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Lydia’s gaze dropped to his hand and returned to his face. Color climbed her throat. She covered his hand with hers and moved it higher.

For a second he forgot to breathe. Then he lifted her into his arms, as he had in the wood. She laughed against his throat, breathless and astonished, and wound her arms around his neck. He carried her up the dark stairs, her lips brushing his ear, and did not set her down until they stood inside her room with the door shut behind them.

The fire had burned low. Mary had left a single candle on the dressing table. He set Lydia on her feet and turned her gently and began on the fastenings of her gown, and his fingers, which had undone a great many gowns without a tremor, fumbled like a boy’s. One hook caught. He swore under his breath. She laughed, and the laugh shook through her back under his hands, and he bent and kissed the nape of her neck below the pinned gold of her hair, and the laugh stopped.

The gown came loose. He drew it down her arms. He unlaced her stays slowly, kissing each inch of her shoulder as he bared it, until the last of the lacing gave and she stood in her shift in the candlelight with her back against his chest. She was trembling. He wrapped his arms around her and held her, his cheek against her hair, until the trembling eased.

“Are you frightened?” he asked.

“No.” She turned in his arms and lifted her face to his. “Only new at this.”

He kissed her for a long time, standing by the bed, until her hands had found their way under his coat and pushed it from his shoulders, and his cravat lay somewhere on the floor, and her shift had slipped from one shoulder. He laid her down on the coverlet. He kissed her throat and the hollow of her collarbone and the soft rise of her breast where the linen had fallen away, and she arched under his mouth and made a sound he would remember for the rest of his life.

He knew he should stop. In the carriage he had told her that he would not make this a marriage, not while the truth about Eleanor still lay between them. But there were other ways to answer what Lydia’s body was asking of him. He wanted to give her pleasure more than he had wanted anything in five years.

He moved lower, kissing the inside of her wrist, her palm, and the soft skin inside her elbow. He drew her shift upward slowly, pausing to look at her whenever her breath changed. When he kissed her knee and then its tender inner curve, Lydia went still beneath his hands.

“Tristan,” she whispered. “What are you…?”

“Let me,” he said against her skin. “If you want me to stop, tell me. I will stop.”

Lydia did not tell him to stop. His mouth moved higher along the inside of her thigh, and the warmth of his breath raised a shiver over her skin. She drew in a sharp breath; her hand flew to his shoulder and caught there. He lifted his head at once. Her eyes were wide and dark in the candlelight, her lips parted, her face flushed, and he waited, giving her time to choose.

“Don’t stop,” she said, her voice unsteady. A low laugh escaped him against her skin.

Tristan bent his head again. He lowered his mouth between her thighs and let his tongue explore her with slow, attentive care. Lydia shuddered beneath his hands. Her hand slipped from his shoulder to the nape of his neck; she threaded her fingers through his hair and held him to her. Her insistence sharpened his hunger, and he followed where her touch urged him.

Tristan attended to every change in her breathing as carefully as he had once watched the turn of her hand by the library window. When she tensed, he gentled his touch; when she reached for him, he answered. He discovered what made her gasp, what drew a silence from her, and what made her fingers knot in his hair. She did not stay quiet for long. Her hips shifted beneath his hands; her breath quickened, broke, and caught again. She said his name again and again in a voice he had never heard from her.

When her whole body drew taut, Tristan looked up at her. Lydia met his gaze, then pressed one hand over her mouth as pleasure overtook her. She cried out against her palm and trembled beneath him.

He held her until the tremors passed. Then he came up beside her and gathered her in. Lydia turned her face into his shoulder, still shaking. He felt her laugh, then felt the small, wet catch of tears, and held her closer.

“Did I hurt you?”

“No.” Lydia laughed again, wetly, against his throat. “Nobody told me. I did not know it could be like that.”

He kissed her hair. His own body ached with wanting her, but he lay still and let it ache. After a while Lydia’s hand moved down his chest toward the fastening of his breeches, shy but determined. He caught her hand and held it.

“Not tonight,” he said.

She raised her head. “Why not?”

Because if he let her touch him he would not stop. Because he had made her a promise in the carriage and broken half of it already, and if he broke the rest tonight it would be because he could not help himself, and she deserved a better man than that. Because he had not told her the one thing she needed to know before she could choose him.

“Because I owe you a conversation first,” he said. “And I would rather have it in daylight.”

She searched his face in the candlelight. He thought she would be angry. Instead, she laid her head back down on his chest and said, her voice muffled, “You are the most infuriating man in England.”

“So I am told.”

“By whom?”

“My mother. Julian. A woman in a corridor, the first day I met her.”

She laughed into his shirt. He stroked her hair until her breathing slowed and she slept. Then he lay awake in the dark, holding his wife, her heart beating against his ribs, and knew that in the morning he would have to tell her about Eleanor, and that he did not know how.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN