Tessa had kissed, perhaps, dozens of men in her lifetime.

Beaux and suitors, men she met at balls, men who had plied her with flowers and poetry and jewelry. Some she enjoyed, others were more like conquests.

But no kiss, not in all her twenty-three years of kissing, ever compared to the kiss that she . . . she . . . seized in the boot room of his earl’s cellar.

And seized it, she had. She’d listened to his story, she had stood very still while he touched her fingers and her wrist and her face. She heard the rise and fall of his breath and the low, crackling register of his voice. She had witnessed his restraint.

Restraint was something about which she also had a fair amount of knowledge. Old Tessa or New Tessa or the Man in the Moon, she had always known when a man wanted to kiss her but held himself back. She’d known when they were too chivalrous or too afraid or when they simply did not know how to go about it.

Clearly, Joseph Chance knew how to do it.

Whether he was afraid or chivalrous or some other reason, Tessa could not say, she only knew that she wanted him, and he wasn’t initiating, and this would be up to her.

“Tessa,” he breathed when she dragged her mouth from his to suck in a breath.

She turned her face, offering her cheek, and he came down with a growl, dragging a raspy line of kisses along her jaw. The roughness of his whiskers and his labored breath, so very close to her ear, plunged her into a pool of sensation. She closed her eyes and dropped her head.

They had kissed at Berymede many times, and Tessa had enjoyed those kisses, but she had also kept herself just a little bit removed.

Well, her mind had been held back, even while she quite enjoyed being in his arms. Her mind hovered just north of the baby growing inside of her and just south of her ultimate goal of getting Joseph Chance into bed, the sooner, the better.

Any kiss had the potential to evolve into sex, and if she could possibly maneuver it, she had known every kiss must try. Most things she had done at Berymede had had some ulterior motive, kissing included. She hadn’t been entirely sure what she’d done to spirit Captain Marking from kissing her to . . . what he did to her, but if she could possibly compel Joseph to repeat it, she had known she must.

In the last eleven months, as she’d lain awake missing Joseph, she wondered how, if he did come back—really back, all the way to her arms—how would she manage intimacy with him?

And now that it finally happened—well, now that kissing had happened—she felt tenuous . . . relief. She felt no fear, at least not of the kissing. And she wanted to continue kissing very, very much. When she thought about it (her brain was not entirely analytical in the moment), she would describe herself as ravenous to kiss and kiss and kiss.

When she’d launched herself at him, she’d cinched her arms around his neck—the fastest, surest way to catch him and hold him. Now, her hands roamed. She wanted his hair, his tousled, sun-streaked hair, and she dug her fingers in, sliding it between her fingers. His cravat was stiff and unyielding, ironed to parchment, and she crushed it, her fingers greedy.

He laughed against her mouth, seeking it out, kissing her again. She kissed him back, playing her fingers along his collar like she was unwrapping a gift, yanking at the unyielding cravat. After three tries, the stiff linen gave way and her fingers found bare neck. She opened her hand like a fan and reveled in the warm bronze skin.

“Tessa,” he repeated.

He said her name like the word yes. An affirmation. An agreement. A pledge. He’d caught her around the waist, but now his hands inched slowly upward. He held her like she was a pillar, palms flat, fingers splayed, like he was carefully balancing her upright. When his hands were at her ribs, his fingertips grazed the sides of her breasts. When he moved up, the hollow of his palm slid perfectly over the curve of her breast. Here, he paused, allowing the warmth of his hands to seep through the wool of her dress. She fought for lucidity in the swirling sensation of the kiss, forcing herself to think about his hands on her body. She waited for the fear, and nothing happened—no recoil, no immobility, not even the slightest tremor of alarm. She felt only heat and closeness and the gentle strength of Joseph’s large hands.

More, she thought—her pervading thought. She fell forward. More of him, closer, more of his hand on more of her body.

