“I want to consume you,” Matilda said, linking her hands at his nape. “To inhale you and make you part of me forever.”

“You are part of me forever.” That admission gave Tremont a respite from the lust and bleakness riding him. Matilda was right: Love was a comfort, and love was as real as the law or honor or scandal and more powerful than all of them put together.

He stroked Matilda’s hair back from her brow, took a firm hold of his self-restraint, and began a leisurely kissing campaign. Somewhere between her jaw and her shoulder, Matilda let out a long, soft sigh and retaliated with a slow glide of her palm down Tremont’s back and over his hip.

They lavished tenderness on each other until easing their bodies together became the only intimacy yet to explore. Tremont went slowly and sweetly, holding out for more of those sighs from his lover. She yielded them and arched into his caresses until give-and-take blended into a shared exultation.

Matilda surrendered to pleasure twice, the second occasion being Tremont’s notion of an erotic peroration. He turned a dreamy, delicious loving passionate and then explosive, until Matilda’s body grasped what her mind apparently had not: Pleasure could come in yet still greater increments than she’d imagined.

“You fiend,” she whispered as Tremont levered up to give her room to breathe. “You utter, shameless… You are not what you seem, Marcus.”

At that moment, he was trying to mentally recite from Caesar’s Gallic letters, because even withdrawing might push him over the edge.

“What am I?”

“Not a philosopher, not a peer, not a scholar… You are a lover.”

Because he did love her, he eased from her body, availed himself of the handkerchief on the night table, and spent on her belly.

“I am your lover, Matilda.” And some fine day, he would know every joy that status could confer, but today was not that day. He tidied up and gathered her in his arms. “Nap if you like. I comported myself with unseemly dispatch. There’s time.”

That offer was all wrong, all courteous and considerate, when the moment wanted… sweet, sleepy nothings and quiet caresses. A restorative nap and a resumption of intimacies.

“If this loving is your idea of unseemly dispatch, Marcus, I will not survive your sieges.” Matilda drifted off, while Tremont arranged himself beside her and watched the hands of the clock beside the wardrobe advance.

Matilda’s whole marriage to Harry Merridew had been a siege, and now the invading army was back, ready to pillage and plunder what it hadn’t carried off in the earlier battles. Matilda was mentally preparing for defeat, else she would not have asked for this interlude.