That knowing touch skated nearer to where she wanted it most, and she inhaled sharply, her hips lifting from the fur robe still spread over the divan.
“Yes.”
“And you want me to touch you?”
Wicked fingers traveled over her mound, tracing a circle around the pulsing nub that throbbed with desperate desire for his caress. He was taunting her, teasing her. The blood was coursing through her body, rushing in her ears. She was lightheaded and desperate with want.
“Please,” she managed to say when he failed to give her what she wanted.
“I do like the way you beg.”
And then there it was, the briefest hint of his forefinger gliding over her swollen flesh. She wanted more. Needed more. And he knew it, the wretch.
She said something and clutched at his arms, hips wriggling, about to come out of her skin.
His given name.Trevor.
Yes, that was what it was that she’d said, and how good it felt on her tongue.
His finger strummed over her aching bud as if she were an instrument.
Not enough. He was torturing her. She remembered belatedly that she had hands of her own which were up to the task and reached between them, her fingers flying furiously over herself.
“Jesus,” he hissed. “Youarewild, aren’t you?”
Perhaps she was after all.
She was touching her most intimate place, and the Duke of Ridgely was watching her. Virtue ought to have been ashamed, and she knew it. But there was something about the scandalous and forbidden nature of the act that excited her. She rubbed over her swollen clitoris, luxuriating in how slick she was and how good it felt, little sparks shooting from her core and up the base of her spine, a quickening she recognized beginning in her belly.
He rubbed her inner thigh and pressed a kiss to her still-covered breast. “That’s it, darling. Make yourself come while I watch.”
It was all too much. The rumble of his wicked words, his touch, the exquisite pulse of need within her, his mouth on her breast, his body pressed to her side, burning into hers, and his dark eyes devouring her. She was flying higher, heart pounding, the coil of desire tightening like a spring.
She couldn’t hold it back.
The rush of pure, liquid bliss hit her with so much force that she couldn’t contain her cry, and then his lips were there, on hers, smothering her moan. And he was kissing her hard, his tongue taking her mouth as if it belonged to him, as if it always had and always would. And her mind didn’t doubt the veracity of that claim. She felt and understood it to the very depths of her soul. Her thighs had clamped together, holding her hand and his imprisoned there as wave after wave of ecstasy pounded through her.
And as the roaring in her ears began to slowly fade, that was when she heard the stunned feminine gasp from across the library and the accusatory voice of Lady Deering.
“Ridgely, what have youdone?”
* * *
As far asTrevor was concerned, the question wasn’t so much what hehaddone as what hehadn’tdone. He could have done a great deal more. Had wanted to more than he’d wanted to take another breath.
Stillwanted to, in fact, and there was no denying it.
However, there was no better cure for a raging cockstand than facing the shrill disapproval of one’s proper sister after thoroughly debauching one’s innocent ward on a sofa.
In the whirlwind which had followed Pamela’s disastrous discovery of Trevor and Virtue on the Grecian divan in the library, his ward had been sent to her room and Trevor had secured himself a glass of brandy before facing his sister for the inevitable reckoning in his study. He had nearly poured it down his throat in one fluid motion, and he was still waiting for the expected dulling of his senses to descend. Much to his everlasting shame, he had licked his finger clean of every trace of Virtue just before Pamela had stormed over the threshold like a general about to rout an enemy. He could yet taste her sweet musk on his tongue, and it was driving him to distraction.
Clearly, a second brandy was in order.
“Will you tell me what happened, or am I to guess?” Pamela demanded, pale and tight lipped when he was filling his glass anew.
He took his time before lifting his glass to his sister in a mocking toast. “Need I elaborate?”
He would rather not. For he could scarcely make sense of it himself, it was true. One moment, he’d been sleeping on the library divan, and the next, his ward had been there. Tempting and hauntingly lovely. And there had been a strange confluence of relief that he was still alive mingling with his unbridled attraction to her. He never should have touched her. That had been the start of it. Those silken, warm wrists of hers.
