Lady Winnifred’s maid had not batted an eye when Tessa had told her she’d wanted unfastened from the red dress and stripped naked. Her host may have been shocked by Tessa’s pianoforte concert but perhaps nudity in the guest suite of Abbotsford Cottage was not an uncommon thing.

A good omen, Tessa thought. Abbotsford Cottage would likely be her future home and she quite liked the idea. She couldn’t believe they’d not thought of it sooner. If Tessa was unnerved by Joseph’s hand rising in her skirts, why not simply remove the skirt? Why not remove it all?

She had barely positioned herself beside the warm glow of the fire when Joseph knocked twice and stepped into the room. She did not, thank God, have time to second-guess. She simply laced her hands behind her back—why play timid now?—raised her chin, and waited.

Joseph froze when he saw her. No metaphor could do justice to his expression. He looked exactly as if he’d opened the door onto an unexpectedly naked woman. Shock, then captivation, then enterprise. It was all chased with a very little bit of uncertainty, but enterprise prevailed. He understood. And he was immediately complicit. He paced three steps, stalking her, and then paced three back. He looked at her through narrowed eyes, he looked again and again, devouring the sight of her.

She allowed it. Her hands remained behind her back. She thrust out her breasts and he stopped walking.

“You’re certain?” he asked.

“Certain,” she said. “But I should like us both to be naked. Will you do it? So that we both—?”

“Yes.”

He hopped on one foot and tugged off a boot. The other boot came next. After that, his jacket, cravat, waistcoat, shirt, undershirt, buckskins, drawers—all shed in a matter of seconds.

He stood tall and tan and muscled some five feet from her, his clothes in a heap on the floor. He was painfully aroused and Tessa allowed herself to study him in the way he had studied her—in the way he studied her still. She had touched every part of him during the past days, but she had not seen his body.

It was a work of art; the body of a Greek god.

The music she’d played after dinner, Chopin’s “Nocturne Op. No. 2” in C sharp minor, rolled in her head, and she was emboldened to move first.

But he moved, too, they reached out in the same moment, and their bodies made impact like the sun meeting the horizon at dusk, smoothly, gracefully, unstopping.

Tessa felt warm, restricting muscle where she usually felt breeches or shirt; she felt his arousal against her belly without the barrier of her gown. She felt, and nuzzled, and kneaded. She rubbed against him like a cat. She raised her mouth across his skin and tasted.

Her senses were awash with him. The smell of his soap, the taste of skin, the sound of his breathing. She saw him only in flashes of the jumping firelight; his mouth descending, his hands brushing the hair from her shoulder.

Yes, she thought. Yes.

No talking, no stillness, no caution. No dancing around the edges. No clothes.

Why had they not done this sooner?

“It was a mistake,” Joseph panted, “not to do this sooner.”

“Everything has led to this,” she soothed. “No mistakes.”

He slid a hand down the dip of her waist and cupped her bottom, lifting her slightly and pressing her to him while he made one, delicious thrust of his hips.

Tessa’s mind stopped. She’d felt precursors of this, moments of pressure that threatened to overwhelm her, to carry her away, but they had been mere flashes compared to the bright light of pleasure. She could only anticipate the next thrust. Surely there would be a next? She bowed her body, reaching . . . and there it was, he thrust again.

Tessa moaned into his mouth and he answered with her name.

When he pressed again, Tessa’s knees threatened to give away. She wobbled, and Joseph lifted her and carried her to the bed. She felt his muscles strain as he endeavored to lower her down slowly, to bow her back like a tree branch, bent by a gentle wind.

But then she wrapped her legs around his haunches, and his strength failed him. He dropped her onto the bed and came down on top of her. The weight of him made her want to fall and fall and fall.

“Tessa?” he breathed, kissing her shoulder, her clavicle, her breast. “Alright?”

She nodded, pulling his lips back to her breast. He growled and kissed her again.

“You are more beautiful than I imagined,” he said. “And I imagined your beauty quite a lot.”

She should thank him, Tessa thought. She loved his compliments. She never felt more beautiful than when he told her she was a fantasy or a goddess or the prettiest woman he’d ever known, but she was rapidly losing her ability to follow simple thoughts. Speech in this moment seemed like a terrible use of her mouth and her brain. She wanted only to suck in breath, and feel, and press her mouth against any tanned or muscled (or tan and muscled) part of him that occasioned her lips.

Her body had begun to move of its own volition, to press up, to seek, and she was too lost to sensation to ask or consider or sort it out, she wanted only to let it go, to press and find what she sought.

“Tessa?” Joseph moaned. He sounded strangled. “Tessa?”

“Ye—?” So much talking, he was always talking.

“Tessa, love, you mustn’t move like that. I won’t be able to—Tessa . . .”

Oddly, this, her brain was able to follow. A plea. A no-please-yes from a man who was finally losing control. Was it unfair, she wondered, to agitate him, to entice and kindle and move when he’d been willfully touching her, bit by bit, until she was wild with desire for the last two weeks?

And furthermore, was it so very bad that it would be difficult for him to . . . ?

To . . .

