Matthew snorted at that pronouncement. “If an eighteen-year-old virgin can behave like a strumpet—which premise I do not concede—then you should forgive her for it. Look around at your housemaids, Mary Fran. They don’t know the difference between proposition and flirtation, not unless they’ve been in service since childhood. You were even more protected than they, more sheltered, and your grandfather very likely was overbearing and old-fashioned. Have you ever discussed this with your brothers?”

“The shame of it…” She started to pull away, needing to use her hands to better express herself, but Matthew bundled her closer.

“Spare me your Highland drama. I don’t mean you need to review all the specifics. Simply ask your brothers if they ever discussed it with your grandfather. My guess is they feel even more ashamed for letting you slip the leash than you do for taking up with a man who was likely lying in wait for you, grooming you for his own ends, did you but know it.”

“Grooming me?” She hated the term, because it brought to mind a pony standing docilely in the cross ties, preening at the attention given to mane, tail, hooves, and tack, never noticing the fellow in the corner strapping on roweled spurs and flexing a stout whip.

“Setting you up,” Matthew said, “leading you on, getting his hands on the dowry your family worked so hard to save for you, beating out all the other fellows to the prettiest young lady in the shire, the most highly titled…”

She subsided against him, considering his words. He did not have the right of it, but for the first time in eight years, Mary Fran considered that perhaps she didn’t entirely have the right of it either. Gordie could be charming and tolerant, but when he’d pressed his body to hers, the gleam in his eye had been not merely possessive, but smug.

Smug, like a man whose plans have played out exactly to his liking.

“I can hear the compression building in your mental engines, Mary Fran. The night’s too pretty for that.”

“You’ve given me much to think about, Matthew Daniels.”

“Let me give you a little more to think about.” He shifted her so she was on her back, the fine silk lining of his coat between her and the fragrant grass.

“Matthew?” What on earth was he about?

“You’re not eighteen. You’re a lovely, desirable woman with a lot to offer the right man. You have choices now, Mary Frances. Make those choices, and I’ll abide by them.”

He kissed her, and after no longer hesitation than it takes for a lady to smile in the darkness, she chose to kiss him back.

***

Lady Mary Frances MacGregor had needed kissing almost as badly as Matthew had needed to kiss her. With the moon rising like a benevolent beacon and the summer air cooling around them, Matthew felt the urge to intimately cherish a woman for the first time in a long, long time.

He desired her, of course he did, but other feelings eclipsed that desire easily. Admiration for her, protectiveness—he’d felt those things for his wife, too—but also a tenderness that hadn’t found a place between spouses who’d joined in an expedient union.

He and his wife had been partners, comrades in arms and convenient sources of comfort for each other, but with Mary Fran, he wanted to be a lover. Call it a dalliance, an affair, a discreet liaison—he was not worthy of her hand in marriage, but he could share pleasure with her.

“I’ll stop.” He made her that promise while grazing his nose along the swell of her bosom. Her scent was luscious here, flowery and sweet. His mouth was literally watering for the taste of her.

“You’d best not stop yet, laddie.” She winnowed her fingers through his hair and gripped his scalp in such a fashion as to hold him still for her plundering mouth. “Not bloody… Not if you… God, yessssss.”

He eased her breast above her décolletage and ran the tip of his third finger over her nipple. She went still, as if focusing on his caress. He certainly focused on it, on the satiny, ruched flesh beneath his fingertip, on the pale, smooth curve of her breast in the moonlight.

“Lovely. Exquisite. Gorgeous…” He closed his lips around her nipple. “Delicious.” She arched up, a soft, lovely sigh escaping her as Matthew drew on her. Her fingers stroked over his hair, traced his ears, and then cupped the back of his head.

“Matthew Daniels, you are wearing entirely too many clothes.”

She was smiling as she squirmed under him. He could hear her smile; he could taste it. “You’re scolding me?”

“I’ll be tearing your shirt off in a moment—or skelpin’ yer bum.”

He liked that idea, but her brother might disapprove of a shredded garment should they meet the earl upon returning to the house. Matthew rested his forehead on her collarbone. “Undress me, my lady.”

“You want me to do all the work?”

“Of course not.” To make his point, he straddled her and used his teeth to pull her dress off one pale, freckled shoulder. “There will be enough work to go around.”

She hugged him, with her arms and legs both, to the extent her skirts and petticoats permitted it. “You make me feel foolish, Matthew Daniels.”

“I make you feel pretty and desired, which you are.” He sat back and started to work on the myriad buttons fastening the front of her dress. “I make you feel entitled to a little pleasure and some companionship. I make you feel, for a time, a little less lonely.”

She stroked a hand over the trousers covering Matthew’s burgeoning erection. “I suppose pleasure and companionship are an improvement over oblivion and desire.”

Abruptly, what he’d intended as a gift to her—a gift to them both—felt inadequate. “Are you asking me to stop?”

Her brows knitted as she shaped him through the fabric and sent pleasure shuddering through him. “Matthew, I’m asking you to hurry.”

He hurried. He hurried carefully, as though his life depended upon it, hurried through the unbuttoning and unlacing and loosening and unfastening—and without tearing a single button or seam.

When she lay beneath him, her clothing and stays pushed aside—thank God for the old-fashioned, front-lacing country variety—the moonlight turning her breasts, ribs, and belly to so much living alabaster, Matthew took her hands and settled them on his chest. “My turn.”

“Close your eyes, please.”

