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Nor did it say anything about allowing one’s own body to burn with a fierce fire without respite, or feeling oneself shaking with passion—and all from touching a woman.

Not any woman. From touching Helene.

Her face was tipped back in the crook of his arm now, so that every time she came to herself enough to protest, he could swoop down and silence her with his mouth until she succumbed again.

In the first year of their marriage, he told her, with an edge created by his own sense of rage and failure over the whole business of bedding a wife, that her body must be unable to experience women’s pleasure. And so warring in Rees’s soul was a battle between passion and self-loathing. For Helene’s cheeks were tipped rose and her eyes unfocused; her willowy body had turned to plush in his hands, and she was urging herself against his hand, murmuring incoherent things, her breath as ragged as his own.

But, as he said, he was learning.

It took a while, but finally he thought he had a rhythm, a pace, a cadence like a waltz that seemed to drive her farther and farther from logic, and more and more into an incoherent series of little breaths that were like the most beautiful music he ever heard in his life, a medley of “Rees! No! Yes!” and “Oh, oh—” and finally, “Rees!” And then she arched against him, her body shaking in his arms. Rees buried his face in her hair. Self-loathing stopped warring with passion, and was replaced by something infinitely more tender, and more terrifying.

For Helene, it was as if a crescendo—a whole fanfare of trumpets—took over the sweet, arching sounds of a concerto and blew free and clear in the air, the sound tearing to the utmost ends of her fingers, again and again, music crashing over her head so that she was utterly lost in its grip and Rees’s warm steady body was her only fulcrum in a spinning world.

And for the Earl of Mayne, who rounded the turn in the path a split second before, recognizing immediately the moonlit gleam of Helene’s hair, and then just as suddenly the silver gleam of said moonlight on a slender leg, and finally, with a bitter blow that he felt to his chest, realizing that his Helene, his countess as he had imperceptibly started thinking of her, was shaking in the arms of her husband.

That same husband for whom she felt only mild friendship.

He turned without a sound and walked away, the black sweep of his cape sending stray leaves on the path into a lackadaisical spiral in the air.

Honesty is overrated.

Rage, on the other hand—rage has a good deal to be said for it. Rage coursed through his body with a black inevitability that left a bitter taste in his mouth. She was no more than a woman, like all the rest: faithless, dishonest. No more knowing in her understanding of men and women than any other woman.

Worse, actually. Taking her pleasure wherever she found it, apparently. Masquerading in society as a virtuous matron while she stole off to her husband’s house to enjoy whatever attentions he had not given to his resident doxy.

With a faint objective edge, Mayne realized that he was literally shaking with rage. You’re a bit out of hand, he thought to himself.

It’s only a nuisance, that’s all.

Another woman…just another woman. Nothing new there. And if she was rather more devious than many of the ladies he had bedded, that was hardly something for him to grieve over.

He was almost back to the Chinese Pavilion when he saw Lady Felicia Saville prancing toward him, waving her fan and chattering to one of her more foolish friends. Lady Felicia was notorious for two things: her unhappy marriage and her waggling tongue.

His pace slowed to that of a panther.

“Oh, Mayne,” Felicia called, as they came into sound of each other. “Your sister awaits you at the Pavilion, sir.” But he was moving toward her with a concentrated light in his eyes that she had only seen directed at other women. Felicia gulped. Could it be that Mayne—Mayne!—was finally going to approach her? She had quite despaired of the idea, and yet sometimes she felt as if his lovers were an exclusive gathering to which she had not been invited. And Felicia loathed that idea.

She turned to her friend Bella. “Darling,” she said behind her fan, “do make an excuse to return to the Pavilion, will you? As a dear friend?”

Bella looked at her sharply and then at the earl, walking toward them with a little smile on his beautifully cut lips.

“Only if you visit me first thing in the morning!” she said, fluttering her fan as if a sudden tropical breeze had blown through London.

“Without question,” Felicia said. She lowered her fan and smiled at Mayne. He didn’t seem to notice Bella drifting away, slowly so that she could catch Mayne’s greeting.

“I feel as if I never saw you before,” he said, and his voice was dark and suggestive. “Do walk with me, Felicia.”

“Into Lovers’ Walk!” she said with a titter. “Dear me!”

But he tipped up her chin and brushed a kiss across her lips. “Only if you quite, quite wish to,” he said, as his mouth came down to hers.

Mayne found it rather disappointing that when he strolled past the secluded little bench where the deceptive countess and her hell-born husband had been, they had disappeared, and so missed the sight of Lady Felicia Saville clinging to his arm, her cloak thrown off and her bodice slipping to the point of indiscretion.

There was a disappointing lack of revenge about it. He wanted to see Helene’s eyes widen; he wanted her to know—absolutely know—that he had decided she wasn’t worth waiting a month for.

He wanted her to know that he had never believed her in the first place. Never. He’d known immediately that it was all a Maygame, that talk about mild friendship. He had never believed her. He wasn’t taken in.

Yet it wasn’t until he was rather expertly, if with a dismaying lack of interest, sampling Lady Felicia’s charms, that he realized just how to make Helene Godwin understand that he never, for a moment, believed her nor considered waiting for her to leave her husband’s house.