Ria sat. For reasons that were not immediately apparent to her, she wanted to weep. She looked down at his blackened knuckles, at the smear of soot that crossed the back of his hand, but felt only the gentleness of his touch. She blinked back tears.

"What is it?" he asked.

She had not even realized he was watching her. "You make me afraid for you."

"I do? I assure you, it is not my intent."

Ria found it difficult to suppress the quaver in her voice. "You are pushed past the point of exhaustion, yet you are here. I cannot imagine what has befallen you, but it seems to me that you were fortunate to survive it, and still you have pressed on. Of course I am afraid for you. You demonstrate the good sense of a bag of beans."

With only the slightest encouragement from him, she was in his lap, her arms around his neck. The folds of her billowing white nightshift were quickly blackened with soot, but she was careless of those stains.

No lily, she reminded herself, but an immodest rose.

She kissed him as if her life would have no significance if she did not. Her mouth slanted across his, parting his lips with the pressure of hers. Her arms slid forward, and she cupped his face lightly in her palms as she moved her mouth to the corner of his, then to his cheek, his temple, and finally along the line of his jaw. She caught him again, deeply this time, her tongue pushing against his. She felt her breasts swell even before his arms circled her back and pressed her closer. His woolen frock coat was gently abrasive against her cotton shift, and the buttons pulled at the material. The air between them was warm,but it threatened to become charged with heat.

His fingers wound in her unbound hair; it was like dipping his hands into cool spring water. He kissed her hard, needy for the taste of her, eager to be rid of the stale scent of smoke that was in his nostrils, and breathe in the sweet fragrance of lavender and mint that was peculiarly hers. It did not matter that she was in his arms-he felt that he was more in hers. If he had meant to shelter her by drawing her close, then he had not fully comprehended what she would give him in return. She was the one with the sheltering heart.

The knowledge threatened to overwhelm him.

Sensing that something had changed, Ria broke off the kiss and buried her face in the smoky folds of West's neckcloth. She held him tightly a moment longer while her uneven breathing quieted, then she raised her face. "I hope you are not in want of an apology."

He found he still had the wherewithal to chuckle. "And I hope you are not in want of a flannel. You will need several to clean your face."

Ria touched her cheeks, then regarded her smudged fingertips.

"Here, too," he said, placing an index finger against her lips, then showing her the evidence. "You are as soot-smeared as any chimney sweep."

She arched one brow at him, reminding him how she had come to be so. Her reproving look did not last long, however. She held out her hand to him. "Come. I know what is needed now."

Minutes earlier he would have sworn truly that he was incapable of rising to his feet, let alone rise in any other manner. He had underestimated both the pull of Ria's siren's smile and his response to it. It seemed very little effort was required on her part to move him. He could not even be unhappy about it.

Ria led him into the bedroom and closed the door. Without a word, she helped him out of his frock coat, his shirt, then guided him to the bed, bade him sit, then grappled with his boots. The more she touched him, the sootier she became, and never once did she try to avoid that end.

West lay back on the bed, naked save for his drawers, and watched her boldly strip off her nightdress before she climbed into bed with him. Her pale breasts were tipped in pink, and they brushed invitingly against him as she moved close. He looked at his hands, then showed them to her. "I will mark your skin if I touch you with these."

She said nothing, but caught his wrists and brought his hands to her breasts. She allowed his fingertips to graze her skin and his thumbs to pass across her nipples. The trail of his hands left the faint smudges he predicted. Ria raised her solemn gaze to his. "And I will be made beautiful by them," she whispered.

"Everywhere you touch me."

He could have told her she was already beautiful, but was not confident of her accepting it. He showed her instead, rolling onto his side and pressing her back, then placing his mark on her, first with his hands, then his mouth.

He swept back the hair at her temples, sifting the silky strands with his fingertips. His lips found the soft hollow where her pulse beat so faintly and he kissed her there. Her skin was warm, flawless. He kissed her forehead, the corner of her eye. His head dipped, and he caught her earlobe with his teeth andtugged, then his lips touched that spot. He flicked it with the tip of his tongue and heard her breath hitch.

His smile imprinted itself on the skin of her throat. He nuzzled the curve of her neck and sipped lightly on her flesh.

It left a mark that was different from his fingerprints on her breasts, but no less proof of his intimate possession. He kissed the stamp he had left on her skin, then made another.

She moved restlessly against him, urging him without words. He sensed her impatience but would not be hurried. In this, at least, he would have his way. She could not appreciate it now, but she would thank him for it later.

