Willa was shocked by her own disappointment when Alaric did not return her locket with another improper message. She should have been relieved that he had halted the game before other guests noticed the footman traveling back and forth.

Back in her room, she sank in a deep tub of warm water and afterwards gave Sweetpea her own bath. The little skunk paddled in a circle, nose scarcely above the water, waiting for Willa to drop peas so she could dive for them.

When Sweetpea tired of the game, Willa took her to the bed and toweled her until Sweetpea’s tail waved like an ostrich feather. With a thump, Hannibal landed on the coverlet.

To this point, the tomcat had hissed every time she came close to his corner of the room, or to the door leading to the balcony, if he was outside.

Now he glared at her, his eyes squinty.

“Oh for goodness’ sakes,” Willa told him. “I have no interest in hurting your baby; why would I?”

Hannibal put a paw forward. Willa didn’t move. Still glaring at her, he bent his neck, grabbed Sweetpea by the scruff of her neck, leapt down off the bed, and padded over to the basket. Then he ostentatiously curled around Sweetpea and began licking her head, regarding Willa through slitted eyes.

She broke into laughter. She was surrounded by protective males. Absurd, protective males.

When dinner was announced that evening, Willa accepted Parth’s arm into the dining room. She was tired of her suitors’ simpering flattery. What’s more, Alaric showed no reaction when she flirted with them—but he looked daggers whenever she talked to his old friend.

There was no need to feign interest in Parth’s conversation; after he told her about his purchase of the infamous lace factory, their topics of conversation ranged from the ideas of Jean-Jacques Rousseau to exploration of the territory west of the Ohio River in America, to the war between Britain and the American colonies.

Surprisingly, North sat down with them and joined the conversation about the war, revealing a nuanced and thoughtful interest in British skirmishes with American troops. The problem, to his mind, was that the British weren’t fighting for their territory; instead, they’d filled the ranks with Hessians, German mercenaries.

The more they talked, the more Alaric glowered. Hemmed in by admirers who only wanted to talk of his books, he had no way of joining them.

She wasn’t surprised when, late that night after the castle had quieted, a knock came at her door. Sweetpea, ever curious, headed directly toward it, as did Willa—without bothering to pull on her dressing gown.

Sure enough, Alaric stood in the dark corridor. “Roly-poly delivery. Plus one locket.”

She pulled him inside, closing the door. He put the roly-polies on the floor in front of the delighted baby skunk and went to the basin to wash his hands. “What is it you like more about all those proposals you’ve received—the compliments or the kneeling?” he asked over his shoulder.

“The kneeling. It’s so infrequent that men recognize how important women are to their lives.”

Alaric turned, his eyebrow raised. “Just how important is that?”

“If you don’t know, I shan’t tell you,” she said. “I don’t suppose you have spent a great deal of time with ladies in the last few years.”

“None. And that includes Prudence, no matter what she thinks.”

Prudence was no lady. “Do you intend to see her play?”

He flinched. “On the contrary. I intend to close it down.”

“You’re not curious?”

“No.” Alaric prowled toward her with the effortless grace of a large cat. “I’m told Prudence characterized me as so terrified by water that I couldn’t save the missionary’s daughter from nearly drowning in a river.”

His tone was so offended that Willa couldn’t help laughing. “You showed no sign of hydrophobia when you helped rescue Hannibal,” she observed.

“I prefer to maintain a respectful distance from crocodiles, but water in itself? No.”

“I wish I could see it,” Willa said. “From what I’ve heard, the play enacts not just one, but two scenes in which you fail to save the missionary’s daughter.”

“First the flood, and then the cannibals.”

She nodded, watching his frown. He was a man who any woman would instinctively know would care for her. His strength and contained ferocity would be wielded to protect those he loved every time.

It made her think that Prudence had deliberately constructed the play to misrepresent him. But that implied that Prudence hated, not loved, him. “I begin to wonder whether Prudence wrote the play as revenge,” she said, thinking it through as she spoke. “Perhaps she meant the portrayal to shame you, to make the audience believe that Lord Wilde was not a hero, but a coward. But instead—”

“It exploded in her face, and she turned me into England’s most celebrated explorer!” He let out a bark of laughter. “I owe this damnable fame to a woman who tried to ruin me.”

How like him to laugh on hearing something that would drive many men to a murderous fury. Of course, he didn’t care whether strangers thought he was a coward. He knew himself and his strengths. That confidence made her feel weak in the knees.

Light from the candles on her dressing table flickered over his cheekbones and revealed a reddish tinge in his hair. Why did men ever wear wigs?

