She was not nervous.

Oh, yes, she was.

She was nervous in the sense that she did not know quite what to do and was afraid of being gauche.

But she was not afraid. Or in any way horrified at what she was doing. Or ashamed. And she had spoken no lie. She wanted him. She desperately desired him. And he was beautiful – all solid, hard muscle with broad shoulders and chest, narrow waist and hips, long legs. He was warm and smelled of some musky cologne.

He was Jocelyn, and only she had ever spoken the intimacy of his name. She knew all about the importance of names. Only her parents had ever called her by her middle name, her real name, the one that seemed somehow to encompass her true identity. Her parents and now Jocelyn. She had tried to stop him from calling her Jane, but he had done so regardless.

And so in some inexpressible way they knew each other intimately even before the physical knowing, which was just beginning. He was unclothing her. Her nakedness did not embarrass her. She saw herself through the look in his dark eyes and knew that she was beautiful and desirable.

She gave him back the look.

‘Jane.’ He set his hands lightly at her waist and drew her against him. She inhaled slowly at the feel of his bare chest brushing her nipples. ‘We are ready for bed. Come and lie down.’

For a moment the coldness of the sheet against her back took her breath. She had changed the colors of the room but not the materials. Satin, she had guessed, was an erotic accompaniment to what would happen in this bed.

She watched him finish undressing. He did not turn his back and she did not look away. She was to become as familiar with the look and feel of his body as she was with her own. Why begin with shyness or coyness?

She knew pretty well what happened. She had lived all her life in the country, after all. But even so she was shocked. There surely could not be room.

He was smiling that half-inward smile of his when he climbed onto the bed beside her and propped himself on one elbow to look down at her.

‘You will become accustomed to both the sight and feel of it, Jane,’ he said. ‘I have never had a virgin. I suppose there will be pain and blood this first time, but I promise you pleasure too. And I will not put this terror inside you until your body is ready for it. It is my task to see that it is made ready. Do you know anything of foreplay?’

She shook her head. ‘I have never even heard the word.’

‘It means what it says.’ His eyes still laughed gently at her. ‘We will play, Jane, for as long as we need before I mount your body and ride us both to satiety. I daresay you do not know much if anything about the ride either, do you? The pain will be over before it begins. You will enjoy it, believe me.’

She did not doubt it. There was already an ache of something that was not quite pain along her inner thighs and up into her belly. Her breasts had tightened to a strange, tingling soreness.

‘You are doing it already, are you not?’ she said. ‘Playing? With words?’

‘We could sit at opposite ends of a room and arouse each other to fever pitch with only words,’ he said, grinning suddenly. ‘And maybe we will do it one of these days. But not today. Today is for touch, Jane. For exploring each other with hands and mouths. For stripping away the otherness that holds us from merging into the oneness we crave. We do crave it, do we not? Both of us?’

‘Yes.’ She lifted a hand and cupped one of his cheeks. ‘Yes, Jocelyn. I want to be a part of your name, a part of the person who bears that name, a part of the soul inside that person. I want to be one with you.’

‘You, me, we, us.’ He lowered his head and spoke against her mouth. ‘Let us invent a new pronoun, Jane. The unity of I and the plurality of we melded into a new numberless word for Jane and Jocelyn.’

She opened her mouth beneath his, suddenly ravenous and shaken by the words they had spoken – and those they had not. This was not the way she had expected it to be. This was not man and mistress. This was lover and beloved.

It had not been a part of the bargain. Either for her or – surely – for him.

But it was what was happening.

She realized too late, as his tongue plundered her mouth and his hands gave her an intimation of the magic and sensual delights ahead, what this was all about. She understood, far too late, why she had taken this option rather than any of the other more proper and rational ones. She understood why she had accepted his proposition without either outrage or horror. This was love. Oh, perhaps not love exactly. But this was being in love.

This was wanting to give and give to the beloved until everything that was oneself had been gifted away. And wanting to receive and receive until the emptiness had been filled again with a mingling of what was herself and him.

He was right. There was no word. No pronoun. There never was a word for the deepest realities.

‘Jane.’

His hands, his skilled fingers, his mouth were everywhere. He knew unerringly where and how to touch her, where to brush with feather-light fingertips, where to tickle, where to pulse his fingers, where to massage, where to pinch and scratch. He knew where to kiss, where to lick, to suck, to nip with his teeth.

She had no idea how long it went on. And she had no idea how she knew where to touch him, how to caress him, when to change the nature of each caress. But she did know, as if she had always known, as if there were a deep well of femininity on which to draw for the beloved without the necessity of any lesson.

