Before she could catch up, she was stopped in her tracks by an apple hovering before her, ruby red and glossy in its sugary coat.

“A candied apple, milady?”

The vendor towered over her on stilts, his long, striped trouser legs billowing. His wide smile was painted on.

“Annabelle.” Hattie’s voice reached from a few paces ahead.

She didn’t move.

Madness or not, she had to say good-bye, and not when they were leaving tomorrow, terribly formal in the courtyard. In truth, she did not want to say good-bye to him at all.

She turned on her heels.

Not sensible of her at all.

She moved faster, dodging animated guests streaming toward her.

In the ballroom, the throng of people moving through had thinned. She paused under the grand chandelier, pondering, then took a course back to the great entrance hall.

The long hand of the clock stood at twenty minutes to midnight.

And then she knew where she had to go. She turned toward the west wing.

She hurried along dimly lit corridors on soundless tiptoes like a thief. She arrived at the door to his study panting; a breathless moment of hesitation, and then she rapped against the dark wood.

Silence.

Her hand hovered over the door handle.

She quickly, quickly, pressed down and—found that the door was locked.

Her heart sank.

She moved on, using paintings and potted plants as markers to find her way back to the music room. She opened the ornate double door and stuck her head through the gap. Yawning emptiness. The piano looked alien and abandoned in a shaft of moonlight.

A wave of panic welled from her stomach. Had he returned at all?

She dashed through another corridor, and another, until all sense of direction was lost and her corset was biting into her flesh. She had to pause and hold on to a banister, her chest heaving.

Reason, see reason.

Claremont had three floors and two hundred rooms; she could never search them all.

Damnation. She had been so good, so sensible.

How could she have allowed Montgomery to turn her into a panting madwoman haunting his castle?

How could she not?

She had evidently sleepwalked through her days in Kent. Oxford had revived her mind. Montgomery had shocked the whole of her back to life; he hadn’t even tried, he had been cool reserve and bluntness and before she knew it he had snuck under her skin. Now she didn’t know how to dislodge him again. Did not quite want to, either. It felt too good to be alive. It felt too good to be seen. His kisses had lifted a loneliness off her she hadn’t even known she carried.

She forced another breath into her lungs. The skin on her back was sticky and beginning to cool.

One last attempt, and then she’d return to the terrace.

Up, up, up a flight of stairs, down another corridor, past a startled maid . . .

He stood near the door to the winter-sky library with Bonville the butler.

She came to an abrupt halt, her head swimming.

Montgomery turned toward her, and the moment their eyes locked, tension crackled up and down the length of the corridor.

He must have said something to Bonville, for the butler melted into the shadows.

A rushing noise was in her ears as she approached. She should have laid out the words, the purpose, for this beforehand. She hadn’t; her body had been driven to find him like an animal was driven to find water after a spell of sweltering heat. Now that he was here in the flesh, watching her, the urge faded into a dizzying sensation, a shyness. She hadn’t expected to feel shy.

By the time she reached him, meeting his eyes was a little difficult.

He looked taller than she remembered. He felt different, too; there was a raw, glinting edge just beneath his quiet surface.

His fingertips glanced over her cheek, and the contact shimmied through her whole body. His caress traveled along the soft curve of her jaw to the side of her neck, where her pulse fluttered and her skin was damp.

“You ran.” There was a rasp to his voice.

She swallowed, and he stroked lightly over her jugular, as if to settle her right where she couldn’t hide her agitation. It worked. Gradually, her limbs loosened, and a heavy warmth sank into her limbs under the steady up-and-down glide of his fingers.

“Your brother,” she whispered, “have you found him?”

His hand slid from her neck to her shoulder as his other hand reached for the door behind him, and he pulled her with him into the dark silence of the library. He backed her against the door, then she heard the key twist in the lock.

A pang of trepidation rippled through her. The nearness of his body felt as impelling as if he were pinning her to the door with his weight.

He leaned closer. “Tell me why you ran.”

His breath brushed over her lips, and her chin tilted up, seeking the full pressure of his soft mouth against hers.

