Daring Time Read Free Page B

reading. He shuffled through the photos—seven in all—slowly. When he'd seen them all, he studied each one again.
    And then again.
    What he was looking at was a prime example of Victorian-era erotic photography—images of a bound, dark-haired beauty and a big, muscular man in various arousing stages of a session of mild BDSM sex.
    Ryan lowered his head to better examine the woman's face in one photo. The man's hand was on the nape of her neck, appearing to hold her head down on the mattress of the bed while he knelt behind her. Her eyes were closed, but every nuance and angle of her face reflected a sense of profound, intense arousal.
    He moaned harshly, his hand jerking up to his crotch to alleviate the painful stab of lust that shot through his cock like a sizzling bolt of lightning.
    It wasn't just the nearly tangible ecstasy on the woman's face while the man thrust into her. No, it wasn't only that that made Ryan hard enough to pound nails with his erection.
    Nor was it just the arousing photo of her mouth open in a silent scream of pleasure while the man's face was buried between her slender thighs or the image of her restrained to the bed while her lover used a crop on her full, shapely breasts.
    The thing that had him jerking his cock out of his boxer briefs and pumping himself like a madman was the fact that the woman being sexually dominated and pleasured in those pictures was the same woman he'd seen in the mirror.
    The same woman who—if he allowed himself to examine the issue for even a split second—was the sole reason he'd come here tonight to sleep in this cold, hulking, rattling skeleton of a house. Seeing her in that mirror had made the blood simmer in his veins.
    But seeing unmasked desire on her beautiful face made him burn at the center of a raging, white-hot fire.

TWO
    His portable alarm clock went off at seven a.m. Ryan stuck his head up and looked blurrily around the sunlight-filled Prairie Avenue mansion bedroom before he hit the snooze button on the alarm clock and buried his face back in the pillow.
    He groggily recalled how he'd jacked off not once last night, but three times in a shockingly short period of time thanks to the volatile fuel of those erotic photos. Now that morning was here, it struck him as amusing that he'd gotten as horny as a teenage boy over photographs of a woman who'd likely been dead for the greater part of a century.
    He scowled at the thought, turning his head on the pillow, willing the warm, enticing embrace of sleep to enfold him once again. He heard the heater blowing out its hot air and the sound of a car backfiring on a far-distant city street. Ramiro was going to be as pissed and mouthy as a shortchanged whore if Ryan wasn't ready when he arrived.
    He was weighing the consequences of sleeping in and leaning toward getting up rather than endure Ramiro's complaints when a floorboard not five feet behind his back creaked, as though someone had just placed a cautious foot on it and then paused at the subsequent sound. The hairs on his arms rose and prickled.
    For some reason instead of springing up out his warm cocoon and lunging for his gun, like he logically should have, he remained still, his breath frozen in his lungs.
    "You're such a hog with the covers. Let me in there with you. I'm freezing out here."
    Ryan's eyelids popped open; surely he must have imagined the low, sultry voice laced with laughter.
    Slowly, almost as though he believed he moved right at the precipice of a cliff, the ground beneath him fragile and crumbling, he turned around.
    She sat next to him. The morning sunlight cast her pale, naked body into a luminous landscape of feminine curves and planes. The brilliant, breathtaking vision of her blinded him for a second. He blinked .. . but no, she didn't disappear in a sweet, gardenia-scented mist. Instead she continued to stare down at him, puzzlement mixing with the amusement in her large, midnight eyes.
    Ryan whipped back the covers and spread