“And did you know that some men enjoy a woman’s kiss—” She let her eyes drift down to the relevant spot.

“—almost as much as they enjoy other acts? And that sometimes a woman’s pleasure is increased if her lover strokes her at the right moment?”

His eyes looked wild, like those of a man at the very limit of his self-control. “Jemma, are you done talking now?”

Without pausing to give her answer, she turned over on her stomach, came up on her knees, and turned her head to look at him over her shoulder. “I just wanted to say that an old Frenchwoman told me that this was the best position in which to conceive a child.”

Elijah made a hoarse, strangled sound in his throat and flipped her back over. Then he was looming over her, on his knees, looking into her face. “It’s going to be all right, isn’t it?”

She cupped his face. “I love you.”

The words seemed to fall into the room like a blessing, like cool rain in summer. His throat worked and then he said, “Ah, God, Jemma, do you really?”

“More than life,” she said simply. “Elijah?”

He was staring down at her as if she were made of pure gold. “Yes?”

“Would you mind very much if we made love now? Because I think that I’m about to go out of my mind.” Her whole body was prickling and tremors kept running through her legs.

A corner of his mouth quirked up, and a hand settled on her breast.

It felt so good that she twisted under him, gasping, and finally managed to say, “I need—”

“This?” His lips replaced his hand, but it wasn’t enough. They had been playing for hours, and she was mad for him.

“I need you.” Her voice sounded childish to her ears, so she wound her hand hard into his hair and pulled his mouth to hers. She said it into the sweetness of his kiss, “I need you now.”

The Duke of Beaumont was a man whom many in the English government had come to trust. If you told him there was a desperate need for something, no matter how difficult or impossible, he would do his best to satisfy you.

Without saying a word, Elijah reared above her and a thumb stroked down her most delicate part.

Jemma twisted under him, crying out. His voice was as deep as the devil’s itself, without a trace of the controlled statesman about it. “You are exquisite.” His hand caressed her so that she arched again.

“Elijah,” she whispered, and then lost track of what she was saying because his lips followed his hand. His tongue sent wild sensations rocketing through her body. She closed her eyes as if the blindfold were there again. Elijah was ruthless, controlling her desire, driving her higher and higher, closer and closer.

Finally, finally, he pulled back, pushing her legs even farther apart. “Open your eyes, Jemma,” he growled. “Look at me.”

She could no more disobey him than she could fly to the moon. “Please,” she finally gasped. “Elijah!”

She was small, and he was large, yet he stroked into her as if they had made love every night for years. It felt as if he were coming home, as if no time had passed. A dark pleasure burned down her legs, making her cry out.

The passion that gripped her had nothing in common with what she remembered of the awkward couplings of their early marriage. She had been unsure and embarrassed, those days, biting her lip to keep silent so he wouldn’t be disgusted. Now she could no sooner control the moans flying from her lips than she could leap from the bed.

Yet still their rhythm didn’t seem entirely right. He would thrust, and then she would arch up at the wrong moment. They bounced off each other rather than moving in unison.

Elijah stopped moving.

“No,” Jemma gasped. There was a lovely, building heat in her legs, more intense than she’d ever experienced, and she was desperate to chase the sensation. “Please, please don’t stop!” She shuddered and arched against him again.

“You’re leading, Jemma,” he said, his voice hoarse.

“What?” She blinked up at him.

He deftly pulled her arms over her head and imprisoned them with one hand. “Let me,” he said through his teeth.

But she didn’t understand, even when he stroked forward again. It was so lovely that the heat seethed in her legs and she cried out.

Elijah stroked forward again, long and deep.

It was so intoxicating that she twisted up against him any way she could. She couldn’t stay still.

He made a noise that was somewhere between a groan and a laugh and dropped her hands, pulling her hips up so her legs wrapped around him and she couldn’t move.

“Elijah!” she cried, shocked by the vulnerability of her position. But he wasn’t listening, just moving, and suddenly she got it, and pushed back against him at just the right moment.

“Yes,” he said, between his teeth, his eyes intent, fierce. He kept moving that way, hard and deep, and she arched toward him frantically, at the right moment. The fire in her legs was spreading and making her seethe and tremble.

Elijah was looking down at her the whole time. The look in his eyes, the raw possession, made the feelings in her body spiral tighter and tighter.

“Jemma,” he said, deep and hard as his body, and she wrapped her arms around him and broke the way thunder cracks in the sky, into a before and after, into the Jemma-who-had-never and the new Jemma.

He came with her, into the fury and the heat of it, and the only thing she heard was one word, and it wasn’t love, but mine, and that was good enough.

Chapter Twenty

April 1

Morning

Villiers looked with some distaste at the page delivered from Templeton’s office. It contained a neat list of eight names and eight addresses. Why eight, one might ask? He, of all people, knew that he had six children. Or rather, to be precise, he had five children and was paying for six.

Yet the list explained nothing. There was an ominous feeling to it, as if Templeton, his little rat of a solicitor, had disappeared into a hole from which he wouldn’t be re-emerging. And if that were the case, Templeton had likely taken a good amount of ducal coin with him.

Either the list implied that he now had eight children, which explanation he rejected, or two children were unaccounted for in a welter of addresses.

He sighed and summoned his coach.

The first address was a house in a respectable area of Stepney. He considered instructing a footman to knock on the door and simply fetch the child, but thought better of it. This was the place where lived—the very thought made him clammy and slightly nauseated—his firstborn son.

The woman who answered the door was pious, by the look of her. But there was a hint of spice in her eye. Villiers deduced that she had settled for piety when she couldn’t find something more lively.

“Good morning,” he said. “I am the Duke of Villiers. Are you Mrs. Jobber?”

“Huh.” She was clearly nonplussed by the appearance of a duke. Though of course Villiers did not fool himself that there were any in the kingdom who looked more ducal than he. This morning, he was wearing pale rose velvet and could have graced the king’s court with ease.

Instead he was standing before a battered-looking little house. The irony was not lost on him. One might wear all the velvet in the world and still discover that one’s children were living in a small house in Stepney.