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“He kept on berating me but all I could see was this drop of spittle on his lip. I just kept staring at it, wondering if it would fall or just cling there forever. Imagine it, the Marquess spitting. ”

The pain of the memory was etched into Alistair’s face, and Violet wanted to enfold him into her arms to soothe him. But she didn’t. She just kept ahold of his hands.

“You don’t have to tell me anymore,” she said eventually, “if you don’t wish to. But I’m here to listen, if you’d like to go on.”

Alistair shrugged as if it were nothing at all, those summer months with his father, but he continued his story.

“He woke me before dawn every morning for a three-hour course of calisthenics, horseback riding, and fencing. Which was exhausting but turned out to be my favorite part of the day because afterward he locked me in the library and made me memorize the estate ledgers.

“‘Your training in rigor,’ my father called it, as I sat there, squirming and hungry, trying to remember the catalogs of crops, or the tallies of rents, or who requested which land modification or equipment repair.

“I had to memorize all of it. And if I failed, which I invariably did, there would be no dinner. On and on it went for two months.”

“That’s horrible, Alistair. He shouldn’t have treated you that way. You were just a child.”

“Perhaps,” Alistair said. “I was rather a failure. I still am.”

He shrugged again, as if it were nothing, but Violet could see how he’d carried those words around with him all these years. As if they were sharp little knives just beneath the surface of his skin, waiting to cut him.

She tugged on his hands, and when he came close enough to wrap her arms around him, she did.

“Tell me one thing, Violet,” he said, dropping his forehead to rest on hers.

“What would you like to know?” she asked, knowing the words would be her undoing.

It was this Alistair, the gentle, vulnerable one who suddenly showed his face in the middle of their conversations that did it. The version of him who told her the truth of himself. Who made her feel comfortable. Violet never felt comfortable.

The hot-tempered, arrogant version of him could set her body on fire, but this one had the potential to do much more harm, because this one could do the same with her heart.

“Why did you ask him to kiss you?” he asked, and Violet felt his heart beat faster against her body.

He was nervous, another echo of their time on the balcony three years past, and she knew however she answered was important to him. She stepped backward just a little so she could look him in the eye and tell him the truth.

“I wanted to know,” she said evenly, “if it would be the same. As it was with you.”

“It isn’t,” he whispered, a little hitch in his voice.

Violet lifted her shoulders in that small, delicate movement she’d learned. “How could I know until I tested it? I’d only been kissed once before, on the night that James died. And that wasn’t the same at all.”

She looked at him, needing him to understand.

“How could I know if the difference was what came after that kiss or if it was you?”

“It wasn’t what came after,” he said. “And it’s not me. It’s us. ”

“I didn’t want it to be us.” She reached for him again. “I wanted to rid myself of you.”

“And now?”

She closed her eyes against her own wanting. “And now I can’t think of anything else but you.”

“Sit down, Violet.”

He went to his knees in front of her and then reached up to cup her face in his hands. “You’re magnificent. Unlike anyone I’ve ever met. And—” He abruptly stood back up.

“And what?” Violet asked, afraid the pendulum of Alistair Crawford had swung away from her once more. She got to her feet as if to follow him. “And what, Alistair?”

“And I don’t know what you need. Or how to give it to you. I don’t know anything, Violet, except that I don’t deserve you.”

She held his stare for just a moment—his dark eyes swimming with a fervency she’d not seen in them before.

“That’s not my judgment, Alistair,” she said quietly. “Whose is it? Your father’s?”

When he didn’t answer she stepped closer. “Whose?” she demanded.

“Mine. But I will ignore it if you will.” He turned to her and tipped up her chin. “You are sober?”

She was. And she kissed him again to prove it.

This kiss was different from the ones that had come before.

It was gentle and soothing, a whisper of skin against skin, of skimming lips and soft, soulful tongues.

It was a kiss that took its time and let itself unfold, one that was gentled by the truths they had shared with each other and the understanding that they both felt whatever this was between them.

As the kiss continued though, with tongues that slid against each other in the heat of their mouths, it become more frenzied. Lustful. Violet sucked his bottom lip and then she sucked on his tongue. The growl he emitted told her he liked it, so she did it again.

Her arms were wrapped around his neck, and he gently unwound them and pressed her down to sit.

“What are you doing?” she asked, unwilling to let him go, and he grinned, the devil back in his face.

“You’ll see,” he said and moved his mouth to the delicate joining of her earlobe and her neck.

“I’d like to know first,” Violet replied, but her head had rolled back against the cushion of the chair as he pressed kisses to her neck, and her words came out as a whisper directed to the heavens instead of to him.

Alistair smiled and sat back on his haunches. “As you wish, my sweet. I’m happy to explain it to you, but I’ll have to do it from all the way back over here.”

Violet lifted her head, disgruntled at the loss of his lips and tongue, and pulled him back to her.

“As I thought,” he murmured and continued his exploration of her jawline and neck.

She opened her thighs wider so he could nestle in between them, and she kissed him again until there was nothing in her consciousness but warm, wet tongues and hot breath and the smell of him that seemed to eradicate all of her other senses.

He ran his fingers across her breast as best he could, searching for the nipples encased in the thick woolen fabric. He grunted and gave up when he couldn’t find them, moving further down to reach under the hem of her dress to grasp her slippered foot.

