“I may have overestimated my gentlemanliness again,” he said tightly.

“Overestimated?”

“Diantha, keep touching me.” He did not open his eyes. “Your hands . . .” His voice was low and rough. “I pray you.”

There was a quality about his request she recognized amidst the delicious danger of this exploration, a need that she’d heard that night when she held him. She obeyed. Flattening her palms on his chest, she felt him, the smoothness of his hot skin, the shape of muscles that made her weak with longing, the hard beat of his heart. Her hands moved as though knowing where to touch him, curving about his shoulders, along the strong line of his collarbone, across the day’s whiskers on his jaw, then into his hair. He smelled good, of fire smoke and man. She went onto her toes and followed her fingers with her lips. His hands held her to him, spread upon her back, and she felt held and wanted and protected. She knew he would protect her. She had known it from the beginning.

The fabric of her shift bunched in his grasp.

“A gentleman should not compromise a lady’s modesty in order to make love to her,” he murmured. “I should allow you to remain gowned. But I want to see you, minx. I want to see all of you.”

Alarm leaped in her throat. “You do?”

“When I was fevered, the notion that if I came through it alive I might someday see your body kept me sane.”

“But . . .” He couldn’t. No one had ever seen her like that, not even her sisters or maid. At fourteen she had even turned her mirror toward the wall. Her mother had encouraged it; no need to distress herself daily. “Perhaps if we extinguish the candle first . . . ?”

“Diantha, do not deny me.” His eyes held such heat now.

She closed her own eyes so that she would not see his reaction as she drew off her shift and he helped her.

A moment of silence became two. “Dear God.” His voice sounded strangled.

She slapped her arms across her belly. “I know I’m not— That is to say, if I could—”

“If you could ask God to fashion a woman of pure beauty, he would deny the request. For he has already created you.”

She snapped her eyes open to see his gaze upon her, rapt. He touched her then precisely upon the ugly white stripes across her hips and belly. Nurse had told her that these and the marks flanking her breasts showed where her skin had stretched to accommodate her flesh before, and would always remember that time in scars. Now his fingertips stroked there tenderly.

“Beautiful, unique Diantha.”

Her throat choked in a sob she would not allow. This was fantasy. She must not weep now, even for joy. “Do you really mean it? Are you speaking the truth?”

“Yes, I really mean it. Why would I lie? You are already here, willing. I’ve nothing to gain from you by lying yet all to enjoy simply by looking and speaking my thoughts and waiting for those dimples to appear.”

“You are not looking at my dimples.”

“Easily distracted.” He captured her lips and his warm, strong hands drew her to him and finally they came skin-to-skin. Her breasts flattened against his chest and the throbbing apex of her thighs met with a hardness that showered her with pleasure. “Good God, Diantha.” He cupped her behind and pulled her hips tight against him. “If you wish evidence of how enticing I find you, delay another moment in getting on that bed and I will take you down to the floor right here and have you. I can wait no longer.”

She pulled out of his arms, relief and desire tumbling through her. “To the bed!”

He dragged off his boots as he went, then grabbed the bedpost as though to steady himself. She didn’t know whether to sit or lie down, ending up somehow in between the two, and he was staring.

“What are you waiting for?” Her voice quavered.

“For reality to waken me.” He said this quite seriously.

A little sob of elation escaped her after all. “This is reality.”

He unfastened his trousers and removed them, and then it was her turn to stare. Indeed she could not prevent herself, frightened and shocked and so achy between her legs she had little doubt what came next; her body was telling her.

He came to her and beneath his hungry gaze she did, for the moment, feel truly beautiful.

“You are damnably kissable,” he murmured. “Every inch of you.” He stroked her nipple with his thumb, passing over it once then again, gently, deliciously. He bent and took it into his mouth.

“Oh, yes,” she sighed. “I have been wanting you to do this again since Knighton.”

“I mistreated you that night.” His tongue flicked over her breast’s tender peak. Then again. “I touched you when you did not invite it—”

“I did invite it.” She arched beneath the stroking of his hand down her waist, lifting her hips, inviting him there. “Why didn’t you have me?”

“I could not.” His caresses stilled. “The drink had made me incapable.”

