A tiny ray of light pierced the blackness of his soul and began to glow. He had wronged her, misjudged her. She was no Elizabeth, using his physical desire for her own gain; she was simply his Gillian, his wife, the woman who muddled her way through life with an impish smile and devilish twinkle in her eye. He sighed as he slipped into bed and curled up behind her, sharing her warmth, feeling suddenly as if a burden had shifted, lightening a little.

Why had she agreed to marry him? he wondered suddenly. Marriage to him offered security and a title, but he knew instinctively that neither mattered to her. He stroked the arm curled around her ribs and breathed in the seductive scent of sleepy woman. Why had she married him? The thought tortured him most of the night and into an indescribably lovely English summer morning.

“Mmmmmm.”

Her voice caressed him in a manner that was almost physical, and yet his reaction to it was far more profound than any mere physical reaction could be. The light inside him strengthened, casting the far edges of his soul into dark, forbidding shadows. He stared with unseeing eyes at the letter as he looked deep into the heart of the light. The light was Gillian. She had somehow managed to work her way into the deepest recesses of his being, and there she burned like a beacon. Noble waited with a sick feeling for the black thing that slithered around in his soul to find the brightness, to extinguish it, but the black thing was miraculously banished to a far corner. Noble basked in the glow of the light, feeling for the first time as if life did hold some promise, as if there was some reason for his existence.

“Mmmmm. So good.”

He sighed, unable to bear the torment any longer. He had to look. “Did you wish something, my dear?”

Gillian looked up from the pamphlet in which she was engrossed. “No, nothing, Noble. Thank you.”

He watched her reach for another strawberry and hold it before her mouth, her mind engaged in reading the literature before her. He felt his breathing stop as he watched, waiting. Slowly Gillian parted her lips, the strawberry a hairsbreadth away from that luscious mouth, the very tip of her tongue emerging to lightly stroke the fruit’s heavy round fullness.

Noble felt himself grow hard as steel at the sight. He swallowed back the tightness that threatened to choke him and tried to drag his attention from the erotic sight of his wife eating strawberries to the more important issue of who was threatening to do her bodily harm. The words swam before his eyes and he couldn’t help but wonder what she was doing. Would she have finished licking the essence from the strawberry by this time? Would her small white teeth be pulling at the succulent fruit, tugging its globular, delicate flesh with little nips until it surrendered to the lure of her sweet, hot mouth? Would her tongue make a reappearance as she licked the juices from her soft, warm lips?

He couldn’t help himself. He looked up. She was chewing, a green stem dangling between her long, delicate, albeit bluetinted, fingers.

“More strawberries, my dear?” he asked, his voice strangely hoarse. She looked into the bowl he was offering. “Well, I shouldn’t, but I do love strawberries so. Perhaps just one or two more.”

He deftly turned the bowl so she would have to take the largest one, a veritable giant among strawberries, one that had two distinct hemispheres. He felt himself harden to a degree he would have thought impossible outside the realm of marble as Gillian’s little pink tongue snaked out and caressed one side of the giant strawberry.

“Mmmm,” she murmured happily, her eyes closed in bliss as she gave herself over to the pleasure of tasting the mammoth berry. Noble thought he would either shame himself or swoon when she took one half of the strawberry into the hot, moist, silky cave of her mouth and sucked the juices from its flesh. He shifted uncomfortably in his chair, aware only of his overwhelmingly intense desire to throw her down on the table and plunge himself deep into her womanly depths. Repeatedly. For a lengthy period of time, say a week or two. Maybe longer.

A small trickle of red juice escaped her lush, pink lips. Noble’s tongue swelled up at the sight of it.

“Gark,” he said, unable to tear his eyes from it as it traced a path down toward her chin.

“Pardon?” she asked, reaching for her linen napkin.

“Allow me,” he croaked, and lunged awkwardly out of his chair toward her, his own cloth held clenched in his fingers. He glanced at it quickly, calculated the amount of energy it would take to unlock his rigid fingers, and leaned down.

“You have some juice. Just there.” His voice was rustier than iron left in saltwater. “Allow me to attend to it.”

She turned her head slightly, the tempting fruit still held before her lips. Noble inhaled the sweet smell of Gillian mingled with the earthy scent of strawberry just before his tongue touched her skin. He followed the path the juice had made up to its source and paused, looking into her fathomless eyes.

“Bite?” she asked, her voice strange and rough. It reached out and struck a resonance deep within him, like a harp string quivering after it had been plucked.

Gillian’s lips parted. Her tongue pulled part of the strawberry into the sweet darkness of her mouth. Noble was sure he would die if he didn’t taste that piece of fruit. He gripped Gillian’s chair on either side of her and forced her head back as he claimed both her mouth and the strawberry.

He hardened to granite. The juice from the strawberry mingled as their tongues twined around each other, dancing, teasing, sending Noble into a blissful state. Little warning bells began to chime in the back of his head as he slid his tongue along the inside of her silken cheek, tasting strawberry, tasting Gillian, tasting paradise. He started to reach for her, needing to feel himself buried in her warmth, drawing from it, merging himself into it, into the heat that was Gillian. He needed her warmth to feed the light burning so bravely inside him. He needed her at that exact instant.

“ ’Ere be the kippers ye were wantin’—eh, take ’em back, lads. ’Is lordship isn’t ’ungry for ’em anymore.”

