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“They couldn’t,” she gasped, delighting in feeling scandalized.

“Are ye sure?” Her husband’s voice was cold, almost cruel, but Grace could hear the embers beneath, the ones that warmed her right up. The game, she realized, through her haze of liquor and lust, gave those embers room to glow. They could burn because he pretended that they did not.

Or maybe she was just foxed. Who could say?

“Are ye sure that no man caught sight of what is mine by rights?” His hands had been on her waist—a nearly proper way to hold one’s wife, if one did not account for how he was also kissing her senseless. Now, though, his palm slid up until he was cupping her breast, then pinching at the bud beneath the gown he’d chosen specifically for her.

Grace’s role shifted. She was now the repentant lover.

“No, never, my lord,” she assured him earnestly. “Only you.”

Caleb’s eyes flashed and Grace’s breath hitched. What was play and what was truth?

He leaned more bodily into her, his weightalmosttoo much where it held her against the cool stone wall of the banquet hall. Like Montgomery Estate, this building was ancient, and Grace found herself semi-hysterically wondering exactly how many misses had found themselves ravaged against this wall over the long centuries that it had stood.

“Only me?”

“Only you,” she said again.

Maybe it was foolish of Grace, to feel so confident in these words. But she did not retract them, not when Caleb groaned and briefly, deliciously pressed his hips against her. Not when he rucked up her skirts with hands that seemed careless until she realized how carefully he was blocking her body from view. Even if anyone did happen upon them, off in this dark little corner of theirs, they would not see what, as Caleb had so gruffly put it, was for his eyes only.

So she did not retreat, did not deny him, not when he caressed her, higher and higher. She let her head drop back against the wall, a little whimper breaking out of her.

“Hush,leannan,”he said. He pinned her skirts with his knee, then pressed the other hand to her lips.

Grace had, in the past, felt a hand over her mouth in violence. But this was not that. This hand was an offer. It was a request.

Let me show you what I can do, it said.Let me pleasure you so that you cannot keep quiet on your own. Let me have you here. Now.

She nuzzled more deeply into the touch. He grumbled approvingly. Grace wanted to preen at the sound.

They couldn’t speak; they had to be silent, so when he needed both his hands to keep her skirts out of the way and to keep caressing, higher, higher, until he was skimming barely over the edges of her core, not touching her where she needed it most, but keeping enough contact to stop her ardor from dimming or even flickering.

With his mouth on her, his tongue against hers, she was socloseto him, to all of him. His mouth on her, that evening on the dining room table, it had been intimate, yes. But this?

She opened her eyes, risking a glimpse. His own eyes were closed, thank the Lord, his lashes fanned out over the upper edges of his cheekbones. It made him look…not soft, but softer. Approachable. Human. Touchable.

And she wanted to approach. She wanted to touch. She ran her hands over his shoulders, down his arms, then back up again. Her movements only fluttered to a stop when he slipped a finger inside her, then another, then used his thumb to press against that sensitive spot.

Caleb,she said, the word silent against his mouth.

“Yes.” He hissed it into her skin.

She whimpered.

He pressed, rubbing and touching and cajoling, whispering hoarse Gaelic in her ear, until she tumbled off into ecstasy.

The pleasure was almost too much to bear when he kept moving his fingers inside her, kept rubbing that sensitive spot until the last tremors left her body. She hovered right on the edge oftoosensitive and was almost, almost tempted to pull back, to put some distance between them.

But she wasn’t ready, wasn’t ready to be done feeling close to him. What if they were never this close again? What if this stolen moment was all they could have?

And what if she could keep stealing the moment, could pull them closer together? Could she do it? Was it worth the risk to try?

Maybe not, but she couldn’t let go.

She instead tried to press herself ever closer to him. God bless the British army and all that, but she absolutelyloathedhis thick woolen coat at the moment, as it hid him from her, made it impossible for her to get her hands on him.

“Please,” she moaned, scrabbling at the fastenings. Surely this could not be practical in battle, could it?