Finally, after what felt like months, when she was out of her mind with need, he ever so slowly contracted his fingers, testing the shape of her breast.

Tessa made a little whimper and bowed her body forward. Her hands dropped from his neck and clasped his shoulders. She dug in, feeling the rock-hard muscle beneath his coat. The fine wool was a frustration, thick and cool with heavy seams, a separation. She slid her hands beneath his lapels, roving over his chest and to the muscle-knotted trapezoid of his shoulders. She squeezed again, feeling the actual muscles. She sighed; he was so very strong and yet restrained. She delved deeper, reveling in the power that she knew he would never use against her.

“Tessa, you will be my undoing,” he rasped, leaving her mouth to breathe, dragging his face across her cheek and ear and hair. He staggered, just a little, and pulled away to glance around. There was a bench against the wall and he stooped suddenly, lifted her, and pivoted the two of them. He fell onto the bench with an oof and pulled her in his lap. He dropped against the wall behind him, laying against a curtain of coats and scarves. His face was a mix of caution and hope and need.

Tessa laughed and fell against him, kissing his neck the way he had kissed hers, devouring the warm skin, rough with an emerging beard. Joseph groaned, and his hands went to her hair, holding her against him as she nuzzled and breathed him in, as she said his name into his ear.

The stiff fabric of her dress snagged against the buttons of his coat, and she never hated it more. It felt like a shroud. Her hair, so tightly constricted in the tight knot of a bun, began to slip free, and she was glad. His hands dug in to the loose waves.

“I hate this bun,” he said. “I’m sorry, Tess, but I hate it so very much.”

“I hate it too.”

“May I . . . ?” His fingers began to work through her hair, massaging it free.

She didn’t answer. Words left her. She could only kiss him. She slid into the swirl of sensation where there was no detested dress or bun, no Old Tessa or New Tessa.

Please, she thought hazily. Please let me sit on your lap and be held and be desired and be close to you and to not be afraid, not of my future or my past.

She slid her hands up his arms and clasped either side of his face, holding him in place. He chuckled and widened his legs. She slid lower into his lap, dropping into the notch formed by his legs. The proximity felt urgently right, her hips pressed against him, and she squirmed to nestle in. Joseph groaned. She’d jostled from his mouth and she rose up to recapture it. He groaned a second time and slid a large palm down her spine to cup her bottom. She gasped at the pleasure of the new closeness.

Her hair, now entirely free from the bun, fell over her shoulders and down her back. It tickled her cheek and stuck in her collar, a waterfall of blonde over the two of them. She shook her head, trying to toss it back. Joseph gathered it loosely, wrapping the thick weight of it around his hand and then gently propping it over a shoulder. It uncoiled, fanning out, and he strummed it through his fingers, following it to her waist. He toyed with the ends, and she loved the feel of his hand. He’d never seen her hair loose and down, not even at Berymede. Her hair had always been a vanity, and even as she transformed into the New Tessa, she couldn’t bring herself to cut it. Now she reveled in the feel of Joseph bobbing his fingers against the ends.

When the last of it slid through his fingertips, his hand delved lower, feeling the roundness of her hip, then lower still to her thigh, hooked over his leg. She relished it all, kissing him with her mouth while her body burned beneath his touch. Her brain floated above them.

She was just about to slide her hands beneath his coat again, to peel it off perhaps, when Joseph’s fingers skated down her leg and grazed the leather of her boot at the ankle.

It was a light touch, more pressure than a touch, but something about that contact caused her brain to hitch, then seize, then plummet from the misty heavens back to the dim, musty boot room on earth.

She went very still, sucking in a labored breath and holding it. She waited. The overloaded senses of touch and taste receded like a wave, while sound and sight crashed over her. His breathing was so loud. His hands were too big and too . . . everywhere. Clasping her bottom, wrapping around her ankle.

Before she could ask him to stop, he moved two fingers upward, the slightest graze, from the top of her boot to her stockinged ankle, just inches beneath the hem of her dress, and panic bolted through Tessa like a runaway horse.