Perhaps it was that hers was not just any woman’s body and his not just any man’s. Some instinct told her that this was usually done in darkness and with eyes tightly shut, that usually all the pleasure was hugged tightly to oneself, the pleasure-giver shut out. Even in her inexperience she sensed that lovers did not always love with eyes open and focused on each other’s whenever it was feasible to do so.

‘Jane.’

He spoke her name over and over, as she did his. She was his beloved, as he was hers.

The ache, the yearning, the need became more persistent and more localized. She needed him there.

Here.

Now.

His hand, between her thighs, worked light, deft magic in her most secret place and built a frenzy of desire.

‘Jocelyn.’ She set her hand over his wrist. ‘Jocelyn.’ She did not know what she needed to say. But he understood.

‘Slick and warm and ready,’ he said, his mouth coming to hers again. ‘I am going to mount, Jane. Lie still and stay relaxed. When I am deep, we will begin the final pleasure.’

‘Come,’ she said to him. ‘Oh, please come.’

His whole weight bore her down into the mattress, holding her immobile while his thighs came between hers and pressed them wide and his hands slid beneath her. By sheer instinct she twined her legs about his. And then he raised his head and looked down into her face, his eyes heavy-lidded with passion. But not blind passion. He looked deep into her own eyes.

And then she felt him hard against the pulsing ache of her entrance. And pressing through it, pushing slowly but firmly, filling her, stretching her, alarming her. There was the sudden premonition of pain, the certainty that he could come no farther. He was too big.

‘Jane.’ There was something like contrition in his eyes. ‘If I could only take the pain for you. But it always falls to the woman to do the suffering.’ He pushed hard, frowning as he gazed into her eyes.

There was an involuntary tensing, a fear of pain, and – and an awareness that the moment had passed, that he was deep. That he was inside her body. And inside her heart. Inside herself. She smiled at him.

‘I am still alive.’

He grinned and rubbed his nose across hers.

‘That’s my girl,’ he said. ‘I could not expect tears and vapors from Jane Ingleby, could I?’

She clenched her muscles about the unfamiliar thick hardness inside her and closed her eyes to revel in the wonder of it. But he had promised more. And now that the dreaded moment of her lost virginity was over, all the longing, all the aching came flooding back.

‘What is the ride?’ she asked, opening her eyes again. ‘Show me, Jocelyn.’

‘Lie still if you wish,’ he told her. ‘Ride with me if you wish. There are no rules here in our bed, Jane, and nothing in that foolish contract either that applies to this. Just you and me and what is mutually pleasurable.’

He lowered his head then to rest in her hair on the pillow. He withdrew slowly to the brink of her – and pressed inward again.

There was no pain this time. Only wetness and heat and soon the rhythmic thrust and withdrawal of a riding motion to which her own body soon adjusted and matched. A carnal, energetic, blissful mating of bodies that was focused there, where her woman’s body had opened to him and his man’s body had penetrated deep. And yet the sensation went beyond that localized physical point. This was the mating of man and woman, of Jocelyn and Jane. It was a ride to union, to that wordless moment at which the I and the you of the two of them would lose focus and meaning. The moment in which the plurality of we would become singular.

Desire, yearning, need – all became pain and reaching, reaching …

‘Now, Jane.’ He lifted his head again. His lips touched hers. His eyes looked into her own. ‘Now. Come. Come with me. Now, Jane.’

Yes, now. All the way. Now. All the way to nothingness, to everything. To oblivion, to the ultimate knowing. To oneness.

Yes, now.

‘Jocelyn!’

Someone cried his name. Someone murmured hers.

She felt a final, blissful gush of heat and knew that the mating was complete.

There was murmuring after that, and lightness and coolness as he moved off her, and more murmuring, and the comfort of his damp chest against hers as he drew her onto her side against him, his arm about her, and the coziness of bedcovers over her shoulders.

‘Jane.’ She heard her name once more. ‘I am not sure you are still capable of saying you are alive.’

She smiled sleepily. ‘Mmm,’ she said with a sigh. ‘Is this heaven, then?’

She was too tired to hear his chuckle. She slid into a delicious slumber.

Jocelyn did not sleep. He was thoroughly sated but also uneasy. What the devil had he been babbling? He hoped she had not been listening.

Of course she had been listening.

What they had just done had been done together. They had not been separate entities giving and taking a purely physical pleasure. They had been – damnation, he could not stop thinking the way he had been speaking. He had become her, and she had become him. Not that that was it either. They had both, together, become a new entity that was both of them and neither of them.

He was going to end up in Bedlam if he was not careful.

