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Slowly Reina leaned forward to rest her head on his shoulder. The new position altered the angle between them, settling her more firmly over the straining row of trouser buttons. A perfect alignment of hardness . . . softness . . . intimate pulsation.

Hearing the change in her breathing, John asked, “Does this make you nervous, cariad?” A subtle upward nudge drew a little gasp from her.

“Not a bad sort of nervous . . .”

“How much do you know about it?”

“I may lack experience, but I’m not uninformed. Women do talk, you know. I’ve also been to the museum, and I’ve read books—”

“Museum?”

“The British Museum. I visited an exhibit of Greek and Roman statuary.”

“Ah. I thought there might have been a wing I didn’t know about.”

She lifted her head to view him suspiciously. “Are you making fun of me?”

“Only a little, love.” John played with a lock of her hair as he considered what he knew about classical sculpture. “Reina . . . the statues you saw . . . they may not have given you an accurate impression of men.”

“In what way?”

“Back then, their—” He stopped, trying to think of a genteel way to phrase it. “Their . . . private parts . . . were usually minimized by the artist.”

“Why?”

“For the sake of elegance, I suppose. Men in real life tend to be more endowed.”

“So I’m gathering,” came her muffled voice. After a pause, she added, “You’re no Cupid.”

John crushed a smile against her head. “Tell me about the books you read. Were they instructive?”

“Heavens, no. Trying to find information on procreation is high effort with low reward. Like eating artichokes. Naturally I consulted the Britannica, and—”

“Naturally.”

“—I found nothing whatsoever about human reproduction. It goes on for pages about the mating habits of barnacles, dromedaries, pigeons—”

“Barnacles?”

“Yes, they reach out to fertilize their neighbors with little retractable tubes.”

“How impertinent of them.”

Reina gave a throaty chuckle. “Ideally I suppose they should wait for an introduction,” she conceded. “Now, what was I—oh yes, the books. I found a medical textbook, but the explanation was all gears and pulleys . . .”

She went on to make further observations about the medical text and then returned to her disappointment with the Encyclopedia Britannica, having expected much better from the eighth edition, but she was trying to be optimistic about the ninth edition, which was said to be more thorough. And John sat there charmed out of his wits with the luscious bundle of her in his arms.

This woman was worth more to him than anything in life.

It has to be me, he thought. He couldn’t bear the idea of her ending up with a man who might disapprove of her divided dinner plate, or expect her to be subservient, or dismiss her ideas. But he didn’t want her to go through life without a partner. Especially not with the difficult path she’d chosen. She needed someone to love her the way he would love her.

“. . . they’ve only published volumes A through C so far,” Reina was saying, “and at this rate, we won’t have the updated entry on physiology until 1885 . . .”

It has to be me.

Denying her was as impossible as denying his need for air. He didn’t believe for one second that she was his fate—he had no illusions that fate had ever intended to be this kind.

But she was his choice. She would always be his choice, no matter what came of it.