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And when he brought his hot mouth down around her nipple, his tongue teasing the heat to the surface until she whimpered and strained beneath him, she began to understand what her sisters had hinted at.

Down below, it was like with his fingers, but better. As the inside of her loosened to accommodate him, her skin thrummed with life and her blood hummed through her veins. She clutched at his arms, stamped kisses on whatever parts of him she could reach—his shoulders, his whisker-shadowed chin, his strong neck.

“Not so bad now, is it?” he choked out as he increased the pace of his thrusts, pounding, thundering into her like Hephaestus hammering the molten metal with stroke after stroke after stroke…

“Sebastian…oh…dear heavenly God…I’m on fire…”

“Then we’ll burn together.” He stared down at her, an all-powerful creature, the giver of fire whose every driving thrust heated her to boiling point. “Now…forever…just we two…”

Reaching down between them, he flicked his thumb over her sensitive secret place, and she exploded at once, crying out his name, erupting into ecstasy.

“Ah, yes…yes!” he growled, then drove so deeply that she clutched him close and held on for dear life. The hot flood of his seed flowed into her, and his body spasmed as it had before. But this time she knew what it meant, and it gave her immense satisfaction to think she could drive him to lose control not once, but twice.

For a moment, they strained against each other, taut and clinging. Then slowly they drifted back to normalcy and sank back onto the bed. Relaxing, he rolled off to lie at her side. He tugged her over until they lay facing each another, arms entwined.

He brushed the hair from her eyes and rubbed his thumb along her damp lips. “So how do you like losing control, my dearest Juliet?”

She raised an eyebrow. “As much as you do, I think.”

He chuckled. “That much? Then I suspect we’ll do very well together as husband and wife.”

“If we marry. You haven’t yet fulfilled your part of the bargain, you know.”

His amusement faded at once. “Thanks for reminding me.” Sighing, he rolled away from her to lie on his back and stare up at the ceiling. “You certainly know how to put an abrupt end to a man’s pleasure.”

“I’m sorry,” she said, and meant it. “That was rather unfair of me. I’ve waited over two years to hear this. I suppose it won’t hurt to wait a few minutes more.”

He shook his head. “No, putting it off won’t make it any easier.”

Dragging a sheet up to cover her body, he left the bed to pull on his drawers.

Chapter 16

Who cannot open an honest mind

No friend will he be of mine.

Euripides’ Medea, worked on a sampler by Juliet Laverick at seven

As Juliet sat up and clutched the sheet about her lush curves, Sebastian paced the floor, determined to keep to his end of the bargain. He was a man of honor, after all, and when he’d promised to tell her everything, he’d meant it. “It was my brother Morgan who took up with Crouch’s gang of smugglers in the spring of 1815.” When Juliet looked disappointed, he added softly, “But I was the one who kidnapped you.”

Confusion spread over her face. “How could that be? Surely you and your brother are very different, for all the reasons I said before—”

“Yes, we are. What I think has probably kept your family—particularly Knighton—confused is that both Morgan and I were involved with the smugglers at different times, with Crouch’s knowledge.”

As awareness dawned, Juliet sat up straighter. “So then I was right about you. Not that I wasn’t sure anyway, but—”

“You were right.” He paused. “You see, I…er…lied a little when I said Morgan had promised to return for Christmas. Actually, he’d promised to return for the harvest at the end of July. We generally hold a large feast on the estate then, and I’d asked if he thought he’d be back. He said yes.”

“But he didn’t return.”

“No. And since he hadn’t told me where he was going, other than to say it was south, at first I waited and did nothing. But it worried me, his not returning. He’d been so mysterious about his destination. So around the middle of August, I went to London and hired a runner, who tracked him to Hastings in Sussex.”

She pursed her lips and waited.

“I went there at once, not knowing what purpose he’d had in being there. But as soon as Crouch saw me in town, he mistook me for Morgan. He waved a cavalry pistol in my face—prime piece, too…French, I’d say…three, four years old—”

“Sebastian, I don’t care about the pistol,” Juliet said irritably.