“He truly didn’t care?”

Giles shook his head. “He had no interest in his legacy. I remember him as despondent and self-effacing. My mother was carrying a child when they married, and he knew there was a good chance that his heir wouldn’t be his. I don’t care about an heir either, Yasmin.”

“You think so now, but you may change your mind.”

“It might be best if we didn’t have children. My father was too unhappy to be a good parent, so I have no idea how a father behaves.”

Yasmin instinctively leaned in, her hand sliding from his chest around his back. “I’m sorry about his misery.”

“Shame and guilt are terrible bedfellows.” Giles caught up her right hand and put a kiss on her palm. “I can curb my desire, and I will. No matter who my father is, I am a man of honor.”

Yasmin took a gulping breath. The uncompromising honesty in his voice was convincing. She could have Giles, the man whom she had danced with, was entranced by, had dreamed about.

Her eyes flashed down, below his waist.

His mouth quirked up. “That’s irrelevant.” He flattened her palm against his chest. “Marry me, Yasmin. Please.”

She could feel the thump of his heart under her fingers. It didn’t make her uncomfortable, any more than did the hungry desire in his eyes.

“We would have a platonic marriage, though you would be welcome to kiss me at any time, day or night,” Giles said, his voice deepening with a hungry edge.

A sizzle of heat went down Yasmin’s back.

“In private or public,” he offered, a gleam of amusement in his eyes.

“Kiss you on the ballroom floor? The very proper Earl of Lilford?”

“Anywhere.”

She leaned forward and brushed her mouth against his. “Here? In my bedchamber? ’Twould be a scandal if anyone knew.”

“Only if you want to.”

“I do want to kiss,” she breathed.

His tongue flicked her lip, and she opened her mouth with a gasp.

It felt like hours later when Yasmin finally pulled herself away. True to his word, Giles hadn’t touched her, which meant—annoyingly—that she wished he would.

He had talked, though: his deep, rumbling voice told her that she made him ache with desire, that he wanted to breakfast with her, that she smelled like elderflowers with a hint of raspberry, that he wanted to see her grow old. That, and his kisses, made her muddled and hot, so much so that alarm pulsed through her.

“We should probably leave my bedchamber,” she murmured. “I can’t imagine what the household thinks of us.”

“Will you marry me?” Giles’s big hands were at her waist, and his eyes were dark with lust. His voice had that aching tone he never used in public, that she heard only when they were together alone.

How could she not marry him? “Are you in love with me?” she asked, blurting out the question.

He froze.

A stab of pain went through her. He wasn’t in love with her, but she was agonizingly in love with him. The silence in the room was deafening. “Do you consider the question inexcusably gauche?” she asked, trying to give her voice a flippant air.