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special part of you that will give great pleasure to us both.”
    Bliss licked over her. She was certainly awash in delight, but she wasn’t sure how this intimate touch was supposed to give him pleasure. Maybe it had something to do with how it was more blessed to give than to receive. She wasn’t about to argue with him. She was overflowing with pleasure enough for the two of them.
    “You’re breaking the rules, you know,” she finally managed to say as his hand continued to play a wicked game with her needy flesh. “That’s not a kiss.”
    He flicked her ‘pearl’ with his thumb and sparks of desire raced through her. “Want me to stop?”
    “Not for worlds.” She wrapped her arms around his broad shoulders and held on as if her hope of heaven depended upon it.
    “I wish it was a kiss,” he said huskily. “If there were room in this wardrobe, I’d drop to my knees and show you what well placed kisses can really do.”
    Just the thought of his mouth on that swollen achy nub made her insides spiral in on themselves. Something unraveled in an instant, like a spindle tossed high into the air, unwinding its thread in a corkscrew all the way down. Her limbs shuddered. Tristan abandoned her breasts to cover her mouth with his, so he could swallow up the cry that escaped her lips.
    She sagged against him while her insides pulsed. He held her, one arm around her waist to keep her upright, the other hand cupping the soft lips of her sex. Finally, she stilled.
    “Oh, Tristan, I do love you.”
    “Or are you only in the throes of lust?” he whispered back.
    “Aren’t they connected? Are we not body and spirit, blood and bone? Can you love me with only your mind or do you feel the need to touch me?”
    He pressed a kiss to her crown. “You have me there.”
    “Then you do love me.” Her heart fairly sang it. He had called her his dear one, after all. While everything else had coalesced into a dizzying fog of aching desire, she remembered that quite clearly.
    He removed his hand from the snug space between her thighs and let her skirts fall to the floor of the wardrobe. “God help me, I think I do,” he said hoarsely. “But it doesn’t change a thing.”
    “How can you say that? Love changes everything.”
    “No, it doesn’t. I am not a man with no obligations. I have dependents—tenants, crofters, and a gaggle of servants, all of them beholden to me for every bite of food in their bellies and each coin in their pockets.” He straightened to his full height and seemed to press his spine against the far wall of the wardrobe, trying to put a little space between them. “Then there is my family. They’re depending on me to rebuild the family’s fortune. I cannot simply please myself in this matter.”
    “So you’re still set on wooing Lady Florence.” It wasn’t a question. Delphinia simply had to say the words aloud in order to make them real to her mind.
    “I see no other course before me.”
    “Then you’re a fool, Tristan.”
    He didn’t respond. Instead, he shifted his weight to lift his arms over his head, reaching for something. Delphinia heard the scrape of metal on metal as he pulled the pins from the hinges on the wardrobe door. It sagged enough for Tristan to insert a finger through crack and unhook the latch. He pushed the door open.
    He slipped out of their hiding place and disappeared into the dark.
    Delphinia sank to the floor of the wardrobe, her skirts billowing around her like a collapsed sail.
    “But I’m the bigger fool,” she whispered to the darkness before she covered her face with her hands.
     

Chapter 5
     
    “Honestly, Del, I wish I was as brave as you. Imagine, getting locked into a wardrobe with Lord Edmondstone!”
    Harmony hugged her knees to her chest and rocked in excitement. Delphinia and her friend shared a room at the Duke of Seabrooke’s sumptuous estate. There were undoubtedly enough chambers in the capacious four-storey manor house for all His Grace’s