She loved the way he could hold his features solemn, even alarmed, while his eyes danced with laughter.

“Absolutely nothing at all,” she told him. She lowered her voice as her hands found the top buttonhole of his coat. “Yet.”

He shivered elaborately and his eyes danced.

“I begin to think,” he said, “that I could grow to like women who are free to love.”

“And I begin to think,” she said, still in her low, velvet voice, “that you are about to be driven to the brink of madness by one of them, my lord.”

“Oh, goody,” he murmured agreeably.

She opened back his coat and pushed it off his shoulders and down his arms while he stood relaxed and unmoving. Waistcoats, she discovered then, had far too many buttons, all of them small, each with an accompanying buttonhole that seemed smaller yet. She did not hurry. She occupied herself while her hands worked by feathering kisses over his throat and neck above his cravat. She ran her tongue along the seam of the long scar beneath his jaw and surprised an epithet from him that was definitely not suitable for the ears of a lady. She kissed his mouth, which he held relaxed. She prodded her tongue beyond his lips, exploring the soft, moist inner flesh with its tip. She stretched her tongue deep into his mouth.

“I have won praise and commendation from high places,” he said conversationally when his mouth was free, her eyes being needed to discover the secrets of the front flap of his breeches, “for military feats that required only half the courage and discipline I am displaying this afternoon. I hope you realize that you are in the presence of extraordinary heroism.”

Sometime during the last ten minutes or so, she had lost her blanket, Lauren realized. It did not matter. The fire had burned up and taken the damp chill from the air. In fact the cottage felt almost uncomfortably warm.

“A word of advice,” he said, “from a man who has been undressing me for almost thirty years. Tackle the boots first. Would you like me to be a participant yet? Shall I haul them off for you?”

“No.” She kneeled down on the floor.

“An erotically submissive posture,” he commented with a sigh, raising one foot. “Entirely deceptive, of course. Yes, you have to tug hard. You are not about to break my ankle, I assure you. I feel inclined to urge you to hurry so that we can reach the good part. But alas, you are turning all my preconceptions on their head, Lauren. This tortoiselike seduction feels excruciatingly good.”

“And this is only the beginning,” she promised, looking up at him from beneath her lashes before pulling off the second boot and standing up again.

“Witch!” he said. “I strolled into Lady Mannering’s ballroom that night all unsuspecting, poor innocent that I was. You looked like a perfectly harmless lady. Respectable, prim.”

“Prudish,” she said.

“Precisely.”

“I should be calling for the hartshorn now, then,” she said. “You look neither innocent nor harmless, Kit.” She had pulled off first his breeches and then his drawers.

He looked down at himself and she touched him at the same moment, cupping him lightly in both hands, amazed at her own brazenness, half crazed with suppressed desire. He looked up and their eyes met.

“You can continue this game all afternoon and all evening if you wish, love,” he said. “Sex games are delicious. I look forward to playing an infinite variety of them with you for the rest of our lives. But unless you have a definite preference for prolonging this, I think we might be better occupied on the bed in there. I would very much like to put that inside you.”

The greatest surprise of all was the discovery that not being touched could be every bit as arousing as having his hands and mouth all over her. He was still standing motionless, his arms loose at his sides, his eyes, heavy-lidded, devoid of laughter, gazing into her own. But his words were her undoing. She was suddenly weak-kneed.

“I thought,” she said, “you would never ask. A lady never invites a gentleman to bed.”

His hands did not touch her until she had pulled back the blankets and lain down on her back on the bed and reached up for him. They touched her then only at her hips and beneath her buttocks as she spread her legs wide. He came down on top of her and mounted her with one deep, hard, satisfying thrust.

She drew a few slow breaths.

“We can do this the easy way,” he said, raising his head and grinning down at her, all the old roguery back in his eyes, “or I can aim at the highest medal of honor and ride the long, hard route home. Very long and very hard. Which shall it be?”

“Which is the road to near madness?” she asked, hooking her legs snugly about his and tilting herself slightly so that she could receive him more deeply.

