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She drifted awake, aware only that she was happy.

Happy?

She had never been more unhappy than in the past few days. Her eyes flew open. There was no mistaking the safe, strong circle of Giles’s embrace.

“Sacré bleu!” she exclaimed, looking up at him, her eyes widening. “We’re in my bedchamber! What are you doing here?” Under her bottom, she felt iron-hard legs and that ever-present erection, the one that caused him no pain, or so he said.

“I carried you upstairs,” Giles said, his arms tightening. His expression was composed, but his eyes were . . . longing? Of course he did want her. “Your chamber is very peaceful. Very like you, Yasmin.”

She blinked at him. “You shouldn’t be in here.”

“I expect your grandfather feels that ship sailed when I locked the drawing room door last week. After I found you asleep, I carried you here—on his instructions.”

“Oh.” Yasmin frowned at the wallpaper, trying to decide what she should say. Or do. Everything in her wanted to sink back against his chest and close her eyes, but that was the coward’s way out. “You were supposed to come tomorrow or the next day, after I am more rested.”

“You are not being compromised,” Giles said, dropping a kiss on her head. “I would never force you to marry me.”

“You’d have no luck with that,” Yasmin replied, trying to pull herself together. Abruptly, she remembered why she had asked him to pay her a call. “Did you talk to Lydia?”

His brows drew together. “About what?”

Yasmin sighed and then reached for the arm of the chair, pulling herself upright. Giles’s arms slid away and she stood, feeling unpleasantly crumpled. “I did something that will make you very angry.”

Giles came to his feet. “I doubt that.”

“I was at Cleo’s house this morning, and Mrs. Turing provoked me. I don’t have any excuse for this, but I blurted out the fact that if her son was forced into marriage, it wouldn’t be with me.”

He nodded.

“I told,” she added.

“Why should I be angry? From what I understand, any number of young ladies have experienced Turing’s unwelcome advances.” His brow tightened. “Or welcome advances, in the case of my sister.”

“I promised never to tell,” Yasmin said, leaning against the back of the armchair on the other side of the fireplace. She was still so tired.

“Perhaps I don’t understand. Did you inform the assembled ladies that you found my sister Lydia alone with Turing?”

Yasmin bit her lip. “No. But I’m afraid that Lydia was there as well, and she spoke before thinking.”

Giles closed his eyes for a moment. “I’m going to have that intolerable poet as my brother-in-law?”

“Hopefully not,” Yasmin said. “I informed everyone that I had walked in on Turing proposing marriage to Lydia in a most poetic vein, and that when she rejected him, he wept. I said that we had agreed to never speak of his shame, and I apologized to his mother for breaking my promise.”

Giles’s mouth eased. “Not a bad story.”

“Mrs. Turing was displeased with the characterization of her son as a lovelorn fool, but she had to go along with it or expose him as a seducer of young maidens.”

“The story will hold.”

“Yet I blurted it out, Giles. You must be worried that I’ll do the same as regards your parentage, but I swear that I won’t. I am not a gossip. That is, I am a gossip, but I dislike trading in scandal. Lydia is afraid, but I promise. Not that you’ll think my promises are worth much after this.”

Giles stepped forward and put his hands on the back of the chair, on either side of her. She could feel the warmth of his body. “I am not afraid.”

Yasmin made herself keep going. “Even though I lived up to all your worst ideas about me? I’m a gossip who shared hurtful information.”

“I often told myself that I disliked you.”

She flinched, keeping her eyes on his. “So you said.”