He was going to have to marry her. It was that simple.

“Harry?” she whispered, and his gaze fell to her lips.

“I’m going to kiss you,” he said softly, without thinking, without even considering that it might be something he should ask her.

He leaned forward, and in that last second before his lips touched hers, he felt washed clean. This was his new beginning.

He kissed her then, the first touch achingly gentle, nothing more than a brush of his lips against hers. But the contact was electric. Breathtaking, in every literal sense of the word. He drew back, just far enough to see her expression. She was gazing at him with a sense of wonder, her cornflower eyes drinking him in.

She whispered his name.

It was his undoing. He pulled her to him again, this time with all the urgency rushing through his veins. He kissed her hungrily, all caution sliding away, and before he knew it, his hands were in her hair, and the pins were falling out, and all he could think was that he wanted to see her again with her hair down.

Her hair down, floating across her skin. And nothing else.

His body, already tight with desire, grew impossibly hard, and in one wretched burst of sanity, he realized that if he did not set her away from him immediately, he was going to rip the clothes from her body and take her right there in her parents’ drawing room.

With the door open.

Good God.

He put his hands on her shoulders, not pushing her back so much as he dragged himself away from her.

For a moment they could do nothing but stare at each other. Her hair was tumbling from her coiffure, and she looked adorably, splendidly mussed. She raised one of her hands to her mouth, her three middle fingers touching her lips in wonderment.

“You kissed me,” she whispered.

He nodded.

Her lips moved into a hint of a smile. “I think I kissed you back.”

He nodded again. “You did.”

She looked as if she might say something more, but then she turned toward the open door. And her hand, which had still been up near her face, moved to her hair.

“You’ll want to fix that,” he said, his own lips quivering toward amusement.

She nodded. And again, she looked as if she might speak, but she didn’t. She gathered all of her hair at the back of her neck, using one hand to keep it all bunched together like a pony’s tail, and then stood.

“Will you be here when I return?” she asked.

“Do you wish me to be?”

She nodded.

“I shall be here,” he said, even though he would have said the same if she had said no.

She nodded yet again, hurrying over to the door. But before she left, she turned one last time and looked at him. “I-” she started to say, but then she just gave her head a shake.

“You what?” he asked, unable to keep the warm amusement from his voice.

She shrugged helplessly. “I don’t know.”

He laughed. And she laughed. And it was, he decided as he listened to the fading sound of her footsteps, a perfect moment.

In every possible way.

Harry was still sitting on the sofa a few minutes later when the butler stepped into the room. “Prince Alexei Gomarovsky for Lady Olivia,” he intoned. He paused, leaning forward as he glanced about the room. “Lady Olivia?”

Harry started to say that she would be back in a moment, but the prince had already stalked into the room. “She will see me,” he was saying to the butler.

But she’ll be kissing me, Harry wanted to cackle. It was quite a marvelous feeling, this. He had won. And the prince had lost. And although a gentleman did not kiss and tell, Harry was quite certain that by the time Alexei left Rudland house, he’d know who had won Olivia’s favor.

Harry stood, feeling just a little evil for how much he was looking forward to this.

He’d never claimed he was an uncompetitive man.

“You,” Prince Alexei said. Actually, it sounded a bit like an accusation.

Harry smiled blandly as he stood in greeting. “Me.”

“What are you doing here?”

“Visiting Lady Olivia, of course. What are you doing here?”

The prince chose to answer this with curled lip. “Vladimir!” he barked.

Vlad the Impaler (as Harry had taken to calling him), thumped heavily into the room, sparing Harry a surly glance before turning back to his master, who was asking him (in Russian, of course) what he had discovered so far about Harry.

“Poka nitchevo.”

Nothing yet.

For which Harry was immensely grateful. It was not well known that he spoke Russian, but it was not well hidden, either. It would not require much investigation to discover that Harry’s grandmother had come from an extremely old and noble Russian family.

Which didn’t necessarily mean that he had learned the language, but Prince Alexei would have to be an idiot not to wonder. And while Alexei was rude, and lecherous, and most probably without any redeeming social qualities, he was not an idiot, regardless of what Harry might have called him in the past.

