y lord.” At the sound of his butler’s voice, Marcus looked up from his desk with a slight frown. He had been working for the past two hours on the amendments to a list of recommendations that would be presented to Parliament later in the year by a committee that he had agreed to serve on. If the recommendations were accepted, it would result in a substantial improvement to the house, street, and land drainage in London and its surrounding districts.

“Yes, Salter,” he said brusquely, resenting the interruption. However, the old family butler knew better than to disturb him at his work unless something was significant enough to warrant it.

“There is a…a situation, my lord, that I felt certain you would wish to be informed of.”

“What kind of situation?”

“It involves one of the guests, my lord.”

“Well?” Marcus demanded, annoyed by the butler’s diffidence. “Who is it? And what is he doing?”

“I am afraid the person is a ‘she,’ my lord. One of the footmen has just informed me that he saw Miss Bowman in the library, and she is…not well.”

Marcus stood so suddenly that his chair nearly toppled over. “Which Miss Bowman?”

“I do not know, my lord.”

“What do you mean, ‘not well’? Is anyone with her?”

“I do not believe so, my lord.”

“Is she hurt? Is she ill?”

Salter gave him a mildly harried stare. “Neither, my lord. Merely …not well.”

Declining to waste time with further questions, Marcus left the room with a low curse, heading to the library with long strides that stopped just short of an outright run. What in God’s name could have happened to Lillian or her sister? He was instantly consumed with worry.

As he hurried through the hallways, a host of irrelevant thoughts flashed through his mind. How cavernous the house seemed when it was devoid of guests, with its miles of flooring and infinite clusters of rooms. A grand, ancient house with the impersonal ambiance of a hotel. A house like this needed the happy shouts of children echoing through the halls, and toys littering the parlor floor, and the squeaky sounds of violin lessons coming from the music room. Marks on the walls, and teatime with sticky jam tarts, and toy hoops being rolled across the back terrace.

Until now Marcus had never considered the idea of marriage as anything other than a necessary duty to continue the Marsden line. But it had occurred to him lately that his future could be very different from his past. It could be a new beginning—a chance to create the kind of family he had never dared to dream of before. It startled him to realize how much he wanted that—and not with just any woman. Not with any woman he had ever met or seen or heard of… except for the one who was the complete opposite of what he should want. He was beginning not to care about that.

His hands gripped into white-knuckled balls, and his pace quickened. It seemed to take forever to reach the library. By the time he crossed the threshold, his heart was driving in sharp blows inside his chest …a rhythm that owed nothing to exertion and everything to panic. What he saw caused him to stop short in the center of the large room.

Lillian stood before a row of books, with a pile of them surrounding her on the floor. She was pulling rare volumes from the shelves one by one, examining each with a puzzled frown and then tossing it heedlessly behind her. She seemed oddly languid, as if she were moving under water. And her hair was slipping from its pins. She didn’t look ill, precisely. In fact, she looked…

Becoming aware of his presence, Lillian glanced over her shoulder with a lopsided smile. “Oh. It’s you,” she said, her voice slurred. Her attention wandered back to the shelves. “I can’t find anything. All these books are so deadly dull…”

Frowning in concern, Marcus approached her while she continued to chatter and sort through the books. “Not this one…nor this one…oh no, no, no, this one’s not even in English…”

Marcus’s panic transformed rapidly into outrage, followed swiftly by amusement. Damnation. If he had required additional proof that Lillian Bowman was utterly wrong for him, this was it. The wife of a Marsden would never sneak into the library and drink until she was, as his mother would phrase it, “a trifle disguised.” Staring into her drowsy dark eyes and flushed face, Marcus amended the phrase. Lillian was not disguised. She was foxed, staggering, tap-hackled, top-heavy, shot-in-the-neck, staggering drunk.

More books sailed through the air, one of them narrowly missing his ear.

“Perhaps I could help,” Marcus suggested pleasantly, stopping beside her. “If you would tell me what you’re looking for.”

