“You are very ready to assign all sorts of sentimental motives to me today,” he said. His plate was empty. He set down his knife and fork and picked up his glass of wine. “But if there is some truth in what you say, Frances, there is truth in this too. I will marry for love. I have decided that, and that puts you in an awkward position. For I love you. And so I cannot settle for anyone else. And yet I have a certain promise to keep before the summer is out.”

The landlord arrived to clear away their plates. A maid behind him carried in two dishes of steaming pudding. Frances waved hers away and asked for tea.

“Your father acknowledged you from the moment of your birth, did he not?” Lucius asked as soon as they were alone again. “He was married to your mother? He gave you his name?”

“Yes,” she said, “of course.”

“Then you are legitimate,” he said. “In the eyes of the church and the law you are Frances Allard—or perhaps Françoise Halard.”

“But no high stickler, knowing the truth, would want to marry me,” she said.

“Good Lord, Frances,” he said, “why would you want to marry a high stickler? It sounds like a dreadfully dreary fate. Marry me instead.”

“We are arguing in circles,” she said.

He looked up from his pudding to smile at her.

“It has only now struck me,” he said, “that you never did make suet pudding and custard to follow the beef pie, Frances. But I will say this. That pie was so satisfying that the pudding would surely have gone to waste if you had made it.”

She loved him so very, very much, she thought, gazing across the table at him. She must have fallen in love with him—

“I believe,” he said, “I fell in love with you after tasting the first mouthful of that pie, Frances. Or perhaps it was when I walked into the kitchen and found you rolling out the pastry and you slapped at my hand when I stole a piece. Or perhaps it was when I lifted you out of your carriage and deposited you on the road and you gave it as your opinion that I ought to be boiled in oil. Yes, I think it must have been then. No woman had ever spoken such endearing words to me before.”

She continued to gaze at him.

“I must know something, Frances,” he said. “Please, I must know. Do you love me?”

“That has nothing to do with anything,” she said, shaking her head slowly.

“On the contrary,” he said, “it has everything to do with everything.”

“Of course I love you,” she said. “Of course I do. But I cannot marry you.”

He sat back in his chair, his pudding only half eaten, and beamed at her in that intense-eyed, tight-lipped, square-jawed way in which he had looked at her before. It could hardly be called a smile, and yet . . .

“Tomorrow,” he said, “you will continue on your way to Bath in the old boat, Frances. You have teaching duties there, and I know they are important to you. I will return to London in my curricle. I have duties awaiting me there, and they are important to me. Tonight we will make love.”

She licked dry lips and saw his eyes dip to follow the movement of her tongue.

He had given up the argument, then.

Her heart broke just a little more.

But there was tonight.

“Yes,” she said.

He could not believe what a difference loving her made—consciously loving her, not just bedding an attractive body for which he had conceived a strong sexual desire.

He had, he supposed, fallen in love with her early, as he had told her at dinner. Why else would he have pleaded with her to go to London with him when he had no real plan and when there was every reason not to take her? Why else would he have found it impossible to forget her in the three months after she had rejected him even though he had convinced himself that he had? Why else would he have made her such an impulsive marriage offer in Bath? And why else would he have pursued her so relentlessly ever since?

But somewhere along the way—and it was impossible to know exactly when or why it had happened—his feelings for her had shifted and deepened so that he was no longer just in love with her. He loved her. The beauty of her person and of her soul, the strong, sometimes misguided, almost always irritating sense of duty and honor by which she lived her life, the way she had of tipping her head slightly to one side and regarding him with a look of exasperation and unconscious tenderness, the way her face had of lighting up with joy when she forgot herself, her ability to give herself up to fun and frolicking and laughter—ah, there were a hundred and one things about her that had brought him to love her, and a hundred and one other intangibles that made her into the only woman he had ever loved—or would ever love.

When they came together, naked, in the middle of the wide bed in their inn room, he wrapped both arms about her slender, warm body and drew it against his and found that he was almost trembling. The thought that he might yet lose her threatened to overwhelm him, and he set his lips, parted, over hers and concentrated upon the moment.

Now, at this precise moment, she was naked and eager in his arms, and now was all that mattered.

Now they were together.

And she had admitted that she loved him. He had known it—in his heart he had known. But she had spoken the words.

Of course I love you. Of course I do.

“Lucius,” she said against his mouth, “make love to me.”

“I thought that was what I was doing.” He drew back his head to grin down at her in the faint light being cast through the window by the lamps burning in the stable yard below. “Am I not doing well enough?”

Her whole body trembled with her laughter. He loved it when she did that.