“If you look at me like that, Evie,” he said softly, “I will take you to that bed, and be damned with the fact that I’ve made up my mind not to let you seduce me.”

“Let me seduce you?” she cried. “I’ve no such intention!”

“It doesn’t matter,” he said, shaking his head. “You’re doing it without trying. May I kiss you goodnight?” There was a raw note to his voice, a shocking, blatantly erotic undertone.

Heat ripped through her, roaring up the back of her neck and between her legs, and the tips of her breasts—all parts of her that hungered for his caress. Somehow it was even more erotic to know that he wouldn’t approach her unless she gave permission. Not here, in her bedchamber where she was vulnerable.

Modesty was called for, but she ignored it. Willa didn’t care that they weren’t married, or even betrothed. Alaric looked as hungry as a man who hadn’t eaten in days, as if the only thing in the world that would satisfy him was her. She’d never seen hunger like that in any of the fourteen men who’d proposed to her.

He read the answer to his question in her face and drew her into his embrace, bending his head until his lips met hers, whisper-soft.

In that moment Willa understood that kisses were like kindling for a fire yet to come. When her lips opened, the spark caught flame. When Alaric invaded her mouth, the blaze threatened to turn into a bonfire and burn out of control.

She caught hold of his shoulders in order to steady herself. Unfamiliar sensations crowded into her faster than she could catalogue them: desire, hunger, tenderness. The hard length that pulsed against her, burning through her nightdress.

Many kisses later, she watched him, mute, new emotions crowding her throat so that she couldn’t, didn’t want to, speak. She wanted things that couldn’t be said aloud.

She wanted to lick the severe line of his jaw. She wanted to make him groan. She wanted to eradicate every trace of Lord Wilde and make the man before her all Alaric, all hers, only hers.

None of that could be spoken aloud, and it all whirled in her head in a daze of possession and desire. He kissed his way down her neck, and she tipped her head to the side to let those lips go where they would, trembling as he pushed down the wide neck of her nightdress and kissed the line of her shoulder.

He made a sound, low and deep in his throat, when she tugged the nightdress farther down. Her breast was revealed, and they both stared at it as if surprised.

“Kiss me,” Willa whispered.

Alaric’s expression was somewhere between awe and yearning. “I don’t dare,” he said, his voice guttural. He eased her nightdress back up, wrapping her in a fierce embrace, his mouth ravaging hers in a possessive, dominating kiss that made Willa’s mind tumble over and over itself, shattering into fragments of heat and light and desire.

“You are so beautiful,” he said, his voice harsh in the quiet room as he eased away. She tried to see herself through his eyes, hair tumbling over her shoulders like a wanton, her skin gleaming in the candlelight. “You’re demure during the day, but you are not demure in truth, are you?”

“I’m afraid not,” she admitted. She ran a finger down the white line of his scar. “I believe I inherited a bawdy sense of humor from my father. I remember him roaring with laughter while my mother beat him around the head with her fan.”

There was a question in his eyes, but he didn’t voice it. He didn’t need to; everything in her responded to his desire.

Without a word, she moved her shoulders just enough that the neckline of her unbuttoned nightgown slid down again. At the expression in his eyes, she allowed it to slide further, until the delicate cambric gathered in folds at her elbows and her waist.

Silence hung in the room for a long second. He looked at her breasts before meeting her eyes again. “You are certain?”

She took a breath, trembling with the pleasure of the pure carnality of his gaze before she said steadily, “Yes. Alaric, yes.” He reached toward her with a stifled groan, his palms clasping her breasts. Her groan followed his as his callused fingers rubbed her nipples and set her blood on fire.

Willa shook like a willow in a breeze as he slid one hand around the curve of her breast and lowered his mouth there, there, to skin that had never been touched by anyone other than Willa herself.

His lips were like a brand, hot and sensual, turning her inside out, making her mind slip away into some other place. Some other woman curled her fingers into Alaric’s thick hair. Stared at the buttonholes of his waistcoat as he kissed her breast, her mind wordless for the first time in her life.

Delicious tremors ran up her legs and kept going through her, over and over, growing in strength as he suckled. Her hands stopped caressing his hair; they curled tight, keeping his head in place so that he would keep doing that mad, wild thing that made her want to surrender to him.

Her body, herself. Everything.

He felt it. She knew it, and he knew it. He raised his head and met her eyes. She couldn’t find words. Perhaps there were no words for this intoxicating, glorious pleasure.

Alaric’s gaze was heated, fierce … sane. “Is this a betrothal between us, a real betrothal?”

The look in his eyes lit an erotic fire in Willa’s blood. Surely this was the definition of madness: when a woman throws away all propriety and all the rules that made her life what it was.

