Page 75 of A Deal With a Notorious Devil
“I’m sorry.” At least the dark concealed her flush of shame. He’d been so kind to her just lately, kinder than he had ever had to be. All week he had kept her company during the night, though she knew he had sacrificed his privacy to do so. Even though he’d woken at every nightmare.
“Not your fault. I sleep lightly. But you—you are going to sleep deeply tonight. For once.” His knee nudged between hers, and his fingers tightened in her hair as he eased her to her back. The swirling shadows above her no longer seemed quite so threatening as her head sank into the pillow, as his lips touchedthe point of her chin and slid down the line of her throat.
A low sound of pleasure rumbled in his chest as her hands explored the firm muscles of his back, stroking his shoulders, his sides. His lips touched the hollow of her throat, and then there was the silky stroke of his tongue tracing a delicate line across her sensitive flesh, sweeping down toward her breast.
A lambent head kindled in her belly as his tongue swirled around her nipple, and it was impossible to keep still—her hips canted into the press of his knee there between her thighs, and she cast her head back upon the pillow with a soft, plaintive sound that provoked an amused snicker from him.
Fire sliced through her veins with every soft suck, every delicate nibble of her tender flesh. She licked her dry lips. “Kit, please—”
“Hush.” His knee retreated, and she could have whimpered for the loss. A whisk of cool air slid between them as he ducked beneath the covers. His tongue touched the dip of her navel in a ticklish caress as he slid lower, and lower still. One hot hand wrapped around her right thigh, shoving her legs wide to admit the width of his shoulders and then both palms slipped beneath her to arch her hips to his mouth.
Phoebe pressed one hand to her mouth, but a humiliating sound slipped between the gaps of her fingers anyway. A searing stroke of his tongue teased past crisp curls, searching out the hot, damp flesh beneath. Her blood sang in her veins, her thighs tensed, muscles quivering. Her knees fell wide in open surrender, and he chuckled against her, notably avoiding that most sensitive part of her.
When her hips arched to his mouth of their own accord, he reclaimed a hand, sliding two fingers deep inside her, easing the ache of emptiness within her. A plaintive cry warbled from her throat. Almost, but not quite enough. Her trembling hand found his hair beneath the blankets, gripping a fistful of the coolstrands.
He made a feral sound in his throat—approval, she thought—and let her redirect his attention to that little bead of sensation at the apex of her thighs. A thrust of his fingers and a slow suck, a swirl of his tongue. She shattered with a queer sound of relief, more moan than sigh, awash in a blissful satiation.
“Mm.” His low sound of satisfaction vibrated against her thigh, where he placed a tender kiss. “I love to feel you coming on my fingers.” Another gentle thrust of them provoked a new burst of spasms, and Phoebe shuddered and gasped. Kit gave a regretful sigh. “It’s too damned bad I didn’t prepare for this.”
“I did,” Phoebe murmured through fractured breaths.
His fingers stalled in their rhythmic plunges. “Did you?”
“Stole a few condoms from your drawer.” Her fingers stroked his hair in praise. “I had to ask Charity how to prepare them. God, don’t stop. Please.” That fierce fire had ebbed in the wake of her climax, but the thrust of his fingers was kindling it once more. Her skin sizzled with the slow burn of it.
“You glorious, wicked woman,” he said, kissing her thigh. “Where?”
“Nightstand drawer.Hurry.”
The covers went sailing off as he withdrew, and the intrusion of cool air soothed her overheated skin. There was the slide of a drawer, a brief fumbling, and moments later the heat of his body settled over her. She loved the weight of him, the texture of his skin sliding across hers. The crisp hair on his chest teased her nipples, and she slung one leg about his waist, arching into the slow thrust of his hips as the blunt head of his cock sank inside her, filling that aching emptiness.Perfectly.
He made a soft sound; a gasp of pleasure, she thought, and she felt a shudder tremble through him. Her hands slipped across his sweat-slicked back, found purchase as she gripped his shoulders. Whatever patience, whatever forbearance he hadexercised, it was gone now—he moved in fierce, strong plunges, searing her from the inside, stroking across tender tissues until he touched a part of her that made her gasp and arch as every nerve sparkled and hummed.
His breath sawed from his lungs in harsh pants as he strove for fulfillment. “I need to feel you,” he rasped against her ear. “I need you to come again. I need you to take me with you.”
“Yes.Yes.” Her fingernails bit into his skin, and she turned her face toward his to invite the brush of his lips. “Ahh—Kit!” Every muscle seized in an agony of pleasure. She felt the contractions of her inner muscles upon him, felt his last brutal lunge and the helpless shudder of his large body over hers. For a few moments she drifted, weightless, across a sea of repletion, cognizant of nothing more than the lovely lassitude that drifted over her like a soft, downy quilt.
Her scattered wits gathered themselves slowly, but the lethargy that enveloped her was unshakeable. She heard Kit’s muted chuckle, felt the tender kisses he pressed to her cheek, her forehead. Distantly she was aware that he had absented himself for a moment, when he’d recovered himself, but all she cared for was that he had returned to gather her into his arms once more, and she settled against his chest with a sigh.
“No more nightmares,” he murmured against the top of her head. “Not tonight.”
And for once she slept like a babe, deep and dreamless.
∞∞∞
His room the next evening, if only because Phoebe had run out of pilfered condoms and today he’d had the foresight to prepareone of his own. As the candle had burned low, she’d found his trinket box stuffed at the back of his nightstand and had begun rooting through it to demand an explanation of how he’d acquired each piece.
And he’d humored her, because she seemed so damned amused with them.
“This one?” Phoebe asked, picking a piece out of a small wooden box, holding it up to dangle before his eyes. A pocket watch chain, done in silver.
“Ah,” Chris said. “I’m afraid that one belongs to your brother.”
“Really?” Phoebe asked, blinking in the dim light of the candle set upon his nightstand. “Could you not get the watch as well?”
“As it happens, I got both,” he said. “But the watch had an inscription from your father on the occasion of Laurence’s marriage.” And though it had not injured his conscience to lift the watch on principle, it had…scratched at it just a bit when he had considered keeping them both. “The chain was enough,” he said in a grumbly sort of voice, vaguely annoyed with himself. “I slipped the watch back into his pocket when he was distracted.”
“What did he do?” she asked.
