After much deliberation, Tessa consented to leave the baby with Perry at the inn for their night at Abbotsford Cottage. It would be her first night spent away from the baby since his birth. Perry had insisted that she and Christian were more comfortable at the inn. Certainly, there was far more room than the cellar in Belgravia. And Christian was deliriously in love with the innkeeper’s cat.

“We must get a cat for Dollop when we settle down, wherever it may be.”

“A cat and a goat,” said Joseph. “And a horse. As soon as he is able to ride. I want all our children to ride.”

Tessa loved hearing him talk about Christian as if he was his own son, but the mention of other children caused her to turn away. Even after a week alone together in an inn bedroom, after hours of intimate moments steeped in sensuality, her marriage to Joseph had still not been consummated.

The night before, she’d lain very still and quiet while he’d casually wrapped his large hand around her ankle. She had not cried out. She had not leapt from the bed. But, unlike all the other parts of her body, his touch on her ankle had been met with silence and stillness. She had been . . . stoic. It had taken all available strength not to cry out.

She had not been able to kiss him, she hadn’t laughed, she hadn’t explored his body. She hadn’t burned with need for him and begged him to do more—do anything more!

She’d simply lain there, her heart pounding, her mind spinning, willing herself to carry on with four anxiety-ridden minutes of his warm, casual hand wrapped around her left ankle.

When Joseph saw her reaction, he had endeavored to withdraw. He’d never meant to experiment if she appeared unhappy or, God forbid, in distress.

But Tessa had felt the value of each of the other times he had touched her, and she saw the value especially his hand on her ankle. Joseph was slowly replacing the small ownership taken by Captain Marking and giving it back—first to her. Second, if she allowed it, she would share possession with Joseph, who, after he moved his hand, would return with tickles and tweaks and massages that drove her mad with desire.

All the while, she had been distracted by the joy of exploring his body, marking it and possessing the beautiful expanse of his muscle and heat, to call it her own.

“I believe my ankle is a problem,” she’d told him, “because the moment the captain touched my ankle, I knew what was to come.” She said the words into the darkness.

“I was finished,” she went on. “Ruined. A rough kiss or even a tussle in the woods would have been unpleasant, but I could have recovered. When my ankle was under his control, when he bent my leg, I was powerless. It was the beginning of the end.”

“We will get past it,” Joseph had said against her hair.

But Tessa struggled to see how. The obstacle of the ankle was that it was the first thing Marking’s hand found when he’d delved beneath her skirts. How could she ever forget the cold, terrifying realization that a man—this formerly dashing man—was clawing his way up her body from below?

“The beginning of the end,” she had repeated and fallen asleep.

She’d awakened to Joseph whistling, fresh and hopeful; eager to see Abbotsford Cottage again. She could not remain downtrodden when he, denied so long, was cheerful and eager to spend a night in the beautiful home he wished to buy for her.

They arrived to Abbotsford Cottage in time to take another tour of the house and change for dinner before the other guests arrived. The house was as Tessa remembered it, grand but not opulent; a piece of history but also a home.

Ever aware that the sellers were auditioning them in the same way they considered the house, Tessa was generous with praise and open about the ways she might style the house if it became hers.

It was easy to be enthusiastic about the property—she had loved it at first sight—but even so, she struggled to focus. Her lack of attention felt like a betrayal of Joseph, who all but rubbed his hands together in anticipation over the library, the ballroom, the solarium. She wanted to enjoy it with him, but honestly, Joseph was the source of her distraction.

The longer the day wore on, the more determined she became that tonight their lovemaking would happen. Enough had been . . . well, enough. Her demons, surely, had been exorcized. She’d carried on, wounded and nervous, until she’d grown weary, even of herself.

It was fun (and useful) to enjoy Joseph claiming one part of her body at the time, but then they’d hit the barricade of her stupid ankle and Tessa wanted to rail at the sky. An ankle wasn’t even one of her naughty bits. She refused to allow her anxiety to stand in their way another night.

She, Tessa St. Croix-Chance, once formerly the most notorious flirt in Surrey, would be bedded by her own husband. Tonight. In this beautiful home. With no baby in the next room. And no Perry to face in the morning. She would put the past to rest, satisfy Joseph (who had been so very patient), and satisfy herself.

The first step, she thought, was to look her very best. After the tour, Tessa reminded Lady Winnifred that she’d traveled to the house without a maid. The lady kindly provided a woman from her own staff and sent her up to assist.

The middle-aged maid arrived promptly and said almost nothing compared to Perry’s constant chatter. She styled Tessa’s hair simply, in a high, loose bun at the back of her head, with wisps of blonde dropping around her face. She was fastening Tessa into a cherry-red evening gown glittering with tiny iridescent crystal beads when Joseph let himself into the room.

