In a single, slow caress, he shifted her clothing aside, baring one lovely, full breast. Hester closed her eyes and let her head fall back. Tye took it for an invitation and closed his mouth over her pink, ruched nipple.

“Oh, Tiberius.”

He’d never heard his name spoken in such voluptuous tones. When he drew on her gently with his mouth, she groaned and arched toward him.

She might not have the words to make intimate demands on him, but her body was eloquent with need. Hester sighed, she squirmed, she pulled his hair, and more than once, Tye felt a wool sock stroking over his bare arse. Before she could drive him to utter madness, he rose up and kissed her mouth again.

She’d caught the more languorous rhythm of his lovemaking, caught it and was offering it back to him in slow undulations of her body against his. He kissed her onto her back, and she went easily, cradling his jaw when he rested his cheek against her breastbone.

“I cannot think when you are with me like this, Tiberius. I don’t ever want to think again. My wits—”

He brushed his fingers over her mouth. “Thinking isn’t required of either of us right now.” Thank God. Nor was propriety, nor was proper deportment. What was called for was an impressive display of shamelessness on both of their parts.

He sat back, surveying her where she sprawled on the chaise. Her clothing was frothed around her, her hair fell about her in golden disarray, and firelight gilded her bare skin. She watched him with slumberous eyes, but when he moved her clothing aside, exposing not just her breasts but her sex as well, she did not move.

To resist what was before him, even for a few instants, was excruciating. “What I need from you, Hester, is for you to enjoy yourself.” He’d never said such a thing to any woman, which in hindsight was remiss of him. He reached behind her, grabbed a pillow, and stuffed it under his knees.

Her eyes were going wide as he bent his head and brushed his thumb over her curls. “You may scream if you like. There’s nobody in this wing to hear you, save myself, and I will enjoy the sound of your passion.”

He enjoyed the taste of it as well. She was sweet and clean, bearing the scent of lavender even here, laced with the fragrance of a willing woman. While he nuzzled her curls, he felt her hand land in his hair. When he shifted her legs over his shoulders and drew his tongue up the damp length of her sex, that hand fell away on a sigh.

Earning her trust took time. It took long, lovely minutes while he traced each fold with his tongue and flirted a finger shallowly into her damp heat. It took the occasional stroke of his palms over her breasts, it took listening for what provoked her sighs and what—exactly—tempted her to minutely flex her spine.

He was distracted by the music of her aroused body, almost to the point where he could ignore the pulse throbbing in his cock and the soft brush of wool against his back.

He settled his mouth over the center of her pleasure and built a rhythm based on the undulations of her hips, the sound of her sighs, the feel of her body opening itself to pleasure.

She didn’t scream. When her moment came, Tye sank his fingers into her heat, and she convulsed around him almost silently. Low sounds of pleasure came from her throat, and she bowed up to clutch at him while pleasure wracked her. The spasms of her release reverberated through his body, going on and on until he kept the need to spend at bay by sheer force of will.

When Hester lay back, panting and rosy, Tye brought himself off in a few quick strokes against her mons. His seed jetted onto the pale expanse of her belly, leaving him physically spent and more than a little surprised at his own behavior.

He subsided between her legs, letting himself frankly stare at the lovely, wet, pink flesh of her sex. Time enough later to be shocked at the intimacy of what they’d just done, time enough to wonder where such carnal behavior and the trust it required had come from.

He kissed her knee, nuzzled her sex once, rested his cheek on her thigh, and closed his eyes.

* * *

Hester was sure etiquette existed for when a man was going to sleep between a lady’s legs, his seed drying on her belly, and her vocabulary sent begging by intimacies too unimaginable to contemplate.

Tiberius would know the words for what he’d just done to her, probably know them in several languages. She traced the curve of his ear with her fingers.

“What is the Latin term?”

“It’s vulgar and translates to something like ‘he who licks a particular part of a woman’s anatomy.’ Do not move.”

He rose looking disoriented. The sight of him thus—naked, his arousal fading, his hair going in all directions as a result of Hester’s disarrangement of it—was disconcertingly dear.