Noble snapped his head back from Gillian just in time to see the insolent grin on Crouch’s face before the door closed. He felt as if someone had doused him with a bucket of ice water. He looked down at Gillian, down to where his fingers were white as they clutched the sides of her chair. Her breasts were rising and falling erratically, her eyes misty with passion. He tried to swallow but couldn’t.

“Good, aren’t they?” Gillian asked hoarsely, and plucked the remainder of the strawberry from between his teeth.

“What is that you are reading so attentively?” Noble inquired some minutes later, when he had managed to wrest control of his mind away from the demands of his body.

“It’s an absolutely fascinating pamphlet I bought off a man in the square this morning when I was strolling with Piddle and Erp. It’s called Celestial Stimulation of the Organs, and it explains how one might, by using special Oils of Araby and balmy, ethereal essences, restore elasticity and good health to those who are suffering from bad humors.”

Noble, keeping his eyes carefully averted as she reached for another strawberry, asked if she were feeling ill.

“No, but you are.”

He looked up at her statement.

“I couldn’t help but notice that you were most restless last night, husband. And this morning, when I asked you why you were looking so peculiar and disgruntled, you said you had a pain in your head. All signs, according to Dr. Graham’s helpful pamphlet, that your organs need attention.”

Noble thought back to the night of torment he had endured, a self-imposed night of torment borne of his desire to show his wife that he was more than just a lustful beast who valued his own urges more than his wife’s need to rest.

“I am quite well, I assure you, madam,” he said, lying through his teeth. He was a lustful beast. He wanted her, needed her, had to have her. That very moment. “My organs have no need of stimulation, celestial or otherwise. I do, however, believe that we did not finish our discussion about the proper way of organizing and structuring your life.”

Gillian looked surprised. “Would that be the lecture you delivered last evening?”

“It would. You looked tired, so I postponed the balance of the discussion until today.”

Gillian sighed. Dabbing at her mouth, she sat back in her chair with her hands folded demurely on her lap. “Very well, Noble, if it will make you happy, you may lecture me now.”

“Thank you. Now, as to—”

“It comes as news to me, of course, to find out my life is unorganized and unstructured.”

“You may be assured it is, my dear. As for last evening’s events—”

“Active, perhaps, or full of those marvelous little surprises that life always seems to offer, yes, I can see that, but unorganized and unstructured?”

“It is. How else do you explain that?” He waved toward her blue hands.

She considered her hands. “Curiosity?”

“Curiosity, lady wife, when held unchecked by common sense and rational thought, is nothing more than chaos. And as we have discussed at length, a chaotic lifestyle is not one that is conducive to a happy home.”

“But, Noble—”

He ignored her protests and spent fifteen minutes explaining again the importance of control and order in one’s life. He paced back and forth before the sideboard, his stride lengthening as he gesticulated when making particular points. He waxed eloquent as he presented both arguments and examples for her edification. He was pleased to see he had her full attention. Her eyes never left him as he offered her rational and valid reasons why she would learn to suit her life to his, and how happy their lives together would be once that seemingly monumental task had been accomplished.

“Now, my dear,” he finished, pulling out his pocket watch and consulting it, “I must keep an appointment, but before I go I will hear your plans for the day.”

“Hmm?” she asked dreamily, her gaze still intent on him.

“Your plans, madam.”

“Have you ever thought of wearing colors, Noble? Perhaps just a colored waistcoat? Not that you don’t look elegantly delicious in black, but I thought perhaps you might like, once in a while, to don a bit of color.”

He narrowed his eyes at her. “What has my method of dress to do with your plans for the day?”

She widened her eyes in response. “Why, nothing. I just asked a question. Oh, never mind, it doesn’t matter. My plans for today — well, I believe Charlotte is coming to help me with ideas for the drawing room you said I might redecorate. And we plan on making a call to a…an acquaintance. And then I thought I would take Nick to Regent’s Park to see the zoological gardens. Would you like to accompany us?”

“No, thank you, I have my own schedule to attend to. Very well, my dear, I hope you keep the precepts we have been discussing in mind as you go about your day.”

“Precepts?” She blinked at him.

“Yes, those that we’ve just spent the morning discussing. I will escort you to the Gayfields’ rout tonight if I am able; if not, I will send Harry or Sir Hugh and meet you there later.”

“But Noble, where—”

He was out the door before she could finish asking him about his plans for the day. And what precepts had they just discussed? Perhaps she should have been paying attention to what he was saying rather than woolgathering, but she couldn’t help it. Whenever he started in on his pet lecture, which she seemed to have already heard as many days as she had been married, her mind wandered.

She really would have to watch that habit; it was not a wise one to indulge in around the Lord of Kisses. He had enough ways of distracting her from her goal without her helping him by not paying attention to what he was saying.

Noble settled back into an armchair in Boodle’s and waved away the attendant. “Good morning, Harry. You look pleased with yourself. May I assume from that expression that you’ve had some luck?”

“Alas, not the luck you seek, my friend.” Lord Rosse proffered a silver cigar case to the Black Earl. “But something interesting, nonetheless. Did you know that Mariah has disappeared?”

Noble paused for a moment in the act of lighting his cigar. “I had some suspicion she had, since she vacated the premises of the house in Kensington so quickly. Her sister has no idea where she’s gone to ground?”