“Did you ever consider buying your colors?” Vivian asked, only a little alarmed when he sat on the end of her bed and lounged back against the bedpost. She accepted the drink he passed her, but didn’t sip it just yet.

“I did not.” He scooted to scratch a shoulder blade on the bedpost, an informality if ever there was one. “My father was not kindly disposed toward my sister Leah. If you’re of an age, you probably know that much, so I considered it my responsibility to stick close to her rather than defend King and Country. Then too, until my nephew Ford was born, I was the Wilton spare and obligated to keep body and soul together as a result. Don’t forget your drink.”

She dutifully sipped but couldn’t think of a thing to say to the handsome man regarding her from the foot of her bed.

“What are you reading?”

She eyed the book. “Byron. William would snort with derision.”

“Byron himself does a good job of deriding just about everything. Shall I read to you?” He picked up the book where it lay facedown on the counterpane and ran his finger down the page. When he started in reading, Vivian realized the poetry was better for being rendered in the voice of a young man, one jaded, but not quite bitter, and just as unimpressed with Polite Society as the poet was.

“You read well,” she offered between verses.

“Better than you finish a nightcap,” he said with a slight smile. Vivian took another sip. It was potent stuff, burning a trail down her throat to her innards.

She eyed the little glass dubiously. “What is this?”

“Cognac.” He set the book aside. “I favor it in winter. I had another purpose for coming up here.”

“You’re going to pounce?” She had to ask. He was without cravat or coat—in dishabille by polite standards—and by candlelight, at his ease on her bed, he looked even larger than he had at dinner.

Also… handsomer, plague take him.

“No pouncing for me, delightful as the prospect might be. I haven’t been given permission.”

“You don’t have to do this, you know.” She set the drink aside, only to have him move up the bed and take a sip of it himself—from the same place on the rim she’d just put her lips to.

“Do what?”

“Be so… considerate. I’ll manage. Earlier, downstairs, it was just a weak moment. If our good queen could bear fifteen children to a man she’d never met before her wedding day, I’ll manage.”

“I’m not offering a kingdom in return,” Darius said. “Not in the traditional sense.”

“What does that mean?”

“I can offer you pleasure, Vivian, or I can be as perfunctory and undemanding as you wish.”

“This is an increasingly uncomfortable discussion.” Vivian tucked the covers more tightly around her. “Not one I am prepared to have.”

“Consider this a discussion of how you want to be pounced upon. You need to decide whether pleasure and duty are mutually exclusive, Vivian. If they are, I’ll come to you only when the candles are out and you’re under the covers. We need not see each other, in fact, for the duration of this month.”

“And if pleasure and duty can coincide?” She knew she’d taken the bait, as he’d intended, but the question was exactly what had been bothering her. Where had her resolve not to socialize with him gone, and why had it seemed so important?

“If duty and pleasure are to coincide, then you have to trust me at least a little to make this a seduction, a pleasure for us both.”

“Which would you prefer?”

His eyebrows rose, and that caught her attention, suggesting he wasn’t used to being asked his preferences. She stored that realization away for later, and lengthy, consideration.

“My first reaction is to say it makes no difference to me,” he said. “I am being paid good coin to achieve a specific end, but I’d rather do that in the manner least upsetting to you. If I had to be honest though…”

“Yes?”

The look in his eyes changed, became slumberous in that instant before he lowered dark lashes and veiled his soul from her scrutiny.

“You are lovely, Vivian, and deserving of pleasure.”

He wasn’t telling her everything. A man who romped with society women as he did was capable of discretion, of keeping his own counsel. Silence crept up between them and expanded as Vivian considered him. He took another sip of her drink then raised his gaze to hers.

“I propose an experiment,” he said, putting her book on the night table. “To help you make up your mind.”

The look in his eyes was naughty and entrancing. “What kind of experiment?”

“A good-night kiss. I won’t touch you with anything other than my mouth, and you decide whether you like it or not.”

She scooted back against her pillows. “Kissing is very personal.”

“Just my mouth, Vivian. You simply turn your head and wish me good night if you don’t like it. Kissing is not pouncing, not by any stretch. I kiss Waggles.”

Surely she could keep up with the standard set by a fat, lazy tomcat?

“Here’s my dilemma.” She folded the edge of the counterpane into a precise one inch hem. “I don’t want you to laugh.”

“To laugh?” She could tell he was laughing already. “I just confessed to kissing a cat, and you think I’ll laugh at you? I thought we weren’t going to take any of this business too seriously.”

“You weren’t,” she corrected him. “You know what you’re about.”

“Vivian, all I’m proposing is a kiss,” he began, but she stopped him with an upraised hand, needing to get this part of the conversation behind them.

“William isn’t a… demanding husband.”

“I see.” The smile spreading across his face was at once beatific and diabolical.

“What do you think you see, Mr. Lindsey?”

“I’m sitting on your bed after dark sharing a drink with you. Don’t you think you could call me Darius?”

“I don’t want to.”

“You’re not torn up with conflicted loyalty,” he accused, pleased as punch. “You’re afraid of yourself, afraid you’ll enjoy yourself just as old William so generously intended you to.”

“Afraid…” She narrowed her eyes at his hubris. “You’re likely afraid I won’t, and then where will your swaggering, pawing image of yourself be?”

“Good shot, Vivian.” He nodded, still grinning. “But best pucker up, as I’m still here.”