“Something romantic. Something with a happy ending. There should always be a happy ending, shouldn’ there?”

Marcus reached out to finger a trailing lock of her hair, his thumb sliding along the glowing satin filaments. He had never thought of himself as a particularly tactile man, but it seemed impossible to keep from touching her when she was near. The pleasure he derived from the simplest contact with her set all his nerves alight. “Not always,” he said in reply to her question.

Lillian let out a bubbling laugh. “How very English of you. How you all love to suffer, with your stiff… stiff…” She peered at the book in her hands, distracted by the gilt on its cover. “…upper lips,” she finished absently.

“We don’t like to suffer.”

“Yes, you do. At the very least, you go out of your way to avoid enjoying something.”

By now Marcus was becoming accustomed to the unique mixture of lust and amusement that she always managed to arouse in him. “There’s nothing wrong with keeping one’s enjoyments private.”

Dropping the book in her hands, Lillian turned to face him. The abruptness of the movement resulted in a sharp wobble, and she swayed back against the shelves even as he moved to steady her with his hands at her waist. Her tip-tilted eyes sparkled like an array of diamonds scattered over brown velvet. “It has nothing to do with privacy,” she informed him. “The truth is that you don’t want to be happy, bec—” She hiccupped gently. “Because it would undermine your dignity. Poor Wes’cliff.” She regarded him compassionately.

At the moment, preserving his dignity was the last thing on Marcus’s mind. He grasped the frame of the bookcase on either side of her, encompassing her in the half circle of his arms. As he caught a whiff of her breath, he shook his head and murmured, “Little one…what have you been drinking?”

“Oh…” She ducked beneath his arm and careened to the sideboard a few feet away. “I’ll show you… wonderful, wonderful stuff… this.” Triumphantly she plucked a nearly empty brandy bottle from the edge of the sideboard and held it by the neck. “Look what someone did…a pear, right inside! Isn’ that clever?” Bringing the bottle close to her face, she squinted at the imprisoned fruit. “It wasn’ very good at first. But it improved after a while. I suppose it’s an ac”—another delicate hiccup— “acquired taste.”

“It appears you’ve succeeded in acquiring it,” Marcus remarked, following her.

“You won’ tell anyone, will you?”

“No,” he promised gravely. “But I’m afraid they’re going to know regardless. Unless we can sober you in the next two or three hours before they return. Lillian, my angel …how much was in the bottle when you started?”

Showing him the bottle, she put her finger a third of the way from the bottom. “It was there when I started. I think. Or maybe there.” She frowned sadly at the bottle. “Now all that’s left is the pear.” She swirled the bottle, making the plump fruit slosh juicily at the bottom. “I want to eat it,” she announced.

“It’s not meant to be eaten. It’s only there to infuse the—Lillian, give the damned thing to me.”

“I am going to eat it.” Lillian tottered drunkenly away from him as she shook the bottle with increasing resolve. “If I can just get it out…”

“You can’t. It’s impossible.”

“Impossible?” she scoffed, lurching to face him. “You have servants who can pull the brains from a calf’s head, but they couldn’ get one little pear out of a bottle? I doubt that. Send for one of your under-butlers—just give a whistle, and—oh, I forgot. You can’t whistle.” She focused on him, her eyes narrowing as she stared at his mouth. “That’s the sillies’ thing I ever heard. Everyone can whistle. I’ll teach you. Right now. Pucker your lips. Like this. Pucker… see?”

Marcus caught her in his arms as she swayed before him. Staring down at her adorably pursed lips, he felt an insistent warmth invading his heart, overflowing and spilling past its fretted barriers. God in heaven, he was tired of fighting his desire for her. It was exhausting to struggle against something so overwhelming. Like trying not to breathe.

Lillian stared at him earnestly, seeming puzzled by his refusal to comply. “No, no, not like that. Like this.” The bottle dropped to the carpet. She reached up to his mouth and tried to shape his lips with her fingers. “Rest your tongue on the edge of your teeth and…it’s all about the tongue, really. If you’re agile with your tongue, you’ll be a very, very good”—she was temporarily interrupted as he covered her mouth with a brief, ravening kiss—“whistler. My lord, I can’t talk when you—” He fitted his mouth to hers again, devouring the sweet brandied taste of her.

