He smiled faintly. “Indeed-we should gather our rosebuds while we may.” He ran a hand through his ruffled curls. “I am grateful for your company, even though,” he added with a small grin, “I have done my best to disabuse you of that notion. Forgive my boorishness.”

She waved away his apology. “We both have our demons.” Perhaps now was the time to stop grieving over what might have been, she precipitously thought, her sudden postulate making her feel as though a huge burden had been lifted from her shoulders. “Let us dwell on pleasure today.”

“Agreed. May I offer you a drink? I find the world is always more tolerable after a drink or two.” She might need time to deal with her confession, he reflected, while he, in turn, needed time to digest her disclosure. Another layer had been added to the intriguing Miss Russell.

She smiled. “Perhaps one.”

Ormond lit the fire that had been laid and with their drinks in hand, they watched the dancing flames in an atmosphere of harmony and calm.

“You color my world most pleasantly,” Ormond said after a time, smiling across the small distance separating them.

“You offer me a degree of pleasure I find impossible to resist.”

“How is it,” he murmured contemplatively, “that we found each other in this vast and brittle world?”

“I believe you were trying to seduce my sister.”

He laughed. “Fortune, it seems, was on my side. I found you instead.”

“Or fortune was on mine,” she flirtatiously replied.

“Speaking of mutual desires,” he softly drawled, “might I interest you in trying that rather flamboyant bed over there? I’m told it was once in the Trianon.”

“I rather thought it had the look of France. And yes, you could indeed interest me in your bed.”

“Your bed.”

“We’ll see.”

He didn’t argue, but set down his glass instead, stood and offered her his hand.

He undressed her slowly, slowly, as though wanting to remember this occasion, as though these moments were auspicious.

She did the same for him with a kind of fastidiousness he found charming-with a kind of breathless awe that was particularly provocative. Regardless of her engagement, she was still relatively uninitiated in the world of amour and for a man who had always preferred experienced women, he found her naivete wildly arousing.

When she at last stripped away his linen small clothes, her eyes opened wide at the sight of his upthrust erection. “My goodness,” she breathed, glancing up at him. “Did all of that fit inside me?”

He smiled faintly. “To perfection as I recall.”

“May I touch it?”

She was already about to do so, her fingertips poised a hairsbreadth away. Not that he would have said no in any case. “By all means. We would like that immensely.”

She glanced up at the amusement in his tone. “I suppose every woman asks you the same.”

“Some do,” he lied. His partners were not so virtuous as to be astonished at a cock in full rut. That they touched him, he couldn’t deny, but for reasons other than Miss Russell’s guileless sense of discovery.

She tentatively brushed the engorged head of his penis with her fingertips and watched amazed as his erection increased, stretching upward, each pulse beat fueling its expansion visible in the corded veins of his penis.

He took a small sustaining breath, his self-discipline legendary in the boudoir. Along with his stamina.

“I know now why you are so much in demand,” she whispered, slipping her cupped fingers under his heavy testicles. “Everything about you is-gigantic.”

“As long as you are tempted, I am content.”

She looked up again, his testis warm on her palm. “Everything about you tempts me. As you no doubt can tell.” No woman could resist him, she thought, gazing up his hard, muscled form, wondering if his amorous activities alone accounted for his strength and virility.

“And you me as you can see,” he murmured. “If you do this-” he took her hand in his, curled her fingers around his rigid length and eased her hand downward-“see what it does?”

“Oh,” she squeaked. She shot him a quick smile. “How exciting. May I do it again?”

She was an eager student and he in turn was highly appreciative, but there came a time when a man could only take so much. “Why don’t we see if you’re as ready as I? Come,” he said, easing away her grip on his penis. “Lay with me.” Without waiting for an answer-he had no intention of climaxing before exploring her luscious cunt-he drew her to the bed. Throwing back the coverlet, he lifted her onto the bed and joined her.

“Unlike last night, we don’t have to rush,” he whispered, lying beside her, leaning over and kissing her mouth and eyes, her fine straight nose and rosy cheeks, taking a novel pleasure in his artless spinster. He’d always avoided women of moral piety and yet his libertine soul liked the taste and feel of the naive Miss Russell.

Warmed by his kisses, by his hard, taut body lightly touching hers, by the delicious possibility of lying with him in this gorgeous bed-like ordinary people might in love and friendship-provoked such wistful longing Claire had to remind herself that Ormond had gone to these great lengths today for sex not love. That he had manipulated scores of people for sexual gratification alone.

Not that her lustful desires were not in full, impetuous accord, nor was she averse to orgasmic pleasure. In fact, the intensity of her passion was perhaps more fierce than his. A master of this game, he was a man jaded by sensation-when she was not. While in terms of sexual restraint, she was clearly inept. He wasn’t even breathing hard, while her breathing was becoming erratic. “Are we going to kiss much longer?” she blurted out, hot desire spreading like wildfire through her blood.

“We don’t have to.” He pulled away enough to smile at her. “Would you rather move on?” he murmured, soft suggestion in his tone.

“That would be ever so nice. I don’t mean to-er-pressure you…but-that is, I am absolutely famished for you.”

He softly chuckled, his gaze amused. “So I needn’t be polite?”

“Please no. I suppose I seem incredibly unsophisticated, but you felt so wondrous last night and made me feel more glorious than I’ve ever felt before and the thing is-” she shuddered as a jolt of desire rippled through her vagina-“I don’t think-I-can wait,” she gasped.

“Nor should you have to,” he gently said, smoothly rolling over her, more than willing to cut to the chase. How unlike she was from the usual ladies in his life who preferred flirtatious coyness to honesty.

