Rather the contrary. When she spoke he often watched her lips but he never stared at her bosom.

She was more than halfway to falling in love with a man with a dark past who would never marry her.

Admiral Finch-Ascot’s gardener appeared and offered a tour of the park’s cultivated beds and impressive statuary. Teresa went gladly; she needed a moment away from the earl to order her feelings.

Her brother and Lady Una walked together. As the gardener led them about, every so often Una would lift her face and speak quietly to Tobias. For an hour he did not leave her side.

Teresa was standing at the back of the group, brow furrowed as she stared at Una and Tobias and considered what it might take in the next two hours to lead them to a secluded place and abandon them there, when a man’s large hand covered her behind.

She gasped. But she knew whose hand it was, and she did not move.

“What are you doing?” she whispered nonsensically because she knew perfectly well what he was doing.

His hand slipped away. “Stroll wi’ me,” he said in that deep, slightly rough brogue that made her liquid inside.

They left the group and followed a path that meandered toward a hothouse. When they were well away from the group she could bear the suspense no longer. She snatched open the hothouse door, poked her head in, and beckoned to him. He followed her inside and closed the door in an oddly pensive manner. Then he walked to her amidst exotic blooms and broad-fingered fig leaves.

“Did you do that because of our wager or because you especially wanted to?” she said.

He offered her a roguish grin.

“Who is betrothed?” she asked.

“It seems ma sister Lily has a fancy to bake cakes.”

“Wishing to bake cakes does not make her betrothed to be married, my lord.”

“Her bridegroom says otherwise. This morn he signed a contract to purchase a bakery for her.”

“He did?” She clapped in delight. “Well, I am immeasurably happy for her.

Monsieur Le Coq seems like a . . . a . . . that is to say, he is a—”

“French chef.”

Her stomach was all butterflies. The air in the hothouse was sweetly scented and warm. “Was that it?” she asked. “What you did back there? Was that the inappropriate touch I am to have?”

“It suits the terms o’ yer wager.”

“Our wager.”

He moved close and the budding branches of a peach tree framed his handsome face and wide shoulders. “Our wager,” he repeated.

“You startled me, you know. I am unaccustomed to men groping my behind.”

His brows rose. “I should hope so.”

“You sound like Lady Elspeth.”

The twinkle she adored lit his eyes. “’Tis the first time anybody’s accused me o’ that, to be sure.”

“About that inappropriate touch . . .” Her mouth was terribly dry. She licked her lips.

“Do that again,” he said in a low voice.

“Do what again?”

“Lick yer lips.”

She did it, and it felt like wicked sin to do it expressly for him.

He took her face in his hands and covered her mouth with his. It was certainly testament to his extraordinary skill in kissing that she experienced the descent of his hand in a sort of molten haze of pleasure. When his palm came to rest at the small of her back then slipped down to possess her buttock, this time thoroughly and securely, she heard herself moan into his mouth.

“I want to feel ye against me, Teresa Finch-Freeworth o’ Brennon Manor at Harrows Court Crossing in Cheshire,” he said huskily over her lips, his hand stroking her behind. “All o’ ye.”

“I—” She grabbed hold of his coat and nodded. “I believe the terms of the wager allow for that.”

He drew her against him and it did not feel distasteful like when the bounder had pushed her against the gunroom wall, but a little alarming and very good. His chest and thighs were hard and her breasts flattened as he crushed her against him. Nothing except resting on her belly had ever caused her breasts to do anything other than stick out too far, and then they always made it too uncomfortable to sleep. This was not uncomfortable. It was quite as though his broad chest and muscular arms had been made to cradle her breasts safely, securely, just as his hand was cradling her buttock. In imitation, her mouth seemed to want to make a home for his tongue, inviting him to enter her again and again, first gently, seeking, then with deeper, possessing thrusts that made her wild inside.

Twining her hands into his waistcoat, she let him bear her back against the hothouse wall, and at that moment was introduced to that particular hardness the likes of which Annie had been telling her about for years—a masculine hardness that told a woman a man was fully prepared for the marriage act.