She leaned against him helplessly, her fingers sliding into his hair, while her breath struck his cheek in rapid, delicate puffs. A tide of sensual urgency rolled through him as the kiss deepened into full-blown compulsion. The memory of their encounter in the hidden garden had haunted him for days …the delicacy of her skin beneath his hands, her small, exquisite breasts, the enticing strength of her legs. He wanted to feel her wrapped around him, her hands clutching his back, her knees clamped around his hips…the silky-wet caress of her body as he moved inside her.

Pulling her head back, Lillian stared at him with wondering eyes, her lips damp and reddened. Her hands left his hair, her fingertips coming to the hard angles of his cheekbones, delicate strokes of coolness on the blazing heat of his skin. He bent his head, nuzzling his jaw against the pale silk of her palm. “Lillian,” he whispered, “I’ve tried to leave you alone. But I can’t do it anymore. In the past two weeks I’ve had to stop myself a thousand times from coming to you. No matter how often I tell myself that you are the most inappropriate…” Hepaused as she squirmed suddenly, twisting and craning her neck to look down at the floor. “No matter what I—Lillian, are you listening to me? What the devil are you looking for?”

“My pear. I dropped it, and—oh, there it is.” She broke free of him and sank to her hands and knees, reaching beneath a chair. Pulling out the brandy bottle, she sat on the floor and held it in her lap.

“Lillian, forget the damned pear.”

“How did it get in there, d’you think?” She poked her finger experimentally into the neck of the bottle. “I don’ see how something so big could fit into a hole that small.”

Marcus closed his eyes against a surge of aggravated passion, and his voice cracked as he replied. “They… they put it directly on the tree. The bud grows …inside…” He slitted his eyes open and squeezed them shut again as he saw her finger intruding deeper into the bottle. “Grows…” he forced himself to continue, “until the fruit is ripe.”

Lillian seemed rather too impressed by the information. “They do? That is the cleverest, cleverest …a pear in its own little…oh no.”

“What?” Marcus asked through clenched teeth.

“My finger’s stuck.”

Marcus’s eyes flew open. Dumbfounded, he looked down at the sight of Lillian tugging on her imprisoned finger.

“I can’t get it out,” she said.

“Just pull at it.”

“It hurts. It’s throbbing.”

“Pull harder.”

“I can’t! It’s truly stuck. I need something to make it slippery. Do you have some sort of lubricant nearby?”

“No.”

“Not anything?”

“Much as it may surprise you, we’ve never needed lubricant in the library before now.”

Lillian frowned up at him. “Before you start to criticize, Wes’cliff, I should like to point out that I am not the first person ever to get her finger stuck in a bottle. It happens to people all the time.”

“Does it? You must be referring to Americans. Because I’ve never seen an Englishman with a bottle stuck on his finger. Even a foxed one.”

“I’m not foxed, I’m only—where are you going?”

“Stay there,” Marcus muttered, striding from the room. As he went out into the hallway, he saw a house-maid approaching with a pail full of rags and cleaning supplies. The dark-haired maid froze as she saw him, intimidated by the sight of his scowling face. He tried to remember her name. “Meggie,” he said curtly. “It is Meggie, isn’t it?”

“Yes, milord,” she said meekly, dropping her gaze.

“Do you have any soap or polish in that pail?”

“Yes, sir,” she replied in confusion. “The housekeeper told me to polish the chairs in the billiards room—”

“What’s it made of?” he interrupted, wondering if it contained any caustic ingredients. Seeing her increasing bewilderment, he clarified, “The polish, Meggie.”

Her eyes turned round at the master’s untoward interest in the mundane substance. “Beeswax,” she said uncertainly. “An’ lemon juice, an’ a drop or two of oil.”

“That’s all?”

“Yes, milord.”

