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Instead of the rise he’d intended to get out of her, she flashed a sad smile. “I’d still take a life ... how did you phrase it? Humbled and pitiable? With people I love in it to this cold, empty, emotionless existence you’ve set up for yourself.”

He’d not set anything up for himself.

He’d simply lived the life he’d been dealt. It was on the tip of his tongue to tell her as much. It was a physical effort to keep back that admission she’d no right to.

As if she sensed that weakness, she drifted over to him. “What is it that makes you so determined to hold on to your secrets, Malcom? Is it guilt? Fear of acknowledging to the world what you lost?”

He was upon her in two long strides, catching her lightly by the arms. “I’ve not lost anything, Miss Lovelace,” he hissed. One would have to have memories of something in order for it to be truly gone. “There is nothing more, nothing less. This is my life.”

“But it’s not,” she cried, pounding a small fist against his chest. “You are an earl.”

A sound of impatience escaped him. “I don’t want it.” His fingers curled reflexively into the satiny-smooth skin of her arms, and he forced himself to relinquish her. His hands flexed, much like when he’d burnt his hand as a lad, making a fire in a home he’d found for himself one winter. “I don’t want any of it.”

“You don’t know how lucky you are,” she cried. He made to step around her, but she darted into his path. “You’re content in this miserable end of London any one of us would sell our souls to climb out of. And all the while you sulk.”

He sputtered, “I do not—”

“Because of what?” she continued over his indignant interruption. “Because you had the misfortune of being born an earl? Well, forgive me if I don’t feel badly for you, Mal—”

He covered her mouth with his. It was nothing more than an attempt at quieting the seemingly never-ending tirade prattling past her lips. And yet the same explosive hunger when she was near, in his arms, blazed to life.

She moaned and caught herself against him, clinging like tenacious ivy.

Malcom swept his tongue inside, and she met that invasion with a bold lash of her own flesh against his. He groaned as lust pumped through him.

Working his hands over her generous hips, the equally generous swells of her buttocks, he explored all of her again as he’d longed to in ways that had kept him awake these past weeks. He devoured her mouth, its hint of honey shockingly seductive in its sweetness.

“I’m not the gentleman you take me for.” He panted against her mouth, and then catching the hem of her gown, he tugged her skirts up and exposed her legs, then sank his fingertips into her hips.

A keening cry spilled from her lips, and her head fell back.

Malcom swept down and suckled and bit at the long column of her neck. Working his lips over her, dragging more and more breathless sounds of desire from Verity.

He caught one of her legs and looped it around his waist; that deliberate angling brought his throbbing shaft against her core. Even through her modest undergarments, the heat of her burnt him. And an embrace that had begun of one purpose took on more powerful, all-consuming overtones that reduced Malcom to the feeling of this woman in his arms. He rocked himself against her.

Her lips formed a small circle. “Oh!” She breathed a ragged, hungry whisper of discovery, and it enflamed him all the more.

“Who are you, Verity Lovelace?” he whispered between each slant of his mouth over hers. Her reply was nonexistent beyond the little puffs of her every exhale.

His hunger for her was mindless, his body’s need for her all-consuming.

And was the reason he didn’t hear the door open—until it was too late.

Cursing, he wrenched away from Verity and shoved her behind him. “Bloody hell, Fowler.”

The old tosher stood in the doorway, making no attempt to hide the amused grin on his lips. “Merely came to see if you wanted me to toss ’er out.” His smile widened. “Oi see that ya don’t.”

“Get the hell out,” Malcom shouted.

Fowler was already drawing the panel closed.

The sound of his laughter carried in the hall, muffled, and then distant, before fading altogether.

Malcom scraped a hand through his hair.Bloody hell.It was one thing to have been weak not once, but twice where Verity Lovelace was concerned. It was an altogether different matter to have that weakness on full display before Fowler—or anyone.

He faced the young woman and found her busily smoothing her skirts. “You’ve quite unconventional servants.”

Had it not been for the faintest shake to her palms, he’d have believed she was as unaffected as her composed tones suggested.