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“Shall I just hold you?” he asked, his voice low and teasing, like someone with a sense of humor. “Or?” His fingers flexed, once, and she bit back a moan. “Tell me how it feels,” he crooned and flexed his fingers again. “What should I do next, Mina?”

“Mina? You called me that before.”

His eyes were heavy lidded. “When I am in my bed, alone at night, I think of you as Mina. It’s your name, and it’s almost ‘mine.’”

They were kissing again, but all the time his fingers were holding her tight, until she found herself rocking against his hold, trying to make pleasure thrum through her body.

In the back of her mind, a voice was reminding her that she didn’t want the messy part. But this part . . .

This part was not messy. This part was enthralling. Giles was whispering, his voice gravelly and low in her ear, calling her Mina, saying that he loved the sounds she made, the little whimpers, that it was all he could think about, in bed and out.

All of a sudden, he pulled away, moving his hand, pulling her skirt over her knees, picking her up like a rag doll, and placing her on the opposite seat.

“No,” she gasped.

“We have arrived.” Thankfully, Giles didn’t look unmoved, or she would have had to murder him. Slashes of color made his cheekbones look even more prominent.

Carson greeted them at the door.

“My fiancée isn’t well,” Giles said coolly. “I shall escort her upstairs.”

A bolt of embarrassment went through Yasmin, but when she glanced at Carson, his face looked concerned and respectful. Not as if she were a hussy, but as if she were a countess whose husband loved her and had brought her home early from a dinner party.

Loved her?

She pushed the idea away.

Theirs was not a mere convenient arrangement, but not a love match either. Giles hadn’t even given her a betrothal ring, after all. He’d scarcely wooed her; one moment they were grappling on the settee and the next, they were secretly betrothed.

Her relationship with Hippolyte had been secret too, but the Frenchman had lured her with promises of love and adoration. Giles had never lied to her.

Yasmin walked up the stairs aware that all the delicious, bawdy heat was leaking out of her. What was she doing? She was the one who said that they wouldn’t bed each other, and then she acted like a strumpet.

He had the right to expect—

Except she knew deep down that Giles would never make a demand, no matter how strumpet-like her behavior might be. He would wait for her to decide.

He followed her into the bedchamber and closed the door behind him. And latched it, she noticed.

“I would like to try making love again. Not now,” she added hastily.

He walked over to her. “There’s no rush, Yasmin. We are not yet married.”

“But we are betrothed.”

“True.” He waited, eyes patient and warm and lustful all at once.

“Did you expect me to change my mind?”

“I hoped you would. When you asked me to hold you in the carriage, I felt hopeful.” His eyes drifted down to her crumpled skirt.

Yasmin smoothed the creases, knowing her fingers were trembling. She cleared her throat.

“Would you like me to leave?” Giles asked.

It was only at that moment that Yasmin realized how much she had expected humiliation as a response to revealing desire. The way Hippolyte had made her desire him, and then laughed about it to the French court. Shamed her for going to that cottage with him. She fidgeted. “Before, you seemed to consider me such a wanton.”

Giles’s jaw tightened. “I believed gossip, even when I was scolding my sister for repeating it. I find that ironic given what happened to my father.”