All the rules that defined her as a lady, as chaste, as sensible.

The word “betrothal” knocked about in her head as she tried to connect it to desire and possession, to the way Alaric looked at her, as if he could eat her up.

If she nodded, he would never give her up. She would be Lady Alaric Wilde to the end of her days, never just “Willa” again. She would be Evie. He would pull her into his sphere, with all the blazing attention and fame that entailed.

Alaric felt the change in Willa before she spoke. It wasn’t as overt as a flinch, but her body changed: she withdrew without moving, cooled without notice.

She was afraid, though she would be angry if he were to say so.

Perhaps she was rightly afraid. He didn’t know how to get rid of the admirers created by Wilde in Love. Willa wouldn’t want to live in a house that was slowly losing its bricks and couldn’t keep flowers in its beds.

He let his hand slip from her breast because Willa, his Willa, deserved better than to be seduced. He wanted her to choose him free and clear.

Slipping her nightdress back over her shoulders, he kissed her with complete concentration, willing her to understand that a house missing a few bricks wouldn’t matter if they were under the roof together. “I would have new white rosebushes planted every year,” he whispered later.

“What?” Her voice was a gulp of air. She was trembling in his arms, a slim column of passion and flame.

“I will keep a bricklayer on the grounds,” he promised. His hand rounded her arse and he pulled her against his aroused cock, consumed with hunger. “I will close down the play, and I will never write another book.” Vows fell from his mouth, surprising him. And yet they felt right.

He had never written his books for the audience who bought lockets and thought of him as a romantic hero; after all, he had not even known they existed. His true readers enjoyed accounts of faraway countries and exotic customs. They were curious about the world, not about him.

“What did you say about a bricklayer?” Willa asked, her voice drowsy and drugged, her fingers trailing over his back.

It would not be seducing her to remove his waistcoat. Or his shirt. It would be … chivalrous. She was asking him without words. He stood back and wrenched off his waistcoat, tore off his shirt.

Even that took too long. He made his arms into a prison and kissed her, carnal, scorching kisses that did everything his body wanted to do: they explored her, caressed her, spoke to her.

Loved her.

He pushed the thought away.

“This is very improper,” Willa gasped, sometime later.

“I love impropriety with you,” he whispered.

She was still running her fingers over the muscles in his back. He was larger than most Englishmen, his shoulders widened from exertion. Climbing mountains, hacking his way through impenetrable jungles, sailing through a hurricane. Vigorous activity had changed his body.

“And Evie, you enjoy impropriety,” he added.

Her hands moved to his chest, her eyelashes dark against her cheeks.

“Would this be the first time you’ve seen a naked man?” he asked.

Her long, curling eyelashes fluttered. In this light, her eyes were darker than the bluebells they usually brought to mind. Perhaps it wasn’t a consequence of candlelight; perhaps it was desire.

“Yes,” she said. “I am sorry for myself that my first naked chest is such a defective one.”

He laughed.

Her fingers gently traced a white scar that cut across his waist. “What caused this?”

“A whip,” he said, shrugging. “I took a lash from an irate sailor before I managed to disarm him.”

Willa had found another. “And this?”

The scar was so old that it had whitened and lay flat. He couldn’t remember its origin, because his mind was engulfed by a wave of sharp desire.

“May I give you pleasure?” he whispered, drawing up her chin and pressing a kiss on her lips.

“You do give me pleasure.” Now her eyes were lighter again, like a stormy sky in summer.

“I want to take you,” he said, the words guttural.

She froze like a deer caught in the sudden light of a lantern.

“Not that way.” He wanted her so much that his body longed to claim her in the most primitive of ways, to own her, to take her. “That is, I do want you that way, but I won’t. Not until you agree to marry me.”

The word “love” knocked through his mind again, but he dismissed it. She hadn’t understood what he’d meant by the bricklayers and the rosebushes. She had no idea that he would give all that up for her. Easily, for her.

He swept her into his arms and she gave a startled squeak. But when he laid her on the bed, she didn’t protest.

Willa appeared delicate, but appearances were deceiving. She looked proper; she was not. She looked as if a strong gust might knock her over; he suspected she would live into her nineties if not longer.

His hands slid up her legs. Like her arms, her legs were slender, and the skin, always hidden from the sun, was tender.

She made a muffled sound and her thighs quivered under his touch. Swallowing a grin, he kissed her left knee.

Another on the right, to be fair.

A little farther up. She squeaked a phrase that didn’t seem to be a protest so he kept going.

He reached the part of her inner thigh that began a shy curve inward.