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“You don’t.” He almost laughed at her honesty. “But—”

she wiggled a little, and the breath caught in the back of his throat—“perhaps . . .”

He withdrew and slid smoothly back to her core.

“Do you like that?” he whispered, placing feather-light kisses on the edge of her mouth.

He was teaching her something. Henrietta knew it dimly. All she could do was try to chase the feeling that raced through her body when he moved. It was nothing that she would have described as pleasure. It was too fiery for that, too all-encompassing, too much. It made her feel anguished with longing.

“Do it again,” she cried. She had been holding on to his forearms, but it didn’t feel enough—none of it felt enough. She let her hands run down his back, over lovely muscles and then—what was a pair of buttocks compared to what she had already touched? They were muscled and tight and she clutched them and said something fierce, something to make her husband move in, closer to her, all the way. He shuddered the moment she touched him. Dimly Henrietta realized that she could make him groan, make him burn as she was.

So she pulled him closer, and arched up until she could 288 Eloisa

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feel every inch of him, until that empty, craving space inside her was filled with him, and her arms were filled with him, and her heart—

Well, that too.

< 37 =

In Which Lady Rawlings Remembers That Propriety, Decency, and Honor Rule English Society

He was sitting by the fire, sharpening a set of garden implements. He sprang up when she entered. “Esme.”

“Did you know that my friend Henrietta married Simon Darby?” she said without preamble, sitting down on the rough-hewn bench across from him.

He picked up the tool again, his eyes guarded. “There was talk of the wedding in the village.”

“Have you heard the marriage service lately, Sebastian?

It’s so beautiful.” She caught her voice before it shook. “I don’t think I listened when I married Miles. There was a part—I don’t have it just right, but the vicar said that marriage was a remedy against sin, and to avoid, to avoid fornication.”

“You are no longer married, Esme.”

“I never honored him in marriage,” she said, and a tear escaped down her cheek. “It’s the least I can do to behave with propriety after his death.”

Sebastian put the tool aside. He knelt beside the bench with utter unself-consciousness. “Marry me, Esme. Please. Honor me. I will honor you as your husband never did. Our 290 Eloisa

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marriage would be a remedy against sin, if anyone could ever call it a sin to love you.”

She just shook her head, her throat thick with tears. “I can’t. I dreamed of Miles last night,” she said, trying to explain. “In my dream, he was so happy about the baby. And he was alive and well.”

“I can’t say that I wish he were alive, but I am sorry that his memory causes you grief.”

“It’s not his memory, or not entirely. I hate myself for what we are doing to his memory. I am still in mourning. In mourning! And yet here we are . . . I hate myself!”

“Why hate yourself?”

“I am betraying Miles, my husband.”

“I don’t agree,” he said, and all the stiffness was in his tone that used to accompany pronouncements by the Marquess Bonnington. “Lord Rawlings is dead. You have no husband. You are widowed, and I am unmarried. While our interaction was unconventional, I do not see how it could be construed as betraying a dead man.”

“He is still alive in my heart,” Esme said slowly. “I can’t stop thinking about him. And the baby. I keep thinking about the baby too.”

“I am grievously sorry about your husband’s death. But we did not kill him, Esme. He had a weak heart. He could have died at any time. You yourself told me that he had had two attacks that week alone, and that the doctor had given him until the end of the summer.”