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“I don’t know how you keep all these lovers apart,” Helene said, amused.

“See what you think,” he said abruptly. And then he began to sing. “Love, you’re the brightest of bubbles, out of the gold of the wine. Love, you’re the gleam of a wonderful dream, foolish and sweet and divine!” Rees had a pure baritone that washed over her with as much potency as that brandy she had drunk the night before. And his music was wonderful: light, foolish, unutterably heartwarming.

Helene put the plate to the side and leaned back on her hands. Rees was watching her as he sang, which made her feel edgy, so she closed her eyes and tried to concentrate on the music. He was using too many long portamento phrases: it would sound mawkish in a tenor range, though it was lovely in Rees’s warm baritone. Somehow, without the drive of the last nine years to prove to Rees that she was intelligent, she couldn’t think of another critique.

“Come with me, come, come to the ball,” Rees sang. The sunlight was warm on her eyelids. “Flow’rs and romances fade with the day. Come in your beauty, fair as a rose…At the ball! At the ball!” There was a finely tuned urgency in his voice, in the notes, a siren call that to miss the ball was to miss life, to miss love, to miss everything golden and beautiful.

Helene had to swallow a lump in her throat.

Now he’d reached the coda: his voice was deeper now, and slower, rather sleepy, but there was still that sense of deep urgency: “Come, Come, Come to the ball…Romances fade with the opening of day…Come, Come, Come to the ball!”

She didn’t open her eyes when he finished, letting the emotion of it sweep through her, really enjoying Rees’s music for the first time in years. Then the bright gold behind her eyelids darkened as his body blocked the sun. “Have I put you to sleep?”

At that, her eyes flew open, and she knew they were drenched and she didn’t even care. “It was lovely.”

He put a hand on her cheek. “Tears?”

She smiled, but the smile wobbled. “It was just so lovely. I’ve—I’ve missed your voice.” She closed her eyes instinctively on seeing the look in his eyes and then his mouth was touching hers tentatively, just a brushing of lips.

How could she have forgotten how much she loved his kisses before they married? During her debutante year, they spent all the time they could retreating to the corners of ballrooms and talking of music, finding a piano and running through one of his compositions, and finally, when she knew him well enough, one of her compositions. And throughout it all, there was the thrilling matter of a kiss or two, stolen behind doors, taken in secret.

As to why they were so secret, who can tell? Her father was ecstatic that the heir to an earldom had formed an attachment to his gawky, plain daughter. “Why did we elope?” she asked now, weaving her fingers through his hair.

“I wanted you,” Rees answered.

He was merely brushing his lips across hers. Helene hoped he wasn’t thinking about how loudly she had proclaimed that kissing was disgusting, once it became associated with all the humiliation and pain of actual bedding.

Before those ugly times, before they eloped, her heart would become shallow and rapid at the mere sight of his mouth, and she dreamed of the moments he caught her behind a door and gave her a hard kiss. Those were the kisses of a boy, a boy without finesse and experience…at the time she thought he was the most potent and sophisticated lover who ever lived.

“Give me a real kiss, Rees,” she said.

His hand was stroking her neck. It froze for a moment.

“Do you remember how you used to kiss me before we were married?” she asked.

“I must have been a beast, always pulling you into a corner.”

“I loved it,” Helene admitted.

“You never—”

“Ladies don’t.”

But Rees had clear memories of his wife refusing to kiss him with an open mouth, telling him he was disgusting to want such a thing. He hesitated. Their newfound friendship was so fragile and (although he didn’t really want to think such a thing) important to him. Something about his wife made him feel, well, whole. He didn’t want to frighten her off. To disgust her.

So she came to him. The wife who hated kissing opened her mouth and timidly, sweetly, begged for entrance.

Rees had always known he was no gentleman. And he’d known for years that he had no control around his wife either. Nothing seemed to have changed. He plunged into her mouth so violently that she toppled backwards into a bed of flowers and he came with her, his limbs tangling with hers, devouring her mouth.

All the while, some part of him was waiting for her to tear her mouth away, to push him away, to scream that he was depraved, disgusting…

But the only thing that happened was that slender arms wound around his neck and a slender body tucked itself into the hard curves of his body with such melting softness that he could barely stop himself from groaning with the pure delight of it.

Finally, he was the one who lifted his mouth from hers. “Helene,” he said hoarsely. “You did say every day, didn’t you?”

She opened her eyes, dazed. “Yes.” Her voice was a whisper of sound. Perhaps he was crushing all the air from her lungs.

Of course he didn’t move. Every inch of Rees’s body was aware that he was cushioned between her thighs, his hardness pressing into her softness. But: “Am I too heavy for you?”