“Tell me,” he repeated.

“You said you’d come back.”

He shook his head. “I need to hear you say it.”

Against the spill of moonlight through the window behind him the outline of his shoulders was rigid, and his hands were clenched by his sides as if he were checking himself with some difficulty.

It dawned on her then that most men in his position would simply take what they wanted, and didn’t she know it. She had forgotten all about it around him. But there was no doubt that right now, Montgomery wanted her badly. The tension humming in his muscles reverberated through her own body, and she could smell the salty note of an aroused male on him. If she stroked her hand over the front of his trousers, she’d find him hard. But the choice was hers.

A twinge of pleasure and pain throbbed in her chest.

Beautiful, wondrous man.

He had to know that alone in the dark, they were equals in their longing.

She slipped her hand beneath his coat.

He froze. Under the warm silk of his waistcoat, bands of muscle contracted, and the hardness against her knuckles left her reeling. She watched as her hand flattened against him . . . glided over the silver chain of his pocket watch to his ribs, then up the firm, tapered shape of his torso. So sleek, yet solid, so many strengths contained in one man . . . Slowly, her hand slid down again, down, down over his tense abdomen, over the outside of his trousers.

Montgomery seemed to have stopped breathing. His throat worked as he swallowed, as she hovered, hesitated . . . gently, gently, she pressed her palm against him. She gasped, unprepared for the jolt of pleasure that shot through her at the feel of him. Her fingers curved around him, and the soft grunt this drew from Montgomery set her blood on fire. The mighty man sounded . . . helpless. She caressed him again, inflamed by feeling him heat and twitch, by the rustle of fine wool against her palm.

With a groan, Montgomery clamped his hand over hers, and then her wrist was pinned against the smooth wood of the door and his lips were on hers. At the first taste, things turned fast and mindless. His free hand clutched her waist, hers roamed over his back, his nape, the slippery silk of his hair as his demanding mouth urged her from one kiss into the next. Reality dissolved into shadows and heat, the firm, soft urgency of a man’s kiss, the thick ridge of his desire.

A draft of cool air brushed the back of her knees. She blinked down and found her skirt wadding around her waist, and a hard male thigh invaded between hers. She moaned at the sudden pressure against her softest place.

“Yes,” he murmured, his fingers digging into the curve of her hip. Her uncorseted hip—he groaned into her mouth at the feel of it. His hand on her hip was guiding her in small, rhythmic thrusts against his thigh, and heat bloomed from the friction between her legs. She made an agitated sound. “Please, I can’t . . .”

He made a soothing noise and palmed her thigh, up and over her backside, finding the slit in her drawers from behind, and help, he was touching her. He was touching her there, with slick, knowing fingertips . . . It had only been minutes since the corridor; how could it come to this within minutes? Because they had been needing it for weeks. He stroked harder, and she melted around him as bliss curled through her, curled her toes . . . A finger slid inside her, and her spine arched as she gave a little cry.

They weren’t equal in this at all—he was leading her headlong into frantic oblivion.

Trapped between his thigh and his sliding fingers, devastating pleasure gathered and knotted, and she gripped his arm to stay him, but his muscles flexed so wonderfully as he was pleasuring her, steadily, relentlessly, the tension burst in a white-hot blaze, pulsing in her lips, her toes, her fingertips. Her next cry was muffled against his shoulder, Montgomery’s other hand clasping the back of her head.

She clung to him, her knees like water, the sound of her breathing a roar in her ears.

The fine wool of his coat was rough against her cheek.

He withdrew from her gently.

Behind closed eyelids, white dots flashed and faded like stars.

The haze cleared when his foot pushed at her instep. He was widening her stance, making a space for himself. His hand moved between them, and she knew then that he was working on the fastenings of his trousers.

He wanted her. Right here, standing up against the door.

Her fingers clenched in his shirt. “I . . . I don’t . . .”

Oh, she did. And then she didn’t. She couldn’t. This hadn’t been the plan—there had been no plan.

His hand stilled. “You wish to stop?” He sounded fairly calm, for a man aching to take his pleasure.