She was to pleasure him, which opened up universes of possibilities, wonderful, daring, bold… The trust went both ways. This was a revelation of such magnitude, Hester had to scoot down and hide her face against his chest. He let go of her breast and encircled her shoulders with his arms.

Hester straddled him, and between their bodies, closed her fingers around the hard shaft of his membrum virile. She knew the proper name for that part of him. Tye could probably tell her a dozen terms for it, each naughtier than the last.

“Hester?”

“I’m all right.” She was so much better than that. Edges inside her mind grown jagged with self-doubt and recrimination were being smoothed over; places in her body left aching with regret were easing.

And she still hadn’t even taken off her nightgown. She lifted off his chest and shrugged out of the wrapper, feeling the fabric fall down her bare arms in a sensuous caress.

He lay on his back, resplendently naked by candlelight, resplendently erect, simply watching her. His gaze on her body was another caress, but she lacked the courage to be as exposed as he was.

Spathfoy apparently understood this. “Come here.” He held up one arm, implying that she was to cuddle against his side. She went willingly, though when he hiked her knee across his thighs, she was taken a little aback. “For such a bold woman, you are surprisingly shy, Hester.”

He sounded puzzled rather than disapproving. Just when she thought they might get into a contest of vocabulary—comparing “shy” and “reserved” for example—he shifted so her leg was hiked up over his hip, and he was on his side, looming over her while she lay mostly on her back.

How had he done that?

He peered down at her. “But not too shy.”

She didn’t bother forming a reply. Instead she drew her fingers along the architecture of his jaw, caressed the strong bones and lean muscle that created a sense of resolution and strength in his countenance. He caught her hand, kissed her palm, and set her fingers on his chest.

And his mouth on hers.

Kissing him was a relief of tremendous magnitude. When he settled his lips over hers, Hester felt as if a current ran between them, everywhere they touched. A current that had been damming up inside her body since she’d first laid eyes on him.

And perhaps in his body as well.

He was good at this. He could kiss and go plundering with his hand at the same time. Into her hair, to anchor her head on the pillow, down her arm, to squeeze her fingers gently, and then up her rib cage to… there.

Through the fabric of her nightgown, he teased her nipple to an aching peak, then covered the fullness of her breast with his hand. She moved into the caress, used her leg around his hips to pull herself closer to him, confident in the knowledge that her desire was a precious, wonderful thing to him. On that liberating thought, she hitched closer still.

And felt his erection against her belly.

“Kiss me, Hester.”

She needed the reminder, because his intimate flesh was that distracting, that fascinating. She opened her mouth for him, welcoming his questing tongue, savoring him, and letting him tease her into exploring his mouth as well. When he pulled back and grazed his nose over her eyebrows, she fisted a hand in his hair and manually ordered him to resume his attentions to her mouth.

He smiled against her lips, a lovely sensation, but one that suggested he wasn’t as absorbed in what they were doing as she was. Hester ran her hand down his torso and closed her grip around his shaft.

Only to feel his hand on her bare torso.

“My nightgown—” Somehow, he’d untied the bows down the front.

“Hush. Kiss me.”

He plied her breast with exquisite focus, even as his mouth tried to distract her from those breathtaking sensations of pressure and want—and pleasure. She shifted her hold of him while he peeled her fingers loose from his member and set them on her own breast. Was the skin on the underside of her breast as soft as the crown of his male part? What that what he was showing her?

“Tiber—”

His touch delved lower, until he was teasing his fingers through the curls shielding her sex. She gave up on speech altogether, gave up on trying to figure out how she ought to touch him, gave up on thinking.

“Part your legs a little for me.”

She did not give up on listening, but had to push back a wave of self-consciousness to comply.

“Yes.” He set his palm over her sex, which should have been an act of dominion, except it wasn’t. His hand brought warmth and a vague sort of relief, but frustration too.

Even when she said not a word, he heard her body’s needs. This time when he kissed her, there was nothing coy or teasing about it. He consumed her with his mouth, using his tongue to set up a slow, sinuous rhythm Hester felt beneath the pit of her stomach.

“Move for me, Hester.”

He glossed his fingers over her sex, his touch delicate and yet assured. The touch came again, slightly different, higher. Jasper hadn’t touched her like this, hadn’t done more than pummel her body with his own while he told her to hold still and be quiet.

She could not hold still; she had to move against that knowing male hand. Her hips flexed, and Spathfoy growled into her mouth. “Yes, like that. Again.”

As he fell silent, Hester felt music start up in her body. With his hand and his mouth and even the pressure of his chest along her side, Spathfoy started a drumbeat of wanting in Hester’s veins that ran hotter and hotter while his fingers kept up the same steady, teasing caress.

She should be touching him; she should be asking him what all this was in aid of; she should be… breathing.

The last was all Hester could manage. Though she knew the bed was solid beneath her, she felt behind her closed eyes as if she were suspended over some great chasm, her balance no longer her own but entirely dependent on the man touching her so intimately.

“Let go, Hester. I’ve got you.”

Let…?

Her body understood. When pleasure coalesced into convulsions of soul-scorching ecstasy, she clung to him, flailed herself hard against his hand, and felt him slip two long, male fingers deep into her heat.