She blinked.

“Do you understand?” he whispered somewhat unsteadily against her cheek.

“I think so.” She glanced downward. “It—It isn’t always like this, is it?”

A crease formed at the corner of his mouth. “It is when you are near.” Then his smile faded. “Except that night.” His grasp tightened on her waist. “Will you withdraw your forgiveness for that offense now—now that you know it was not by my honor but by my failure that I left you a maiden that night?”

“I don’t believe it.”

“Diantha—”

“I don’t believe you would have. Not if I had refused you.” She stroked her fingertips along his chest and closed her eyes. “More to the point,” she whispered, and slipped her hand down his waist. “You haven’t been drinking tonight.”

His breaths came hard. She curved her fingers around his man part. It was as solid as it looked, and smooth and as hot as the need that throbbed inside her. “If I refused you now, at this moment, would you truly let me go?”

“You will not refuse me.” There was a rawness to his voice, the craving he had spoken of now at the surface.

“No.” Her voice shook like her body. But she ached and she needed the ache answered by him. She parted her knees and he moved between them, his body hot, his skin caressing hers so that she could not catch her breath.

“I will not hurt you,” he said quietly.

“I know.” It was barely a whisper. “You won’t?”

He kissed her brow, beside her mouth, her throat, then her lips so beautifully. “Never again.”

“But—”

He touched her with his fingers, deftly, intimately. She froze. Then he stroked again, his caress certain, and skillful. Her body seemed to remember him inside her, wanted it, and opened with a shudder. Upon that shudder he entered her.

He went still, his breaths heavy and fast. “My God.” His voice sounded strange, at once rough and tight. “Are you all right?”

“Yes. I think so.” Oddly stretched, not entirely comfortable, but boggled that her body could do this with his. She let her hand slip across his shoulder, taut male strength beneath her fingertips. He was all around her, his arms holding her even as her body held him. She had never imagined this sort of thorough intimacy. For all she had dreamed of his embraces, she had never imagined this. “There is no pain. Not really. Shouldn’t there be pain the first time?”

He threaded his fingers through her hair. “We may have taken care of that in Knighton.”

“I thought you didn’t remember Knighton,” she whispered.

He kissed her mouth softly. “I could not forget that.”

“There is more to this.” She tilted her head back, accepting his kisses on her throat, sliding her toes along the counterpane, feeling him so solid inside her, so attached. “Isn’t there?”

“Considerably more.” His eyes glimmered like diamonds. “Let me show you.”

“Yes.”

He showed her. Rather—gentleman that he was—in response to her many questions, he taught her.

He was very patient. But he was a very good teacher. She learned quickly. And as he touched her and made her body hunger then fed her hunger with his, she learned most of all that her flesh could be teased, it could be tormented to the point of desperation. But it could not, after all, be divorced from her heart. Because amidst the caresses and kisses, when he whispered her name, that was when she lost all control.

Then the pleasure that she did not expect came, tightly wound, seizing her, tumbling through her so that she groaned quite uncontrollably, then whimpered, then actually shouted.

“Oh, no.” She dug her fingertips into his waist, pulling him tighter, harder, and wanting it to go on and on. “Kiss me so that I will cease making these noises.”

He kissed her. With a strong hand he pulled her knee up beside his hip, and she loved this intimacy amidst intimacy, the brush of skin against skin, her thighs cradling him, the heat of their bodies as he moved in her. His thrusts came faster, his muscles like rock beneath her hands. He delved to the very center of her it seemed and everything inside her opened again.

“Ohh!”

Eyes closed, abruptly he gripped her hard and did not move except within her. “My God,” he growled, then upon a hard breath, “Diantha.”

She gulped in air, her lips and brow damp and his skin beneath her hands. He lowered himself to his elbows, his chest brushing the tips of her breasts, and kissed her anew. They were kisses of satisfaction and tasted different, salt clinging to her lips and the flavor of him. He passed his thumb across her lower lip, then stroked down her throat and shoulder, her entire body skimming upon the surface of unbearable sensitivity.

He drew away from her, his hand trailing across her waist. Falling onto the mattress at her side, he closed his eyes and released a long breath that sounded no steadier than her erratic heartbeats.