“Good,” he said with a decisive nod. “Let me have it, if I may.”

Agog, the housemaid reached into the pail, pulled out a small pot of the waxy yellow concoction, and extended it to him. “Milord, if you wish for me to polish something—”

“That will be all, Meggie. Thank you.”

She bobbed in a little curtsy, staring after him as if he had taken leave of his senses.

Returning to the library, Marcus saw Lillian lying on her back on the carpeted floor. His first thought was that she must have drifted into oblivion, but as he approached, he saw that she was holding a long wooden cylinder in her free hand, and squinting through one end. “I found it,” she exclaimed in triumph. “The kaleidoscope. It’s verrrry interesting. But not quite what I ’spected.”

Silently he reached out, plucked the instrument from her hand, and gave her the other end to look through.

Lillian promptly gasped in amazement. “Oh, that’s lovely …How does it work?”

“One end is fitted with strategically placed panels of silvered glass, and then…” His voice faded as she turned the thing toward him.

“My lord,” she pronounced in solemn concern, viewing him through the cylinder, “you have three …hundred… eyes.” She dissolved into a fit of giggles that shook her until she dropped the kaleidoscope.

Sinking to his knees beside her, Marcus said tersely, “Give me your hand. No, not that one. The one with the bottle on it.”

She remained lying on her back as Marcus smeared a gob of the polish onto the exposed part of her finger. He rubbed the stuff into the seam where the bottle was clamped around her skin. Warmed by the heat of his palm, the scented wax released a heady burst of lemon fragrance, and Lillian breathed in the aroma with relish. “Oh, I like that.”

“Can you pull it out now?”

“Not yet.”

Making a sheath of his fingers, he continued to smooth the oily wax over her finger and the shaft of the bottle. Lillian relaxed at the gentle motion, seeming content to lie still and watch him.

He looked down at her, finding it difficult to resist the urge to climb over her prone body and kiss her senseless. “Would you mind telling me why you were drinking pear brandy in the middle of the afternoon?”

“Because I couldn’ open the sherry.”

His lips twitched. “What I meant was, why were you drinking at all?”

“Oh. Well, I was feeling rather …high-strung. And I thought it might help me to relax.”

Marcus rubbed the base of her finger with soft, twisting strokes. “Why were you feeling high-strung?”

Lillian averted her face from him. “I don’t want to talk about that.”

“Hmm.”

She looked back at him, her gaze narrowed. “What did you mean by that?”

“I meant nothing by it.”

“You did. That was no ord’nary ‘hmm.’ It was a disapproving ‘hmm.’ ”

“I was merely speculating.”

“Gimme a guess,” she challenged. “Your bes’ guess.”

“I think it has something to do with St. Vincent.” He saw from the shadow that passed over her expression that his guess was on the mark. “Tell me what happened,” he said, watching her closely.

“You know,” she said dreamily, passing over his question, “you’re not nearly as handsome as Lord St. Vincent.”

“There’s a surprise,” he said dryly.

“But for some reason,” she continued, “I never want to kiss him the way I do you.” It was a good thing that she had closed her eyes, for if she had seen his expression, she might not have continued. “There is something about you that makes me feel terribly wicked. You make me want to do shocking things. Maybe it’s because you’re so proper. Your necktie is never crooked, and your shoes are always shiny. And your shirts are so starchy. Sometimes when I look at you, I want to tear off all your buttons. Or set your trousers on fire.” She giggled helplessly. “I’ve so often wondered—are you ticklish, my lord?”

“No,” Marcus rasped, his heart pounding beneath his starched shirt. Acute lust caused his flesh to burgeon heavily, his body eager to plunder the slender female form that was spread before him. His beleaguered sense of honor protested that he was not the kind of man who would take an inebriated woman to bed. She was helpless. She was a virgin. He would never forgive himself if he took advantage of her in this condition—

“It worked!” Lillian held up her hand and waved it victoriously. “My finger’s out.” Her lips curved in a sultry grin. “Why are you frowning?” Heaving herself to a sitting position, she caught at his shoulders for support. “That little crinkle you get between your brows …it makes me want to…” Her voice trailed away as she stared at his forehead.

