Her mouth fell open. “What?”

Giles leaned forward and kissed the curve of her jaw, not in the mood for conversation. He couldn’t answer her query. He didn’t know how. He was in uncharted waters, unplanned and unanticipated. A small voice in the back of his head was yammering at him, saying things about propriety and proper countesses, but he focused on the silky skin under his lips. “I adore the curve where your shoulder turns into your neck.”

“I thought I got to kiss you next,” he heard.

He brushed her earlobe with his lips and straightened. “I am not myself,” he said, just so she knew.

“I realize that,” Yasmin murmured. “For one thing, you are talking to me.” She cupped his face in her hands and brought her mouth to his.

Their lips opened at the same moment. To Giles, the touch of their tongues felt like a sentence that he had never shaped into words. Fire blazed down his spine as her arms tightened around his neck, and his around her back. His cock throbbed and stiffened in fierce arousal.

“Mon Dieu,” Yasmin breathed, and he felt a crack of triumph. This sophisticated woman had slipped into her mother tongue because of their kiss. His kiss. Not Silvester’s or any of those other men who tripped over themselves with desire when she smiled at them.

His.

Chapter Twelve

Yasmin’s tongue teasingly darted around Giles’s mouth. She kissed with the same effervescent joy with which she greeted life, he decided dimly, his fingers tightening on the curve of her hip because he didn’t dare to relax his grip or his hand would slide upward toward her breasts.

One of her hands left his neck and landed on his front, fingers caressing his chest. Of course, she wasn’t an innocent. So perhaps—

But gentlemanly instinct kept him from reciprocating that caress. Even stroking her back would be inflammatory. And she . . .

“What are we doing?” Yasmin asked as if she’d heard his thought. The French inflection in her voice was deepened by longing.

Giles couldn’t stop himself from brushing a kiss on her forehead. “Making love,” he murmured, realizing that was an experience he’d never had.

She pulled away.

“I’m not kissing you the way other men do,” Giles told her. His arms tightened around her. “I want you, Yasmin.”

Her brow furrowed. “You seem to be implying that I allow ‘most’ of my suitors to kiss me. I assure you that isn’t the case.”

He took a deep breath. “I want the same thing they do. I want to marry you.”

“What?”

“Marry you,” he repeated. “Would you do me the very great honor of becoming the Countess of Lilford?”

Yasmin’s mouth actually fell open in an almost comic expression of surprise. “You don’t!”

“I do.”

“You don’t even like me!”

“Yes, I do,” he said, feeling the truth of it in his bones. “I tried not to like you, but I wasn’t successful.”

“Of course you tried not to like me,” she murmured, looking fascinated. “You certainly didn’t want to marry me, did you?”