“I daresay…” He kicked his hips, still full and very hard inside me. “You’ll be enduring my unseemly manners for another round. And a few more after that.”

He wasn’t jesting.

As he carried me toward the sleeping chamber, he stopped in the day cabin and fucked me on the desk. Afterward, when I crawled onto the bed, he grabbed my hips and took me from behind.

Following several more orgasms, my hearing went fuzzy, and my muscles lost coordination. Any limits my body might have imposed had been eradicated by the endless stamina of a commodore thirteen years my elder.

His strained male gasps of exertion couldn’t be trusted. Just when I thought he’d worn himself out, he broke me all over again.

As the sun crested the rail of the balcony, yellow-pink fingers of light crept over our tangled, sweaty limbs. We lay naked on our sides, face to face, waning in the softness of a new day.

He twisted a coil of my hair around his finger, regarding me with the grin of a sated wolf.

It made my heart dance, and I couldn’t stop myself from touching that curved mouth. “So this is what you look like when you smile.”

“I haven’t…experienced this in a long time.”

“Smiling?”

“Feeling. You make me feel again.”

“Why ever did you stop?”

“Titles. Ranks. Responsibility.” His gaze roamed my face. “But you…with your unrehearsed words, bold touches, fierce eye contact, raw, untamed beauty… God help me, everything about you is such a welcome freedom from the tedious, rigid order of my life.”

“Then change it.”

“Change…?”

“Your life. Remove the things that confine you. You can do anything you want.”

“Like your mother did?” he asked gently. “She was the daughter of an earl, and one time, she ignored the rules and followed her heart. How did that work out for her?”

My stomach hardened. In fourteen years, I’d never once seen her smile. She’d been utterly and completely miserable. Because of her mistake. Because of me.

I hooked my leg over his hip. “Have you ever been in love?”

“I’m betrothed.”

“And?”

“It’s a sensible contract. Business. Love is unneeded, and frankly, unwanted.”

“You’re a fool.”

His eyebrows formed an angry V. “Careful…”

“Surely you see the gross stupidity in forsaking your happiness for that which is perceived as sensible. Nobility as a notion is objective and impersonal. What a horrible doctrine to live by. From where I stand, aristocrats rob the world of pleasure.”

“Says the woman who chose a dangerous career that put her constantly on the run. Tell me, Bennett. In your life beyond the reaches of laws and social constraints, have you been happy?”

I’d been happy for a year. In the arms of a libertine.

“No.” I sighed, feeling the press of exhaustion. “But at least I’m free to love who I want.”

But I wasn’t free.