'to chase away any wolves who take it into their heads to try to devour Miss Huxtable on the way.' Constantine gave him a hard look before riding off with the other gentlemen. 'It must be gratifying,' the earl said, 'to have so many people willing to champion your person against any and all villains.' 'It is,' she agreed. 'But I warned you it would happen.' 'Is it,' he asked her, 'why you decided to receive me yesterday instead of having Merton send me packing? Is it why you did not dismiss my offer out of hand when you /did/ see me? And why you invited me to the theater last evening and agreed to take tea with my mother this afternoon? Is it simply /because/ all your champions are set against your allying yourself with me? Are you a secret rebel, Miss Huxtable?' She was beginning to believe that she really must be. The notoriety she had garnered during the past two days should have horrified her sufficiently to send her into full retreat. Instead … Well, here she was, /almost/ enjoying herself. 'I find myself unwilling to reject you only because the world and all the evidence tell me that I ought,' she said. 'I must be grateful to the world and all the evidence, then,' he said, 'and a secret rebel who insists upon forming her own opinions. But what more evidence do you need to convince you that you would be better off being a spinster for the rest of your life than allied with me?' 'I am not even sure,' she said. 'But you have faced the hostility of the /ton/ – you are facing it now – with a certain dignity. Does that mean anything in your favor? I do not know.' 'Perhaps it means that I am without conscience,' he said, 'or desperate enough to grovel at any cost.' 'Yes,' she agreed. 'Or perhaps it means that there is more to know of you than just a few bare facts from five years ago. I know two things that you once did. That is all. I really do not know /you/ at all, do I?
And that is the whole point of these two weeks of courtship – getting to know who you really are, that is.' 'I believe,' he said, 'you are attracted to me, Miss Huxtable, and are looking for a way to rationalize a desire to marry me.' 'You may believe what you choose, Lord Sheringford,' she said sharply. 'But neither a reluctance to take unsolicited advice from the rest of the world nor any personal attraction I may or may not feel toward your person would impel me into doing something against my character or principles. Marrying you would seem an extremely … /unprincipled/ thing to do. And you have said nothing so far that would make it seem less so.
You have made no attempt to excuse your past behavior, and you have made no effort to show me how… reformed you are now.' He had turned them while she spoke onto a narrower path, one that led toward a grove of ancient oak trees. It was less crowded than the main path they had just left. 'Enough public wooing for now,' he said, dropping his free hand to his side again and lifting his head to the vertical. 'The past cannot be changed, Miss Huxtable. Or excused. And if it can be excused, or at least partially explained, then I choose not to offer excuses or explanations to a virtual stranger, which is what you are to me. If you become my wife, then I will perhaps attempt to put before you facts that the world will never know and would neither believe nor care about if it did. But you are not my wife yet, or even my betrothed. If you choose to marry me, you must choose me as I am.' 'That is not fair at all,' she said. 'How can I make a judgment about you if I do not know all the facts?' He drew her off the path when they were among the trees, and they wound their way among tall, thick trunks until they could see down onto the wide lawns of the park stretched below them. He released her arm and propped one shoulder against a tree, crossing his arms over his chest as he did so. 'Tell me,' he said, 'about your relationship with Major Dew. Everything.
Including the physical details. How many times? Where? When? How satisfactory?' She felt the color rise in her cheeks and her nostrils flare. She glared at him. '/That/, Lord Sheringford,' she said, 'is absolutely none of your business.' 'It is,' he said, 'if I am to marry you. Is a man not entitled to a virgin bride? Or to an explanation if she is not virgin?' 'The details of my relationship with Crispin Dew,' she said, still glaring, 'which happened twelve years ago, are absolutely /none/ of your business.' 'Precisely,' he said and looked steadily back at her with eyes that seemed to see to the core of her skull. 'TouchГ©.' 'But your case is different,' she said. 'You are the one wooing /me/, not the other way around. You are the one who has to convince /me/ that you are worthy to be my husband. I do not have to prove anything.' 'But if you marry me, Miss Huxtable,' he said, 'you will be as much my wife as I will be your husband. What if you loved Dew so much that you can never forget him? What if you still love him, despite your denials two evenings ago? What if your sexual experiences with him were so earth-shatteringly wonderful that you can never find satisfaction with me? Or so shudderingly awful that they rendered you frigid for the rest of your life? What if your past really does make you an undesirable bride?' 'I will /not/ discuss my relationship with Crispin,' she said. 'And I will not discuss mine with either Caroline or Laura,' he said, raising his eyebrows.
