"Do you know what you've been doing to me?" demanded Miles.

"Me? To you! Ha!" exclaimed Henrietta articulately. As repartee, it wasn't her finest hour, but she was too furious to attempt words of more than one syllable.

"Yes, you! Running around in my dreams, singing like that — I can't think. I can't sleep. I can't look my best friend in the eye. It's been sheer hell!"

"Is that my fault?" exclaimed Henrietta. "You're the one who kissed me and then didn't bother to — wait. Your dreams? You've been dreaming about me?"

Miles backed away, looking horrified. "Never mind. Forget I said that."

Henrietta took a dangerous step forward. "Oh, no. There are no 'never minds.' You're not getting off that easily this time."

"Damn," said Miles feelingly. "Fine." He took a step forward. "You want to know the truth? I don't find you repugnant." Another step. "If you must know, I find you the very opposite of repugnant." Another. "It's been all I can do to keep my hands bloody off you the past two days."

One more step and Miles was so close to her that her breath stirred the stiff folds of his cravat. Henrietta cravenly sidled backwards, but the hedge was at her back, pricking her through the thin muslin of her dress, blocking retreat.

"In fact" — Miles's hands closed around her shoulders as his head plummeted towards her — "you have been driving me absolutely bloody mad!"

With a desperate sideways movement, Henrietta wrenched herself from his grasp, leaving Miles to stumble headlong into the hedge.

"Oh, no," she panted. "I'm not playing that game again."

Miles's eyes were glazed and his breath rasped in his throat. "Game?" he forced out.

"Yes, game!" snapped Henrietta, tears of rage and frustration gathering in her hazel eyes. "The game where you kiss me and then run off and hide from me for a whole blasted week! It's — I just can't — if you're just looking for a bit of fun, you're going to have to find it somewhere else."

Gathering her skirts in her hand, she whirled in the direction of the house, only to be jerked abruptly short as Miles grabbed her by the elbow.

"That's not what I want!" Miles burst out, swinging her around to face him.

"Then what do you want?" demanded Henrietta.

"You, damn it!"

The words hung there in the air between them.

Each stared at the other, Miles's brown eyes locked with Henrietta's hazel, both frozen as still as Lot's wife's peering back into a forbidden land.

Henrietta's heart surged with frenetic joy, before hiccupping to an abrupt stop, and swinging wildly back in the opposite direction. Of all the ambiguous statements! What exactly did he want? And if he wanted her, why on earth had he been hiding from her? An odd sort of wanting that drove the pursuer away from the object of desire!

Henrietta waved her hands in the air in frustration. "What exactly is that supposed to mean?"

"Uh…" Funny, it had seemed quite clear to him when he uttered it, but when forced to encapsulate the sense of it, Miles couldn't find any appropriate words. Somehow, he didn't think "I want to fling you down among the rosebushes and have my wicked way with you" would necessarily appease Hen's wrath. That was the problem with women; they always insisted on verbalizing everything. "Um…"

Fortunately, Henrietta was still in full rant, so Miles was spared replying. "And why," she demanded, "have you been behaving like such an idiot?"

Miles chose not to dispute the appellation, primarily because he agreed to it. In fact, he knew it was the height of idiocy to linger in the garden when what he ought to do was flee straight back to the safety of London, without passing the house, without collecting his belongings. To remain… the word "idiot" didn't even begin to encompass it.

As much for himself as for her, Miles said forcefully, "You are my best friend's sister."

Henrietta took a very deep breath. Miles struggled nobly to keep his eyes fixed above her bodice. It was a cause doomed to failure from its very inception.

Henrietta's chest heaved to a stop, followed by an expectant silence.

"What?" asked Miles.

"I fail to see what that has to do with anything," repeated Henrietta through gritted teeth. Speaking through gritted teeth involved very little passage of air. Sanity — or some modicum thereof — returned to Miles, along with the capacity for speech.

Miles ran his hands through his hair till it stood up like porcupine quills. "Do you know how many kinds of betrayal that would be? Forget Richard, even. Your parents raised me! And how do I repay them? By seducing their daughter."

Henrietta swallowed painfully. "Is that all I am to you? Someone else's sister? Someone else's daughter?"

Of its own volition, Miles's right hand rose to cup her face, gently tilting it back to face him.

"Don't you know better than that, Hen?"

