After that, she promised herself not to let Peter have even a corner of her mind, at least not when she was in bed with Hugo.

“Phee,” Hugo said, lowering his head to hers. He licked into her mouth with an impatient ownership that made her shiver even more. His kiss was possessive, as possessive as the gesture of winding her legs around his hips.

“You’re mine,” she told him later, when her lips were plump and tingling from an endless kiss that broke only for gasps of air that sounded like groans.

“Always,” Hugo said. He moved to her side and cupped her face in his large hands. “I am always yours, Phee. To death and beyond.”

They had that together: that knowledge that life is meant to be savored, and that time is limited.

“We have a choice in every moment of life,” he said, his voice brushing her body. “I choose to spend every possible one of them with you, Phee.”

“Are we never leaving this bed, then?”

He kissed her again, so fiercely that her legs felt boneless. “No,” he said later, enough later that her nightgown had been tossed to the floor. He raised his head from her breast to say it.

“Please don’t stop,” she begged.

He glinted at her and then put his mouth over her nipple. “This?”

She arched toward him. “More.”

He pursed his lips. “More?”

Words were coming from Ophelia’s mouth, but they didn’t answer the question. It was as if her lips refused to be silent, but her brain couldn’t spare the time to shape an opinion. One of Hugo’s hands made its way down her belly and slipped between her legs.

“God, you’re so wet,” he whispered, his voice cracking.

She wound her hands into his hair and did the one thing that Ophelia Astley had never done in her life: She commanded.

“Now, Hugo,” she said. “Now, damn it.”

The duke who never took direction from anyone—and that had included his young wife Marie—cracked a smile and braced himself over her. “Sure?”

“Yes.” Ophelia drew her knees up and made herself vulnerable in a way that she never could have imagined: body and soul. Hugo’s kisses ravished a small, unnourished part of her soul that she had never suspected existed.

And yet there it was.

Making itself known with trembling intensity and a stream of inarticulate words, some of them profane.

Hugo braced himself and thrust forward, and her body melted in a confusion of grateful pleasure that rushed through her like rivers of fire. She closed her eyes and let her hands run down his muscled back all the way to his arse, loving the way that he trembled under her fingers.

She didn’t even realize that she was babbling until Hugo laughed and said, “I never would have imagined you were so vocal. And so obscene.”