Giles’s mouth eased. “Not a bad story.”

“Mrs. Turing was displeased with the characterization of her son as a lovelorn fool, but she had to go along with it or expose him as a seducer of young maidens.”

“The story will hold.”

“Yet I blurted it out, Giles. You must be worried that I’ll do the same as regards your parentage, but I swear that I won’t. I am not a gossip. That is, I am a gossip, but I dislike trading in scandal. Lydia is afraid, but I promise. Not that you’ll think my promises are worth much after this.”

Giles stepped forward and put his hands on the back of the chair, on either side of her. She could feel the warmth of his body. “I am not afraid.”

Yasmin made herself keep going. “Even though I lived up to all your worst ideas about me? I’m a gossip who shared hurtful information.”

“I often told myself that I disliked you.”

She flinched, keeping her eyes on his. “So you said.”

“It was because I like you so much. I want to hear all your gossip.”

Yasmin took a deep breath. “You needn’t—”

“I don’t just desire you. I like you,” he interrupted. “I like this room, with all its feminine fripperies. It’s a happy room. My parents were never happy, Yasmin. My father was melancholic by nature, and my mother was angry. I have no idea whether they were constitutionally like that, or developed those characteristics over time. But they were never happy.” His voice was jagged.

Truthful.

“From the moment I met you, I felt like a moth drawn to a flame, and it had nothing to do with desire. Desirable women are everywhere. But you? Your courage and joy and pure love of life? The way you tease and giggle and dance through the day?”

She sounded very frivolous. Yasmin pushed the thought away. She was frivolous. It didn’t have to be a criticism. “You may think you like frivolities, but what if you get tired of someone who is not more useful?”

“I don’t want a useful wife. I want you. Only you. I want to be the only one who kisses you.”

Yasmin cleared her throat. “Actually, I haven’t kissed very many men, Giles.”

“May I?” His voice was low and strained.

She swallowed hard. All the time she had been flirting with Giles, trying to get him to drop his proper demeanor, she had been counting on the man behind the facade. A man whom only she would know, who had saved himself for her.

Now she saw that man in his eyes.

“I know you don’t wish for further intimacies,” Giles offered. “I remember, Yasmin. I will never forget that, nor ask you to do something you don’t care for.”

The subject was embarrassing; she didn’t want to discuss it. She’d been wretchedly unhappy for the past few days, unable to sleep. Brokenhearted, her grandfather had called it. She remembered feeling terrible when Hippolyte betrayed her, but this heartache had been more acute.