He obeyed, which meant he felt the little tugs and twists as her fingers worked at his neckcloth, then at his waistcoat, and finally, his shirt. He could not be naked with her in the sense of revealing his past, but he could share the simple pleasure of physical nudity with her.

“You are such a braw, lovely man.” Her burr had thickened—a braw, loovly mon—while her hand skimmed down his breastbone, spreading warmth over his chest.

“I’m a man in need of kisses.” He shrugged his shirt off and shifted to prop himself on an elbow beside her. “Moonlit kisses taste the best.”

They felt the best too, particularly when Mary Fran’s hands roamed his person as if she’d sketch his soul with her touch. She lingered in the oddest spots—his nose, the soft skin inside his elbow, her thumbs in the vulnerable hollow of his armpit—and her hands felt as though they warmed not just his body, not just his lust, but his soul.

“Ye are no’ hurryin’, boyo.”

“I’m pleasuring.” A fine idea, one his conscience took to with the dreadful enthusiasm of a martyr. Mary Fran wasn’t particularly objecting either, so Matthew stroked a hand up her long, shapely leg, baring calves and knees and muscular thighs as he did. “I have the oddest urge to worship your knees.”

“Ye daft Englishman.” Such affection she put into her scolds. Matthew felt an abrupt pang of pity for the departed Gordie Flynn. The man had bungled badly, irrevocably, but had probably been unable to help himself.

Matthew knew exactly how that felt. “Spread your knees a bit, love. Pleasuring takes a little trust.”

She spread her knees more than bit. “And far too much time.”

He’d decided to keep his pants on, which meant the feel of her nails digging into his buttock was muted, a teasing hint of the intensity he craved with her—more damned martyrdom.

“Matthew Daniels, when are you going to bestir—Oh, that is…” Her hand relaxed on his bum and smoothed over him in a languorous pat. “That is lovely.”

Lovely was an understatement. To his questing fingers, the folds of her sex were dewy and hot, soft and sweet to the touch. He wanted to feast on her by moonlight, visually, orally, tactilely, but did not indulge himself beyond what would pleasure her directly.

“Shall I stop?”

She shifted to flat on her back and kissed him as his fingers dallied between her legs. When he dipped shallowly into her heat, she moaned into his mouth.

“More?”

Her grip on Matthew’s hair was fierce enough to distract him from the lust racketing through him.

“Aye, more. Now, if you please.”

“Always in a hurry. Don’t rush me, Mary Fran. I’ve things to see to.”

She was exquisitely responsive, and Matthew had the sense she wasn’t sensitive merely from long abstinence. Despite his own period of self-enforced celibacy, he found the resolve to drive her mad with arousal, then soothe her with petting and kisses, then drive her mad again.

“Matthew, I canna… I willna… Ach, damn ye…” She trailed off into muttered Gaelic, most of which Matthew understood, thanks to Scottish grandparents on his father’s side. She called him daft and damned and dear, among other things. Lest she reveal unwitting confidences, Matthew increased both the pace and the pressure of his caresses.

“You can have your pleasure, and you shall, my lady. Fly free, Mary Fran.”

He infused the last admonition with a touch of command, despite himself, and though he wanted to watch her face as pleasure overcame her, he instead bent and took her nipple in his mouth.

When he drew strongly on her, she started bucking against his hand in short, sharp rolls of her hips. He thrust two fingers deep into her heat and felt her body fist around him in pleasure. The sensations were in some ways more intimate than coitus, more punishing than a shared climax would have been. Inside his breeches, he was undergoing torture, but in his heart, he flirted with something approaching absolution.

“Ye wretched, pestilential mon.”

“You’re welcome.” He pushed her over to her side and spooned himself around her. “You’ll take a chill in a moment.”

“Not with your great, lovely self draped around me. You make me rethink my estimation of the English.”

“Don’t.” He tucked his arm around her, cradling a full breast in his hand.

She kissed the back of his wrist. “Are you giving me an order, sir?”

“I’m begging you not to trivialize this shared pleasure as some exercise in international diplomacy. Are you all right?”

He was not all right. He was suffering the pangs of unsatisfied lust, which he’d suffered often enough in his life, but he was also suffering more of that need to cherish a woman—this woman.

“No, I am not all right, Mr. Daniels. A relatively harmless, well-mannered if gorgeous fellow has just sashayed out under the stars with me and plucked from my grasp not only my very dignity, but also the one thing I could keep—”

Her voice caught a little. Matthew threaded an arm under her neck and gathered her closer. “The one thing you could keep?”

“Damn and blast you, Matthew.” She heaved out a sigh and shifted. For a frustrating moment, he thought she was going to sit up and start dressing, but she instead shoved him to his back and straddled him. “What just happened—inside me, between us—it has happened before.”

“Frequently, I hope.”

She left off nuzzling his throat to frown at him in the moonlight. “Only when I’m drowsing, ye ken. More asleep than awake. It never happened with my husband. I wouldn’t allow it.”

“Mary Frances MacGregor, you probably drove the poor bastard right out of his mind, which is exactly what he deserved for entrapping you.”

“I drove him to Canada.” This was said miserably, the words muttered against Matthew’s shoulder.

He recognized guilt and recognized even more when guilt had been carried too long. “Gordie had choices too, Mary Fran. A marquess’s second son has a damned lot more choices than an eighteen-year-old virgin has. He could have transferred to a ceremonial regiment, could have apologized, could have wooed you properly, could have admitted he’d been desperate to secure your hand at any price because he was smitten. You would have let him serve out a reasonable penance and then taken pity on him.”