ate in the morning, as they waved good-bye to successions of their guests, Felix studied his wife.

He could not stay away from her—that much had become obvious. Everything else, however, was pure chaos. With so much injury inflicted and only a fortnight into their marriage, how would they carry on? How would he carry on, knowing that a part of him was now at her mercy?

Before he climbed into bed with her last night, he already knew he would have to make amends when the sun rose. A simple matter, he’d told himself: When a man behaved badly, he admitted to his mistake and tendered an apology. Nothing to it.

But now, in the light of day, with her demeanor cool and opaque, he could not completely suppress his inner agitation. It felt as if he would be seeking her approval—and he had always adamantly refused to seek anyone’s approval.

When the house had at last emptied, he said to the woman who had not looked at him once the entire time they saw off their guests, “Well done, Lady Wrenworth. Word will spread now of your brilliance as a hostess.”

“And of our general domestic felicity, no doubt,” she countered, with that grande dame haughtiness she sometimes used with him.

He remembered how amusing he’d found it before, but now that capacity for sangfroid unsettled him.

Now she knew how to punish him.

“I have given the staff the rest of the day off, but there is a picnic basket that has been packed for us. Would you care to join me?”

“You are too kind,” she said coldly. “Five thousand a year is all I require from you, sir, nothing more.”

“Five thousand a year is the bare minimum of what I should do for you. I would be quite remiss as a husband if I left it at that.” A phaeton, with the picnic basket already in the boot, arrived. “Now, shall we?”

She shot him a brief, hard look. She knew he was exploiting the fact that she guarded her public image carefully and would not turn her back on him before the coachman who had brought the carriage: Even his gesture of apology was not free of manipulation.

It made him feel less vulnerable to be up to his old tricks.

He dismissed the coachman and took the reins himself. They drove in near complete silence. Had he felt more in charge of the situation, he would have wheedled and cajoled her, until she laughed despite herself. But he was as hesitant as he had ever been in his adult life, an uncertainty that smothered any lighthearted words that might otherwise have emerged.

For the picnic, he had selected one of his favorite spots in the surrounding countryside, atop a high bluff overlooking a panorama of hills and valleys. She made no comment on the beauty of the place, though she did help him weigh down the corners of the picnic blanket on a patch of lush, soft grass.

“Thank you,” he said, from the opposite corner of the blanket, down on one knee.

She made no reply, but rose to her feet and walked to the edge of the bluff to inspect the view, the hems of her skirts fluttering in the breeze.

He unloaded the contents of the picnic basket, setting out three salads, four meat pies, five bottles of beverages—and the basket was far from emptied.

“I said to pack what you like,” he told her. “It would seem the kitchen staff put in everything for which you’ve ever expressed a preference. We’ve enough to last us in a siege.”

She turned around and glanced at the laden picnic blanket. He was still extracting ever more foodstuff from the basket: a loaf of bread, a wedge of cheese, a bowl of fruit.

“If you want to bed me outdoors, you have but to say the word.” Her tone was uninflected. “No need to go to so much trouble.”

“When I wish to bed you outdoors, I will but say the word,” he answered. “But now I’d like to feed you.”

Her jaw worked. He could not tell whether she also blushed.

When she came and sat down at the edge of the picnic blanket, her features were quite composed. Ignoring all the prepared dishes, she reached instead for a cluster of grapes.

She’d done the same at a different picnic, the day he suggested that she become his mistress. An era of blissful ignorance, that, when he had no idea just how deeply he was already mired in his obsession.

“Did you and your family picnic?” he asked, uncorking a bottle of raspberry wine.

She studied him. He realized that she considered the picnic a Machiavellian game of power on his part, with every move intended to undermine her. He could not blame her for thinking so—he’d always enjoyed his upper hand in all their dealings.

His current motives, however, weren’t quite so despicable. He wasn’t callous enough to use her body when he needed to and ignore her the rest of the time, so he must make amends for his earlier cruelty. And he would like to do so while keeping his pride intact.

“Occasionally,” she said at last, rolling a single grape between her fingers. “But we didn’t have such fine foodstuff—for us it was tea and sandwiches.”

He poured a glass of wine for her. “How are they getting on without you?”

She peeled the skin from the grape in small strips. “Matilda has taken to directing the big move and my other sisters complain she is more draconian than I ever was.”

“She is the one who shared a room with you, is she not? She must have absorbed some of your generalship.”

The grape was now na**d. She looked down with a frown, as if vexed that she might actually have to eat something.

“Do you want to give that to me?”

She didn’t. She put the grape in her mouth and wiped her hand with a napkin. As she was about to toss the napkin aside, her face changed.

Between them hung the moment he’d thrown his handkerchief into the wastebasket.

“I’d like to repair matters between us,” he said impulsively.

