terms?”

      Hesitantly, I nodded. He took my hand. I nearly gasped as I felt the warmth of his skin, the roughness of his palm against mine. A current of electricity went through me. My lips parted.

      “Good,” he said softly. We were so close, I smelled his breath, warm and sweet—like liquor. I saw his bloodshot eyes. And I realized, for the first time, that he was slightly drunk.

      A half-empty bottle of expensive whiskey was on the table by his chair, beside a short glass. Dropping his hand, I snatched them up. “But if I’m going to stay and be on call for you every hour of the day, you’re going to commit as well. No more of this.”

      His dark eyebrow raised. “It’s medicinal.”

      I didn’t change my tone. “No drugs of any kind, except, if you’re very nice to me, coffee in the morning. And no more late nights with lingerie models.”

      Edward smiled. “That’s fine.”

      “Or anyone else!” I added sharply.

      He scowled, folding his arms like a sulky boy. “You’re being unreasonable.”

      “Yes,” I agreed. “So that makes two of us.”

      “But if you take away all my toys, Diana,” he looked me over, “what else will I have to play with?”

      My cheeks burned at his deliberately insulting glance. “You’ll have hard work,” I said crisply, “and lots of it.”

      Edward leaned back, his handsome face cold. “You still yearn for Jason Black.”

      The cruelty of his words hit me like a blow. With an intake of breath, I looked towards the window at the deepening night. I saw my plain reflection in the glass, against the red-orange glow of the fire.

      “Yes,” I whispered, and was proud my voice held steady.

      “You lo-ove him,” he said mockingly.

      My throat choked. Madison and Jason were probably making love right now, in their elegant suite at a five-star Parisian hotel. I said in a small voice, “I don’t want to love him anymore.”

      “But you do.” He snorted, looking over me with contemptuous eyes. “You’ll probably forgive that stepsister of yours, too.”

      “I love them.” I sounded ashamed. And I was. What kind of idiot loves people who don’t love her back? My teeth chattered. “People...can’t choose who they l-love.”

      “My God. Just look at you.” Edward stared at me for a long moment. “Even now, you won’t say a word against them. What a woman.”

      Silence fell. The wind howled outside, shaking the leaded glass in the thick gray stone.

      “You’re wrong, you know,” he said quietly. “You can choose who you love. Very easily.”

      “How?”

      “By loving no one.”

      At those breathtakingly cynical words, I looked at his powerful, injured body. The hard jaw, the icy blue eyes. Edward St. Cyr was the master of Penryth Hall, handsome and wealthy beyond imagining.

      He was also damaged. And not just his body.

      “You’ve had your heart broken too,” I whispered, searching his gaze. “Haven’t you?”

      Edward looked me over in a way that caused my body to flash with heat. He took a step closer, and his muscular, powerful body towered over me in every direction.

      “Perhaps that’s the real reason I wanted you here,” he murmured. “Perhaps we are kindred spirits, you and I. Perhaps we can—” he brushed back a tendril of my hair “—heal each other in every way....”

      Edward pulled closer to me. I felt the warmth of his breath against my skin and shivered all over. My heart was beating frantically. He started to lower his head toward mine.

      Then I saw the sardonic twist of his lips.

      Putting my hands on his chest—on his hard, muscular, delicious chest, warm through his shirt—I said, “Stop it.”

      “No?” Taking a step back, laughing, he mocked me with my earlier words. “Too soon?”

      “You are a jerk,” I choked out.

      He shrugged his one-shoulder shrug. “Can’t blame me for trying. You seem so naïve, like you’d believe any line a man told you.” He considered me. “Kind of amazing you’re still a virgin.”

      Outrage filled me, and new humiliation. “You claim you’re desperate to be healed—”

      “I never used the word desperate.”

      “Then you fire your physical therapists, and waste your days getting drunk—”

      “And don’t forget my nights having sex,” he said silkily.

      “You’re already trying to sabotage me.” Narrowing my gaze, I lifted my chin. “I don’t think you actually want to get better.”

      His careless look disappeared and he narrowed his eyes in turn. “I’m hiring you as a physio, Miss Maywood, not a psychiatrist. You don’t know me.”

      “I know I came a long way here to have my time wasted. If you don’t intend to get better, tell me now.”

      “And you’ll do what? Go back home to humiliation and paparazzi?”

      “Better that, than be stuck with a patient who has nothing but excuses, and blames others for his own laziness and fear!”

      “You say this to my face?” he growled.

      “I’m not afraid of you!”

      Edward stared at me blankly.

      “Maybe you should be.” He fell back heavily into the chair and stared at the fire. The sheepdog lifted his head, wagging his tail.

      “Is that what you want?” I said softly, coming closer. “For people to be afraid of you?”

      The flickering firelight cast shadows on the leatherbound books of his starkly masculine study. “It makes things simpler. And why shouldn’t they fear me?” His midnight-blue eyes burned through me. “Why shouldn’t you?”

      Edward St. Cyr’s handsome face and cultured voice were civilized, but that was a veneer, like sunlight over ocean. Beneath it, the darkness went deeper than I’d imagined. In spite of my earlier brave words, something shivered in my heart, and I suddenly wondered what I’d gotten myself into.

      “Why should I be afraid of you?” I gave an awkward laugh. “Is your soul really so dark?”

      “I loved a woman,” he said in a low voice, not looking at me. “So much I tried to kidnap her from her husband and baby. That’s how I got in the accident.” His lips turned flat. “Her husband objected.”

      “This is why you wouldn’t allow the agency to give me any details,” I said slowly, “not even your name. You were afraid if I knew more about you, I wouldn’t come, weren’t you?”

      His jaw tightened.

      “Was anyone hurt?”

      His expression suddenly looked weary. “Only me.”

      “And now?”

      “I’ve left them to their happiness. I’ve found that love, like dreams,” he said the word mockingly, “offers more pain than pleasure.” He turned to me in the firelight, his expression stark. “You want to know about the depths of darkness in my soul?” His lips twisted. “You couldn’t even see it. You, who are nothing