“Wait . . .” she heard herself yelp, and then, “No.”

She pushed from his lap.

Joseph’s hands flew back as if she’d combusted in his arms. His face was frozen in horror and guilt.

Tessa’s panic flared, leaping inside her like a shooting flame, and then, almost as quickly, it dissipated. It sank slowly, deflated and powerless, like a limp sail. In its wake, the terrible feelings of regret and confusion and anger. Resentful, bitter anger. Captain Neil Marking had packed her with latent panic in the same way he packed a musket with powder. She’d been cocked to explode all along, sabotaged against loving touch.

“I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” she said breathlessly, clapping her hands over her face. “Don’t stop. Please.”

“Don’t stop?” Joseph rasped.

She peeked at him.

He was sprawled on the bench as if he’d been blown there by a strong wind.

“You’re standing across the room, Tessa,” he panted. His voice was hoarse. “Granted, it is a small room. Hardly an ideal room for a romantic encounter, but I was enjoying it.” He exhaled quickly, like he’d just cheated death. “I’ve . . . I’ve overstepped, Tessa. Forgive me. Tell me how I’ve frightened you.”

“No,” she said immediately. She thrust her hand out with one finger raised like a governess. “No. It’s not you. It was never you.”

Her brain thrummed with conflicting jolts of desire and fear and frustration. She wanted to scream, but what did screaming solve? She wanted to sob against his chest, but she’d cried enough at Vauxhall. She’d needed tears that night, but now crying seemed like a regression.

“Give me a moment, please.” She turned away.

Tell him, tell him, she thought. Tell him something, anything.

She wanted to talk even less than she wanted to scream or cry. She was loath to reveal a single, excruciating detail about Captain Marking and the night that Christian had been conceived. But how much of her struggle with Joseph Chance was because of what she did not say? She glanced over her shoulder. He looked as if he was slowly dying of a gunshot. He was owed some explanation.

And she had loved kissing him so very much. If ever they were to kiss again, if ever she were able to muddle through more than kissing, he must know of her . . . experience.

But how could she articulate what she did not understand herself? Joseph, I enjoy kissing you and touching you but there are certain ways that you might touch me that will send me into hysterics.

And I won’t know these incendiary touches until we are upon them.

Good luck to us both.

She toyed with blurting out these precise things, but she bade herself pause, take a deep breath, think. She reached for practicality, which had been a mainstay of the New Tessa.

“Here,” said Joseph gently, “Tessa, please will you sit, or let us go—”

“Yes,” she said. Without really thinking, she sat down again, right in his lap. She sat squarely this time, facing away, her spine straight. They sat like children on a downhill sled.

When her bottom hit his thighs, Joseph went rigid. He made an odd sound, like someone had handed him a wet cat. He held his arms wide.

Tessa took a deep breath. She wanted the closeness of sitting with him without the intensity of looking at him. And she’d wanted to be still. Everything effective about the New Tessa had been still and deliberate, not hysterical and reactionary.

She raised her chin, examining the opposite wall. It was dotted with pegs on a grid, each peg hung with a man’s hat.

“This family has a proliferation of hats,” she said.

“Trevor doesn’t like the sun in his eyes,” Joseph answered cautiously. His voice was rough. “They travel much of the year.”

“Resourceful,” said Tessa.

“Tessa?” Joseph said. He sounded miserable. Slowly, he lowered his arms to his sides. He did not touch her. She reached on either side and gathered up his open hands. He clasped them, and she held on. He let out a fraught breath.

“Joseph,” she began, “this has become so very strange, and I’m sorry.”

“I was too aggressive,” he offered.

Tessa shook her head at the hats. “No. No. I am determined to accept whatever amorous . . . er, tide you may wish to, er, be carried away upon. However—”

“Accept my amorous tide?” Joseph repeated. His voice was too loud in the small room.

