The scent of lavender assailed me, and I inhaled him, melting into the kiss that, even in this dream state, felt more real than any I’d ever experienced.

Though he’d closed his eyes, I held mine at half-mast, enough to see his brow furrow with an almost painful bliss. That bliss, that pain—it resonated through me, too. The love he’d professed for me echoed through him, resounding with enough force to make my knees go weak.

I leaned against him, my hands braced on his chest, my body responding all on its own, awakening to desires no longer latent. Both his . . . and mine.

My fingers curled around the lapels of his jacket. Answering his kiss with my own, I drew him to me, as if being as close as possible still wasn’t close enough.

With these small actions, I stoked within him a hidden fire, inciting the kiss that up until that moment had been both chaste and cherishing to become something more consuming.

Fervent, even urgent, his lips sought mine with a sudden hunger that told me just how long—how much—he’d yearned for this. For me.

In response, my heart beat with a wild rhythm—one that begged me to forget all that I’d branded impossible and put my trust in him.

His thumb brushed my cheek. In answer, my hands unfastened his cloak. Next, they trailed down the fabric of his waistcoat. Encountering buttons, my fingers performed, again, the task of their unlatching, shaking even more uncontrollably than they had the night before last, though now for entirely different reasons.

This time, I wasn’t afraid of what I would find. I was afraid of what had found me.

These feelings. This yearning.

He let me undo the waistcoat, and he didn’t stop his pursuit of my lips, either. Not even when I untucked his shirt. He just kept kissing me while my fingers crept under the barrier of the fine fabric. As I pressed my palms to a sculpted and smooth abdomen—the flesh there as real and alive as the rest of him—his own hand went to his throat, where he loosened and then pulled free the cravat, letting it drop.

Stripping away the waistcoat next, he let that fall, too.

Breathing hard, my heart a thunderstorm, I stepped back and watched him not breathe at all.

His stare burned through me a moment longer. Then he closed the distance between us again, backing me toward and then onto the black-curtained bed I had sensed was there all along.

I scooted myself backward, drawing him with me onto the mattress. The moment my head hit the heavy blankets, his lips found mine again. Only now, with growing abandon, he deepened the kiss, his dark hair falling around us to block out the candlelight from the countless tapers that surrounded us.

My world, my whole awareness of everything, then zeroed in to exist only at our points of contact. While my palms took his face, he trailed a hand down the front of my bodice, causing the night-blue dress to become my dressing gown. And only my dressing gown.