“I am guessing,” she said, “that you have some experience in all this. I hope so, because one of us needs to know what to do.”

His hands stilled in her hair, and his eyes smiled back into hers while the rest of his face did not. It was a quite devastating expression, one that surely would only ever be appropriate in the bedchamber. It made her knees feel weak and the room seem a bit deficient in breathable air.

“I am not a virgin, Camille,” he told her, and as he removed one more pin her hair came cascading down her back and over her shoulders. “My God. Your hair is beautiful.”

She had not worn it down outside of her dressing room since she was twelve, but sometimes, in rare moments of vanity, she had thought that a pity. She had always thought her hair was her finest feature. It was thick and heavy and slightly wavy.

“You are beautiful,” he said, his fingers playing through her hair, his eyes on hers.

She did not contradict him. She said something foolish instead, though she meant it and would not unsay it even if she could. “So are you,” she said.

He cupped her face with his hands while she grasped his elbows, and he kissed her, his lips parted, his mouth lingering on hers, his tongue probing her lips and the flesh behind, entering her mouth, circling her own tongue, feathering over the roof of her mouth so that she felt a raw, purely physical ache of desire between her thighs and up inside her. He moved his hands behind her waist, pressed them lower to cup her buttocks, and drew her hard against him so that she could feel the shocking maleness of him, the physical evidence of his desire for her. Her own hands flailed to the sides for a moment and then settled on his upper arms.

“Mmm.” He drew back a little and leaned beyond her to draw back the bedcovers. “Let me unclothe you.”

She let him do it, did not try to help him, and did not allow herself to feel embarrassed as garments were peeled away one by one with tantalizing slowness. He was looking at her, drinking her in with eyes that grew heavier with desire. He had called her beautiful when all her clothes were on. She felt beautiful as they came off—beautiful in his eyes, anyway, and for now that was all that mattered. Her heart hammered in her chest and her body hummed with anticipation and her blood pulsed with desire.

Who would have thought it? Oh, who would? Not her, certainly. Not until . . . when? A few hours ago when she waltzed with him? A few days ago when she dashed laughing through the rain with him? A short while ago when she watched him look on his mother’s face for the first time?

“Lie down,” he said when she was wearing nothing at all and he was turning his attention to removing his own clothes.

She did not offer to unclothe him. She would not have known how to go about it. She lay on the bed instead, one knee bent, her foot flat on the mattress, one arm beneath her head. It did not even occur to her to pull the bedcovers over herself to hide her nakedness. He watched her as he undressed, his eyes roving over her, and she watched him.

His shoulders and arms were firmly muscled. So was his chest. It was lightly dusted with dark hair. He was narrow waisted, slim hipped, long legged. If he was imperfect, as she was, she was unaware of it and it would not have mattered anyway. He was Joel, and it was Joel she looked at, not any romantic ideal of the perfect male physique. She drew a slow breath when she saw the evidence of his desire for her, and for the first time she was afraid, though not with the sort of fear that might have had her leaping off the bed to grab up her clothes and bolt from the room. Rather, it was the sort of fear of the unknown that might just as accurately be described as an aching yearning for what she had never experienced before and was about to experience now.

She had never seen a picture of a Greek or Roman statue, because of course they had been sculpted nude, a shocking thing indeed and to be kept far from a lady’s eyes. But he looked as she imagined those statues must look, except that he was a bronzed, living, breathing man while they would be cold white marble with sightless eyes, like those busts in the hall of Mr. Cox-Phillips’s house. Perhaps he was perfect after all. His eyes, those eyes that could not possibly belong to any statue, were dark and hot upon her.

And then he lay down beside her, gathered her into his arms, and turned her against him. She felt all the shock of his warm, masculine nakedness against her own, but she was not about to shrink away from it now when the long, slow building of desire was at an end, and the urgent heat of passion and carnality was about to begin, and their hands began to explore and arouse, and their mouths met, open and hot and demanding. She was not going be a passive recipient either. All the longings and passions of her suppressed femininity welled up in her and spilled over as she made love with a fierce eagerness to match his own.

But ultimately she was shocked into stillness when his body covered hers, his weight bearing her down, his knees pressing between her thighs and spreading her legs, his hands coming beneath her buttocks. She twined her legs about his as he pressed against her entrance and came into her, slowly but firmly and not stopping until she felt stretched, until she feared there could be no deeper for him to come without terrible pain, until the pain happened, sudden and sharp, and there was indeed somewhere deeper for him to come and he came there, hard and thick, and her virginity was gone.

He slid his hands from beneath her and found her own hands and laced his fingers with hers on either side of her head. He raised his head to gaze into her eyes, his own heavy lidded and beautiful, his weight full on her. And he kissed her while her body adjusted to the unfamiliarity and she tightened inner muscles about him to own him and what was happening between them. She would never regret this, she thought quite deliberately. She would not no matter what conscience and common sense told her afterward. She felt as though she were awakening from a lifelong sleep during which she had dreamed but never been an active participant in her own life.