In contrast to the great good humor of his words, his kiss was serious. He just leaned in and laid his lips over hers, giving her a moment to startle and breathe and then settle in. When she’d managed all that, he moved his mouth softly over hers, pulling her lower lip between his teeth and sucking gently, then turning his head an inch and tracing his tongue along her lips.

She startled again and thought she heard him chuckle, so she retaliated by using her tongue the way he’d used his to… taste his lips. That earned her his sigh into her mouth, fruity and sweet from their nightcap. And then she felt herself being pressed back against the pillows, until she was lying on her back and Darius Lindsey was balanced over her, braced on his hands.

And it was her turn to sigh, more slowly, more of a bodily sigh or relaxation of her defenses, because in this kiss, he would take care of her.

“Better,” he murmured, shifting to cruise his lips over her features. He nuzzled and nibbled and grazed and tasted, her jaw, her forehead, her chin, and then back to her mouth, until she was happily melting into the bedclothes, ready to concede that duty and pleasure could disguise each other thoroughly.

And then the real kissing began, as his tongue stole past her lips, into her mouth, and began to insinuate beautiful, naughty, wonderful, previously unimaginable notions. She tried to follow his lead, until she realized her hands were tangled in his thick, dark hair, pulling him down to her, and her body was…

“Merciful heavens.” She turned away by force of will but kept her hand wrapped around the back of his head, inviting him to rest his forehead on her collarbone.

“That is a little taste of option A,” Darius said, sitting up.

Why was any effort at all involved in letting him go? “And option B?”

He leaned in again, and when she’d inhaled in anticipation of another rousing, lingering, soul-stealing kiss, he put a brotherly peck on her forehead.

“Good night, Vivian.” He rose, took her glass from the night table, and turned to leave.

“That’s it?” She struggled up to her elbows. “Good night, Vivian?”

“Good night, Lady Longstreet?”

“Get out.” She tossed her book at him. “Just go, and I hope you sleep miserably.”

He stopped at the door to blow her a kiss, still smirking, and Vivian realized she was smiling too. Awful man—how was she supposed to sleep after that?

Which, she reflected, had likely been the point of his experiment.

* * *

Darius took himself to his bedroom, resisting the urge to stand outside the door and listen for the sounds of Vivian Longstreet going to bed. She’d be methodical: banking the coals, replacing the fireplace screen, snuffing each candle, and in all likelihood, locking her door. Her place in her book would be carefully marked with a bookmark—no dog-eared pages for her naughty Lord Byron—and she’d kneel beside the bed to say her prayers, no matter how drafty the floor, no matter how her knees might ache.

William Longstreet had taken a perfectly lovely young woman to wife and made her elderly, as well as deaf, dumb, and blind to her own appeal.

Darius had been more honest than she’d known, when he’d said she deserved pleasure. She deserved heaps and hoards of it, years of it, but instead she’d gotten duty. As he readied himself for bed, he had to wrestle with a question: Vivian deserved a romp, a frolic, a few weeks decadently rife with flirtation and sexual gratification. He was in a position to give her that, but as she’d said, then what? A virtual spinster, she’d be ill equipped to deal with the attachments that formed when two people were physically intimate.

Except, he could teach her that too. He could teach her to flirt and carry on and enjoy herself, and part with a sigh and wave before moving on to the next enjoyment. Clearly, Lord Longstreet had urged her in that direction, but Vivian had been too timid to dip her toe in the waters of dalliance.

Or maybe, she had been too wise.

By habit, he checked on John before turning in, finding the child fast asleep in his bed, the tomcat blinking slowly as Darius closed the door to the boy’s room.

He could fathom pleasuring Vivian, could imagine it all too easily, but far more difficult was the idea that she was eager to bear his child. He’d seen it in her eyes—she wanted a child, and to his surprise, he wanted that for her as well.

And this, he reasoned as he climbed between cold sheets, was why he didn’t allow other women the intimacy of coitus with him. It made a simple situation complicated and had him wishing all manner of impossible things, when he really should be too tired to give a damn.

Vivian Longstreet should be a means to put a new roof on his stable, a duty, a convenient source of revenue, and here he was, offering to escort her past reason into the land of sexual pleasure and harmless dalliance. Offering her a choice had been rash, and upon reflection, he wished he could recall his words and sneak into her bed of a night, pretending by day her body had been shared with some other man. That would be smarter—better, at least for him.

But by breakfast, Darius had come to a decision: if she allowed it, he was going to pleasure Vivian Longstreet out of her clever, nimble, ladylike mind.

Four

The dress made up Darius’s mind, a shapeless, no doubt warm atrocity in a color that put him in mind of calf scours.

“Good morning, Mr. Lindsey.” Vivian smiled at him shyly when Darius seated her at the breakfast table.

“Good morning.” He let himself lean in for a little whiff of her, catching the scent of daffodils. Lemon verbena might have been more retiring, but only just. “I trust you and Lord Byron slept well?”

Her smile widened. “I wouldn’t presume to speak for him. I slept like the proverbial baby.”

“I’ve wondered where that phrase came from.” Darius poured her tea. “My experience with babies suggests they are better at waking entire households than sleeping. May I fix you a plate?”

“Thank you.” She accepted the tea. “You’ve had the raising of your… relation since infancy?”

“I’ve had exclusive responsibility for him since shortly after his birth.”