"You're amused." The words came from deep in Ria's throat, a husky, heavy whisper that was foreign to her.

"Mmm." West lifted his head and nudged his mouth against hers, parting her lips. Her breath was warm, sweet. "Always," he said. He kissed her for a long time, holding her still with nothing but the pressure of his mouth on hers. He made that kiss an end in its own right, sucking on her full lower lip, her tongue, tracing the ridge of her teeth, licking at the sensitive, velvet underside of her lips, making them wet, making the whole of her mouth humid and hot.

She seized his neck when he would have drawn back and would have held her to him if he had permitted it. What he did was remove her hands and place a kiss in the heart of each palm; then he let them fall away and find purchase in the sheets as he bent to her again.

This time his mouth settled at the hollow of her throat. He made a damp trail to her breasts. Her heart beat a steady tattoo that he could feel against his lips. He kissed her there, then again at the curve of her breast. He took the puckered aureole into his mouth and suckled her. Her nipple was as perfectly formed as a rosebud and equally tender; he rolled it between his lips, flicked it with his tongue.

His hand fell on her hip, steadying her as she rose off the bed in a catlike arch. "Shhh," he said, not to quiet her, but to calm her. "I have you. I shall always have you."

He saw her mouth part as though she meant to say something, then she merely shook her head. Her eyes were dark at the center, her expression wondering. He thought he might even know what she was thinking, though one could never be certain about the bent of Ria's thoughts. "When you come to the precipice again," he told her, "I will let you fall. Then I will catch you." She nodded, not because she understood, he thought, but because she trusted him. The enormity of what he would do to her, what she would allow him to do, squeezed his heart and stole his breath.

She saved him from himself. He had no doubt of it as her fingers wound in his hair and gently tugged.

That intuitive sense of hers, the one that linked her to him and allowed her not only to see his soul, but to be unafraid of it, had divined his faltering resolve. It was not that he did not desire her still, but that he did not want to desire her. He wondered if she could distinguish the difference when he could barely do the same.

He felt her tug again and saw the corners of her mouth lift in a shy smile. No siren's tasty curve this time; no coy, flirty beckoning. She made herself vulnerable with her honesty, and in doing so made him want to be her equal. "Witch," he said, then he bent his head and took her other breast into his mouth.

West was glad for the slim bars of sunlight that touched the bed and lay their transparent splendor acrossRia's body. He slid his hand under one, stroking her hip, letting his fingers trail lightly along the curve of her bottom. She stirred again. His hand moved upward to her waist, his thumb passing over her abdomen, dipping slightly when her skin retracted in response.

She fit him perfectly, as if every curve was made to fill his hand. He made a slow study of her, learning the shape of her shoulder, her arm, the delicate depression at the inside of her elbow. Her breasts spilled over his palms, firm and taut; her skin had the blush of a ripening peach.

His hands slid along the length of her thighs, the back of her knees. The pressure of his fingertips, light but insistent, made her part her legs for him. He slid down her body, no longer making a trail with his hands, but with his mouth.

West stripped off his drawers and pitched them over the side of the bed. He urged Ria's knees upward as he bent between them. That she found a way to hook her legs over his shoulders was her own doing, but it meant the intimate kiss he pressed to her mons began as a smile.

He felt her give a start at the first touch of his lips, and again when he applied his tongue. She was warm and humid here; desire had made her damp. Now he used his mouth to make her wet.

All around them were the sounds of the school stirring: the chatter of students on their way to the dining room, followed by the occasional admonition to be quiet; the march of girls in the corridor and in the stairwell; the housekeeper's scolding of one of the maids; the more determined step of the teachers as they herded stragglers to breakfast; and finally, the knock on the door to Ria's apartments and the concerned inquiry from the other side as to the state of her health.

Ria heard none of it above the sound of her own breathing and the dull, distant roar in her ears. West was aware of it only peripherally; the sharpest focus of his attention was Ria. They might have been ten leagues distant, for all the impact it had.

West lifted his head. From the quick sips of air, the tension in her frame, the way her back curved, and her soft lips parted, he judged that she was ready for him. He raised himself up, dropping one shoulder to let Ria's leg fall, and cupped her bottom. She helped him, lifting her hips, but her eyes remained on his face.

Her body was better prepared to receive him than she was. West found her hand and guided it to his erection. "Watch," he told her. "Watch what we shall do together."

Chapter Ten.

Ria did exactly as West instructed her: she watched his first thrust and the lift of her own hips taking him.

