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“Traitor,” Stella hissed.

“If she doesn’t agree to marry me,” he said steadily, “the next time we are kissing, I will caress her inappropriately.”

“That’s easily solved,” Stella said. “No more kissing! You warned me about men, Aunt, and—”

This time her aunt interrupted. “His Grace showed restraint, if I understand him appropriately.”

“Which nearly killed me,” Silvester said. “Only my father’s precepts stood between me and disgrace. My disgrace, I hasten to add.”

Mrs. Thyme’s eyes fired.

“No!” Stella gasped.

“You are compromised,” her aunt announced. “We’ll keep it to ourselves, naturally. But you will marry the duke, Stella.”

“I don’t wish to.”

“Then you shouldn’t have kissed him.” A hard edge came into her aunt’s voice. “While I am happy that the duke was able to show a restraint that few men can muster, I know you, Stella. Had you not welcomed those kisses, you would have boxed him on the ears. Tell me that you were an unwilling participant, and this shall go no farther.”

She was incorrigibly honest, his little Stella.

To his horror, her eyes filled with tears.

Silvester’s heart sank as if weighted with lead. “Is it such a dreadful prospect to marry me?”

“It will be an adjustment,” Stella said, her voice breaking. “I’ve adjusted before. If you’ll excuse me, Your Grace, Aunt, I wish to retire to my chamber.”

“Stella!”

She turned away without another word and walked rather blindly toward the door. Silvester’s muscles tensed, instructing him to leap after her, to catch her in his arms and kiss those tears away.

A hand patted his arm. “Let her go,” Mrs. Thyme said. “Marriage is a shock for a woman as independent as Stella.”

“I do not plan to take away her independence.”

“How will you not? A lady has nominal control over her future, though we pay obeisance to the idea with kneeling, jointures, rings, and so on.”

Silvester was silent.

“Lady Yasmin chose her spouse,” Mrs. Thyme said wryly. “Few other women are so lucky.”

“I didn’t mean to—” He stopped and began again. “I asked your husband for the right to propose to her.”

“But you made certain the marriage would occur by offering my niece clandestine kisses. I must say, you are lucky that Lady Yasmin changed her mind and chose the earl. If I understand you, Stella has kissed you—I gather, several times—in the midst of your courtship of Lady Yasmin, which might well have ended in betrothal. After all, you are—”

“I am a duke,” he said hollowly.

“Exactly. The lady’s choice of a lower title is unusual.”

Silvester was trying to think, but he felt dazed and incoherent. One side of him was jubilant. For good or ill, he wanted Stella in his life more than he’d ever wanted Yasmin, or gold, or anything else he’d pursued.

But the other side of him recoiled from the desperation he’d seen in her eyes.

“I have to speak to her,” he said hoarsely. “I have to persuade her.”

“Not yet,” Mrs. Thyme said. “I know Stella. She is nothing if not rational. If you give her time, she will understand. When she first came here as a little girl, after her parents died, I was afraid she wouldn’t speak again.”

“Wouldn’t speak?”