“So I have been told with relentless frequency.” Her cheeks were still flushed, but she was frowning at him now. “I don’t care if you are my guardian, and your honor and sense of duty can go hang. I’m not marrying you.”
She could have knocked him down with a feather.
Her words at the ball returned to him, mocking.I’m in love with Mowbray, she had claimed. This absurdity he plainly refused to entertain, that she could fancy herself in love with a spineless dandy like the viscount and yet refuse to marry Trevor himself.
“Neither are you marrying Mowbray,” he warned her sternly. “So you may as well get that particular maggot out of your head. You will marry me, and that is final.”
“And what shall you do if I don’t?” she demanded, crossing her arms. “Steal into my chamber and take the books you’ve only just returned? Banish me from the library again?”
She was angry with him, he realized dimly. The force of her passion had quickly given way to indignation, and he was the source of both. She was far less prickly when he was kissing her. Likely, he ought to have asked her to marry him when his tongue had been on her and his fingers had been deep inside the drenched heat of her cunny. Her answer would have decidedly beenyes.
“The repercussions of our actions extend far beyond mere books,” he told her. “Boundaries have been crossed which cannot be uncrossed. We must wed.”
Three words he’d never thought to say. And yet, here he was, saying them to Virtue, of all the women in the world. To this beautiful, magnificent woman who was intelligent and bold and stubborn and maddening. To his own dead friend’s daughter.
Ah, Pemberton. The marquess would have likely told him to name his second after what he had done. And Trevor wouldn’t have blamed him one whit. He never should have surrendered to temptation. He never should have touched her. Kissed her. Tasted her.
But he had. And now, even without Pamela there to verbally box his ears and issue dire warnings of consequences, he knew what had to be done. There was only one way to make amends for his lack of control, and it was marriage.
His ward, however, remained unconvinced.
“Why must we wed? No one has seen us. No one knows what has happened here except the two of us.” As she spoke, her fingers were investigating the damage which had been done to her chignon.
It was almost completely undone. Her sleek locks rained around her shoulders, and his fingers itched to touch them.
“Iknow what has happened,” he said grimly, “and that is sin enough. Your father entrusted you into my care. I have a duty to do right by you, and in this instance, there is no other way to ameliorate my inexcusable actions save a union between the two of us.”
“My father scarcely remembered my existence when he was alive,” Virtue countered. “I hardly think he’ll care about what has become of me now that he is gone.”
Her assessment of Pemberton was harsh. It occurred to Trevor that he’d never asked his friend about his relationship with his daughter. Christ, now that he thought of it, he’d imagined the marquess’s child had been little more than a babe. Certainly not a woman fully grown. Virtue was not entirely wrong. Pemberton had scarcely mentioned her. The realization angered him on her behalf. What manner of man would simply ignore his own flesh and blood?
“Regardless of the relationship you had with Pemberton, you are my responsibility,” Trevor bit out, furious with himself as much as with his old friend, now that the fogs of lust had been banished from his mind. “I trespassed. I took advantage of you whilst you are in my care. A gentleman would never—”
“Would you cease this nonsense?” she interrupted crossly. “Pray do not pretend that you are a gentleman, Ridgely. You are a rake. What happened just now was likely as commonplace to you as breakfast.”
That rather stung.
He clenched his jaw, wanting to reach for her and yet restraining himself. “Nothing about what we just shared was commonplace.”
Damn her for suggesting otherwise.
He wasn’t a stranger to bed sport, and he’d readily admit that. Trevor wasn’t certain he was quite the rakehell Pamela suggested. But he was no neophyte to the art of lovemaking, that much was certain. However, he could honestly say that he had never, in all his thirty years, been as profoundly affected as he was whenever he so much as stood in Virtue’s presence.
She transfixed him.
“You must think me a fool, Ridgely.” She shook her head. “I know you don’t want to marry me.”
She wasn’t wrong.
He didn’twantto marry anyone. Not truly. Good God, the mere thought of that vaunted institution was enough to induce body-wracking shudders. To hang, draw, and quarter his soul.
But if Trevormustwed at all, then there was only one woman he would consent to shackling himself to in holy matrimony. And it was Virtue. Virtue, with her flashing honey-brown eyes and reckless defiance and love of books and questions and flippant air after he’d just made her spend all over his tongue and fingers. With her rebelliousness and her plain speaking and disregard for society and above all his title.
God, she was maddening. Infuriating. He wanted to kiss her and fuck her and bask in her presence and never let her go.
This time, he did reach for her, catching her waist and pulling her against him, all her delicious curves melting into his hardness. “I don’t think you a fool, and I must marry you.”
“Youmust?” She pursed her lips. “Look around the music room, Ridgely. No one else is here save us.”