“Yes,” she vowed, trying to sound very open, “however, there is more to my experience with, er, kissing, than you and me. As you know. I hesitate to bring it up, but I worry there is no help for it—for me—if I do not. Can you tolerate it?”

“Tessa,” he breathed. “The only thing I can tolerate is not knowing what you want.”

She sighed at this. Could she simply stop with this assurance? No, she thought, he deserved more. He deserved all of it. She forged ahead. “In the weeks before I met you, I endured an encounter with the man who fathered Christian . . .”

Tessa gritted her teeth. It was physically painful to form the words, as if she spoke around a horse’s bit. Joseph fell silent, not a breath, not a shuffle. She had his full attention. She forced herself to start again.

“On the night Christian was conceived, the man who was Christian’s natural father was rather . . . demanding. And he . . . he, well—”

Now she squeezed Joseph’s hands tighter. She closed her eyes.

“What he did was,” she said softly, “well, one of the first things he did was . . . to put his hand beneath my—” Deep breath. “That is, my skirt was lifted and his hand touched my ankle to begin, so . . .” She let the sentence trail off.

Flashes of memory rushed back from that night. The darkness of the trees at the edge of the clearing. Marking’s face, lit by moonlight. The thin clouds sailing overhead, sailing smooth and fast, as if they couldn’t be bothered to stop, even to block the light from the moon.

When she spoke again, her voice was dazed. “To be honest, I am shocked I reacted to you as I did, because you did not even touch my, er, ankle. Not really. I am wearing leather boots—I always wear sturdy leather now—but that night, of course I had worn silk slippers. I suppose it was the pressure of your hand and not that you actually took up my ankle, not that you . . . er, shoved.”

Tessa stopped talking after that. She’d forced out all she could say on the topic of Neil Marking and silk slippers and ankles. No one knew these fine details, not even Willow or Sabine. Tessa kept them locked so deep in her brain that she thought sometimes even she could not remember them herself. But then a word or a smell would trigger a memory so distinctive and clear, she was immobilized, and she was reminded that it was all there, trapped in her head, and the key was very handy, indeed. The key was, in fact, in the lock, and she need only to turn it to remember the horrible events inside.

Was it the wrong decision to share them, even a few of them, with Joseph? What husband, convenient or otherwise, wanted to hear the details of previous trysts, especially about a man who impregnated her? There was a reason she had not told him before the wedding, even with their entire lives at stake.

She could not say what was at stake now. It felt very much like the rest of her life all over again.

A fresh wave of despair floated up, and she stared at the Earl of Falcondale’s hats, straining to hear her husband draw breath or clear his throat, straining for some indication that he would speak. That he would exonerate her.

Finally, after what felt like an eternity, after the circles of the earl’s hats had seared into her vision, Joseph said, very lowly and with more steel than ever she had heard, “He was demanding in what way, Tessa?”

As much as Joseph did not wish to hear the details of his wife’s previous affair, he could not let go of the extremely troubling words that had, haltingly, emerged from her memory.

Demanding, she’d said. Took up my ankle. And perhaps most disturbingly of all, the word shove. Added to that, she would not look at him. He was literally staring at the back of her head. And finally, terrifyingly, their kiss had ended because she’d leapt from his lap. She leapt like he’d jabbed a finger into a wound.

His wife, he realized—and he cursed himself for his slowness—had been coerced or strong-armed or, God forbid, attacked. By Christian’s father. He was suddenly as sure of it as he was that she conquered motherhood alone or saved a dock slip for his bloody boat.

The idea of a man forcing himself on her spilled rage into his veins like scalding water. Through sheer force of will, he paused. He cleared his throat. He was careful about the tenor of his voice. He would not grab her up or demand that she reveal everything, every detail, and reveal it this instant.

She was talking. It was a private, halting, pained sort of talk. But it was progress.

