His Virgin Wife: The Wedding in White / Caught in the Crossfire / The Virgin's Secret Marriage

He searched them quietly, and a faint smile touched his hard mouth. “I’ve waited years for that expression,” he said under his breath. “Years.”

He bent again, and this time her arms lifted slowly around his neck, cradling his head as his mouth covered her parted lips. They clung to each other, letting the kiss build, feeling its power. She moaned when it became fierce and hungry, but she didn’t try to get away. Involuntarily, her body pressed hard against his.

She felt him shiver. He pushed down, his hands lifting her suddenly into the hard thrust of him and holding her there with a slow, sensual rhythm that made her tremble and gasp into his mouth.

“Sweetheart!” he whispered roughly.

The kiss grew harder. She felt him move and lift her clear off the floor in his arms. He walked to the sofa and spread her lengthwise on the leather, easing his body down to cover hers in a silence that was heated and tense.

He was fiercely aroused, and she wanted him at that moment more than she’d ever wanted anything in her life. She followed where he led, even when she felt him shifting her so that his lean hips were pressed squarely against hers, between her legs, in an intimacy that was suddenly urgent and feverish with dark pleasure. She couldn’t have pushed him away if her survival had depended on it. Presumably he felt the same, because his arms held her relentlessly as he began to move against her.

She shuddered with the riptide of pleasure the movement produced, and her eyes flew open, locking with his dark, passionate gaze as he lifted his head to look at her.

With his hands at her head, taking most of his weight, he moved deliberately, watching her as she lifted to meet him and gasped at the sensations the contact produced. Her nails bit into his hard arms, but she wasn’t fighting. She was melting into the leather, flying up into the sky, burning, burning!

The intimacy became so torturous, so fierce, that it was almost too late to draw back when he realized what was happening to them. His hands caught her hips in a bruising clasp and he pulled her over him, holding her still, with her cheek on his pounding chest as he fought to breathe and stop all at the same time.

“No!” She choked, trying to return to the intimacy of their former embrace.

His hands forced her to be still. His breath at her forehead was hot and shaky, audible in the stillness of the study. “Don’t,” he bit off. “Don’t move. For God’s sake, don’t!”

Her mouth pressed into the cotton of his shirt, hot and hungry. “I want to,” she choked.

“God, don’t you think I want to?” he demanded huskily. His hands hurt in their fight to keep her still. “I want you to the point of madness. But not like this, Natalie!”

Belatedly, she realized that he was trying to save her from her own hunger for him. It wasn’t a thought she cherished at the moment, when her whole body was burning with a passion she’d never felt before. But slowly, the trembling eased and she began to breathe normally, if a little fast.

His hands smoothed over her hair, bunching it at her nape as he held her cheek to his chest.

“Why?” she whispered miserably when she was able to speak.

“Because I can’t marry you,” he explained. “And because you can’t live with sleeping with me if I don’t.”

All her dreams vanished in a haze. As the room came into focus across his broad chest, she realized just how far gone they were and how intimate their position on the sofa had become. If he hadn’t stopped, they’d be lovers already. She hadn’t even protested. But he’d had the presence of mind to stop.

So much for her willpower and her principles, she thought sadly. It seemed that her body had a will of its own, and it was much stronger than her mind.

Tears poured from her eyes, and she didn’t even notice until she felt his shirt become damp under her cheek.

His hand laced into her hair and soothed her scalp. “If I thought it would help matters, I’d cry, too,” he murmured dryly.

She hit his shoulder with her fist. “How could you do that to me?” she demanded.

“How could you do it to me?” he shot back. “You know how I feel about commitment. I’ve said so often enough.”

“You started it,” she raged.

He sighed. “Yes, I did,” he admitted after a minute. “This is all I’ve been able to think about since we went nightclubbing,” he confessed. “That was probably the most misguided thing I’ve done in recent years. It’s hard to put out a brushfire once it’s started. Or didn’t you notice?”

She moved experimentally and felt him help her move away to a healthy distance, lying beside him on the long leather couch with her cheek on his shoulder. She looked at him quietly, curiously. His face was a little flushed, and his mouth was swollen from the hard, hungry kisses they’d shared. His shirt was open at the throat. His hair was disheveled. He looked as though he’d been making love, and probably so did she. She didn’t really mind. He looked sensual like that.

“You’d better leave town,” he suggested with a wry smile. “You just went on the endangered list.”

Her fingers spread on his shirt, but he caught and stilled them. “Stop that. I’m barely a step away from ravishment.”

“How exciting,” she murmured.

“You wouldn’t think so for the first few minutes,” he murmured skeptically. “And you wouldn’t be able to live with your conscience even if you did enjoy it eventually.”

She grimaced. “I guess not. I’m not really cut out for passionate affairs.”

“And I’m not cut out for happily ever after,” he said without looking at her.

“Because of your family?” she asked.

He drew in a long breath. She felt his chest rise and fall under her hand. “We could make a list. It wouldn’t change anything.” He looked at her rapt, soft face, and his hardened. “Despite everything,” he whispered huskily, “I would give everything I own to have you, just once.”

She managed a faint smile. “Maybe you’d be disappointed.”

He traced her mouth with a lazy finger. “Maybe you would, too.”

“So it’s just as well, isn’t it?”

“That’s what my mind says,” he agreed.

She nuzzled against his shoulder and closed her eyes. “Isn’t there a poem about hopeless attraction?”

“Hundreds,” he said.

She felt his hand smoothing her hair, almost in a comforting gesture. She smiled. “That feels nice.”

“You feel nice, lying against me like this,” he whispered. He bent and kissed her closed eyelids with breathless tenderness. “It was like this, the night of the wreck,” he added in a hushed tone. “I held you and comforted you, and wanted you until I ached.”

“But I was seventeen.”

“But you were seventeen.” He pressed a kiss on her forehead and put her aside so that he could get to his feet. “You haven’t changed much,” he added as he helped her up.

“I’m older,” she pointed out.

He laughed, and it had a hollow sound. “If you were a modern woman, we’d have fewer problems.”

“But I’m not modern,” she replied sadly. “And that says it all.”

A door opened and shut, and he glanced toward the closed door of the study. “That’ll be Romeo, I reckon,” he drawled with a glittery look at Natalie. “I don’t like the way he hangs around you.”

“He likes me,” she said carelessly. “I like him, too. What’s wrong with that?”

“He belongs to Vivian,” he returned, and he didn’t smile.