“Can Alano not assist you?”
“Do you think I need assistance, Sarah?” He almost flexed his muscles, then, but restrained himself.
“I should think you would want help,” she said.
Her gaze had not moved from his chest. She was really making this difficult.
“Blame Mrs. Williams,” he said.
At that, her gaze lifted to his face. “Mrs. Williams?” she asked, clearly confused.
“I believe Alano is smitten,” Douglas said. “At least that’s my thought after seeing them together this morning.”
“Mrs. Williams?”
“Do you object?” Surely she wasn’t that much of a snob. In fact, he hadn’t thought her a snob at all despite the fact she was the daughter of the Duke of Herridge, a man very much impressed with his status in life. Look at how easily she’d taken the news of Douglas’s past. “Alano is a good man.”
“I’m sure he is,” she said quickly, “but Mrs. Williams is not in the first flush of youth.”
He began to smile, understanding. “She’s not dead, either, Sarah. She has a right to love and lust along with younger people. So does Alano. Or do you think such feelings disappear after a certain age?”
She looked wide-eyed at him, as if she’d never given it any thought.
He left the shovel speared into the earth and walked slowly toward her.
“Lust doesn’t just disappear, Sarah. It might go to ground a bit, but it never truly goes away.”
“Really?”
How very proper she sounded. How very English. But her stormy gray eyes were now as soft as dandelion down, and her cheeks were colored pastel pink. She was biting her bottom lip, and he wanted to ask her to let him do that, instead.
“Truly,” he said, reaching her. “And lust has another enormously interesting component. It renews itself. Constantly.”
“Really?” She was evidently so lost in that thought that she didn’t seem to notice he was steering her toward the observatory.
“Most assuredly. I can guarantee it, as a matter of fact. Before seeing you, I was basking in the warmth of my thoughts of last night. Now that memory isn’t at all sufficient.”
“It isn’t?”
He knew that he would fall apart if he didn’t have her. Now. He would cease to live, and the man he’d known himself to be—resilient, intractable, focused—would simply falter. Or he would crumble to dust.
When they reached the doorway, she looked up at him, her features aware and alert, as if she were trembling on the edge of a great discovery.
“Oh, Douglas, it’s the same with me,” she said softly, almost unmanning him.
He hesitated, needing to be with her, but holding himself away at that last little bit of moment. His mind, forever urging caution and prudence, was not silent on this occasion, but his body overruled his sense, reactingsilently and powerfully in a burst of heat that filled his cock and made it rock hard.
“Let me show you how it can be,” he said, and led her into the darkness of the observatory.
It was the sound like pebbles Sarah heard first, a clink, ping, clink against the tile sides of the observatory.
She pressed her palm against Douglas’s bare chest as he raised his head from their kiss.
They looked at each other.
“What is that?” she asked.
She could suddenlyfeelthe silence, as if the absence of sound had created a hollow space around her. She looked toward the slightly open door. Suddenly, a whoosh of heated air flung them both against the curved wall.