“The less easy road,” he said.

“The long, hard ride, then, please,” she said, using her low voice again and running her palms over the muscles of his shoulders as she watched the laughter fade from his eyes. “Please, my love.”

It was very long. And very hard. It took a great deal of energy. After a while she became aware of the dampness of their sweat, the heat of their bodies, the heavy, labored sound of their breathing, the silken pounding of their joining, the erotic sound of wetness, the rhythmic squeaking of the bed.

For a while her enjoyment was tempered by the fear that it would end too soon, that she would not reach the startling explosion of pleasure she had experienced on the island bank among the wildflowers when he had touched her with his hand and then taken her on top of him. But after a while she knew with an instinct born of love and trust that he did indeed have the fortitude and the sensitivity to wait for her—as he had at the lake.

It came slowly. Achingly slowly, first with an intense physical yearning in the place where they rode together, and then swirling in slow spirals, down into her legs, back into her bowels, up into her stomach, her breasts, her throat, her nose. It came so slowly she feared there could be no ending, no climax, no fulfillment.

“Relax now, love,” he murmured against her ear. “Let me do the rest for you. Let yourself open and I’ll come to you. Trust me.”

Words dimly remembered. Had he spoken them to her before? She was afraid. Mortally afraid. He might as easily have asked her to leap off a high cliff into his waiting arms. But she had known long ago that she would trust him with her life. She had given him her love since then and had accepted his this very day. All that was left to do was to trust him with her heart, to withhold nothing that was herself—to believe with her heart, as she already did with her intellect, that he would never abuse the gift, that he would never hold her love imprisoned.

She launched herself forward off the cliff, trusting, never doubting, that he would catch her.

“Ah, love.” He was thrusting faster, deeper into her. “Oh, God!”

She was falling, shuddering out of control, never fearing for a moment, never doubting. He cried out, and his arms and his body caught her at the bottom of her descent, wrapping firmly about her, pinning her safe and warm and sated against the mattress. She could hear her heartbeat pounding in her ears. And his too. They beat as one.

He was very heavy. She could scarcely breathe. Her legs were stiff from being pressed apart for so long. She was sore inside. And she had never been more comfortable in her life.

“We,” he said, his voice sounding shockingly normal, “are going to have the first banns read next Sunday. It is high time I made an honest woman of you. Besides, it may be possible to pass off an eight-month child as an early bird, but a seven- or six-month child would look scandalously suspicious. It might even be whispered that we had anticipated our wedding night.”

“Shocking indeed.” She sighed with contentment. “Sunday it will be, then.”

“A big ton wedding one month from now,” he said. “Both our families will be set on it, and frankly I do not have the energy to argue. Do you?”

“I would like a big wedding,” she admitted.

“Good. That is settled, then.” He kissed her temple. “I have just made a delightful discovery, considering the fact that we are going to be sharing a bed for the rest of our lives. You make a wonderfully comfortable mattress.”

“And you make a tolerable blanket,” she said, untwining her legs and stretching them luxuriously beside his. She yawned lazily. “Stop talking, Kit, and let’s sleep.”

“Sleep?” He lifted his head and grinned down at her. She was filled with instant alarm. “ Sleep, Lauren? When we are both stale with sweat and sex and there is a perfectly decent pool out there, complete with waterfall?”

“Ki-it—”

He just grinned.

“I am not,” she said. “I am absolutely, definitely not going to swim out there. It is raining.”

“A definite problem,” he conceded, disengaging from her and lifting himself off both her and the bed. “You might get wet.”

Had she not giggled, she might have been saved. Though probably not, she admitted a couple of minutes later as her naked body plummeted into ice-cold water and she came up gasping, her hands with a death grip on Kit’s. She wished fervently that she knew a few foul curse words. But her teeth were probably clacking too loudly for them to be heard, anyway.

She shook her head to clear the water from her eyes and laughed at him before doing the most foolish thing she had done all day. She challenged him to a race to the waterfall and—of course—he accepted, another bedding in the cottage to be his prize if he won.