This woman—this beautiful, unbiddable, all-too-perceptive woman—was his personal embodiment of danger. She could ruin him. Destroy everything he’d worked to become.

And she would do it all with a smile.

Charlotte didn’t know what to make of the man standing in her bedchamber. He looked like Piers, and he spoke like Piers. But a darkness hovered about him. It was as though Piers’s shadow had come to life, unstitched itself from the person of Lord Granville, and traveled down the corridor to pay her a call.

“May I ask you something?”

He spread his hands in invitation.

“Are you reconsidering the engagement?”

He paused, a bit too long for her comfort. “No.”

“Then why have you ignored me so thoroughly?”

“You don’t want a truthful answer to that question.”

“Yes, I do. I really do.”

She needed to know what was going on in his mind. Even if it hurt her pride.

He began to cross the room in slow, deliberate strides. “Because, Charlotte, it simply wouldn’t do. Every time we share the same room, I think of nothing but touching you. Holding you. Tasting you.”

He continued moving toward her.

Charlotte began to back away.

She wasn’t intimidated. She was excited beyond measure, craved the hardness of his body pressed close to hers. Still, some instinct made her take steps in retreat.

When she saw the wild gleam in his eye, her body thrummed in response and she understood why. He wanted the chase. She wanted to be pursued.

“So I have to ignore you, you see,” he continued in that low, devastating tone of aristocratic command. “If I were to look at you, I would want to strip you naked. If we conversed, I would need to hear you sigh and moan. That’s not proper drawing room behavior.”

He had her backed up against a wall now. Which was a fortunate thing, because her legs had gone weak.

“In fact, if I let myself come anywhere near you”—he caught her wrists and lifted them, pinning her arms to the wall—“I’d have your skirts tossed up to your ears and my cock buried inside you before the rest of them looked up from their tea.”

Excitement pulsed through her veins. He had her at his mercy, but she didn’t feel the slightest whisper of fear.

“And that,” he said, staring hard at her mouth, “would be very bad manners.”

“Well . . .” Charlotte wet her lips, daring to look up at him. “I’ve never been too concerned with etiquette.”

His response was like lightning. In a flash, he’d pressed her against the wall with the full length of his body. Desire sparked along her nerve endings as he kissed her, making her tingle from crown to toes.

He overwhelmed her. All of her. His tongue explored her mouth. His chest rubbed against hers, drawing her nipples to tight, aching peaks. His arousal made firm demands against her belly.

He released her arms. His hands slid downward, to her hips. He grasped the frail linen of her shift in impatient handfuls, hiking it to her waist. Then he attacked the buttons of his trouser falls, loosing them one by one.

Charlotte reached between their bodies. She hadn’t been brave enough to touch him there the other day, and she meant to make up for it now. She reached inside his trouser falls, freeing his hardening erection from the confining fabric.

Emboldened by his unsteady breath and the cloak of darkness, she took her time exploring. Stroking up and down the hot, steely thickness filling her hand, skimming her thumb over the broad, silky crown. A bead of moisture welled beneath her touch, and she spread it in widening circles.

With a muttered curse, he grasped her bared backside and lifted her straight off her feet.

Startled, she gave a little shriek of pleasure. Her spine met the damask silk-covered wall. She wrapped her legs over his hips. She wasn’t certain if that was what he had in mind, but it seemed the thing to do.

He seemed to like it.

His erection swelled even larger in her grip, and he began to thrust against her. Slowly. Teasing.

Yes. Oh, yes.

She was reeling, stunned by the speed of her body’s response. In a matter of mere moments, she’d grown desperate for him. She tangled her free hand in his hair, drawing his mouth to hers for a deep, openmouthed kiss.

He rocked his hips in a rhythm, rubbing the head of his cock up and down the seam of her sex. Parting her with firm, insistent strokes. The smooth pressure teased her most sensitive places, driving her hard and fast up a steep mountain of bliss.

When he encountered the hot, wet evidence of her arousal, he groaned against her mouth.

She ached to be filled.

He broke their kiss, panting. “Now?”

The word skipped down her spine. “Now.”

“Guide me in.”

She tilted her hips and positioned his hard, eager length where it fit with her body. Where she needed it to be. Then she withdrew her hand from between them and clutched his shoulders.

He pushed into her in strong, incremental thrusts. “God,” he moaned. “You’re so tight.”

She wasn’t certain if he meant that as a good or a bad thing, but it was undeniably the truth. Despite her feverish arousal, her body was still painfully new to the act. Their joining was torturously, maddeningly slow, and then—when she began to vibrate with need, as though the tension would break her apart—blindingly fast.

He hadn’t even seated his full length inside her when her crisis began to build. She couldn’t wait any longer. She pushed her own hips forward, frantic for more of him, all of him. Deeper, harder, faster.

There.

When at last his pelvis met hers, the first brush of sweet friction flung her over the edge. She shook and cried out, clinging to his neck as he thrust unrelentingly, pushing her through crest after crest of pleasure.

He kissed her as she floated down from the peak. She locked her ankles together at the small of his back. They moved together in an easy rhythm.

She tugged his mussed cravat free of his neck, letting it fall to the floor before sliding her palms beneath the open collar of his shirt. She ran her hands over the taut, straining muscles of his shoulders and explored the sprinkling of dark hair on his chest. She kissed his neck, ran her tongue over his Adam’s apple, nuzzled the light growth of whiskers on his jaw. Loving the taste of him, and all the masculine textures of muscle and scruff and sweat.

He froze, anchoring her to the wall, as deep inside her as he could possibly go. His chest was heaving.