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“It was because I like you so much. I want to hear all your gossip.”

Yasmin took a deep breath. “You needn’t—”

“I don’t just desire you. I like you,” he interrupted. “I like this room, with all its feminine fripperies. It’s a happy room. My parents were never happy, Yasmin. My father was melancholic by nature, and my mother was angry. I have no idea whether they were constitutionally like that, or developed those characteristics over time. But they were never happy.” His voice was jagged.

Truthful.

“From the moment I met you, I felt like a moth drawn to a flame, and it had nothing to do with desire. Desirable women are everywhere. But you? Your courage and joy and pure love of life? The way you tease and giggle and dance through the day?”

She sounded very frivolous. Yasmin pushed the thought away. She was frivolous. It didn’t have to be a criticism. “You may think you like frivolities, but what if you get tired of someone who is not more useful?”

“I don’t want a useful wife. I want you. Only you. I want to be the only one who kisses you.”

Yasmin cleared her throat. “Actually, I haven’t kissed very many men, Giles.”

“May I?” His voice was low and strained.

She swallowed hard. All the time she had been flirting with Giles, trying to get him to drop his proper demeanor, she had been counting on the man behind the facade. A man whom only she would know, who had saved himself for her.

Now she saw that man in his eyes.

“I know you don’t wish for further intimacies,” Giles offered. “I remember, Yasmin. I will never forget that, nor ask you to do something you don’t care for.”

The subject was embarrassing; she didn’t want to discuss it. She’d been wretchedly unhappy for the past few days, unable to sleep. Brokenhearted, her grandfather had called it. She remembered feeling terrible when Hippolyte betrayed her, but this heartache had been more acute.

Now, she looked up at Giles’s clear, grave eyes and couldn’t stop the happiness that bubbled up inside her.

She leaned in and kissed him, rather than the other way around.

Giles’s arms wound around Yasmin, and heat coursed through her, healing the cracks in her heart. When she drew back to take a breath, his mouth slid along the line of her jaw, and teeth gently tugged at her earlobe. It felt so good, and yet so silly that she burst into giggles.

“What are you doing?” she asked.

Giles came back to her mouth. “You make me want to bite you.”

She shook her head, tapping his strong jaw with a finger. “Are you certain, Giles? I want to marry someone who knows I am not like my mother.”

“I trust you.”

“Even though I blurted out your sister’s secret?”

“She blurted out the truth in a rage, which is characteristic of Lydia,” Giles said. There was a painful edge to his voice. “I learned that my sister knows more of our mother than I thought, and the truth has hurt her.”

She frowned at him. “What do you mean?”

“My mother was carrying me when she married, as I told you. Thereafter, she took other lovers to bed. My sister and I have different fathers, and in her case, he was certainly not the late Earl of Lilford.”

“Goodness,” Yasmin said faintly.

“I didn’t realize that my mother had informed Lydia of her parentage, but now I think that the reason my sister almost ruined herself lies in my family’s past.” He took a breath. “As do my own convictions. I was raised to believe that my countess had to be the most prudent, virtuous woman in all London, so that her children would not experience that particular shame.”

He had both her hands again. “Yet I truly don’t care about the name I inherited. If we never have children, so be it. I will care if you take another man to your bed, because that will break me. That is the only thing that would destroy me.”

Chapter Nineteen

The only sound in Yasmin’s bedchamber was a lonely sparrow chirping outside the window. Somewhere in the bowels of the house, comforting sounds suggested that a meal was being prepared.

“I don’t know how to trust your feelings about me,” she said haltingly. “What will happen to your title without an heir?”