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“This is Lovers’ Walk,” Rees said.

“Oh,” Helene said faintly. They walked on, until they hadn’t met anyone for at least ten minutes. The din of the Gardens proper seemed very far away now, and the orchestra couldn’t be heard at all. Suddenly there was a popping noise and great flowering bursts of color splayed over their head.

“We can watch the fireworks from here,” Rees remarked, pulling her into a little recessed alcove graced with a marble bench.

He sat down next to her and bent his dark head back to watch lights burst and tumble in the sky. Helene watched him instead, until he turned and met her steady gaze.

“I haven’t bedded you today,” he said, in an absolutely conversational tone, as if they were discussing the weather.

Helene gasped and looked quickly down the path. “Don’t say such a thing out loud!” she scolded. “What if someone heard you?”

“So what?” Rees grinned. “I’ll bet I’m not the only man thinking hungrily about bedding his wife.”

Helene’s face was hot. He was hungry for her. That was an…interesting thought. No one had ever been hungry for her before.

Rees took off her loo mask and pushed back the hood of her cloak. The night air felt like a caress on her cheeks. Over his shoulder the London sky flew with sparks, as if the great fire of ’66 had come again, as if a conflagration of huge proportions had seized the sky and was making kindling of the clouds.

Helene had made up her mind that pushing off her hood was the only intimacy Rees was allowed. It hadn’t passed her notice that her husband took to marital intimacies in the outdoors like a duck to water. She certainly wasn’t going to add to the dismal reputation of Vauxhall Gardens by allowing herself to be intimately handled in Lovers’ Walk.

At first he just kissed her. But could one call it just? Something about the way his tongue plunged into hers made her body burn to be near his. Yet when his hand strayed treacherously close to her bosom, Helene pushed him away. He kissed her so hard that at first she didn’t notice his hand stealing up her leg, trailing a delicate, fiery caress toward her knees, and only belatedly squealed and pulled away. He followed her, and somehow she ended up half lying on the bench, with him laughing over her, pulling her cloak open and trapping her arms.

“It’s only your cloak, Helene!”

“We’re in public!” she said, struggling. “Anyone could see us.”

“No one has come this way in a good ten minutes.” His eyes were black against the sky and the feeble gaslight.

She licked her lips and the heavy droop of his eyelids suddenly became even more pronounced. “One could almost suppose you think that I haven’t noticed what you’re—you’re doing,” she managed. For one large thumb was rubbing over her nipple in a way that made her legs tremble.

“Do forgive me if I have disconcerted you,” he said tranquilly, taking his hand away. Her nipple stood out against her light gown, and their eyes met as she glanced down. “I wouldn’t like to do anything that you didn’t enjoy, Helene.” His voice was as low as a cello, and as seductive too.

She opened her mouth, but couldn’t lie. His smile was pure wickedness. And the sigh that came from her lips when he put his hand back on her breast was pure delight. Yet Helene did not lose sight of her initial thoughts on the matter.

“This is all very well,” she said—or rather, gasped—some time later. “But you are not going to bed me in Vauxhall Gardens, Rees, you are not!”

“I’m not bedding you,” he said. He had rearranged herself and him so that she was lying across his lap, her body laid like a feast before him. One hand held her tightly against his chest, but the other—

The other wandered. From her breast, with an increasingly rough stroke that made the breath catch in her throat and her body arch toward him. To the sleek line of her leg, skimming under her gown, walking his fingers up her thigh so slowly that she started shaking all over and had to hide her face in his shoulder.

“What are you doing?” she moaned.

“Just playing,” he said, and it seemed to her that his voice was more strained than it had been.

“With what?” she managed, with a fair degree of logic. For his hand had reached above her garter now, and he was swirling little circles on the skin of her thighs.

“With your body, Wife,” he whispered into her neck.

“And what if someone comes by?” she demanded.

But he was bending over her and just as his lips captured hers, his fingers slipped into the sweetest space of all. He swallowed her cry with his mouth, and the next, and the next…Quieted her struggles with his body. For it didn’t seem to him that she really knew what she wanted.

“No,” she cried sharply, “you mustn’t…” but her voice disappeared into a wave of pleasure that coursed through her body. He could see that well enough.

“If I hear anyone coming,” he told her, “I’ll simply drape your cloak over you.”

“No!” she said tremblingly, but he tried a little flick of his finger, and was rewarded with a squeak of delight, and after that she stopped worrying about passersby, other revellers not enthralled by fireworks.

It took a bit of experimentation. Rees had never given much thought to women’s pleasure. They were there; he was a rakehell, a take-what-you-want-and-leave type of man. He’d known that since he was a youngster. And nowhere in the training of a rakehell did it say anything about touching women for their pleasure.