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Ella shook her head at him. “I presume that you refuse to leave.”

He didn’t bother to answer, just kissed her.

“There’s only one bed,” Ella gasped when he pulled back.

Fiennes eyed her from under thick lashes. “We can place a pillow between us. I believe that’s what affianced couples did a few centuries ago.”

She was silent.

His eyes were tender, but also hungry. Sweet but lustful.

Ella smiled.

“Or not,” Fiennes breathed. He bent his head, and then they were kissing long and deep.

Ella savored the way her body yearned for him, the rasp of his quick breathing, the joy of simple human contact. “I just realized that no one has touched me in years,” she said with a gasp.

“Making love involves rather more touching than we’re doing at the moment,” Fiennes said. “We could stop.”

“If we didn’t stop … what would come next?” Ella asked.

“I would disrobe.”

“You may certainly do that,” she said with a giggle.

Fiennes stood up and began to undo the four buttons at his neck. “It must have been a terrible shock when your parents died.”

Ella nodded, her eyes glued to his movements. Her voice came out breathlessly. “My uncle sacked my maid, who had been my nanny.” She had been starved for affection beyond Jarvis’s kindness and her aunt’s infrequent compliments.

“We will find your maid,” Fiennes said, pulling his shirt from his waistband.

“I called her Marguerite, but I don’t know her family name.”

“Your uncle will tell me.”

“Unfortunately, I don’t think he wishes me well.”

“I’ll pay him,” Fiennes explained. “Anything you want from him, just tell me.”

“I don’t want anything from him!” Ella said vehemently. “Earlier, I realized that I don’t really know my aunt,” she added, registering that Fiennes’s calves were burly and muscled, covered with a fine layer of black hair.

“I expect few people genuinely know their relatives. I certainly didn’t understand my mother.”

“Why didn’t my aunt leave my uncle, since she had a lover to go to?”

“Perhaps the lover is married—or a member of the clergy. How could she leave, Ella? The countess had as few options as you did. Without a husband, she would have no income. Where would she go?”

Ella winced. “You’re right. Of course, you’re right.”

Fiennes reached backward and hauled his shirt over his head. “My mother refused to be in the same room with my father for decades, and she did have money of her own. Why not leave? Or if she loved him, why not fight for him? At the very least, demand that he apologize for his mistress?”

“If you take a mistress, I shall likely murder you,” Ella informed him. “Does that count as fighting for you?”

Fiennes tossed his shirt onto the rocking chair and turned back, his eyes laughing.

Ella fell silent. The contours on Fiennes’s hard, powerful chest were shaped by muscle, rather than by ribs or fat. A mat of hair covered the area where his breasts would be, if he were a woman.

His hands paused at his waistline. “We needn’t be intimate, Ella. We can wait until tomorrow.”