She yanked another grape from the bunch. “Why, I did not know relations were strained.”

Her words were full of condescending bite. He realized with more than a little startlement that she might be mimicking him, rather than some imaginary dowager duchess.

“I behaved abominably and for that I apologize.”

She fixed him with a flat stare. “Why?”

“Why apologize?”

“Why did you behave abominably? You never do anything without a properly thought-out reason.”

If only that were, in fact, the case. He had been going from one ill-thought-out reason to the next ever since he first laid eyes on her.

“I wanted to preserve our interest in each other. Since we are to be married a long time, God willing, it seemed prudent to not erode our delight in each other too soon.”

An easy lie, since he knew precisely why he stayed away from her: to preserve the fortress that he had made of himself, the foundation of which was sliding into an unseen abyss even as he spoke.

She snorted. “I’m disappointed, sir. You can lie better than that.”

He could not help smiling a little. “I love it when you take me to task.”

She served herself some cucumber salad and rammed her fork rather forcefully into the mound on her plate. “So this is how you repair relations then, by feeding me more lies.”

“No, this is what happens when you ask too many questions,” he said. “You should let my action speak for itself.”

• • •

Louisa set aside her plate. “What action?”

His hand, the one on which he wore the carnelian signet ring, toyed with his glass. She was reminded of the night she first saw him, of her—in hindsight, especially—utterly justified hesitation to lift her eyes to his face. As if her instincts had already sensed that he would prove to be the bane of her existence.

He rose with the grace of a big cat and came toward her. Quietly and efficiently, he removed her hat and maneuvered her onto her back.

“You’ve done this before and it doesn’t prove anything,” she said.

He gave no reply, except to push up her skirts.

“The crudeness of your method is excruciating,” she went on, keeping her tone clipped.

The grass was cool and fragrant beneath her, the sun warm on her face and the exposed band of skin above her stockings. She ought to feel a certain mortified titillation from the fact that he was making a spectacle of her where anyone could chance upon them, but she only felt like a very small raft on a very turbulent sea, buffeted from every side by both need and fear.

He had a powerful, effortless hold on her and he knew it.

The only thing he didn’t know was the exact strength of this sorcery he wielded.

He removed her drawers and parted her thighs. There had been a time when she would have gladly opened her legs to tantalize him, when the pleasure he brought her did not immediately touch off a cascade of pain in her heart. But now she had to bite down on her lower lip in order to not clamp her limbs together again.

“And the grapes were too tart,” she said when he still didn’t reply.

He pushed her legs farther apart, kissed her on the inside of her thigh, and made love to her with his lips and tongue. The wickedness of it shocked her, as well as the intimacy. The pleasure made her gasp and moan. His tongue was so clever, so demanding, and he knew exactly where to stroke with his fingers and when to apply the pressure of his teeth.

The peak he took her to was sharp and voluptuous. But he did not stop. As if that initial burst of pleasure were but a foundation on which to build ever bigger cl**axes. And he created those ever bigger cl**axes, until they came right on the heels of one another, until she was but one sustained vibration of extraordinary pleasure.

Afterward she kept her eyes shut, unable to face him. He rearranged her skirts so she was decent—if one didn’t inquire too closely into the whereabouts of her drawers. And when the heaviness of her breaths no longer blocked out all the other sounds, she heard the soft pops of several grapes being detached from the bunch.

“You are right,” he said half a minute later. “The grapes are too tart, especially compared to the sweetness of you.”

Her face, already warm, turned hot.

“I will also concur that my method is crude. And if you still feel this proves nothing, let me know, and I will gladly repeat the experiment and see if we can’t generate better results.”

She forced herself to open her eyes and sit up—she had to face him at some point. He was on the far side of the picnic blanket, reclined with his weight on his elbows, studying her from beneath his eyelashes in just such a way as to make her heart thud. Reminding her that even when he seemed somewhat humbled, he was still every inch the predator.

“Can I serve you something?” he murmured solicitously. “You’ve scarcely touched any food—and of course the grapes must have been terribly unsatisfying.”

She flushed again. “No, thank you. I’m not hungry.”

He drank from his wineglass. “I am. For you, that is.”

She swallowed. “Then you must exercise your husbandly prerogative.”

He held her gaze. “Do you want me to? And do not answer as an obliging wife—I already know I have an obliging wife. Do you wish it?”

Yes. No. “I don’t know.”

“Hmm,” he said. Then he beckoned her with one finger. “Come here.”

She should remain exactly where she was, at a safe distance. But she was pulled in by the same undeniable force that had had her revolving around him from the very beginning, a once freewheeling asteroid caught in the gravitational pull of a ruthless planet.

There was no such thing as a safe distance from him.

She lay down next to him. He shifted his weight so he was on his side, his head in his palm. His other hand took hold of her chin, keeping her face turned toward him—as if she could look away.