She closed her eyes then. She could not help herself. For a moment she thought she would not be able to bear the pressure or the openness necessary to accommodate his entry. Her hands went to his forearms and gripped him tightly. She bit her lower lip so she would not embarrass herself by asking him to let her go.

"Ria?" He spoke her name as a question. "Look at me." Her lashes fluttered upward. He was in her asdeeply as was possible for a man to be. To the hilt, she thought, exactly as it should be. There was no pain now; she could not even say that it was precisely pain that she had felt. There was discomfort, but there was also the sense of an ache being massaged that made her think the discomfort would pass. "I can stop now," he told her. "But only now." His voice came to her from the back of his throat, both smooth and rough, like honey over sand. It prickled Ria's skin and made her shiver. "I know what I want," she said on a thread of sound. "And it's not that."

His hips jerked in response, withdrawing and plunging again. He leaned over her, resting his weight on his forearms, and slowly this time, exercising a degree of restraint he did not know he had, he taught her the rhythm that would pleasure both of them.

She was tight around him, but she fit him here as she did everywhere else. When she rose and fell, her breath quivered. He had prepared her to take him deeply and hard-she knew that now. When he had kissed her, every invasion of his tongue was a foreshadowing of what he was doing to her at this moment.

He had thrust and withdrawn, thrust again. He had made her reach for him, not just welcome his touch, but need it. Nothing had changed.

Ria reached for him, looping her arms around his back, splaying her fingers across the faint ridges that still striped his flesh. She felt him stiffen, then shake it off, accepting that she, of all the women he had known, had a right to touch him here. The tapered tips of her nails scored a light crease on either side of his spine from the small of his back to his nape, then down again. The shiver that slipped under his skin became hers as well, and when she felt herself being edged toward all that was unfamiliar about this pleasure, he was as good as his word, pushing her to experience the lightness of falling from a very great height, then sweeping her safely into his arms at the very moment she would have shattered.

He moved between her open thighs a minute longer, his strokes becoming short and quick, rocking them both hard. The last test of what remained of his strength and resolve happened as he felt his own release.

He jerked away from her, withdrawing, then collapsing beside her, giving up his seed to her naked hip and flat belly and finally to the sheets.

"So there will be no bastard," he said quietly.

Ria nodded. Her throat had closed, and she could not have spoken if she wanted to. She lay very still for several long minutes. His milky seed dried on her skin. She thought of this final mark on her and wished it made her feel as beautiful as all the others.

"You understand, don't you?" West turned on his side and raised himself on one arm. He placed a hand on her shoulder. "Ria?"

"Yes, of course." She worked the words past the tightness in her throat. "It was unexpected, that is all.

You were right to think of it. It speaks to your experience, I suppose, and my lack of the same."

Before he could reply, Ria edged herself off the bed and stood. "Allow me to wash and dress, and then I will have a bath drawn for you. You can sleep here. No one will disturb you. Mr. Dobson is bound to have seen your horse by now. He, at least, knows you are about." She picked up her nightdress and held it in front of her. "I will explain that you rode out from Ambermede and were sickened by a megrim."

West raised an eyebrow. "A megrim?"

"You have another ailment in mind? Scarlet fever? Typhus? The influenza?" "A megrim will do," he said, surrendering to the idea. She was taking him in hand now, and the tartness of her approach warned him he should proceed cautiously. "Eastlyn suffers from them on occasion, though he does not always take to his bed."

"Then he is a stalwart fellow." Ria felt some of her prickly humor fade and her heart twist a little as she saw the effort West was making to hold his head up. "More stalwart than you at the moment," she said in a gentler vein. "Let me care for you, then I shall hear your explanations. There will be some, I collect."

He nodded. There were no reserves remaining for him to brook an argument. Deprived of sleep for more than twenty-four hours, he could feel his eyelids begin to droop before Ria was out of the room.

The sun set early at this time of year. It was already dark, but not terribly late when West woke. He stretched slowly, feeling the aching pull of every one of his muscles. He was reminded of that unpleasant night outside Madrid, the one that he'd spent curled in a rock crevice waiting for the French to pass over his head. This was like that, only worse.

Opening his eyes a fraction, he stared blearily at the fire. What he could see of the room was not immediately familiar to him. He could not recall that he had ever owned bed curtains the exact color of wheat fields blanketed in sunshine, and was certain he did not secure each one to the posts of the bed with braided silk cords. An armoire that was also certainly not his, stood on claw feet between two shuttered windows. There was a large armchair near the fireplace, turned slightly more in his direction than toward the fire. He could still make out a faint depression in the cushion. A book lay on the arm of the chair, its spine turned toward him. He could not clearly see the lettering, but the burnished leather binding was one he knew from hours of holding it in his hands.