He reappeared with a cloth in his hand and resumed his place kneeling between her legs. “This is not what I had planned, Hester Daniels.” He swabbed briskly at her belly then more carefully at her sex. “You tempt me beyond the call of reason.”

“Do I really?” What a lovely notion. “You tempt me too, Tiberius.”

He pitched the rag away and stood scowling down at her. “A man’s sense of self-possession is important to him, or it ought to be.”

Hester hiked up on her elbows and regarded him as he tried to be stern and proper, his hair sticking up, not a stitch on him. With a flash of insight, she realized he wasn’t afraid, nor was he anything approaching embarrassed, but he was uncertain. The idea that he, of all men, would suffer such insecurity was untenable.

She pushed up to a sitting position, which put her at eye level with a part of his anatomy that was curiously unassuming in its present state, and just plain curious by any lights.

“Tiberius?” Hester caught him by one wrist and tugged him a step closer. “My self-possession is important to me too.” She leaned forward enough to rest her cheek over his soft, damp genitals. Two could play at the business of being shocking, though it wasn’t her aim to disconcert him.

She wanted to reassure him, in fact, and to regain that sense of closeness with him she’d enjoyed before he went haring off in search of a damp cloth and his dignity. His hand gathered her hair and draped it over her shoulder.

“Is it? Then you will accept my apology for taking the kind of liberties a man does not appropriate with marriageable women. It was not my intent to offend you.”

She was tempted to take him in her mouth. To taste him and learn what pleased him. But the dratted man wanted words now, words and coherent sentences and maybe just a touch of reassurance.

Of appreciation.

“I am not offended.” She kissed him low on his belly, the hair at his groin tickling her chin. “If marriageable women are denied the kind of pleasure you just gifted me with, then I pity them as a race.”

“Hester?” Her name on his lips had a controlled quality.

She sighed against his skin, wondering why pleasure made her drowsy while it made him loquacious. “Hmm?”

“Nothing.” He scooped her up against his chest, her nightgown and wrapper floating to the floor. “You are a remarkable woman.”

“I’m a tired woman. You have worn me out, Tiberius.”

He settled her onto the bed and stood back, his expression hard to read in the waning firelight.

“For pity’s sake, Tye, come to bed. It’s time for my vocabulary lesson.”

To her relief, he put one knee on the mattress. He’d needed to be invited to share her bed, which was interesting.

“Would you rather go back to your own bed?” She held the covers up for him to scoot in next to her. “I hardly know how to go on in this situation. I rely on you to establish the rules.”

He fluffed the pillows and got off the bed, which Hester took for a delaying tactic. When he returned, he carried her nightclothes and his robe, all of which he laid across the foot of the bed. “There are no rules, Hester, other than the ones we establish. I think one rule ought to be you don’t ask me to teach you naughty language.”

“I’ll ask Aunt Ariadne, then.” Except then Aunt would retaliate with questions of her own.

“You’ll do no such thing.” In an instant, he’d gone from tidily laying out their nightclothes to blanketing her with his naked frame. “If you’re to be acquiring a command of indecent terms, you’ll acquire it exclusively from me.”

She smoothed a hand over his hair. “I’d like that. Now get under the covers. You’ll catch your death strutting around in the altogether with your hair damp. Are you trying to flaunt your wares, Tiberius?”

He rolled off of her, lifted the covers over his body, and lay back against the pillows. “Yes, I am. I am flaunting my wares shamelessly. Are you tempted?”

He sounded amused despite himself—if a little exasperated—and this pleased her, to think she could make him smile even if the damned man wouldn’t actually show it. “I am impressed.” She rolled over to her side lest he see her smile. Behind her, she felt Tye shifting on the mattress, and then a voice sounded very near her ear.

“Cunnilingus.”

She drew his arm around her waist and snuggled her backside into the lee of his body. There was no point trying to disguise the laughter that lit her from within, no point hiding her pleasure in the answering humor she felt reverberating through him, either.

* * *

How did a man clarify that he’d come to propose marriage when a woman’s mouth was inches from his ill-behaved cock? Tye considered this question as he wrapped himself around his naked, laughing, prospective marchioness.