“Prudish,” she said.

“Precisely.”

“I should be calling for the hartshorn now, then,” she said. “You look neither innocent nor harmless, Kit.” She had pulled off first his breeches and then his drawers.

He looked down at himself and she touched him at the same moment, cupping him lightly in both hands, amazed at her own brazenness, half crazed with suppressed desire. He looked up and their eyes met.

“You can continue this game all afternoon and all evening if you wish, love,” he said. “Sex games are delicious. I look forward to playing an infinite variety of them with you for the rest of our lives. But unless you have a definite preference for prolonging this, I think we might be better occupied on the bed in there. I would very much like to put that inside you.”

The greatest surprise of all was the discovery that not being touched could be every bit as arousing as having his hands and mouth all over her. He was still standing motionless, his arms loose at his sides, his eyes, heavy-lidded, devoid of laughter, gazing into her own. But his words were her undoing. She was suddenly weak-kneed.

“I thought,” she said, “you would never ask. A lady never invites a gentleman to bed.”

His hands did not touch her until she had pulled back the blankets and lain down on her back on the bed and reached up for him. They touched her then only at her hips and beneath her buttocks as she spread her legs wide. He came down on top of her and mounted her with one deep, hard, satisfying thrust.

She drew a few slow breaths.

“We can do this the easy way,” he said, raising his head and grinning down at her, all the old roguery back in his eyes, “or I can aim at the highest medal of honor and ride the long, hard route home. Very long and very hard. Which shall it be?”

“Which is the road to near madness?” she asked, hooking her legs snugly about his and tilting herself slightly so that she could receive him more deeply.

“The less easy road,” he said.

“The long, hard ride, then, please,” she said, using her low voice again and running her palms over the muscles of his shoulders as she watched the laughter fade from his eyes. “Please, my love.”

It was very long. And very hard. It took a great deal of energy. After a while she became aware of the dampness of their sweat, the heat of their bodies, the heavy, labored sound of their breathing, the silken pounding of their joining, the erotic sound of wetness, the rhythmic squeaking of the bed.

For a while her enjoyment was tempered by the fear that it would end too soon, that she would not reach the startling explosion of pleasure she had experienced on the island bank among the wildflowers when he had touched her with his hand and then taken her on top of him. But after a while she knew with an instinct born of love and trust that he did indeed have the fortitude and the sensitivity to wait for her—as he had at the lake.

It came slowly. Achingly slowly, first with an intense physical yearning in the place where they rode together, and then swirling in slow spirals, down into her legs, back into her bowels, up into her stomach, her breasts, her throat, her nose. It came so slowly she feared there could be no ending, no climax, no fulfillment.

“Relax now, love,” he murmured against her ear. “Let me do the rest for you. Let yourself open and I’ll come to you. Trust me.”

Words dimly remembered. Had he spoken them to her before? She was afraid. Mortally afraid. He might as easily have asked her to leap off a high cliff into his waiting arms. But she had known long ago that she would trust him with her life. She had given him her love since then and had accepted his this very day. All that was left to do was to trust him with her heart, to withhold nothing that was herself—to believe with her heart, as she already did with her intellect, that he would never abuse the gift, that he would never hold her love imprisoned.

She launched herself forward off the cliff, trusting, never doubting, that he would catch her.

“Ah, love.” He was thrusting faster, deeper into her. “Oh, God!”

She was falling, shuddering out of control, never fearing for a moment, never doubting. He cried out, and his arms and his body caught her at the bottom of her descent, wrapping firmly about her, pinning her safe and warm and sated against the mattress. She could hear her heartbeat pounding in her ears. And his too. They beat as one.

He was very heavy. She could scarcely breathe. Her legs were stiff from being pressed apart for so long. She was sore inside. And she had never been more comfortable in her life.

“We,” he said, his voice sounding shockingly normal, “are going to have the first banns read next Sunday. It is high time I made an honest woman of you. Besides, it may be possible to pass off an eight-month child as an early bird, but a seven- or six-month child would look scandalously suspicious. It might even be whispered that we had anticipated our wedding night.”

“Shocking indeed.” She sighed with contentment. “Sunday it will be, then.”

“A big ton wedding one month from now,” he said. “Both our families will be set on it, and frankly I do not have the energy to argue. Do you?”

“I would like a big wedding,” she admitted.

“Good. That is settled, then.” He kissed her temple. “I have just made a delightful discovery, considering the fact that we are going to be sharing a bed for the rest of our lives. You make a wonderfully comfortable mattress.”

“And you make a tolerable blanket,” she said, untwining her legs and stretching them luxuriously beside his. She yawned lazily. “Stop talking, Kit, and let’s sleep.”

“Sleep?” He lifted his head and grinned down at her. She was filled with instant alarm. “ Sleep, Lauren? When we are both stale with sweat and sex and there is a perfectly decent pool out there, complete with waterfall?”

“Ki-it—”

He just grinned.

“I am not,” she said. “I am absolutely, definitely not going to swim out there. It is raining.”

“A definite problem,” he conceded, disengaging from her and lifting himself off both her and the bed. “You might get wet.”

