“From that moment I wanted you,” he explained. “More than I’ve ever wanted a woman before.”

Thank goodness she hadn’t blurted out the word “love.” She’d heard that particular claim from several men: something about her beauty and her tarnished reputation made her more desirable than most women.

So she didn’t answer, just lay quietly, shoulder to shoulder.

“I said something wrong, didn’t I?” Giles asked.

“Of course not,” she replied, summoning up a smile. So Giles had the same reaction to her as so many men before him. More importantly, he was the first man other than Hippolyte whom she’d ever wanted.

Their relationship—their marriage—would be the better for it. Somewhere deep inside, she must have recognized that she could be intimate with him even as they quarreled. “I am feeling quite proud of myself,” she said, changing the subject.

He leaned down and placed a kiss on her lips. “Because you are magnifique?”

Yasmin blinked. “In bed?”

“Yes.”

“In that case . . . could we do it again?” Her face turned pink at the expression in his eyes. “I’ll take that as a yes.”

“I want to come into you in the middle of your orgasm,” Giles said.

Again he kissed his way down her body. It was easier for Yasmin to let pleasure take over this time. At his first lap, she arched up with a gasp. Giles crooned to her, a flood of unintelligible, hoarse words. He drove her to the edge by bringing a broad finger into play, making her whole body catch fire.

She was frozen there, on the brink of the wave, when Giles commanded gruffly, “Now, Mina.”

She let go with a cry.

With one swift movement, he came over her and thrust inside her pulsating body. Yasmin opened her eyes in time to see the wild look in his eyes as he rode her storm. Before she could catch her breath, urgent, deep strokes drove her toward another peak.

Chapter Twenty-Two

The weeks that followed were the happiest of Yasmin’s life. Lydia pranced around London with her brother on one arm and her fiancé on the other, celebrating her status as a newly betrothed lady.

Yasmin and Giles often found themselves at the same event. He would bow before her, intoning, “Lady Yasmin,” in a particularly flat voice.

She would curtsy and walk away, giving her hips an extra wiggle, knowing that he was watching. Flirtation had always been a charming pastime; now it took on an entirely different resonance. If Giles wasn’t in the room, she didn’t bother.

But if he was?

She lit up like a firework, the kind that sent off sparks—and those sparks singed any unmarried man in her vicinity. Gentlemen were knocking down her grandfather’s front door, offering marriage, having no idea that every enticing glance was meant for Giles. Was directed at her secret fiancé. Viscount Templeton proposed on one knee, so fervently that Yasmin felt terrible refusing him.

That was the daytime.

At night?