“Of course,” he said, turning her onto her back and looming over her, one arm beneath her head, one knee pressed between her thighs, “you are rather hot to handle, Frances. Red hot. I might burn myself with touching you. You are not coming down with some fever by any chance, are you?”

She laughed again and reached for the back of his head. She drew his mouth down to hers once more and thrust her breasts up against his chest.

“I think I am,” she said. “And I think it is going to get worse before it gets better. But there is only one cure I can think of. Make me better, Lucius.”

She spoke in a low, throaty voice that raised goose bumps along his arms and down his spine.

“My pleasure, ma’am,” he said, his lips feathering kisses down over her chin and throat. “Shall we dispense with the foreplay this time?”

“This time?” she said, twining her fingers in his hair. “Is there to be another time, then?”

“How many hours are left in the night?” he asked.

“Eight?” she suggested.

“Then there will be other times,” he said. “One hour for play, one for rest between times. Three other times, then? Perhaps four since this is likely to be brief.”

“Then let us dispense with the foreplay this time,” she said, and laughed softly again.

He came down on top of her, slid his hands beneath her, positioned himself between her thighs, and thrust hard and deep into her wet heat.

He had known almost from the start that she was a passionate woman. But tonight she had abandoned all her inhibitions to it. He had not lied when he had told her that she was almost too hot to handle. What followed his mount was pure, mindless, glorious carnality. She met him thrust for thrust, and they mated with vigor and panting breath and mingled heat and sweat—and ultimately with a shared and shattering climax.

Aware at the last possible moment that they were at a public inn and the walls might not be as thick and soundproof as they ought, he opened his mouth over hers to absorb her final cry.

Then he turned his head to one side, relaxed his weight down onto her, and sighed.

“The secret when one intends to spend a whole night at play,” he said, “is to save some energy, to conduct the first bout in a restrained manner and build to a lusty climax with the final bout sometime after dawn.”

“But that is exactly what we are doing, is it not?” she said softly, her breath warm against his ear. “Wait until that final bout, Lucius. It will shatter the globe, and we will find ourselves shooting through space.”

“Heaven help me,” he said. “And heaven help the world.”

And he promptly fell asleep without first bothering to move off her.

Was it possible, Frances wondered during one of the drowsy times in the course of that night when she was not either making love or dozing, that some people lived life this vividly day after day, week after week, even year after year? Giving joy and taking it with reckless disregard for the consequences or the future or anything, in fact, except the precious moment as it was being lived.

The cautious part of her mind told her she was being foolish, even immoral. But something in her soul knew that if she never reached for joy she would never find it and at the end of her life she would know that she had deliberately turned away from the most precious opportunities her life had offered as a gift.

She could not marry Lucius. Or rather she would not because she knew that without his family’s blessing he would never be quite happy. And how could they give that blessing if his bride was the daughter of an Italian singer and some unknown Italian man?

She could not marry him, but she could love him now tonight.

And so she did, giving herself up to all the passion she felt for him. They made love over and over again, sometimes with swift vigor as they had done at the start of the night, sometimes with prolonged, tantalizing, almost agonizing foreplay and long, rhythmic couplings, which were so excruciatingly sensual and beautiful that they both, by unspoken consent, held back from the moment when excitement would be unleashed to hurl them over a precipice into satiety and peace and sleep.

His hands, his body, his powerful legs and arms, his mouth, his hair, his smell—all became as familiar to her in the course of the night as her own body. And as dear. She came to understand the idea that man and woman could become one flesh. When he was inside her, it was hard to know where she ended and he began. Their bodies seemed made to fit together, to mate together, to relax together.

“Happy?” he murmured against her ear when dawn was graying the room. He had one arm beneath her neck, his fingers twined with hers, while his other hand described lazy circles over her stomach and one of his legs was draped over both of hers.

“Mmm,” she said.

But daylight inevitably followed dawn, she knew.

“You will be glad to get back to work?” he asked.

“Mmm,” she said again. But really she would. She had always been happy at the school, and the work there had always brought her satisfaction. Her fellow teachers were the closest friends she had ever had. She loved them—it was as simple as that.

“The rest of the school year will be busy?” he asked. He took her earlobe between his teeth and rubbed his tongue over the tip, causing her toes to curl up.

“There will be final examinations to set and mark,” she said. “There will be farewell teas for the senior girls who are leaving, and placements to arrange for the charity girls in positions for which their education and personal inclinations qualify them. There will be the selection of new girls for next year—Claudia always involves all her teachers in those decisions. And there is the end-of-year prize-giving evening and concert for parents and friends. Several of my music pupils will be performing and all my choirs. There will be daily practices from now until that evening comes. Yes, I will be too busy to think of anything else.”

“Will you be thankful for that?” he asked.