Had she not giggled, she might have been saved. Though probably not, she admitted a couple of minutes later as her naked body plummeted into ice-cold water and she came up gasping, her hands with a death grip on Kit’s. She wished fervently that she knew a few foul curse words. But her teeth were probably clacking too loudly for them to be heard, anyway.

She shook her head to clear the water from her eyes and laughed at him before doing the most foolish thing she had done all day. She challenged him to a race to the waterfall and—of course—he accepted, another bedding in the cottage to be his prize if he won.

If he won!

She was still getting her arms and legs organized when he was nonchalantly treading water right under the waterfall and grinning despicably.


A wedding eve ball had been the tradition at Newbury Abbey for a number of generations. It seemed rather strange to Kit when the bride and groom might be expected to want as much sleep as they could get the night before their wedding night, but perhaps the Newbury bridegrooms who had allowed the tradition to develop had not been particularly lusty men. Or perhaps it had been a clever ruse of Newbury brides to take the edge off their lust.

However it was, his own wedding eve ball and Lauren’s was in full swing. The abbey was packed to the rafters with Kilbourne and Redfield family and friends. The dower house too, and the village inn. Even by the standards of a London Season, the gathering in the ballroom, on the balcony beyond the French windows, and on the landing and winding stairs beyond the ballroom might be called a very creditable squeeze. How everyone was expected to fit inside the village church tomorrow morning he could not begin to guess.

Lauren, with whom a mere bridegroom was expected to dance only once—and he had already been allotted his quota—was flushed and looking radiantly happy. She was also many times lovelier than the next loveliest lady in the room. She literally shimmered in a satin gown of such a deep violet that some might call it purple. The diamond necklace his mother and father had given her as a wedding present sparkled in the light of hundreds of candles. His ring—the diamond was so large and many-faceted that he had distinctly overheard one of his least favorite females, the former Lady Wilma Fawcitt, more recently the Countess of Sutton, describe it as vulgar—his ring glinted on her finger.

“You cannot get close enough for another dance, Ravensberg?” Lord Farrington asked him.

“An abomination, is it not?” Kit said cheerfully.

“Does the delectable Lady Muir dance?” Farrington asked. “One would hate to risk a faux pas when she has that limp.”

“She dances,” Kit said.

Farrington, it appeared, had escaped the clutches of the ambitious Merklingers during the spring. He was footloose again, his roving eye intact.

“I’ll go and try my luck with her, then,” he said, “and see if I can charm her away from that great handsome Viking.”

“Ralf Bedwyn?” Kit grinned—and then turned his attention to a footman who had touched his sleeve. There was a gentleman newly arrived and waiting downstairs. He had requested a word with Lord Ravensberg.

Yet another guest? Kit strode off in the direction of the staircase.

The new arrival was a very young man. He was tall and overslender as if he had not yet quite grown into his body. He was also fresh-faced. If he shaved at all yet, it was clearly not a daily necessity. He was a good-looking boy, though. Kit assessed him in one quick glance, as he had once been accustomed to doing with scores and even hundreds of new recruits.

“Good evening,” he said.

“Ravensberg?” The young man strode toward him, his right hand outstretched. “I read your invitation less than a week ago. By that time the notice of your wedding was in the papers. I came as quickly as I could.” He flushed when Kit regarded him blankly. “I beg your pardon,” he said. “I am Whitleaf. Viscount Whitleaf.”

“Whitleaf?” Kit took his hand. “The invitation was to my betrothal celebrations at Alvesley Park. My grandmother’s birthday party, actually.” He had sent it off at the same time as he had sent one to Baron Galton, before Lauren had arrived at Alvesley, before he had known of her total estrangement from her father’s family. He had been more relieved than disappointed when no one had shown up.

“I have been in Scotland ever since coming down from Oxford in the spring,” the young man explained, “on a walking tour with my old tutor and a couple of friends.”

And where have you been for the rest of Lauren’s life?

Kit did not ask the question aloud. He clasped his hands behind him.

“I asked my mother who Lauren Edgeworth was after reading your invitation,” Viscount Whitleaf said. “It was obvious she must be a relative. I am an Edgeworth too.”

“You did not know who she was?” Kit asked.

“No, not really,” the young man replied. “Maybe she was mentioned when I was a lad. I don’t remember. I was sorry I had missed the celebrations at Alvesley. But when I read the notice in the paper, I thought it would be rather jolly to come down here to pay my respects to my cousin on the occasion of her wedding.”

“Jolly?” Kit frowned.

The young man flushed again. “You are not pleased to see me,” he said.

“How long have you held the title?” Kit asked.

“Oh, forever.” Whitleaf made a dismissive gesture with one hand. “My father died when I was three. I was the last of six children—the only boy. I’ll reach my majority in January. I’ll be free of all my guardians then. That will be jolly, let me tell you. Are you really not glad I have come? Was my cousin offended when I did not even reply to the invitation? Should I leave?”

“Guardians,” Kit said quietly. “Since you were three.”

“Lord, yes,” the young man said, grimacing. “Three of them. A humorless lot. Not one funny bone among the lot of them. And my mother too, though she does occasionally laugh, to give her her due. And mothers do not have a great deal of say in their minor sons’ lives, you know. For some peculiar reason they are supposed not to have brains. Anyway, for most of my life I have had leading strings projecting from all parts of my body, like the spokes of an umbrella.”