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Violet was not an accomplished kisser, not like the women Alistair usually sought out, but it couldn’t have mattered less to him at that moment. He didn’t know if he was her first kiss, but he hoped he was. He wanted to be the first man who swept her off her feet. He wanted to be everything.

And that wanting shocked the blazes out of him. Almost as much as when she looked him in the eye, said she didn’t want to dance, and pressed her lips against his instead. He didn’t have to be asked twice. He was a man who understood pleasure.

Alistair tilted her jaw to a better angle, slid one powerful thigh between hers, and let his tongue sink into the warm, welcoming embrace of her mouth. Her tongue met his own, tentatively at first, but then with more interest and passion as she became accustomed to the movements.

He groaned in the back of his throat, and she pressed her tongue further into his mouth in response. And then his hands, eager to resume their rightful place, landed on the small of her back and eased their way up to her arms and shoulders before cradling her cheeks.

“Violet,” he whispered, his lips nipping at the soft, fleshy part of her earlobe before moving down to caress her collarbone. He felt her shiver beneath his touch. “Look at me.”

He pulled his head back and looked into her blue eyes. He could barely see them, they were under such a cover of darkness, but he didn’t need to. He knew their color.

Blue, like the South Seas .

And as she became more aroused, sapphire, like the South Seas before a storm.

The smell of him invaded her nostrils, and the heat of him pressed through her gown.

Violet Goodwin practically swooned under the onslaught to her senses that was Alistair Crawford.

She wouldn’t have previously identified herself as a woman who swooned, but the evidence to the contrary was stacking up.

She pressed her hips into his, where she felt the hardness of his arousal. She knew what that hardness was, what it meant, and she liked it—the proof that he felt as much passion as she did.

And then he’d pulled back from her and looked into her eyes, and her body registered its objection at the loss of his lips. With no input from her mind at all, her hands reached up to his dinner jacket, her fingers grasped his lapels, and her arms pulled him closer. Again.

She had no idea what she was doing. She’d been involved in exactly one kiss so far in her twenty-one years, the one that had occurred on the night that James had died.

The memory of it had been quickly squelched in the horror of all that had come after, but even from her hazy recollection, she didn’t recall it being anything like this one.

And then Alistair licked her lower lip, and Violet made a small whimpering noise in response.

She opened her mouth for him to slip his tongue in again, and it was delicious.

Sweet and salty and virile, and he was rolling his hips so that she could feel his erection through the layers of her gown, and she opened her legs further so he could position himself as close as possible to that place within her that wanted. That ached.

He reached up a finger and trailed it along the creamy skin of her décolletage, so thoroughly hidden from view most of the time.

Violet moaned and arched her back. She pressed against him as he pressed against her; her lips devoured his as his devoured hers.

The feel of him eradicated any thinking from her mind whatsoever.

And then his thumb left her décolletage and slipped down the front of her bodice, skimming her nipple, and Lord above, she felt herself harden too, the exquisite pleasure of his touch shooting through her.

He growled low in his throat at the sounds she was making.

She hadn’t even realized until he responded that she was moaning and panting.

He was, at that moment, the center of her attention. And she was the center of his, recreating that little world on the balcony they’d made so long ago. A fugue state inhabited by the two of them and no one and nothing else.

Nothing else, that is, until she heard the wheezing from the garden patio.

Unfortunately, Violet knew all too well what that noise was, and she couldn’t ignore it.

Her patients that lived in the soot-filled alleys of Lower Manhattan made that same sound as they tried, and too often failed, to breathe.

The sound of it tore through their little world and instantaneously brought her back to reality. She shook her head once to clear her thoughts, and then she broke away from Alistair and ran.