“I’ll finish,” Joseph said to the maid. “Thank you, that will be all.” The woman bobbed a curtsy and disappeared from the room.

“You look too good to leave this room,” Joseph said, coming up behind Tessa. He dropped a kiss on her neck and she shivered.

“My mother adored this dress. It was never my favorite, it’s stiff and uncomfortable, but it makes a statement.” Tessa fidgeted, trying to find the most comfortable way to tolerate the sharp beads. She gave a kick of one leg, then the other, jostling the layers of petticoat that tangled around her legs. She caught sight of a red slipper beneath the hem, and she had the thought. An idea.

She slid her foot from beneath the hem again. She smiled. It was a simple idea, really; easy to carry out, pure in its own way.

While Joseph did up the buttons on the back of her dress, Tessa traced a half circle with the toe of her slipper on the carpet, like a ballerina. Crinoline scratched against the silk of her stockings. The beadwork cut into the skin beneath her arms. She had never once removed this dress without a network of tiny scrapes marring her skin from the embellishments.

Why hadn’t she thought of this before?

The idea would have to wait until after dinner, of course, but she could whet his appetite. She could tease him, just a little, as he had done to her when he’d introduced his “game.”

The idea of this thrilled her, and she was determined, suddenly, to bring her idea from theory to conjecture. She gave her skirts one final shake and reached for her ruby earbobs.

“Joseph?” she called casually. He’d drifted away to study the bookshelves.

“These novels are all about hauntings,” he said. “Do you suppose we should take it as a bad sign?”

“Joseph, look at me.”

He turned and blinked. “You are stunning. You are the most stunning creature I have ever seen.”

Tears shot to her eyes. “Your compliments thrill me, I hope you know this. But I wanted your attention to tell you . . .” she crossed to him “. . . that I love you. So much.” She raised up on her toes and kissed him softly on the lips.

“I love you too,” he breathed. “But what prompted this declaration?”

He gathered her up. “You hate the house. Not large enough. Too large. No goats. No room for your parents and brothers.”

“Tonight,” she said, cutting him off, “we will make love. Depend on it.” She wiggled free of his embrace.

He raised an eyebrow. “Do you mean . . . at dinner?”

She fastened her second earring. “After dinner.”

He paused. “Tessa.”

She glanced at him.

He continued, “Do not pressure yourself into doing something for which you’re not ready. It could set us back—and for no reason. Really, there is no rush.”

“We’ve been married for nearly a year. It’s hardly a rush to make love ten months on.”

“You imagine the rush. We have a lifetime.”

“We have tonight, and why shouldn’t we? I am a prodigiously sensual woman. Or I used to be.”

“You are—but sensuality was never the problem.”

“I’ve grown weary of being a problem.”

“That’s not what I meant, and you know it.”

“Know this,” said Tessa, turning back, stalking to him. “I’m in love with you, I am undone with desire, and I am a woman who takes matters into her own hands.”

“Oh, you are?” His eyebrows raised. He tugged on the lapels of his dinner jacket. He looked suddenly more interested.

“I am. When I wanted you for my husband and the father of my baby, I made it happen. When I wanted to kiss you, I did it. I kissed you in the boot room, and in the stable at Belgrave Square, and on our first night in the inn.”

“I know that makes me sound suspiciously passive, but you realize how important it felt to allow you to initiate things,” he said.

She waved this comment away. “Tonight, I want to consummate this marriage; and I shall make certain it happens. I am initiating. You’ve been warned.”

She spun and stalked toward the door.

Joseph enjoyed Sir Thomas’s dinner guests very much.

That is, he enjoyed them in as much as he could enjoy any strangers at any meal when he was preoccupied with the promise—threat? vow?—to expect sex with his wife.

And not just any promise/threat/vow. Tessa had come to him with confidence and fire in her voice, with a spark in her eyes that lit the languishing fuse in his own. He tried to prepare himself for possible reconsideration, for a goodwill attempt that resulted with something less than sex, for fatigue, or missing the baby, for a stomachache.

And yet, he could not wipe the look in her eye or the mettle in her voice from his mind. It lodged in his chest and caused his loins to throb.

His wife hadn’t asked, she hadn’t hinted, she hadn’t even teased. She’d informed him in no uncertain terms. Sex tonight, in the giant bed of the beautifully appointed guest suite.

Dinner, therefore, felt very secondary. He comprehended very little of the mealtime conversation. The guests were a father and son, Mr. and Mr. McMillan, and the son’s wife. As Sir Thomas promised, both father and son were active in Whig politics in the area and informed him of men he should meet and lower offices that might, in coming years, be an easy win for a newcomer.

Excellent, good, what a lucky coincidence, he’d said again and again. Are we to pudding yet? Was it rude to encourage the men to forgo port and cigars?

