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“You were trying to be perfect,” Lydia interrupted. “You were trying to avoid the temptation to attach yourself to the wrong woman. You are a much better person than I am.”

“I don’t think so,” Giles said. “But thank you for your opinion, Lydia.” He leaned down to put a kiss on her cheek before he strode down the corridor to his room.

He didn’t break a window or dash the water pitcher into the fireplace, though those actions occurred to him. Instead, he closed the door and tried to imagine a life without Yasmin. A life in which he knew they weren’t together because he had hurt her.

It was inconceivable.

So he sat down and began to think in a concentrated way, the way he had learned to do when the issue at hand in the House of Lords was truly important.

He needed a campaign to win Yasmin’s hand in marriage, and unfortunately, his campaign would spring from a position of weakness rather than strength. After a few minutes of hard thought, he amended his goal: he needed to win her hand in marriage without doing anything nefarious, such as kidnapping her or seducing her again.

An hour later, his valet entered. Giles threw him a look, and the man backed out without a word.

He had planned—and won—campaigns that seemed impossible before. No one thought the anti-slavery bill would pass Lords after the eleventh such bill failed in 1805. He had partnered with Quakers to meticulously, craftily, plan a new campaign, and abolition of slavery passed in 1807.

Failure was simply a preface to winning.

The key to winning any campaign was giving ground. He was going to have to explain himself to Yasmin. He couldn’t make up for his behavior, but he could explain it.

A point in his favor was that she liked to kiss him. Moreover, he was a different man when he was with her. When she looked at him with desire, words eagerly tumbled out of his mouth, words he had never uttered to any woman, and never would again, if he didn’t win Yasmin’s hand in marriage.

He sent away Lydia when she came knocking at his door.

Only late at night, after he had fashioned a coherent campaign, did he ring his valet and ask for a meal, which he ate in his bedchamber, going over his strategy again and again, testing each turning point.

He wouldn’t launch it for a week. They both needed to calm down.

The hardest question: Was marriage to him right for Yasmin?

He thought so. After all, she had always danced with him. Always. She had tried to make him laugh, and even if he hadn’t shown it, he loved the frivolities she shared with him, the way she shone with joy on finding a special button. Finally, she had allowed him to seduce her, obviously a novel experience, even if she hadn’t been a virgin.

He was unsparing with himself, sitting over that solitary tray.

Either he married Yasmin, or this tray would be his future. He would watch Yasmin dance into the future with the Duke of Huntington or Viscount Templeton.

Watch her surrounded by laughing, mischievous children; watch her bright hair fade and her beauty deepen. Watch her husband love her more every year; watch her become even more joyous.

While he deservedly sat in a room with a solitary tray of food.

Chapter Seventeen

Two days later

Mr. and Mrs. Addison’s Townhouse

Yasmin walked into Cleo’s house to pay a morning call, her heart sinking when she heard the chatter of voices. She should have sent a message the evening before, asking her friend to refuse visitors. Instead, she’d spent yet another night tossing in her bed, her mind spinning in miserable circles.

Giles would never come back to her. She had shamed him, rightly or wrongly, and he was gone forever.

No more waltzes with Giles. No more squabbles.

That was what she wanted. Except . . .

She couldn’t sleep. In fact, she may never sleep again. Even thinking of him made aching, desperate hunger flood her body, keeping her awake, staring at the ceiling. Lust was overwhelming.

You didn’t have to like someone to desire them, and she desired Giles.

A wave of sadness twisted her stomach. Her rejection of the earl was as good as saying that she, at the age of twenty-five, was giving up . . . all of that. An erotic life. A love life. A family of her own. If she couldn’t imagine the act with Giles, she certainly couldn’t do it with anyone else, even Viscount Templeton. No matter how cuddly he was, she shuddered at the thought.