He held her gaze, his expression like granite, as impassive as ever.

Breckenridge didn’t misinterpret her challenge, didn’t miss the flash of stubborn pride in her eyes. But they both had a surfeit of that particular emotion. “You’ll know when I know.” He kept his tone even, his gaze level — meeting her challenge with his own. “Of that, you can be absolutely sure.”

Her chin rose another notch as, with a faint arching of her brows, she looked ahead.

Facing forward, too, he concentrated on walking on unaffectedly, unthreateningly, by her side, subduing — denying — the compulsion to halt, haul her into his arms, and make clear in unequivocal fashion that he had no intention of ever letting her go, of ever permitting her to escape him. His inner male didn’t appreciate that she’d even entertained the thought, much less given it voice.

But his civilized self was too experienced to give into such reckless impulse. She’d backed away from implying that she wished their liasion had never been. . he needed to tread warily, to give her time to come around. This was not the moment to pressure her.

Not yet.

As they walked back to the manor, the morning bright about them, he turned his mind to planning the next stage in a conquest unlike any other, one from which he could no longer walk away.

A conquest he couldn’t afford to lose.

After lunch, Breckenridge joined Richard in his library. They’d discovered they shared a passion for fly-fishing; tying lures was an occupation whose attraction never waned.

On one side of the library, they sat at either end of a narrow table reserved for the task. Tiny boxes containing hooks, beads, and feathers of every conceivable sort were spread over the tabletop, along with various coils of line and an assortment of implements.

Richard was using a viselike stand to hold the lure on which he was working. Breckenridge preferred to use a simple clamp.

Silence reigned, companionable and soothing, while they each concentrated on their creations. The long case clock in the corner ticked on.

Eventually Breckenridge tied off the lure he’d constructed, snipped the end of the line, then carefully released the lure from the clamp and set the lure aside.

Setting down the clamp, he leaned back in his chair, stretched.

Noting that Richard, too, had reached the final, less exacting stages of construction, Breckenridge hesitated, then leaned forward again. Selecting a hook, he started the process of assembling the various feathers and beads for another lure.

Eyes on his task, murmured, “One question I feel compelled to ask: Before they agreed to marry, did all the Cynster females behave as irrationally as Heather is?”

He glanced briefly up, but Richard didn’t look up from the lure he was tying off as he unperturbably replied, “Prickly at the best of times, then ‘have-at-you’ the instant you set a foot, nay, a toe, wrong?”

“Exactly.”

“Then yes.” Richard straightened, tipping his head as he examined his lure. “It seems to be a family failing, even when they’re not Cynster-born.”

Breckenridge humphed.

He was carefully placing the fresh hook into his clamp when Richard continued, “There seems to be this prevailing wisdom, not just over marrying for love, but what that actually equates to. They seem to all have it firmly in their heads that without some cast-iron assurance, preferably in the form of an open declaration from us, then no matter the reality of any love, that love won’t be solid and strong.”

Unwinding the vise to release his completed lure, Richard grimaced. “It’s almost as if they think that unless we state our feelings out aloud, we won’t know what they — our feelings — are.” He snorted. “As if we somehow might not notice that our lives have suddenly shifted to revolve solely about them and their well-being.”

Breckenridge grunted in masculine agreement.

“Sadly,” Richard said, selecting another hook, “it appears futile to expect them to go against the familial grain.”

Silence lengthened once more as they both became absorbed — Richard in making his next lure, Breckenridge letting his fingers go through the motions while his mind weighed Richard’s words against his own reading of his and Heather’s situation.

That she required, and was indeed angling for, a clear declaration of his feelings rang all too true. A bare second’s thought confirmed his continuing antipathy to giving her any such declaration. Quite aside from the vulnerability he would feel over acknowledging that she was so emotionally critical to him, to his future, to his happiness — a vulnerability shared with Richard, and all the rest, all the other men like him who’d been fated to fall in love, something akin to inviting a permanent itch between his shoulder blades, or more accurately, an exposed feeling over his heart — all of which was bad enough, there was the not-so-small matter of his experience with love, with ever having been foolish enough to utter that word.

The thought of doing so again. .

His entire being — his sophisticated self as well as his inner male — balked.

Obdurate, unyielding, immutable.

Yet he needed to win her agreement to their wedding.

While his fingers shaped and twisted, placed, balanced, and bound, he juggled the issues. There had to be some way forward.

He had to find some way of meeting her need that didn’t involve him making any syrupy declaration of undying love. He wasn’t expecting her to make any such reciprocal declaration; he might prefer her to love him back, prefer that she returned what he felt for her with equal fervor, but he wasn’t prepared to consciously hope that that would actually be the case.

Other than gaining her agreement to wed him, he wouldn’t make any further demands of her. He had no further caveats; as she wanted children, that subject didn’t need to be specified.

Which left him still facing the central critical issue: How to declare that he loved her in exactly the way she wanted to be loved. . his throat constricted just at the thought.

All his vaunted charm and glib persuasiveness weren’t going to be of any help; a verbal declaration simply wasn’t an option. If he was unwise enough to try. . an aborted attempt might only serve to infuriate her, to convince her that he wasn’t in earnest, that he would never measure up, and had no intention of ever measuring up, to her requirements.

No way forward there. .

His fingers stilled. He stared unseeing at the half-made lure as the clock ticked steadily on, and the one possible way forward, the one real option available to him, blossomed and took shape in his brain.

Chapter Seventeen

Once the manor had settled for the night and there were no more candles bobbing along the corridors, when silence had fallen and enough time had elapsed for the last stragglers to have found their beds, Breckenridge opened the door of his room and stepped out into the darkness of the turret stairs.

Closing the door, he waited for his eyes to adjust to the darkness. Luckily the manor’s narrow, stone-walled stairwells and corridors were largely free of furniture he might bump into, with only the occasional wall hangings to act as landmarks. Otherwise the corridors all looked much the same, especially in the dark.

Hoping he wouldn’t get lost, as soon as he could make out the stairs, he descended to the floor below, the first floor above the hall, and started along the gallery that Worboys, Richard’s valet, who had been tending his few clothes, had helpfully told him led to Heather’s bedchamber.

When he’d baldly asked which room she occupied, Worboys had answered readily, confirming his suspicion that the entire household was eager to play matchmaker. As in this instance their goal — to see him and Heather wed — was the same as his, he’d accepted Worboys’s aid with nothing more than an inner wince.

He needed to forge a way forward with Heather, to gain her agreement to their wedding. To accomplish that, he had to convince her of the depth of his feelings, and as he couldn’t utter the requisite words, that left only one possible means of communication.

Luckily, it was a means at which he excelled. Although he hadn’t previously used those means in such a way, he felt reasonably confident his experience and expertise would prove sufficient to convey what she required.

On top of that, he saw no reason to spend another night alone. From what Richard had shared, from all he himself had seen, given what he understood his problem to be, keeping his distance was unlikely to aid his cause.

The mouth of the corridor down which Heather’s room lay loomed ahead. He rounded the corner—

She barreled into him.

He caught her. He knew it was her, instantly recognized the alluring warmth and feminine softness of the body plastered to his.

His senses leapt. She was wearing her silk robe again, and nothing else. His hands tightened on her upper arms, long fingers encircling, holding.

“Oof!” She blew strands of tumbled hair from her face, then looked up.

“Your room.” His inner male salivating, he tried to turn her.

“No.” Hands against his chest, she resisted. “Your room. You have a bigger bed.”

A pertinent consideration. He nodded, released her, and stepped back, taking her hand in his. Anticipation escalating with every step, he led her back through the corridors to the landing before his door.

Lifting the latch, he sent the door swinging wide, held it open, and waved her in.

He followed.

He would give her no time to talk, to question and expect answers. To argue. Words were of no use to him; better to avoid any verbal exchange.

Ahead, she slowed.

He turned and shut the door.

Turned back—

And she was there.

She stepped close. Eyes locking with his, her hands sliding up his chest, over his shoulders to twine about his neck, she stretched sinuously up, silk susurrating against his coat. Lids lowering, she drew his head down to press her lips to his.

And kiss him.

Kiss him in a manner patently intended to circumvent all discussion, all questions.

Kiss him in a way that made his head spin, that made him—him—giddy.

Giddy with a need she pledged herself to fulfill. To sate, to satisfy.

With her lips a firm pressure tempting his, her mouth a luscious offering, she wordlessly promised to engage, indulge, and gratify whatever desires he wished.

His temptress incarnate. A siren like no other.

Her lips parted beneath his; with her mouth, succulent and sweet, offered as a delight, with her tongue a fiery brand inciting — nay, demanding — his response, she flagrantly invited him to state his need. His wish, his want.

She pressed closer, the firm mounds of her breasts impinging against his lower chest, her hips meeting his upper thighs, her taut belly cradling his rampant erection, the long, slender lengths of her thighs sliding against his in an evocative promise of sweet passion and tempting heat, and pleasure without reservation.

One hand rising to palm her head, to frame her jaw, he was kissing her back before he’d thought — but his response required no thought, no logical consideration.

If she was offering, he would take.

Gladly.

His other arm banding her waist, he drew her flush against him, sensed the hitch in her breathing, the momentary tensing, then she melted, and gave. Yielded.

Even as he slid the reins from her grasp, as he took charge of the kiss, took control of the exchange and settled to plunder the delights of her mouth — slowly, savoring, claiming as his due — even as he instinctively, intuitively assessed, and planned the tempo of the interlude, the rhythm and the cadences of the dance to come, he wondered at her agenda.

Clearly she had one.

Equally clearly, hers didn’t involve words, either.

Regardless, with their mouths fused and heat and desire stirring, welling, rising, and swirling through them, with her hands sliding from his nape, one upward to tangle evocatively in his hair, the other cruising over his shoulder, then sliding down his chest to slip beneath his coat and fragment his focus, with her body the ultimate distraction in his arms, he had no space left in his head to pause and think. To question, even mentally, what she was about.