Meanwhile, Tessa seemed unhurried and unfazed. She dazzled Sir Thomas, Mrs. McMillan, and Lady Winnifred with stories about Christian and, eventually, with her interest in the dockyard. Sir Thomas promised to introduce her to the Hartlepool dock master, a man he claimed to know well, and to recommend her if, as he put it, “. . . Joseph permitted Mrs. Chance to seek some role in the dockyard.”

Joseph had been listening with one ear and he winked at his wife. It was a pity that such fortuitous news carried an addendum about Joseph’s perceived “permission,” but Tessa did not challenge him. She knew as well as Joseph that, if they smiled along, Sir Thomas would sell them his house, make the dockyard introductions, and then hie off to London, never to bother them again. Eventually, Tessa would show every man in town the role of Joseph’s “permission” when it came to her employment.

After an exceedingly lengthy dinner, Lady Winnifred asked if Mrs. McMillan might play the pianoforte. The younger woman declined because she had suffered a burn to one of her fingers, and Joseph had never been more grateful.

He was just about to claim exhaustion and ask to be excused when Tessa asked if she might have a go.

Or not, Joseph thought, suddenly intrigued. He did love hearing his wife play.

Lady Winnifred accepted and Tessa hurried to the piano, settling her waterfall of fuchsia skirts over the small bench. Joseph lowered himself into a chair. He postponed his accelerated enthusiasm for after, and allowed himself to sink into the beauty of his wife at the keys of a piano. He narrowed his eyes. His gaze traced the curve of her waist and bottom. He promptly forgot the other guests, who sat primly around him, waiting for a minuet or waltz. He licked his lips and reveled in the next best thing to going to bed with his wife.

The composition that followed, a sonata, began with a soft prelude, like the first drops of rain. The notes rose, like a good, soaking shower. After that, she pounded a thunderous, drapery-trembling crescendo that threatened to shatter windows and take down beams. Her playing was like a storm, rolling through the cavernous house.

Joseph swallowed hard, aroused by the theatre of her playing and the drama of the sound. He watched the rise and fall of her shoulders, the sway of her body over the keys. Her delicate slipper on the pedal reminded him of a tongue darting out every fifth beat.

He shifted in his seat and glanced around the room. Maids and footmen had gathered just outside of doorways to listen. Sir Thomas and his wife and the elder Mr. McMillan stared at Tessa with disbelief and at the pianoforte with concern. The younger McMillans, Joseph was relieved to see, looked thoroughly entertained.

Bloody right you are entertained, he thought. When it was over, he clapped politely—clapped ironically, considering the insufficiency of the five other members of the audience. Their feeble clapping was laughable after the verbosity of her performance. Tessa, he saw, did not care. She rose from the bench, gave a little bow, and shot Joseph a flushed, hot look.

Joseph coughed, and then called out, “Well done, darling. Well done.”

After the performance, it was no surprise that their hosts began to suggest fatigue and “. . . overstimulation.”

Well done again, Joseph thought.

The McMillans excused themselves and Joseph and Tessa soon followed, climbing the curved staircase to their appointed room in the guest wing.

Beyond pleasantries and praise for the meal to the hosts, Tessa had not spoken since her tumultuous recital. She rested a calm hand on Joseph’s arm and allowed him to lead her.

His pulse, still elevated from her sonata, kicked up again. The same confidence he’d seen before the meal was also in the hand on his arm; it was in her enigmatic silence, her straight back and raised chin.

Excitement coursed through him, and he blew out a breath. He’d been in a near constant state of arousal since they’d convened at the inn in Hartlepool; and that said nothing of the previous eleven months, when he’d fallen in love with her twice but not taken her to bed once.

When they reached the bedroom door, she said, “May I have five minutes? Lady Winnifred is sending her maid to assist me.”

“Right,” he said, and he pretended to study a row of paintings down the corridor. When the maid arrived, his heartbeat kicked up yet again. Blood coursed through his veins at an invigorating, almost lightening rate. He heard his pulse in his ears.

When he heard the door gently click shut and he saw the maid descending the stairs, Joseph let out an audible breath. His loins grew heavy and tight. He rolled his neck and reminded himself that nothing was an inevitability. He would not perish if they tried, and tried, and tried again.

His hand shook as he knocked twice on the door. He tried to call out, but his voice broke like a youth. Swearing in his head, he pushed the door open and stepped inside.

The room was dim, lit only by the fire and a lone candle beside the bed. He squinted, his eyes adjusting to the darkness. He shut the door. He called out again. “Tessa?”

He scanned the room, giving full attention to the dark corners and curtained window seat. He squinted at the fire.

And then his body turned to stone.

Tessa stood beside the grate fully and completely unclothed.