“You have such pretty eyes,” he murmured, “and such pretty skin.”

His words invoked a black pain not unlike the one she’d experienced whenever she’d thought of his eventual wife. She was his wife now, but the anguish remained the same, that of being replaced and forgotten.

“If you were trying to preserve your interest in me earlier, it must mean now you are trying to weary of me sooner,” she heard herself say.

He kissed her on the lips. “Do you believe I could ever weary of you, my dear Louisa?”

Of course she believed it—as much as she believed in the elliptical orbit of the Earth around the sun. It was the reason she could never trust him. The reason she would never tell him that she loved him.

“As long as we weary of each other at the same rate, I’ll have no complaints.”

His hand tightened on her jaw. A moment later he let go of her face altogether to trace a finger down the center of her bodice. “How you punish me, my dear.”

He lifted aside her skirts and, still fully clothed, entered her, his eyes never leaving hers—a man who wanted to see his power over her reflected in her features.

She let him see it. Because they were in the middle of lovemaking, and she could justify her hunger as that of the body, and not that of the soul. Her hunger, her need, even her fear.

“Spread your thighs wider, darling,” he told her, his voice only a little unsteady. “I want to be all the way inside you.”

The things he made her feel... even the sanctity of holy matrimony might not keep her out of the flames of hell. In desperation, because she did not want to be the only one so tremblingly affected, teetering so close to the edge despite the deliberate, leisurely pace he set, despite the peaks she had already experienced only minutes ago, she whispered, “I have wanted to spread my thighs for you ever since I first saw you.”

He made an animal sound in the back of his throat, his gaze losing some of its focus.

“All my nights lying awake, all my na**d dreams—that’s what it was all about, wasn’t it? Wanting you inside me.”

He grimaced, baring his teeth. His body slammed into hers, shoving her back a few inches, pushing her so close to the precipice she could already feel the involuntary contraction of her muscles.

But she did not want to lose control alone—that path led directly back to the pit of despair. “Come in deeper. Are you in me as deep as you want to be?”

Now they were tumbling off the edge together; now his control was as shattered as hers. And now she finally closed her eyes and let herself be swept away by the surge of pleasure.

And by his harshly uttered words in her ear, as he gripped her close: “I can never be in you deep enough. Never.”

• • •

When she had on her drawers again, and her skirts were decorously in place, she allowed Felix to sit her between his legs, his arms wrapped around her.

He was not sure what he had accomplished this day, or whether he had even truly resolved this lovers’ quarrel between them. But it didn’t seem to matter, not when he could bury his nose in her hair and inhale.

“It smells just like yours, my lord,” she said, her tone arch, forestalling a compliment on his part, “since I’m fairly certain we have the same soap.”

“Then my hair must smell divine. And you might as well call me Felix in private—we wouldn’t want Lady Tremaine to be the only one enjoying that privilege.”

“Huh,” was her dismissive response.

But then she followed that with an offer of the coffee cream she was eating, her person half turned, her spoon held out toward him. “Do you want some? It’s rather nice.”

He ate from her spoon. The coffee cream was more than nice; it was delectable.

“Just to let you know,” she continued, “I am still angry with you. I simply cannot express it very well when I am in direct physical contact with you.”

“Then I must make sure we remain in constant direct physical contact. I like it when you cannot express your anger very well.”

“Huh,” she said again.

He leaned back against the tree behind him, so content he could melt. “Tell me about your childhood intrigue with the night sky.”

“Must I?” She offered him another spoonful of the coffee cream.

“You mentioned it last night, when you knew it was me standing behind you. So yes, now you must.”

She gave the next spoonful of the coffee cream to herself, looking up at the day sky. “One night, when I was three, my father woke up all his daughters and took us outside, promising a special treat.”

Given that she was born in 1864, she must have seen the Leonid shower of 1867, which was not as grand as the meteor storm the year before, but still impressive.

“They tell me that for a week afterward, I would wake my father up every day after midnight and make him take me to see more shooting stars.”

“Did he?”

“My mother said he did. She said that he would read until I came to fetch him and then stay out with me for as long as I wanted.”

He kept his envy from his voice. “A doting father.”

“He was. According to my mother, he was an expensive man to have around. But we all adored him. Too bad he didn’t live long enough to see me carrying on the family legacy of fortune hunting so successfully. He would have been tickled about the bust improvers.”

“I am honored to be tickled on his behalf.”

Her head tilted forward. He moved his to the side, to see a slight smile on her lips. Impulsively he kissed her on her cheek.

“Don’t be so pleased with yourself,” she admonished. “I distrust you and will continue to do so.”

“Your distrust is the spice that gives my life flavor,” he said grandly. “Long may your suspicions simmer.”

Little did he know how much he would come to regret that sentiment.