Even in her fevered state, she knew the end of that sentence was stop. If she encouraged him, it would be difficult for him to stop.

“I don’t want you to stop,” she said. “Please, Joseph, don’t stop. . . .”

“But we—” he panted, and then kissed her, the ultimate manifestation of “we,” or rather the prelude to the ultimate “we.”

“We’ve waited too long,” she told him, turning her head to breathe. “We’ve teased and gone slowly and resisted and now we will lose control.” She found his mouth and kissed him hard. “And we will revel in it.”

Likely one earnest, restrictive moment had built on the next, and they had reached this point through days of smaller moments. But now they’d arrived, and she wanted nothing more than to thrust against him, and the more he tried to ask her to stop, the more she wanted to do it.

“Tessa, I’m serious,” he rasped, and he tried to raise up from her.

She clawed him back, pulling his shoulder, his hair—an ear—whatever she could grab hold. She squeezed her legs around his haunches like a vice. He could not rise up without taking her with him.

“Tessa, are we—?” he gasped.

“Yes,” she sighed.

“But are you . . . ?”

She opened one eye and stared up at him. His face was a mask of agonized restraint. And love. He looked down at her with such love. Her heart burst. “Please, Joseph,” she said, tossing her head on the pillow. “Please now.”

Joseph let out a curse, and he rolled them to the center of the bed.

“Loosen your legs,” he said. His voice was low and rough.

“But I—”

“Tessa,” he pleaded, and a heightened jolt of pleasure zinged through her. “I can’t maneuver with your legs around me. Relax. Can you relax?”

Slowly, Tessa let her legs drop and untangle from his body. The new position felt open and vulnerable; the smallest current of unease snaked up her chest and into her throat.

No, she thought, it wasn’t panic, it was simply the no-turning-back acknowledgment of what was about to happen. What she willed to happen. What she wanted.

Joseph detected her hesitation and leaned down. She raised her lips, thinking he would kiss her again, but he went straight for her ear and began to speak lowly, gravelly, in his other voice, the voice he’d had before he’d become a gentleman.

The words he said were inconsequential. Praise, encouragement, just a little goading, but the tenor of his familiar voice in the unfamiliar accent ignited her, and within moments, she was fighting for his mouth, begging for a kiss. Her body bowed up of its own volition, seeking, open and on fire.

When her breathing turned again to panting, when she strained against him and begged, he said an oath in a language she didn’t understand and repositioned his legs. Tessa whimpered, resenting every time he pulled away, but then he was back, reaching between them. She felt his hand, felt his arousal, felt him pause . . .

She opened her eyes. He was poised above her, looking down, his eyes half-lidded but dilated to midnight.

“Do not ask,” she said. “Do it. Please, Joseph, do it.”

With an oath, he sank into her. Tessa made a little cry. The sound of that cry was different from her previous, lust-soaked cries, and the sound yanked her from him for the flash of a second. Her consciousness hovered somewhere between her daily life and this moment in time. On one side, she wore clothes, stood upright, thought logical thoughts; on the other, she was naked, prone, and in carnal throes with her husband.

If she tipped her thoughts toward everyday life, she would acknowledge some pain, she would realize considerable awkwardness, and she would possibly feel some panic.

However, if she tipped the other direction, she would ignore the pain, embrace the fullness and the weight and the union; and she would, possibly, maybe, perhaps, reach that very insistent . . . whatever-it-was that her body had been seeking so very hard. For days. But especially tonight. It was the urgency that kept her rising off the bed, an unattainable burn that needed just a bit more of . . . something.

Tessa tipped toward that something, her brain dropped back into the numbing sort of want that produced moans and sighs instead of questions and answers. She allowed every other thought to be chased away.

Above her, Joseph was very still and very breathless. He was so still and breathless, she thought he’d turned to stone.

Tessa opened her eyes to smile at him, to tell him she knew what came next, that she wasn’t afraid, that he should move. But his eyes were closed. He wouldn’t even look at her. He held his breath and squeezed his eyes shut and endured.

Tessa would have laughed except she’d made the conscious choice to not think too closely about it. Instead, she moved. Just a nudge. The movement felt fine . . . actually the movement felt rather promising and she moved again, more forcefully this time. More promise. She moved and she moved, and she watched Joseph’s eyes spring open and lock with hers. And she raised her eyebrows—this is a real thing that we are actually doing—and he let out a guttural growl that sounded like the eleven months of pent-up desire being set free.

And then he took over. Tessa closed her eyes, lost to the rhythm and the sound of rushing blood and the burning rush coiling in her body.

And then the great coiling burn detonated within her, a spiral of sensation, every note on the piano played wildly and perfectly at the same time, and she lost herself for a moment, she went limp, she floated, she sank, she bobbed to the surface. Her body sang.

When she opened her eyes, Joseph had thrown his head back and cried out, another guttural release after months and months of separation and doubt and restraint. And then he called her name and collapsed on top of her, and she wasn’t certain, but she thought there was a chance that he wept.

We’ve done it, she thought. She smiled at the ceiling of her new house. No other man entered her thoughts—no other time or place. Only her love for Joseph Chance and the strange journey that had brought them to this moment.