But they were not married and were unlikely to become married. He was kissing her because she had invited him to do so with a wager, the terms of which were truly impossible to fulfill even given her early serendipitous success. And although he wanted her to go away and had in fact told her so in no uncertain terms, she was kissing him back and allowing him to press her thighs apart with his knee and massage her behind with his strong fingers until she was mad for some uncertain satisfaction. When his hands urged her hips against his she arced to him. For a fleeting instant she knew a frisson of gratification, an instant that made her seek it again. It felt so good. Far too good. Better than her wildest imaginings.

“Oh.”

The rumble in his chest echoed her gasp. He kissed her neck, his mouth hot on her tender skin, and the humid air of summer bursting with life and sex surrounded her and filled her head and body with yearning. Six years of need, a young womanhood of frustrated passion desperate to find a mate, seemed to burst from her and fed itself into her clutching hands and her gasps of pleasure.

He held her against him and spoke at her throat. “Why did ye chuise me, Teresa?”

“Why did I— Oh.” She nestled her hips into his kneading hands.

“I’ve nothing.” He nipped at her lower lip and a tingling rush filled her belly.

“No money.” His hands bracketed her hips, his fingertips caressing, pleasing.

“A crumbling castle. A brood o’ wimmenfolk I canna even clothe properly. A benighted title no proud man would wish to claim.” His voice was heavy with bewilderment and need. “Why me?”

She ran her palms along his arms, solid and bunched with tension, and groaned from the echoing tension deep in her. “I don’t know.”

His hands stilled. “Ye dinna ken?”

“I dinna ken!” She opened her eyes. “It was a fantasy, a dream, a make-

believe story like the stories I always tell. But this time I told it to myself.” The words stumbled from her tongue. “I saw you that night at the ball, and you were so far beyond my reach, and I invented it but I never expected it to come true. I don’t really know how I actually went through with it, came to London and went to your flat and proposed to you. Propositioned you. It was a dream.

An impossible dream. It still feels like a dream, for I cannot have possibly traveled so far from being the exceedingly proper wife of the local vicar to kissing an earl with a dark and violent past in a hothouse. It is unthinkable.”

“’Tis anly a dream, yet ye’ve gone an done this to me?” His eyes seemed to plead and accuse at once. But he had done it all to her, taken her in his arms and touched her and made her need not some ephemeral taste of spring, but him. She wanted to be the spring ewe to his ram. She wanted to be the nectar in the bud to his hummingbird’s probe. She wanted him to make her a woman in this hothouse. Now. Before it was too late and she had to box up her mating metaphors as well as her dreams and store them all away at the back of a closet forever.

His arms fell away from her and he stepped back. “The exceedingly proper wife o’ the local vicar?” he said in a thick voice.

“Not yet. And his idea. And my parents’. Decidedly not mine.” She shivered in revulsion.

“Ye’d be a poor match for a beadle.”

“If by beadle you mean a vicar, I consider that a compliment.” She lifted her hands to her flaming cheeks. “Now what?”

“Nou, Miss Teresa Finch-Freeworth,” he said in his beautiful rolling brogue, a muscle contracting in his jaw. “Ye leave.”

Of course. He had paid on the wager. He owed her nothing more.

She moved around him toward the door, but he grasped her hand and stayed her.

“Ye’ve got me so I dinna ken what’s up or down.”

“Then the sentiment is mutual.”

She disengaged from his grasp and left the hothouse. As she walked rapidly along the path toward the picnic blankets, willing away the heat in her cheeks and the quivering in her blood and the sudden acute disappointment of having gotten what she wanted but not at all what she began to realize she needed, she noticed a small carriage alongside the others.

She recognized it, as well as the soberly clad gentleman disembarking from it. Like the devil, the Reverend Elijah Waldon had arrived at the ideal moment to cause the most damage.

Her vicar was a starched, priggish pole of a Sassenach, and Duncan took a quick disliking to any parents who would seek to ally their vibrant, passionate daughter with such a man.

She affected the introductions with grace. Only a hint of dismay in her lily pad eyes conveyed her displeasure over welcoming Waldon to her party.

Duncan shook the man’s hand and found his grip surprisingly firm.

“How fortunate you gentlemen are,” Waldon said expansively, “to enjoy the company of so many lovely ladies.” He chuckled as though he’d uttered a witticism.