She felt a grudging respect for him even though their situations really were quite different. Most men under the circumstances would make as many excuses as might seem credible in order to get their way. 'And as to being reformed,' he said, 'I am as I am, Miss Huxtable. I am as you see me. Many a marriage comes to grief, I believe, because the courting couple will show only their best side to each other – and often an artificial side – until after the marriage, only to discover when it is too late that they are strangers who can never even like each other particularly well. You wish me to charm you and fawn over you and whisper sweet words and sweeter lies in your ear at every turn? You will not find me like that after we marry.' He had a point. But it still surprised her that he would not say anything to entice her – except last evening's promise to… 'Come here,' he said, holding out a hand for hers. 'Why?' She looked at his hand, frowning, but did not take it. 'You want me to woo you,' he said. 'I suppose you want more than just a public wooing. This is a very private place even though we can see a wide vista of the park. We are well off the path, which is not much used anyway, and we are in the shade here on a day that is brilliantly sunny out there. We are virtually invisible, then. Let me try a little private wooing.' 'What /sort/ of private wooing?' she asked, frowning. She felt somewhat breathless. 'I am going to kiss you,' he said. 'You need not worry that I intend to ravish you, Miss Huxtable. This may be a private place, and we might be virtually invisible, but it is not nearly private enough for more than kisses.' 'I am not sure,' she said, 'I /want/ you to kiss me.' Which was a horrible lie. To her shame she wanted it very much indeed. 'You had better come and find out, then,' he said. 'If you are giving serious consideration to marrying me, you are also considering facing nuptials with me within the next two weeks. And nuptials are invariably a prelude to a wedding night. If you do not wish to kiss me now, you will probably not wish to bed with me then. And that would be a severe annoyance to me.' 'I suppose,' she said, 'you would force me.' There was a rather lengthy silence during which they stared at each other and for some reason she felt frightened. His eyes looked very black. 'If you wish to know something about me that you apparently do not already know, Miss Huxtable,' he said, 'then this is it. I would never force you into saying or believing or doing anything against your will.
And if I could obliterate that distastefully asinine moment in the marriage service at which brides vow before God and human witnesses to obey their husbands, I would gladly do so.' He spoke with a soft menace that was quite at variance with his words. 'We had better be on our way,' he said before Margaret could think of a reply. He pushed his shoulder away from the tree trunk. 'Or we will be late for tea.' 'I thought,' she said, 'you wanted to kiss me.' 'And /I/ thought,' he said, 'you did not want to be kissed.' 'You were wrong,' she said.
The words hung in the air between them for a few moments. Then he leaned his back against the tree again and reached out both hands toward her.
And oh, she thought as she closed the distance between them and set her hands in his, oh, she longed to be kissed. There had been a vast, dark emptiness in her life … He clasped her hands firmly, twisted her arms behind her back, and brought her body against his from breasts to knees.
His eyes gazed into hers from a mere few inches away. 'Don't cry,' he murmured. 'I am not – ' But she was. 'Yes I am.' 'You do not want to do this?' he asked her. 'I do,' she said.
And then his mouth was on hers, and her lips were trembling and her knees were buckling, and she was grasping his hands behind her back with enough force to leave bruises, and her breasts pressed to his chest felt swollen and sore, and she forgot to breathe.
Then she was gazing into his eyes again. 'I am sorry,' she said, humiliated. 'It has been a long time.' His body was as solidly muscled as she remembered it from the night before last.
Oh, goodness, was it really only the night before last?
He released her hands and raised his own to cup her face, pushing his fingers beneath the brim of her bonnet. He touched the pads of his thumbs to the center of her lips and moved them outward to the corners, leaving a trail of sensation behind them. He dipped his head and set his lips where his thumbs had been. She rested her hands on his shoulders.
His lips were closed. But then she could feel the tip of his tongue tracing a path across her lips and then prodding at the center and sliding through into her mouth until she was filled with the warm taste of him and reacted to the invasion with every part of her body.
His hands moved from her face, and one arm came about her shoulders and the other about her waist, and
