She passed him his cane. “While you resume the life of a duke’s genius heir, flirting with all the merry widows and straying wives, making fortunes in all the wrong industries, and hiding treasures where nobody will find them. A little trysting with me ought not to impose too much on your busy schedule until you can resume your usual diversions.”

He caught her hand when she would have stalked off across the room, for he appeared to regard her proposition with something less than enthusiasm.

Perhaps that was for the best.

“Abigail.” He kept hold of her hand. “Is this what you want? An illicit affair with a scapegrace lordling who can’t even manage to promenade around a ballroom with you?”

When did anybody, ever, ask Abigail what she wanted? “If you aren’t inclined, you need only say so, but your kisses have been convincing, and you tell me that honesty characterizes—”

He braced his cane across her bum, grasped an end in each hand, and pulled her closer. “I want you. I want you until I am insensate with longing, until you haunt my dreams and preoccupy my waking thoughts. I had to toss myself off in the damned coach on the way to fetch you. That came out wrong.”

“I know what you meant.” And the image of him, falls undone, cock rampant, all that velvet, leather, and lace luxury around him while he…“Shall we find a bed?”

Sexual congress did not require a bed, but Abigail would have few enough opportunities to be intimate with Stephen Wentworth. Some awkwardness was unavoidable. Nonetheless, she wanted their memories to be sweet, not of itchy carpet or a hard desk.

“We have a bed,” Stephen said, easing the pressure of the cane against her backside. “The sofa folds out, like the benches of a traveling coach, only more commodious.” He crossed to the sofa, bent down and released some sort of latch, then gave the bottom cushions a yank. The sofa flattened out into a sizable bed.

“Et voilà tout. Shall I undo your hooks, or will we go about this dressed?”

He probably knew eighteen different ways to copulate without removing a single stitch—the wretch.

“We have time. Why not dispense with some clothing?”

Stephen closed his eyes, hands braced on his cane. “Abigail, you are a woman after my own heart. Come here.”

She crossed her arms.

“Please, rather. Please come here that I might be your lady’s maid and finally, finally get my hands and lips and tongue on the luscious abundance of your breasts.”

He did more to arouse her with words than Champlain had done with his entire repertoire of loverly overtures. “Please suffices. You needn’t lapse into erotic flights.”

Stephen wiggled his fingers at her. “No second thoughts, Miss Abbott, and one doesn’t lapse into flights. One soars. More accurately, two will soar into flights and raptures.”