"Don't play with me." He growled it.

"I'm not playing," she said, smiling more brilliantly than she had ever smiled before. "I'm taking you, Gabriel Spenser. I'm claiming you. I'm marrying you. I'm—"

But he broke into her thoroughly arrogant list by trying to leave, so she had to kiss him again. And then she found herself backed against the wall, and his fingers raked into her hair. A while later there was a smile in his somber eyes, and Gillian knew without asking that she was the only one in the world who had seen that particular smile.

"I shan't take you," he said, belying the smile.

"I'll build a willow cabin at your gate."

"My house is in Cambridge," he said, adding "more than a few people would see you. And they do not know Shakespeare as well as you do."

"Shakespeare's heroine threatens to sing love songs in the middle of the night. It will ruin your scholarly reputation." She said it with relish.

"I have no reputation."

"You have your own reputation," and she said it gently, because he so obviously needed to be told. "That of a brilliant scholar and a man of honor. A man who loves his daughter and will do anything for her, even going against his own instincts and introducing himself to a distant family member, a duke who knew nothing of his existence."

"Shakespeare's hero was not such a fool as I, to go where he should not have been welcomed."

She felt as if her smile were warming both of them from the inside out. "Rafe welcomed you."

"I took advantage of his hospitality to court you."

"Were you courting me?" she asked with some curiosity. "I thought you were merely passing time by kissing me."

"I most certainly was not courting you," he said, reversing himself. "I would never ruin your life in that fashion."

She put on a mournful face. "I suppose I will go back to my first plan."

"And that is?" he asked warily.

"To marry Rafe, of course. Why, Imogen and I planned it quite carefully: she is to have an affaire with you, and I am to marry your brother."

He made a sound in his throat that sounded dangerously like a growl.

"If I have your assessment correctly, you think that I should marry an appropriate aristocrat, no? Why not Rafe? After all—" and her voice stilled—"if I can't have you, Gabe, I don't suppose I will care very much. Rafe and I will have a wonderful time… do you suppose he has read Shakespeare?"

"At some point."

"Philosophers? Because I was very interested to read of the new manuscript of Plato's dialogues that the Bodleian Library just acquired."

"We are negotiating to acquire a twelfth-century manuscript of the Discourses of Epictetus."

"Do you suppose that Rafe knows that?"

He shook his head.

"Perhaps I can learn to talk about horses. Did you know that I'm afraid of riding?"

He shook his head again.

"I'm a paltry rider, and horses dislike me. Do you suppose that might impinge on Rafe's and my happiness once we were married?"

"You could learn," he said, feeling as a drowning man does when the water closes over his head.

"Yes," she said. Then she came closer, right up to his body, and looked up at his face, his dear face. "I will learn to kiss him… the way you taught me?"

He seemed to be struggling to say something, or perhaps to hold his tongue.

She didn't allow herself to smile. Instead, she ran her hands up the muscled planes of his chest. "I'll learn to enjoy talk of horses and stables; I'll forget that I was ever interested in Shakespeare and philosophy; I will learn to kiss Rafe the way you kiss me…" That last part trailed off in an aching whisper because his hands had closed on her waist.

"You'll be the death of me," he said. But he sounded resigned, and her heart sped up.

"Yes," she whispered, and then, her eyes on him, "no?"

"They call it a petit mort," he said, and his mouth came down on hers.

Chapter 32

A Chapter for Which Brazen Jokes

About Holes Would Be Appropriate

(But Your Author Refrains)

Imogen was going to be late for rehearsal. She had fallen asleep after luncheon and had a delicious set of dreams in which masked men with huge mustaches did various delightful things to her, while she weakly said "no," and then, "yes."

All of which concluded with Imogen waking up and dressing, aware of a not uncomfortable but quite new feeling between her legs. It was a funny feeling. A rather—

She wrenched her mind away, ran down the stairs, and began to rush along the corridor toward the theater. But just as she neared the end, a deep voice suddenly said: "Imogen!"

She turned around. "Yes?" And then in a circle. There was no door from which someone could have spoken to her. And yet—she whirled back. One of the painted panels that lined the corridor was ajar. Apparently that was a door, a secret door.

No one emerged.

"Come here." It was unmistakably the grave, low voice of Mr. Spenser. Imogen bit back a grin. Suddenly she knew precisely why she was rushing toward the ballroom, and it had very little to do with whether she was at the rehearsal precisely on time.

"Yes?" she said, walking toward the wall cautiously.

Silence. But the painting was ajar.

She reached out and opened the slender panel, but she didn't have time to peer inside. His arms scooped her up and backwards, and his mouth was on hers. Her eyes fell shut, and she melted against him as if no time had passed between the night and this kiss. It was as if they had both been simmering all day and burst into flame at the same moment.

When she opened her eyes they were in thick, warm darkness. His mouth was tracing fire on her neck, his hands shaping her breast almost roughly, thumb rubbing across her nipple so that she gasped and forgot her own questions, which had to do with the dark—

But he knew. "It's the priest's hole," he said, his voice rasping.

She couldn't see anything, and neither one of them wanted to. This was about feeling: the rasp of his beard across her skin, the silk of her hair on his fingers. The weight of her breast in his hand, and the way she squeaked when he suckled. The softness of her skin and the shaping of his fingers. The muscles in his legs when her hands dropped that low, and the way he trembled when she dropped kisses: bolder here, in the darkness, with the memory of the night before between them. The priest's hole was like the Horse and Groom inn, apart from the world.

By the time he poised himself over her, she was sobbing, pulling him closer with all her strength, wrapping her legs around his body. And when he came to her, she closed her eyes against even the dark, so that her whole body focused on the way he was surging into her, the way her body was melting around him, the way—

"Oh God!" she choked.

He bent his head to kiss her just at the moment when she almost blurted out something fantastical, something about love.

But he was kissing her, and the words got lost in her throat as her body clutched his, feeling him ride higher and harder, increasing her pleasure, driving her higher… until a groan burst from his lips, and he surged against her one last time.