He’d wondered if there was some ulterior motive behind the heavy, dour clothes and the minimalist hair. He hadn’t asked what bothered her because he’d been too focused on what might please her. He’d thought mostly of the possibility of her feelings for him. Of a future. Hell, of a kiss.

And now they’d had that kiss, and not an everyday, neutral, accommodating kiss but a voracious, skin-searing, heart-exploding kiss that went so far beyond questions and answers.

But none of that mattered if she was being haunted by some incident or, God forbid, incidents. If she had been hurt in some way, emotionally or physically.

He rephrased his last question with forced calm. “Tessa, what do you mean when you say demanding?”

“Are you angry?” she whispered.

“No,” he said gently. He wanted to shout the word. He continued, “I am curious. There is a reason that an otherwise . . . amorous—dare I say, enthusiastic—woman suddenly leaps from my arms like a frightened rabbit. I should like to learn what it is.”

She said nothing.

He asked, “Is that reason me?”

She shook her head. “No. I’ve said no.”

“Yes, you’ve said this. That means some other man has caused you to be afraid. I should like to know how and why.”

“Oh, Joseph,” she sighed, dropping her head in hands. She sounded exhausted. “Do you really?” A challenge, not a hope.

No, he thought, but he said, “Yes.” He meant yes.

She looked at the ceiling and nodded. The beautiful curtain of her hair rippled between them. She sat up very straight, took a deep breath, and then—slumped. Slowly, very slowly, she settled back against him. The heat of his body segued with the heat of hers. He wanted to gather her up, but her hands burrowed again into his. He held on.

“It is unpleasant for me to discuss it,” she said. “That’s putting it very mildly. Unpleasant. But I will do it, if you are willing to hear it. And you believe it will be useful.”

“The more we can tell each other, Tessa, the better off we will be,” he said. “I believe. I hope.”

She said nothing but squeezed his hands. She held his hands as if the grip kept her from falling from a great height.

When she kept silent, he said, “But perhaps this boot room has seen all the honest talk one corridor can expect for an afternoon. What do you think? Shall we seek out somewhere less muddy, with fewer of Trevor’s sweaty hats?”

This felt like an unnecessary detour, honestly, and he wondered how he could endure the wait. But regardless of what she had or had not managed today, it would always be her choice what to say and when to say it. He could only wait. It was the least he could do after not asking until now, after simply assuming. He’d assumed she’d had a youthful love affair. He’d assumed their passion was mutual. The alternative was unbearable to him, but he would wait to hear of it on her terms.

Except, God help him, for one detail that could not go unaddressed right here, right now.

“But Tessa,” he said, “there is one thing I must say, even in the boot room. You mentioned something about . . . about accepting ‘the rising tide of my passion,’ and I want to be perfectly clear.”

She went stiff in his arms, bracing herself, and he swore in his head. He would not make it worse. He forged ahead. “Any affection between you and I, Tessa, will be a mutual endeavor—something that we both experience. You are not beholden to the rising tide of—of any part of me. I’ve never compelled a woman to . . . want me in this way, and I’ll be damned if I start now. Do you understand?”

Tessa considered this, nodding finally with an impatient sigh. She sounded a little weary of heartfelt lectures. Joseph had grown weary of them too. And he was so very weary of the bloody boot room.

“Right. Up you go,” he said, hustling her up and shoving from the bench. “Let us find somewhere more comfortable in the house. After seeing the glories of the cellar, you’ll not be surprised to learn that I know the perfect spot.”

He tugged his demolished cravat from his neck. When he glanced at her, she was gathering up the long curtain of your hair.

“Your hair is glorious,” he said. He could not stop. “I adore it.” I adore you, he added in his head.

He looked again and saw her smile, a true smile, the first authentic gladness—delight for the sake of delight—since they’d entered the house.

I want to delight you, he thought. I want the chance to make you smile every day.

But first, I hear what I should have been told from the beginning.

First, I hear what terrible thing has been done to you.