“Have you had a pleasant morning, Your Highness?” Harry asked in his friendliest voice.

Prince Alexei speared him with a stare, clearly intending that to be his reply in its entirety.

“I am having a lovely morning,” Harry continued, sitting back down.

“Where is Lady Olivia?”

“I believe she went upstairs. She had something to…ah…attend to.” Harry made a little motion near his hair, which he decided to let the prince interpret how he wished.

“I will wait for her,” Alexei said in his usual clipped tones.

“Please do,” Harry said affably, motioning toward the seat across from him. For this he received another furious stare, probably earned, since it wasn’t his place to act as host.

Still, it was immensely entertaining.

Alexei flipped his coattails and took a seat, his mouth pressed shut in a firm, unyielding line. He stared straight ahead, clearly intending to ignore Harry completely.

Which would have been just fine with Harry, since he had no great desire for interaction with the prince himself, except that he was feeling just a trifle superior, since he was the one Olivia had chosen to kiss and not the prince, despite Harry’s position outside royalty, outside the aristocracy, outside all that Prince Alexei held dear.

And when one combined this with Harry’s current directive from the War Office, which one could interpret to mean that he ought to do his best to be a thorn in the Russian prince’s side, well…

Far be it from Harry Valentine to shirk his patriotic duty.

Harry stood up just enough to reach Miss Butterworth on the table, then sat back down, humming to himself as he found the page where they’d left off two days earlier, with poor Priscilla losing her family to pox.

Hmm hmm hmmm hmmmmmm hm hm…

Alexei shot him a sharp, annoyed glance.

“‘God Save the King,’” Harry informed him. “In case you were wondering.”

“I was not.”

“God save our gracious King, Long live our noble King, God save the King.”

The prince’s lips moved, but his teeth remained clenched as he ground out, “I am familiar with the tune.”

Harry let his voice rise slightly in volume. “Send him victorious, Happy and glorious, Long to reign over us: God save the King.”

“Cease your infernal singing.”

“I’m just being patriotic,” Harry said, launching right back in with, “O Lord, our God, arise, Scatter his enemies, And make them fall.”

“If we were in Russia, I would have you arrested.”

“For singing my own country’s anthem?” Harry murmured.

“I would need no reason beyond my own indulgence.”

Harry considered this, shrugged, and continued: “Confound their politics, Frustrate their knavish tricks, On Thee our hopes we fix, God save us all.”

He stopped, deciding that the final verse was not needed. He rather liked ending on “knavish tricks.” “We are an extremely fair-minded people,” he said to the prince. “If you’d like to be included in the ‘all.’”

Alexei did not answer, but Harry noticed that both of his hands were balled into tight fists.

Harry turned back to Miss Butterworth, deciding that he did not mind this part of the espionage trade. He hadn’t had this much fun annoying someone since…

Ever.

He smiled to himself at that. Even his sister had not been so delightful to torture. And Sebastian never took anything seriously; it was almost impossible to annoy him.

Harry hummed the first few bars of “La Marseillaise,” just to gauge the prince’s reaction (brilliantly red-faced with fury), then settled in to read. He flipped ahead, quickly deciding that he had no interest in Priscilla Butterworth’s formative years, and finally settled on page 144, which appeared to contain madness, disfigurement, insult, and tears-all the requirements for a cracking good novel.

“What are you reading?” Prince Alexei demanded.

Harry looked up absently. “I beg your pardon?”

“What are you reading?” he snapped.

Harry glanced down at the book, and then back up at the prince. “I was under the assumption you did not wish to speak with me.”

“I don’t. But I am curious. What is that book?”

Harry held the book up so that Prince Alexei could see the front cover. “Miss Butterworth and the Mad Baron.”

“Is that what is popular in England?” Alexei sneered.

Harry thought about that. “I don’t know. Lady Olivia is reading it. I thought I might do so as well.”

“Is that not the book she said she would not like?”

“I believe so, yes,” Harry murmured. “Can’t say I blame her.”

“Read it to me.”

Score one to the prince. Harry would have been only slightly more surprised if the prince had come over and kissed him square on the lips.