It had been something quite beyond his experience. And certainly beyond his intentions. He had wanted a mistress again. Someone to bed at will. Something really quite basic and simple. He had desired Jane. She had needed a home and employment.

It had all made perfect sense.

Until she had let her hair down. No, that had only fueled his desire.

Until she had called him by name. And said something else. What the devil was it she had said? He rubbed his cheek over the warm silk of her hair and hugged her a little closer.

Everyone should know what it is like to be called by name. By the name of the unique person one is at heart.

Yes, that was what had done it. Those few foolish words.

From birth he had been an earl with the rank of a marquess, heir to a dukedom. All his education, formal and informal, had been designed to train him to take over his father’s title and his father’s character when the time came. He had learned his lessons well. He had taken over both at the age of seventeen.

… the unique person one is at heart.

He had no heart. Dudleys generally did not.

And he had no unique character. He was what his father and everyone else had always expected him to be. For years now he had hugged about himself like a cloak his reputation as a dark, ruthless, dangerous man.

Jane’s hair was fragrant with the smell of roses that always clung about her. It made him think of country gardens in the early summer. And filled him with a strange yearning. Strange, because he hated the country. He had been to Acton Park, his own estate, only twice since leaving there after a bitter quarrel with his father when he was sixteen – once for his father’s funeral less than a year later, and once for his mother’s four years after that.

He had intended never to go back until he was carried there one day for his own burial. But he could close his eyes now as he held Jane tightly and remember the rolling, wooded hills to the east of the house, where he and Ferdinand and Angeline had played robbers and highwaymen and Robin Hood and explorers. And where sometimes, when alone, he had played poet and mystic, breathing in the smells of elemental nature, sensing the vastness and the mystery of this nebulous thing called life, trying to formulate his thoughts and feelings and intuitions into words, trying to write them down as poetry. And occasionally liking what he had written.

He had torn up every word in a passion of anger and disgust before he left home.

He had not thought of home in a long age. Not of home at least, even though he kept a careful eye on the running of the estate. He had even forgotten that Acton Park ever had been home. But it had. Once upon a time. There had been a nurse who had given them discipline and affection in generous measures. She had been with them until he was eight or nine. He could even remember why she had been dismissed. He had had a toothache and she had been holding him on her lap in the nursery, cradling his sore face with her large, plump hand and crooning to him. His father had come into the nursery unannounced – a rare event.

She had been dismissed on the spot.

He, Jocelyn, had been sent down to his father’s study to await the thrashing that had preceded the pulling of his tooth.

The Duke of Tresham, his father had reminded him with every painful swish of the cane across his backside, did not raise his sons to be girls. Especially not his heir.

‘Jocelyn.’ Jane was awake again. She tipped back her head to look at him. Her beautiful face was flushed and heavy-lidded, her lips rosy and swollen from his kisses. She seemed cloaked and hooded in fragrant, shining gold. ‘Was I dreadfully gauche?’

She was one of the rare women, he thought, for whom passion and sexuality were instinctive. She had given both unstintingly this afternoon as if she did not know what it was to be hurt. Or belittled. Or rejected.

But before he could answer, she set one fingertip lightly to the bridge of his nose to cover the frown line there.

‘What is it?’ she asked. ‘What is the matter? I was gauche, was I not? How foolish to have imagined that because it was earth-shattering for me, it must have been so for you too.’

Foolish Jane so to expose herself to ridicule and pain. He took hold of her wrist and lowered her hand.

‘You are a woman, Jane,’ he told her. ‘An extraordinarily lovely woman. With everything in the right place. I was well pleasured.’

Something happened to her eyes. Something closed up behind them. He recognized his sudden irritation for what it was. It was shame that his throat and chest were aching with unshed tears. And anger that she had brought him so low.

He should never have told her to call him by name.

‘You are angry,’ she said.

‘Because you talk of earth-shattering experiences and make me feel that I must have misled you,’ he said curtly. ‘You are employed as my mistress. I have just been putting you to work. I always take pains to make work congenial to my mistresses, but work is what it is. You have just been earning your living.’

He wondered if she felt the lash of his words as stingingly as he. He hated himself, which was nothing new except that the passion of his self-hatred had long ago become muted to a disdain for the world in general.

‘And giving good value for money,’ she said coolly. ‘I would remind you, your grace, that you employ me for the use of my body. You are not paying for my mind or my emotions. If I choose to find part of my employment earth-shattering, I am free to do so provided at the same time I open my body for your use.’

For one moment he was in a towering rage. If she had dissolved into tears, as any normal woman would have done, he could have lashed himself harder by treating her with scorn. But typically of Jane, she was scolding him with cool dignity despite the fact that she was lying naked in bed with him.