Bliss and bliss and more bliss deluged her, and he moved those fingers to ensure the flood did not recede until Hester was panting, her fingers manacled around his wrist, her body a foreign and thoroughly pleasured feminine territory she’d never inhabited before.

He understood about this part too, for which Hester nearly loved him. He did not slip his hand free of her body, wipe it on a handkerchief, and climb on top of her. She could not have protested if he had.

“Hush, now,” he murmured in her ear. He gathered her close, rested his chin on her temple, and trapped her leg between his two. When she pressed her cheek against his chest, she could hear his heart and feel it too. They lay like that, entwined, breathing in synchrony, as feelings rioted through Hester in silence.

Tiberius Flynn was arrogant, but also generous, kind, affectionate, considerate, attentive, and… two more words came to Hester’s mind as she panted against his throat. First, Tye was decent in a gentlemanly sense that one had to be naked with him to understand, and second, he was lovable in the sense that a woman could find many reasons to esteem and desire him greatly.

And the man who’d just given her such indescribable pleasure, and who was holding her so tenderly, was also himself yet unsated. According to Jasper, men needed to spend regularly if dire bad health wasn’t to result, but then, Jasper had apparently known next to nothing.

Oh, how that realization pleased her. She kissed Spathfoy’s breastbone, wishing she could tell him, but lacking the courage. Then, too, there was his male member, hard, warm, and lying between their bodies as a rampant reminder that she had not provided him the pleasure he’d showered on her.

“Spath—Tiberius?”

“Tye.”

“Are you all right?”

* * *

“I’m fine.”

Tye silently chided himself for having graduated from dissembling to outright lying. “Just catch your breath, hmm?” He buried his nose in her silky hair and wondered when a plan to scare her back into possession of her common sense had transformed into a burning need to cover her naked body with his own.

And when had that plan—perhaps understandable, if not excusable under the circumstances—shifted to a craving to bring her pleasure and comfort?

“But this?” She brushed her fingers over the head of his erection. “It can’t be very comfortable.” She let go of his cock but smoothed her hand down his chest and lapped at his nipple—for God’s perishing sake.

He caught her hand in his own and brought her knuckles to his mouth for a lingering kiss. Where the resolve to leave the bed, pour himself a drink, and make light of the situation ought to be, he found a stubborn unwillingness to hurt her feelings to quite that degree.

She hadn’t been a virgin, and yet she was still an innocent.

A passionate innocent, and Tye was only a human man.

He wrapped her hand about his cock, and then set his hand around hers. “This way, nobody risks conception. Every schoolboy becomes proficient at it if he isn’t to lose his reason.”

He fell silent, the pleasure of her hand on him eclipsing his ability to explain. She wasn’t shy either, accepting the firmness of the grip he preferred and giving him the exact rhythm he demonstrated.

And she had the knack of slipping her hand over the head of his cock just loosely enough to make his breath catch in his throat. His hand fell away, and she didn’t falter. “Don’t stop.”

She didn’t. Of all times for her to turn up biddable, now Hester Daniels did exactly as he’d directed her. For long moments, he withstood the siren call of pleasure, hanging suspended over a cauldron of erotic sensations: Hester’s hand on his swollen cock, the warm weight of her body plastered to his side, her leg flung over his hips, and the way the scent of her winding into Tye’s brain became the scent of every pleasure he’d ever forbidden himself.

“Hester—” He’d meant to tug her hand away, to finish himself, but she gripped him tighter, wonderfully tighter, and it pushed him beyond the call of volition. Between their bodies his seed spurted, his body seizing with the force of his satisfaction. His ears roared, his mind went blank, and when he could next claim to have awareness of anything save pleasure, he was breathing like a bellows, his arm lashed around Hester, and his cock trapped between their naked bodies.

When he could recall how to form words, he tried to speak. “I’ve made quite a m—”

She didn’t lift her head from his shoulder, but she put her hand—bearing his intimate scent—over his mouth. “You hush. Catch your breath.”

How in the hell did a woman become so quickly attuned to the man who was supposed to be much more experienced than she was?

Who was much more experienced?

He shut up and subsided into her embrace. Yes, he’d made the predictable, inconvenient, indelicate mess on their bellies. Yes, he’d completely failed in his plan to shock Hester back to her own room, permanently cured of boldness where he was concerned. And yes again, he’d failed utterly to control his own attraction to her.

But she was right. He needed to catch his breath, to locate his reason, recollect his duty—honor being a sketchy concept under the circumstances—and to forget for all time the sensation of her soft wool sock brushing provocatively across his arse as he gave himself up to soul-deep pleasure in her arms.

* * *

“Where are you going?” Hester tightened her arms around Spathfoy. He was strong enough to break her hold, of course—he was strong enough to break her neck—but he paused in his flight from the bed.

“We are untidy, my dear.” He kissed her temple, and this time she let him go. They were untidy—sticky, at least, and there was musk hanging in the air Hester found more fascinating than unpleasant. Her body was still humming with the revelations she’d experienced in Spathfoy’s arms, leaving her both languorous and energized.

Pleased with herself—also pleased with him—and curious about what other aspects of the dealings between men and women she’d been kept in ignorance of.

“Lie back.” Spathfoy approached the bed, a damp cloth in his hand. “The only water to be had is cold. I do apologize.”