What her mother didn’t understand was how impossibly difficult it had been to turn down Patrick Foakes’s offer of marriage. She stared at herself blindly in the mirror for a moment, then sank onto the bed as she remembered the Cumberland ball two weeks ago. The glory of it when Patrick made it clear that he was stalking her. The twisting excitement in her stomach when she glanced up from the intricacies of a cotillion, and caught his glance.

Even thinking of the lazy greeting in those eyes, the way his right eyebrow flew up in silent acknowledgment, the utterly masculine arrogance of his glance made her stomach turn over. Her heart beat fast the entire evening, and excitement tingled in her limbs and weakened her knees. By ten o’clock Patrick Foakes had exerted such a pull over her that she was living for those moments when he would suddenly appear at her elbow or when she would turn in the swirl of a dance and catch a glimpse of silver-streaked black hair on the other side of the room. At supper, in the midst of a chattering crowd huddled around a small round table, her heart leaped every time his leg or arm accidently brushed hers, sending a drugging velvet excitement down her legs.

They danced together once; they danced together twice. To dance together a third time would be akin to announcing an engagement.

Sophie didn’t dare speak during their second dance, a Maltese Bransle that kept parting them and then suddenly jolting them back together. She was afraid that Patrick would guess the spinning tenderness that shivered down her body every time the figure brought them back together.

When he silently took her arm and led her out of the ballroom as if to fetch a glass of syllabub, but instead turned into a quiet room full of spindly tables and frothy chairs, she followed with no objection. Patrick propped himself against a biscuit-colored wall and looked down at her teasingly, and Sophie’s only excuse was that the emotional stimulation of the last hours had gone to her head. She impishly grinned back, behaving precisely like the wanton her mama believed her to be.

And when Patrick pulled her into his arms, the moment had the rightness of inevitability. But the purely carnal, fevered urgency of that kiss was a shock. Sophie had been kissed before, so many times that her mother would faint if she even suspected, but this kiss was not the adoring, gentle compliment that she was used to.

This kiss began as an exploration and flared into summer lightning, began as a simple meeting of lips and ended with burning touches and whispered moans. Patrick broke off the kiss with a surprised curse and then instantly bent his head again, his hands walking a firey line down her back to the curve of her bottom.