The Illegitimate King (Castaldini Crown 3)

As she approached it, her upheaval rose until it shook her, deafened her.

She stumbled on the last step, ended up with the side of her face plastered to the cool oak. And then she heard them.

Rumbles. Dark, deep.

Agonized.

She froze, held her breath, attempted to silence her heart, strained to catch every nuance, fathom it.

Dio, why was he groaning like that? The terrible sounds quaked through her as explanations streaked through her mind. Suddenly one screeched to a halt, freezing her tremors with horror.

He could be with a woman. Or more than one. She could be hearing the sounds of him in the throes of passion.

The suspicion lasted seconds before conviction vaporized it.

No. He sounded like he was in pain.

Suddenly he went silent.

She barged into the room, her heart pounding.

The expansive room was dimly illuminated by sconces similar to those in the corridor. She’d taken two dozen leaps before her momentum died on the beige-marble floor. She came to a stumbling halt a few feet from what must have been a nine-by-nine bed, draped in darkness at the far end of the room.

And there he was, in its middle, spread out on his back. One muscled arm was thrown over his head, the other stretched at a right angle to his body. His formidable chest was bare, his hips and part of his slightly parted, endless legs twisted in dark sheets the color of which she couldn’t fathom. His head was tipped back, his face turned toward an arched verandah door framed by white, translucent curtains that billowed in the balmy night breeze.

He looked like a decadent god in the depths of slumber.

But he was totally still. He didn’t seem to be breathing.

Panic wrenched through her, propelled her to his side, breath and heartbeats shattering inside her chest.

Before she crashed beside him on the bed, ready to grab and shake him and sob for him to wake up, to be all right, he stirred.

She almost fell to the floor on her knees under the weight of overwhelming relief. Dio, Dio, grazie, grazie filled her head. He was…he was…just sleeping.

But he wasn’t just sleeping.

Horror seeped back into her blood as she watched his face contort, jerked with the sound his teeth made as they gnashed into a silent snarl, as his whole body tensed.

His every muscle bulged as he arched up from the bed. His veins, distended as if under a high-pressure surge, stood out like thick ropes running across his sweaty, sculpted flesh. Even in the dim light she could see his golden bronze color become livid with the rush of blood. His breathing turned explosive, erratic. The bed started to shake with the terrible tension arcing through him.

It was as if he were having a seizure. No, worse. It was as if he were struggling to escape a weight that was dragging him under, or crushing him. As if he were bracing for unendurable torture, suppressing agony so that it wouldn’t escape his lips in vocal suffering. Then it did.

The rumbles seemed to originate from the deepest reaches of his soul before seeping through his body, guttural snarls filled with fury and ferocity, with dread and desperation, before they burst from his throat in growls of pure torment.

He was in the grips of an inescapable nightmare. Like the ones that still haunted her. The ones she’d assured everyone she no longer had. She’d learned to live with her chronic sleep invaders, trained herself to recognize their advent, to ward off their damage, to escape their talons. At least after she’d woken up. They came far and few between now, but seemed to have gained in power for being less frequent, as if each one slowly built to a crescendo before being unleashed on her unguarded psyche.

She recognized the same anguish radiating from him now, a frequency of distress that resonated with her own.

Was this a one-time occurrence, or was it recurring?

It was recurring. She recognized the signs. So, what pain and horror did he relive every time he closed his eyes, surrendered to the supposedly healing embrace of sleep?

The unending possibilities seared her imagination, all the things that could have scarred him body and soul as he grew up, things of which she knew she’d never have anywhere near an accurate picture of their damage and cruelty.

She thought he’d survived them all unscathed. She’d thought him invulnerable.

He wasn’t. And here was the proof. This was a man writhing in torment so deep, suffering from wounds so indelible, they made anything she’d ever endured laughable.

Empathy flooded through her, drove her to her knees beside him on the bed. Her heart would burst if she didn’t reach out to him, try to save him from the fangs of the darkness festering inside him, preying on him. She’d do anything to tear him away from its ugliness, absorb all she could into herself. And if some distant voice said this was her nemesis, her tormentor, she willfully ignored its insidious warnings.

This was the only man who’d ever aroused her emotions and passions. Now he aroused every compassionate, protective fiber within her. She couldn’t bear the thought of his pain. Not him. Not her conquering, indomitable Ferruccio.

She leaned forward, touched her lips to his clenched eyelids, one after the other, placed her shaking palms on his chest, exerted as gentle a pressure as she could to defuse the excess electricity of upheaval, to persuade his body to relinquish its tension, to subside, let go, be at peace.

His eyes snapped open. In the same split second, her world blurred by then somersaulted in a burst of vertigo and friction, before colliding to a standstill with a lung-emptying slam.

She found herself flat on her back, her hands held above her head in a merciless vise, her throat pressed closed, with two hundred-plus pounds of granitelike manhood and a ton of premium male aggression pinning her to the bed.

She blinked up in shock, saw him looming over her, his face a mask of ferocity, a huge, sleek feline in killing mode, immobilizing his prey before he gouged out its neck.

He blinked, too, then again, dazed, fazed as he removed the hand that had almost choked her. “Clarissa…”

She coughed, realized he’d thought her an attacker.

How many times had he been assaulted, hurt, to develop such an ingrained, lightning-speed reflex in response to a threat?

Hot needles sprouted behind her eyes, the tears seeping from them seeming to originate from her heart.

She felt all his aggression and tension melt away just as his manhood hardened, expanded against her in acute response to feeling her beneath him, so completely accommodating.

Suddenly he let her hands go, rolled off of her and onto his back once more. This time he threw his arm over his eyes.

“Perdonami…Dio, Clarissa, I thought you were…were…”