She gasped as he traced the small, rounded bone of her ankle and then slid one large finger up the inside of her leg.

Her skin tingled, alive beneath his touch as his hand climbed higher and higher.

He massaged her calf and then tickled the crook of her knee.

He caressed the smooth, plump skin of her thigh.

“May I,” he asked as he began to lift up the hem of her gown further.

“You may,” Violet said, her hands reaching down to tangle his chestnut locks.

“Hold it up for me, Violet.”

He took one of her hands from his head and placed it on her skirt. She nodded, the joining between her legs throbbing in time with her heartbeat.

And then his hands were sliding along her inner thigh, making playful little circles on the soft skin above her garters until she made a whimpering noise and thrust her hips up against him.

“Is this what you want?” he whispered. “You want my fingers here?”

“Yes.” She was panting now, breathless.

She could think of nothing else in the world but having his fingers fill her where she was empty, of them taking away the ache she’d felt there since the Waverly Ball.

“Please,” she whispered.

“At your service, my dear. Or would you like them a little further up?”

His wicked fingers moved further, discovering, exploring, until they found the seam in her drawers and opened them.

Alistair groaned when he found her wet, ready curls. They were honey-colored too, exuberant like the tresses that had fallen out of her severe bun and attached themselves to the perspiration on her neck.

“Open for me, Violet,” he said, nudging her thighs further apart.

He wanted to see and taste and feel her. He wanted her bare to his gaze, wet to his touch. He wanted to rip that terrible dress right off her, but on that point he stayed his hand and brushed his fingers along the opening of her drawers instead.

Soon she was making delightful noises of surprise and pleasure that made his cock ache. His fingers breached her soft folds and caressed her wetness.

“There,” she whispered, and he groaned into her neck. Kissing and caressing her lips while he slid one finger up inside her. She pressed up against him, her entire body trembling.

“There.” She moved her hips against his fingers. “ There. ”

“Is that what you want?’ he murmured into her ear as he held her close to his chest. “I’ll always give you what you want. Everything you want.”

He crooked his finger upward into her channel so that he could massage the sensitive place within her, and she moaned and pressed herself closer.

He watched her excitement mount and felt as if he too might explode. All he could think about was replacing that finger with his cock and how tight and wet and sweet she’d be around him.

He took his thumb and rubbed it lightly across her hard knob of pleasure.

She moaned again and he knew her desperation: to be touched, held, possessed.

He felt the same, but he wouldn’t take his pleasure.

This was for her. It was the apology for Pembrooke’s he hadn’t been able to give.

It was an anatomy lesson she’d never learn in a book.

It was his pleasure to watch her take hers.

He pressed his mouth to hers to swallow her sounds. His own arousal climbed higher and higher as he caressed her, as if their two bodies really were one. Her pleasure, his. And his, hers. His hips were thrusting against her soft thigh, all the layers of clothing between them be damned.

“Oh,” she whispered, and she churned her hips against his hand. He pressed his cock into her leg in answer. Rutting as if he were a teenager and not caring one bit.

“Oh… I… I…” He held her close to him, one finger still wickedly inside her as she circled her hips. “I don’t know what to do.”

“Don’t think,” he whispered into her ear. “Enjoy. There is nothing wrong with pleasure, Violet.” He brushed his thumb against her knob once more. “Let me feel you enjoy it. Let me feel you let go.”

And Violet was gone.

Her body trembled harder and harder as he caressed her, and then he felt her deep shudder from the burst of exhilaration that shot through her. He held her in his arms as she shook from one wave of gratification after another.

She looked up at him then, a dazed expression in her eyes as he began to pull away from her to put their clothing back to rights.

“No,” she said. “Not yet.”

She wasn’t ready for this moment to end.

He’d unleashed in her a torrent of passion and desire that she’d kept stowed away for years.

Now that it was loose, she found she didn’t know how to pack it up and put it all away again.

It was still swirling about her, making her feel dazed, delightfully wanton, and completely unready to go back to her normal life.

She pulled him back into her embrace, placing her hand against the bulge of him, and he moaned at her touch.

“Not here, Violet,” he whispered.

“Let me touch you,” she said. “Please. Like you touched me.”

“You don’t know what you’re saying.”

But he was trembling with need as she had been just moments ago, and she knew it. She may not be as experienced in carnality as he was, but the body was her territory. She understood it, could read it as well as any topographical map.

She pressed him again with her fingertips and he shuddered, his body shaking. She knew her fingers seared him, as his had burned against her skin. She slid her thumb over the sensitive head of him.

“Violet…” he was practically begging her now, pressing himself into her hand.

She caressed him again and whispered, “I have you.”

She watched him, his eyes dark and feral. “Please,” he said again and pressed into her palm once more. She brushed his erection with her fingers.

“Anything,” she said. “Anything you want.”

The sound of her voice and the press of her fingers pushed him over.

She felt him shake and then cry out, as he spent himself against the inside of his trousers.

He collapsed forward, his head in her lap and one hand wrapped around her foot, grasping at her ankle bone as if to hold on for dear life.

She brushed the hair away from his temple and carded her fingers through his locks. “I have you,” she whispered again.