She didn’t know.
But Trevor did. He took her mouth in a gentle kiss. Another angling of his hips, and the warm, wonderful weight of his muscled form pinned her to the bed. He slid the rest of the way inside her, with scarcely any objection from her body. How incredible it was, to be joined with him.
He broke the kiss. “I need to move.”
“Yes,” she hissed, because she needed that too. Needed friction. Needed motion. Needed his body possessing hers in the most primitive way.
He guided her legs around his hips, and then he almost withdrew from her entirely, the glide of his rigid cock through her slickness making sparks of desire shoot through her, supplanting any lingering discomfort. And then he filled her again, lodged so deep, finding an angle that created the perfect storm of pleasure bordering on pain.
This time, he didn’t stop. He kept moving, in and out, the rhythm maddening. She felt herself spiraling, every part of her exquisitely sensitive. He kissed her cheek, her ear, her neck. Took her mouth again as he took her body, with fierce, voracious insistence. She understood then, how truly they were one, how wonderfully she had been made for this man, and he for her.
And just when she thought she could withstand no more pleasure, his fingers dipped between their joined bodies, stroking her pearl, moving with the firm pressure he’d learned she liked. Everything inside her seized, and she clamped down on him, throwing her head back into the pillow, tearing her lips from his to gasp with the delirious joy of her release.
He buried his face in her throat, his hand fisting in her hair, the pull at her roots not painful but just enough to heighten her climax and make her cry out as her pinnacle roared through her. He increased his pace, growing more frenzied, his hard cock stroking in and out faster until he groaned into her skin, and his powerful body tensed, and she felt the hot, wet spurt of his seed as he spent.
He collapsed, staying buried inside her, his cock pulsing as he kept her pinned under him. She held him to her, stroking his hair as she returned slowly to lucidity. It occurred to her then in one stunning rush as she lay beneath his warm, muscled weight, his body still within hers, that she had been wrong about the need to guard her heart against Trevor.
For it was too late.
She already loved him.
CHAPTER16
He woke with a jolt, coming to in darkness, terror and dread filling his chest with a heavy tightness. His breaths were ragged and harsh, painful in his lungs. And the certainty was there. Someone was coming for him. Coming to kill him.
Trevor bolted upright, head swiveling as he tried to make sense of the shadows surrounding him and the morass in his mind. He grasped the bedclothes, swimming with delirium, thinking he was going to find the hilt of a knife. All he found was warm curves swathed in a counterpane instead.
“Trevor?”
A soft hand on his back, between his shoulder blades. He flinched, partially trapped in the dream he’d been suffering ever since the night of the intruder in his chamber as sanity rained down on him in slow drips.
The voice was Virtue’s. So, too, the touch.
She was in his bed. In his chamber. Why? How?
More remembrance. The impromptu ceremony, Pamela and Beast as their witnesses in the drawing room. Signing their names to the register. The ride through Hyde Park, down Rotten Row at the unfashionable hour merely because she had requested it.
Saint’s teeth, Virtue was hiswife. He’d bedded her this afternoon like the barbarian he was, not even waiting for nightfall, and some time afterward, he had apparently fallen into a deep slumber.
“Are you well?” she asked, her voice concerned.
“Christ,” he muttered, scrubbing at his forehead as if the action would rid his mind of the terrible thoughts dwelling within it. The feral dreams that haunted his sleep. The memory of the man who had intended to kill him.
The dream had returned each night since it had happened, without fail. And instead of fading, it seemed to become more vivid, more frightening.
He hadn’t intended to sleep with Virtue in his bed. Not like this, not when the dreams continued to plague him. Not until he was assured he was safe. If he ever truly would be. That was the price of having led a dangerous life, was it not? He’d been a spy, a devil-may-care, living each day as if it could happily be his last because he hadn’t given a damn about anyone else, and most especially not himself.
But that had changed now. He had a wife, a woman he, somehow, impossibly,loved. He had Virtue.
“You’re shaking,” she murmured, shifting nearer to him, pressing her naked curves against his back and side. Kissing his shoulder blade. “What is wrong? Won’t you tell me?”
“It was a dream,” he managed, his voice tight even to his own ears. God, he hated this weakness. He’d never been so vulnerable, not even in his days with the Guild. “Nothing is amiss.”
A lie.
His gut clenched the moment he said the words, for he hadn’t lied to Virtue, and he shouldn’t begin. She deserved his honesty, even if it humiliated him.
“Not nothing,” he amended quietly as her hand continued to caress up and down his spine in soothing motions. “I had a dream about…”