Slowly, she shook her head. "No." Her voice broke, half-laugh, half-sob. "I don't know anything right now."

"Funny," Miles whispered achingly, his warm breath feathering across her lips. "Neither do I."

With infinite gentleness, his lips brushed hers. His hands slid softly into her hair, stroking her temples, easing away aches she hadn't realized she had. Letting her eyes drift closed, Henrietta leaned into the kiss, abandoning herself to the dreamlike unreality of it all. Henrietta's hands slid up to Miles's shoulders, feeling the warmth of his body through the fine wool of his coat as warmth of an entirely different kind spread through her. Around them, the garden was rich with the scent of early June roses, as lush and heavy as an old tapestry. It seemed as though the wind moved more delicately through the trees, and even the cranky old gentleman frog who lived in the pond gentled his croaking complaint. The whole world slowed and drifted in a measureless minuet.

With a movement as soft as a sigh, Miles's lips slid away from hers. They remained suspended in time, Miles's lips a whisper above hers, her hands on his shoulders, his fingers still threaded in her hair. Miles smoothed his thumbs along her cheekbones, tracing the well-beloved contours of her face.

"I missed you," Henrietta whispered.

Miles pulled her tightly against him, rubbing his face in her hair. "Me too."

"Then why did you hide from me all week?" asked Henrietta into his shoulder.

For the life of him, Miles was having a very hard time remembering; the feel of Henrietta's body pressed against his was having a decidedly numbing effect on his brain, even as it brought other bits of his anatomy into acute relief. He dredged up the reason as if from a lifetime ago.

"Because I was afraid I'd do this," he said, nuzzling back her hair, and running his tongue along the rim of her ear. He felt Henrietta shiver in his arms and stilled, giving her a space to protest, to walk away.

Henrietta tilted her chin, leaving her throat bare for Miles's questing lips. "I don't understand," she said softly, "why that was cause for hiding."

"Right now," admitted Miles, "neither can I."

His lips followed the delicate curve of Henrietta's jaw, the rounded chin that looked so demure in repose but could be so stubborn in reality, the elegant line of her throat, pausing to blow gently at the delicate hairs that curled at the base of her neck, where her hair had been swept up and away from her face.

Henrietta didn't gasp; a gasp would have marred the dreamlike quality of the moment, like a leaf floating on a stream in a summer's day, utterly unmoored from responsibility, content to simply drift in the golden heat of the sun. But her fingers curled around Miles's shoulders as she marveled at the amazing sensations to be had from so prosaic an item as a neck. Miles's kisses she had been prepared for — well, as much as one could be prepared for something that made one's head spin like too much claret — there were novels and paintings and whispered discussions in the ladies' retiring room. But no one had ever told her about this. Necks were simply something on which to hang jewelry, to set off with a curl or a flounce; they were not supposed to send quivers of pleasure through one's entire body.

In the spirit of experimentation, Henrietta locked her arms tighter around Miles's neck, stood on her tiptoes, and applied her lips to the underside of his chin — she had been aiming for the spot just at the parting of collar and cravat, but the combination of dizziness and half-closed eyes had a negative impact on her aim. His skin smelled of exotic aftershave, and a fascinating hint of stubble, so fair as to be almost invisible to the eye, grazed her lips.

Miles's reaction was instantaneous, if not quite what Henrietta had hoped for. Recoiling backwards, he blinked several times, shook his head like a wet dog, and held Henrietta away from him.

"Did I do something wrong?" asked Henrietta huskily.

Miles's eyes had a distinctly wild cast, and his hair was even more disarranged than usual. Henrietta gave in to the impulse to smooth a lock back. Miles shied like a nervous horse. "Hell, no — er, I mean, no! That is, oh blast it, Hen — "

Since he didn't seem to have anything particularly incisive to say, Henrietta decided to put an end to the conversation by the simple expedient of kissing him again. Miles's arms closed around her with enough force to knock any remaining air out of her lungs, but breathing really seemed quite a minor consideration under the circumstances. Who needed to breathe, anyhow? Lips were much more interesting, especially when they were Miles's lips, and they were doing such clever things to the sensitive hollow next to her collarbone. Henrietta hadn't realized before that the hollow was a sensitive one, but she was quite sure she would remember in the future. Miles's lips drifted even lower, following a slow path along her collarbone, down to the hollow between her breasts, and Henrietta stopped thinking in full sentences altogether, or even recognizable words.