“Yet,” he muttered with a curse as he blew out the candle and headed for his bedchamber. It was going to be a long night, this wedding night of his, but it would be better spent lying sleeplessly in his dark bed where everything he saw wouldn’t remind him of his bride in the next room.

The bed loomed up, melting into the darkness of the room, the long bed curtains turning it into a yawning black embrace of heaven or hell, he wasn’t sure which. He slid between the covers, ignoring the almost painful touch of cool linen across his heated parts, willing himself to concentrate on something not remotely related to the cries of need from his body. His engine, that’s what he’d think about. Engines were masculine. Engines were hard, not soft and sweetly scented like a woman’s welcoming body. Engines had long, steel shafts that fit tightly into waiting oiled bearings. Engines had pistons, lots of pistons, all of them pumping tirelessly, pumping and pumping, driving the shaft in a long, endless motion, building the pressure higher and higher until it was so great, the blow-cock triggered, releasing a great blast of steam…

“Oh, Christ.” Dare moaned into the arm flung over his face. He truly was going mad if even the thought of his steam engine did nothing but conjure images of Charlotte. God’s carbuncles, his mind was so consumed with her, it even manufactured the sweet scent of her perfumed skin to taunt and torment him.

His entire body stiffened. Slowly he moved his hands, flexing his fingers, then turned his head toward the arm draped across his cheek and brow, the arm that most definitely did not belong to him.

“Charlotte?” he whispered.

“Mmm?” came a muffled, sleepy response from the shadowed side of the bed. The soft arm slid down his face to his chest. Dare cursed fluently in Gaelic as he leaped from the bed and grabbed for the flint.

“What the—Ow! Bloody chair—devil are you doing in my bed?” he roared at the disembodied arm lying in a pool of moonlight as he lit a candle.

“Hmm? Alasdair?” The soft glow of the candlelight revealed Charlotte sitting up, sleepy confusion on her face, her hair a mass of streaming gold that glinted as bright as a polished sovereign. “Oh, good, you’ve come to bed. I must have fallen asleep reading about the Beltane Fire.”

Dare stared at his wife as she pushed the hair out of her eyes and stretched. Even covered with a virginal night rail, she was a goddess, a wanton temptress, Aphrodite and Venus rolled into one enticing package. He clutched the candle tighter and tried manfully to drag his hungering gaze from the soft swell of her breasts. “Beltane Fire?”

“Yes.” She smiled and pushed back the bed linens, scooting over to the side of the bed he had just left. “It’s one of the connubial calisthenics. I thought it looked particularly…dear God in heaven!”

Charlotte froze in mid-scoot, her eyes huge as she stared at Dare. All of him. Every last blessed inch of his hide. Especially the traitorous parts.