He chuckled. ‘Our first quarrel, Jane,’ he said. ‘But not our last. I suspect. I must warn you, though, that I would not have your emotions engaged in this liaison. I would not have you hurt at its inevitable ending. What happens in this room is sex. Nothing else. And you were not gauche. It was as good a session of sexual intercourse as I have ever experienced. Better, in fact. There, are you reassured?’

‘Yes,’ she said, her voice still cool. ‘Thank you.’

He was aroused again – by his anger, by her cool refusal to be chastised, by her golden beauty, by the faint smell of roses. He did what he had to do to reassert his control over the afternoon’s business. He turned her onto her back and mated with her again, but this time he concentrated all his powers on keeping the act carnal, even clinical. Man and mistress. Nothing more.

And then he slept, lulled by the sound of rain against the window.

‘I thought perhaps you would wish to stay for dinner,’ she said.

‘No.’

They were dressed again and back downstairs in the sitting room. But he had not seated himself as she had. He had gone first to stand in front of the fireplace to stare down into the unlit coals. Then he had paced to the window to stare out at the rain.

He filled the sitting room with his presence and energy. Looking at his immaculate elegance, his proud, erect posture, his powerful shoulders and thighs, Jane found it hard to believe that just half an hour ago he had been lying naked with her in the bed upstairs. It was already hard to believe any of it had happened despite the physical evidence of soreness and tender breasts and unsteady legs.

‘I have a dinner engagement,’ he said. ‘And there is an infernal ball to be attended tonight. No, I did not come to stay, Jane. Merely to consummate our liaison.’

It was not going to be easy, being his mistress. She had never expected it to be. He was an arrogant man of uncertain temper. He was accustomed to having his own way, especially with women. But it was going to be especially hard to cope with his strange, sudden mood swings.

She would have felt hurt by his words, belittled by them, as she had when he had spoken in a similar manner in bed earlier. But she realized that the words were not spoken carelessly but quite deliberately. She was not sure why. To remind her that she was his mistress, not his lover?

Or to convince himself that she meant nothing to him beyond a female body to be used for his pleasure?

Despite all her ignorance and inexperience, she would swear that the first time he had entered her he had not been using her. She had not been a mere woman’s body. It had not been just carnal pleasure.

He had made love to her. With her.

He was ashamed now of having shown such weakness.

‘That is a relief, then,’ she said coolly. ‘There are several rearrangements to some of the other rooms that I hoped to start today, but I have already lost most of the afternoon.’

He looked over his shoulder at her without turning and regarded her steadily.

‘You will not be put in your place, Jane, will you?’

‘If you mean,’ she replied, ‘that I will not allow you to make me feel like a whore, your grace, the answer is no, I will not. I will be here whenever you need me. It is our agreement. But my life will not revolve around your visits. I will not spend my days gazing wistfully from the window and my evenings listening expectantly for the door knocker.’

She remembered guiltily how she had paced back and forth to the windows all morning. She would not do it again.

‘Perhaps, Jane,’ he said softly, his eyes narrowing dangerously, ‘I should send a message in advance whenever I wish to bed you to ask if you can fit me into your busy schedule.’

‘You were not listening,’ she told him. ‘I signed a contract, and I mean to keep it and to see that you do too.’

‘What do you do with your time?’ He turned from the window and looked about the empty room. ‘Do you go out?’

‘Into the garden at the back,’ she said. ‘It is rather pretty, though it needs work. I have ideas and have started to implement them.’

‘Do you read?’ He frowned. ‘Are there any books here?’

‘No.’ He should know very well there were not.

‘I will take you to Hookham’s Library tomorrow morning,’ he said abruptly, ‘and buy you a subscription.’

‘No!’ she said sharply. She relaxed again. ‘No, thank you, Jocelyn. I have plenty to do. It takes a great deal of time and energy to convert a brothel into a home, you know.’

‘That was unprovoked impudence, Jane, and unworthy of you.’ He looked very large and menacing, standing before her chair, his booted feet apart, his frown still in place. ‘I suppose if I told you I would come to take you walking in Hyde Park, you would be too busy for that too?’

‘Yes.’ She nodded. ‘You do not need to put yourself out on my account.’

He stared at her for a long time, his expression so unreadable that she could see nothing in him of the man who had loved her with unmistakable passion such a short time ago. He looked hard and humorless and untouchable.

Then he bowed to her abruptly, turned, and strode from the room.

She gazed in surprise at the door he had closed behind him and listened to the sounds of the front door being opened and then shut again. He was gone. Without a word of farewell or any hint of when he might come again.

This time she felt hurt.

Desolate.