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Fever bright eyes met his. “Do you like that?” Daisy whispered. Her hands swept down the sides of his body to the top of his breeches. “You have remarkable muscles.”

The words jumped out of his mouth. “Compared to?”

“When I was fourteen, I saw a groom washing himself in the horse trough.” She shot him a naughty look that made his cock pulse against his silk breeches. “I watched for longer than I ought to have, so I have clear memories of his chest. But you …”

“I wasn’t always this burly,” he admitted. “In the last year, I’ve worked off the stresses of my position at the House of Lords by frequenting Gentleman Jack’s Boxing Salon almost every day.”

“I would say rugged rather than burly.”

Miles tugged gently at her toweling, eyebrow raised. “Please?”

She swallowed visibly, then gave a tiny nod, her fingers curling around the waistband of his breeches, touching skin that prickled into life.

Carefully Miles untucked her towel and drew the two sides apart. Daisy was … luscious. Utterly luscious, with generous curves and skin like cream roses, dotted here and there by little brown dots that he wanted to lick. Her nipples were raspberries, and the curls between her legs only slightly darker than the hair on her head.

On her hips were silver streaks, evidence of the child she carried. He ran his fingers over them, thinking that someday Daisy would carry his child. “I will love Belle,” he said abruptly.

Daisy frowned, looking down at his hands. “What?”

“These marks are from carrying Belle, are they not?” He smoothed his fingers over them again. A wash of gratitude went through him. So many women were lost in childbirth. His wife was fertile and had carried a baby to term.

“No,” Daisy said bluntly. “Those have nothing to do with a child. They appeared when I was a girl, as my hips grew.”

His hands curled around her hips, fingers sinking into warm flesh, easing her closer to the edge of the bed so he could kneel and worship her with his mouth. His body shuddered with anticipation, thinking of that intimate caress.

“I love your hips,” he rumbled. Some dim part of his brain reminded him that Daisy had asked for tea and conversation, not a husband who leaped on her like a lion on a gazelle. He cleared his throat. “Was there something you’d like to discuss before we continue?”

She came up on her elbows, looking at him. “Do you wish that I was a virgin?” Her eyes sparkled at him with an odd sense of suppressed excitement. “Every man wishes that in his wife, doesn’t he?”

Obviously, the topic was delicate. Miles hesitated. Social norms governing women’s erotic lives were unfair, yet some uncivilized part of him had loved the idea that his wife would be his alone.

He decided to dodge the question. “Marrying a virgin would be a risk. What if she saw my burly chest and shuddered with disgust? What if she insisted on making love under cover of darkness? What if she took no pleasure in our bed?”

“Couldn’t you have taught her pleasure?”

“I could try, but believe me, it’s a rare gentleman who is lucky in that regard.”

His wife was biting her bottom lip so hard that it had turned cherry red. Obviously, Daisy felt shamed by her lack of chastity. “What if I terrified my bride?”

Her brows drew together. “What do you mean?”

Miles undid his placket and drew out his tool. It bobbed against his stomach. Her eyes widened, and she drew in a silent breath.

“We will fit, but a virgin might well faint at the sight. That’s added to the fact that she wouldn’t know how to find her own pleasure.”

She rolled her eyes. “A male appendage is not necessary for pleasure.”

Miles grinned at her. “You see? I am so damn lucky because you like my burly chest and hopefully the rest of me, and you’ve already given birth to a child, so I needn’t worry about you dying in childbirth—”

“Miles,” she interrupted.

“Yes?”

“I have to tell you something.”

EPISODE ONE HUNDRED AND NINE

THE LIES. TWO OF THEM.