“What?” Marcus whispered, his self-control nearly annihilated.

Still clinging to the support of his shoulders, Lillian rose to her knees. “To do this.” Her lips pressed between his brows.

Marcus closed his eyes and gave a faint, desperate groan. He wanted her. Not merely to bed her—though at the moment that was certainly his uppermost thought—but in other ways as well. He could no longer deny that for the rest of his life, he would measure every other woman against her, and find them all lacking. Her smile, her sharp tongue, her temper, her infectious laugh, her body and spirit, everything about her struck a pleasurable chord in him. She was independent, willful, stubborn…qualities that most men did not desire in a wife. The fact that he did was as undeniable as it was unexpected.

There were only two ways to manage the situation. He could either continue trying to avoid her, which had been a spectacular failure so far, or he could simply give in. Give in… knowing that she would never be the placid, proper wife he had always envisioned having. In marrying her, he would defy a fate that had been scripted for him before he had even been born.

He would never be entirely certain what to expect from Lillian. She would behave in ways that he would not always understand, and she would bite back like a half-tamed creature whenever he tried to control her. She was a creature possessed of strong emotions and an even stronger will. They would quarrel. She would never allow him to become too comfortable, too settled.

Dear God, was that truly the future he wanted?

Yes. Yes. Yes.

Nuzzling the soft curve of her cheek, Marcus relished the hot surge of her brandy-scented breath on his face. He was going to take her. Firmly he slid both hands around her head, guiding her mouth to his. She made an inarticulate sound and returned the kiss with unmaidenly enthusiasm, so sweet and ardent in her response that he almost smiled. But the smile was lost in the luscious friction of their lips. He loved the way she responded to him, feasting on his mouth with a passion that equaled his own. Lowering her to the floor, he settled her into the crook of his arm and explored her mouth with deep, carnal strokes of his tongue. Her skirts bunched between them, frustrating their mutual attempts to press closer. Writhing like a cat, Lillian fought to push her hands inside his coat. They rolled slowly across the floor, first he on top, then she, neither of them caring as long as their bodies were entwined.

She was slim but strong, her limbs wrapping around him, her hands roaming impatiently over his back. Marcus had never experienced such intense arousal in his life, every cell in his body pervaded with heat. He had to get inside her. He had to feel, kiss, caress, taste every inch of her.

They rolled again, and the feel of a chair leg digging into Marcus’s back temporarily recalled him to sanity. He realized that they were making love in one of the most frequented rooms of the house. This would not do. Swearing, he hauled Lillian up with him, clasping her hard against his body as they stood. Her soft mouth sought his, and he resisted with an unsteady laugh. “Lillian…” His voice was hoarse. “Come with me.”

“Where?” she asked faintly.

“Upstairs.”

He felt from the sudden tension of her spine that she understood what he intended. The brandy had loosened her inhibitions, but it had not robbed her of her wits. Not entirely, at any rate. She brought her light, hot fingers up to his cheek, staring into his eyes with glittering intensity. “To your bed?” she whispered. At his slight nod, she leaned forward and spoke against his mouth. “Oh yes…”

He sought her kiss-swollen lips with his own. She was so delicious, her mouth, her tongue…His breathing turned ragged, and he used the shifting pressure of his hands to mold her body to him. They staggered together until he braced one of his hands on a nearby bookshelf to secure their balance. He couldn’t kiss her deeply enough. He needed more of her. More of her skin, her smell, her frantic pulse under his tongue, her hair wrapped around his fingers. He needed the flex and arch of her naked body under his, the scratch of her nails on his back, the shudder of her climax as her inner muscles clenched around him. He wanted to take her fast, slow, rough, easy… in infinite ways, in measureless passion.

Somehow he managed to lift his head long enough to say hoarsely, “Put your arms around my neck.” And as she obeyed, he lifted her high against his chest.