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satin away and left herself in only her chemise and a silken pair of drawers.
    She retook her seat and gently lifted her hand to her chest. At first she only lightly brushed her collarbone, and yet her body was so on edge that even that slight touch set her on fire and made the sensitive area between her legs throb in a most shocking and pleasurable fashion.
    Her body’s needs almost immediately overcame her shyness and uncertainty. With a daring she never would have claimed if questioned, Isabel’s fingers moved lower until she cupped her own breast. She found her nipple was already hard and exquisitely sensitive after being ignored for so long. As she swirled her finger around the bud, she thought again of the book.
    It had advised that she could think of a man’s hands on her while she did this. But Hartley, while a good husband, wasn’t exactly her fantasy. She didn’t know about the “lady’s” footmen, but her own were either too old or too young to make a good fantasy lover… Plus, she feared if she did that she would never be able to look them in the eye again.
    Which left some other man. She shut her eyes, willing herself to form a faceless stranger to be her lover in her mind.
    Only when he materialized, he wasn’t faceless at all. Looming over her, his hand replacing her own on her sensitive breast, was the Marquis of Lyndham.
    Isabel’s eyes flew open.
    Hadn’t she just chided herself for thinking of him, and now this ? This wickedness where she imagined him replacing his hand on her nipple with his mouth, swirling his tongue around and around until her body exploded in liquid fire and she couldn’t make any sound except incoherent gasps of pleasure.
    She blinked as she realized her hand on her breast had begun to pluck harder and the other hand, well, somehow she had managed to slide it into the slit in her drawers and cup her own sex quite shockingly.
    Worse, it felt good . No matter how she had lost her final shreds of resistance, now that she was touching and stroking herself with such an earnest drive for pleasure, her whole body shook with it. It was better than anything, and she wanted to take it to its logical end.
    She shoved aside her regrets and reason and dove back into her fantasy, allowing her image to be Lyndham since that was what she craved. Lyndham driving his tongue between her lips as his fingers worked along the slick, hot petals of her sex and finally spread her open and breached her.
    She panted as she stroked herself, jerking with every burst of pleasure, shaking as she neared completion and suddenly, without warning, she found it.
    Her whole body spasmed as her sex clenched and released around her fingers, soaking them as she cried out with absolute pleasure.
    She stayed in the chair for a long while, trembling as her body came down from the intense high she had just experienced. For the first time perhaps in years, she was relaxed and satiated and utterly spent.
    But within a few moments, her mind cleared. She realized just how she had found that release. With a book she had stolen from a man she had then fantasized as her lover.
    As her cheeks heated and she flung herself into her bed to hide from what she had done, she wondered if she would ever be able to face herself…or Lord Lyndham again.

Chapter Three
    “So often we hide our true natures, but what do we fear? The judgment of others? Or the revelation of our true selves?” —The Ladies Book of Pleasures
    Seth found that he continued to contemplate the fetching Lady Avenbury the next morning as he paced his office. In fact, she was such a distraction that he couldn’t concentrate on the paperwork he was obliged to finish before he could join the day’s festivities.
    It was the oddest thing. After all, while it was unusual to meet a lady in the library after midnight, their exchange had been nothing but appropriate.
    Except that she had seemed nervous. A bewitching kind of nervousness that made her lick her lips,