With a soft, throaty groan, West fell on his back, put a forearm across his brow, and stared up at the ceiling. It was then that Ria bent over the bed and into his view.

"Aaah, so you are awake," she said softly. "I wasn't certain."

As quickly as that, West thought, his world was righted, his balance restored. He smiled up at her, the curve of his mouth more drowsy than weary. His eyelids felt heavy, but his vision was finally clear.

Ria had drawn back her flaxen hair in a loose knot. The tails of a navy blue grosgrain ribbon rested on the ruffled collar of her muslin gown, and fine tendrils of hair that could not be tamed brushed her cheek and temples. Her eyes were bluer now than gray, bright with intelligence, and made even more luminous by the depth of her concern. She might have been an angel, save for a mouth that was too sweetly generous and a chin that was too stubborn. She was, in a word, lovely. He tried to recall if he had ever thought otherwise and chose to believe he had not; it was only that he was allowing himself to appreciate it now.

He remembered bits and pieces of the miracle she had wrought in making him human again. She had somehow coerced him out of bed after a bath was drawn for him in her dressing room. She bullied him into the copper tub and threatened him with a proper scrubbing if he was not up to managing the thing himself. From time to time she checked on him, always at a point, it seemed, when he was ready to fall asleep. She produced warm towels and a clean nightshirt, then pushed and prodded until he made good use of them. It was abuse of a kind and caring nature-or at least that was what she told him.

West pushed at the blankets that were neatly turned down across his chest. He was indeed wearing a nightshirt, and it happened to be his own. "You found my bag." "I did."

He came rather late to the realization of what else she found. His bag had been fixed to Draco's saddle, and fixed to the bag were Beckwith's paintings. "I don't suppose you checked your curiosity."

Ria's expression was genuinely regretful. "It probably will not matter to you, but I resisted for the better part of an hour."

"You're right," he said, pushing himself up. "It does not matter. What have you done with them?"

She pointed to her armoire. "I put them inside where they will not be found."

West pressed his thumb and forefinger to his eyes and rubbed. He wanted to shake off the dregs of sleep and was finding it absurdly difficult. "Did you ladle laudanum down my throat?"

"Only a little. Don't you remember? You complained the megrim was becoming quite real."

In point of fact, he did not remember, though he supposed she would not lie about it. "What is the time?"

"Not much after five, I should think." She anticipated his next question. "Evening, not morning. Can it be so important? You do not mean to go now, do you?"

West ran a hand through his tousled hair, leaving it unimproved by the effort. "No, not just yet. Draco has been cared for?"

"Hours and hours ago. He is in the stable now."

"Good. Thank you for seeing to him."

"Mr. Dobson did that." She hesitated, thinking perhaps she had sounded too acerbic. "You're welcome."

Looking up at Ria, realizing he had made her anxious and that nothing was proceeding as he had hoped, West sighed deeply. "God's truth, but I did not want you to see those paintings."

"I know."

"You looked at both?" He saw the affirmative answer in her clearly expressive eyes. "It's not important,"

he said after a moment. "I don't suppose I really thought it could be otherwise."

Ria sat on the edge of the bed. "I didn't want to see them, either, but I didn't know it until I had."

"If there is logic there, it escapes me." He held up a hand to forestall an explanation. "No, it is the sort of thing that only becomes more knotty when one tries to unravel it."

She nodded, accepting the truth of it. "Shall I bring you supper? It is roast beef tonight and Mrs. Jellicoe has made plum pudding."

"Not just yet." He reached for her hand and threaded his fingers through hers. "Have I been short with you? I did not mean to be. I apologize." "And I accept."

"Is there another apology I should make?" he asked. His clear green eyes held hers. "Should I speak to your regrets?"

Ria shook her head. "I have none."

"Even at the end?"

"No," she said firmly, willing him to believe her. "I did at first, but I have had time to think since then. I was naive to suppose it would end any differently. I would be frantic with worry if you had done otherwise."

West's head tilted to one side as he continued to regard her. "Then you would not want a child?"

Ria chewed on her bottom lip as she considered her reply. It was no longer as simple as saying yes or no. That option did not exist anymore, and hadn't for some time. "What I do not want," she said, "is to present you with a bastard."