“I’ve been wanting to feel you inside me all day and all of last night and ever since I first saw you at the masquerade,” she whispered, spreading her legs wide and clutching his arms as though he were her salvation.

He smiled faintly at her candor. She was soft and warm and sweetly willing, too-everything he wanted in a woman.

She was also, he decided, as he obliged her and slid inside her honeyed warmth, a woman who incited a degree of pleasure quite separate from the sensational, slippery friction of cock against cunt, of raw nerve endings vibrating in fervent unison. She was a woman he felt an unquenchable need to fuck-when in the past sexual glut and swift boredom were always the norm.

In some undefined and inexplicable way, she inspired previously untouched emotions. Or was it simply her high-strung, frantic neediness and the wild oscillation of her hips beneath him? “You’re going to have to stop me when you’ve had enough,” he murmured, feeling a kind of reckless indiscretion foreign to his persona. “I’m not in a particularly reasonable mood.”

“I know what you mean; don’t worry,” she breathed, raising her hips high into his downstroke, shutting her eyes at the fierce, flame-hot spasm shocking her senses.

He wasn’t worried for himself-his penis was calloused from hard use. Her vaginal tissue on the other hand might be more fragile. But a second later, he dismissed speculation in favor of raw sensation for she’d wrapped her legs around his hips and was drawing him in with some amazing, vaginal muscles.

In very short order she was frenzied and frantic like he remembered. She was dripping wet and flame-hot simultaneously-a combination that offered him the sleekest plunging descent and the most silken of withdrawals. She was deliciously tight-really, a-gift-from-heaven tight-their ensuing flesh to flesh contact jolting through his brain with such wild delirium he literally gasped on each downstroke.

She didn’t notice, her own feverish respiration claiming her attention, the deafening echo of her heartbeat in her ears further adding to the tumult in her brain. A manic litany-in and out, up and down, harder, deeper, more, more, more-overwhelmed her senses and insensible to all but her selfish, volatile, all-consuming passions, she exchanged reality for a phantasm of overwrought bliss.

Until she abruptly cried out-a small suppressed sound.

“No one can hear,” he breathed, recognizing her preorgasmic utterance no matter how restrained. Immediately sliding his hands under her hips for better traction, he said, “Scream all you want.” Then, lifting her into his downstroke, he crammed her full, wanting her to feel every possible taut, shimmering sensation, each deep, forceful downthrust-a not entirely unselfish intent. “Am I in far enough?” he murmured, swinging his lower body forward, driving in deeper. “Can you feel me?”

She promptly screamed-and screamed some more, her high-pitched cries echoing her orgasmic tremors, initiating the Trianon bed in its new London location, bringing a satisfied smile to the viscount’s face-in due time leaving the lady prostrate and in thrall to Lord Ormond’s sexual expertise and phallic perfection.

After a time, she opened her eyes very, very slowly and gazed up at the viscount with a balmy, sybaritic smile. “If you could do that again I would be ever so grateful,” she breathed. “Or do I have to wait?”

He smiled at her beguiling query. “You don’t have to wait.” His capacity for dalliance was honed to perfection; self-control was rarely an issue. “You tell me when you’re ready.”

“Would you think me too greedy if I said, now?”

“Not in the least.” Holding her impaled on his cock, he rolled over on his back.

“How strong you are-everywhere,” she whispered, easing upright astride his hips, shifting her bottom in a little voluptuous wiggle that made his erection surge higher.

“How pink and plump these are.” His fingers slid over the high rounded curves of her breasts, down the deep Vee of her cleavage. “And your nipples-” he squeezed the taut buds lightly. “I’d say they’re ready for sucking.”

She softly moaned, awash in blissful sensation-his erection buried deep inside her, his fingers delicately stroking her nipples, her vagina bathed in a fresh rush of slick arousal.

“I can’t reach you,” he whispered, tugging on her breasts to bring her closer, half rising himself in a ripple of stomach muscles until her nipples were within reach.

As his mouth closed over one taut peak, she gasped at the flame-hot rapture streaking downward to meet the seething pool of frenzied nerve endings in her vagina and clit. Obsessed, ravenous with desire, she ground her bottom against his crotch in a frantic gyration of her hips, greedy to feel every virile flesh and blood contour of his huge, rigid erection.

He watched her through his lashes with an inexplicable pride, as though he was the means and instrument of her delight, as though he had discovered this unravished beauty who wished now to be ravished by him.

How was it that her innocence stirred him so profoundly? Why did her dewy-eyed sensuality disarm him so completely? More shocking-why did Miss Russell and the thought of permanence suddenly leap into his mind? Never one to allow an injudicious thought to endure, however, he quickly turned his attention to more pleasant conceits.

She came twice more before he decided to take his turn. It was either that or come in her-a consideration so beyond the pale he instantly dismissed it. Although she said afterward, “It wouldn’t really matter if you came in me once would it?”

He stopped breathing for a second, her words the equivalent of a trap about to spring. “It probably wouldn’t be a good idea,” he replied in an excessively courteous tone. “For your sake, of course,” he added, quickly easing away from her. “Let me get a towel.”

What had come over her to even voice such a question? Claire restively thought, alarmed at how close she had come to disaster. It just went to show, how passion could overrun reason. How the gratifying pleasures of sex with a gorgeous, superbly endowed man like Ormond could affect one’s better judgment. How infatuation could turn too quickly to fondness or more when in Ormond’s embrace. It would not happen again, she silently affirmed.