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“Good,” Rees said, turning his head and staring back up at the ceiling. “Because for all Lina looks like a little strumpet, she’s not.”

“I would never treat her so,” Tom said, and the memory of the way he had kissed Lina, the way he had pulled her body against him, lent urgency to his tone.

“I didn’t mean to imply such a thing,” Rees said, sounding utterly exhausted. “I’d better take a nap. I have to work all night.”

“Is there anything I can do to help?”

Rees was already off the couch and heading for the door. “If you could keep Lina out of my hair tomorrow, I’d be grateful,” he said over his shoulder. “She has an annoying habit of wishing to leave the house, and she expects to have an escort.”

Tom sat there by himself for a while, staring at the washes of paper surrounding his boots and thinking about temptation.

But thinking about temptation, let alone praying for help, never seemed to help much when he was faced with the living, breathing woman herself.

He was walking down the corridor toward his bedchamber when she opened her door and slammed right into him. He drew in a deep breath. Her curvy, fragrant body seemed to leave an imprint on his skin.

“God’s bodkins!” she said, pulling back. “How you startled me!”

He stared at her, and the desire in his heart must have been written on his face, because she turned a delicate rose pink.

“Lina,” he said and his voice came out with a harshness that not one of his parishioners had ever heard. “If you don’t want to be kissed, you should run back into that room of yours.”

Instead, Lina raised her fingers to his cheek. “Kiss me, then,” she said in a voice like velvet.

But he didn’t, holding back due to a grain of wisdom, some shred of sanity.

“Tom,” she added, using his Christian name rather than the bevy of labels she gave him. Not John the Baptist, not Reverend, not Mr. Holland.

Tom.

His lips came to hers with the hot, insistent hunger of a starving man. And she succumbed to him with the same fervor, the silky touch of an arm around his neck setting his skin on fire. Even that fugitive touch made him understand for the first time in his life what a blessing it is for a man and a woman to be unclothed together. But he didn’t—couldn’t—think of that or he might sweep her straight to his chamber.

So he contented himself instead with a rough, demanding kiss. This wasn’t the kiss of a timid vicar, the succor of the poor and the rescuer of wounded animals. This was the action of a licentious rakehell, a man driven by lust, a man who took no prisoners. His mouth scorched across hers, a merciless barbarian with his wild-eyed queen, a man who invaded first, and asked questions afterward.

Still, he was a barbarian in control of himself. He didn’t let his hands roam. Instead he told her with every stroke of his tongue just what he’d like to be doing to the tender undercurve of her breast, to that sweet spot at the inside of her elbow, to the curve of her hips.

It was an endless kiss, because Tom knew under it all, that when the kiss was over, he would go to his chamber by himself. So the barbarian fought with himself, keeping his hand on the Barbarian Queen’s back, never allowing himself even to pull her luscious body against his.

Lina had twined her arms around his neck, and her fingers were compulsively clutching his curls. Through the hot waves of desire that kept breaking over him and threatening to make him buckle at the knees, he realized that her breathing was quick and rapid. Her hands began to wander down his back, a path that threatened to erase Tom’s control.

“Lina,” he said in a hoarse groan, tearing his mouth from hers.

She didn’t open her eyes. He wanted to see languorous pleasure there, so he dropped kisses on her eyes, trying to calm the pounding of his heart, giving her space to recover.

“Reverend,” she finally said, her voice just a wisp of sound.

His heart dropped into his boots. Reverend again. He was Tom no longer.

“My name is Tom!” he said, and the roughness in his voice would have been, again, unknown to his flock.

“If I call you Tom,” she whispered, finally opening her eyes and looking at him, “will you kiss me all night?”

He froze, his hands on her back. He was pretty sure that the agony in his body was echoed on his face. “I can’t sleep with you,” he said harshly. “Never mind the fact that you belong to my brother—”

“Your brother hasn’t entered my bedchamber in months,” she said, tracing his cheek with her fingertips. Her very touch burned his skin. “And not very often even before that.”

“That’s not the crucial issue,” he managed. “I couldn’t sleep with you, because I don’t”—he gathered strength because it was truly one of the hardest things he’d ever said—“I don’t believe in engaging in intimacies outside of marriage.”

Could Salome have ever been so beautiful?