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her inner thigh. He was riled by the scent of her moist heat, too impatient to take the time to remove her underclothes. He found the slit in her linen and tore it wide. She gasped at the sound of ripping fabric. Then she began to murmur her encouragement—directions really. When his tongue lashed out and circled her clit, her hips bucked again and she nearly wailed, muffling the sound against her forearm.
    “Oh, dear. You are good, Sebastian . . . so good.”
    His . This woman was his. Meant for him. For him to spend his life pleasing. Being good for her. The sound of her breathy approval sent his already fast-beating heart into a mad race.
    He pushed her thighs even wider and spread her farther apart for his admiration and attention. He licked and taunted until she was panting hoarsely, ordering him to finish her off.
    Right before she came—her left hand tugging on his hair ferociously, driving him hard against her—her cries had been reduced to torn pieces of language, her voice nothing less than the primal sound of pure desire.
    She shoved his face away from her sensitized flesh and pulled him up the length of her body as she shuddered and quaked, her neck thrown back in satisfied abandon as she held him close. A flush of color suffused her chest and neck, her cheeks. How he could have ever mistaken her for a pale, wispy thing, he had no idea. She was hard steel and fire. Even the way she lounged beneath and alongside his body, as if he were there merely to cushion her. Which he supposed he was.
    After she had calmed and he could feel her straightening, putting her metaphorical disguise back in place as she adjusted her skirts, he asked, “So . . . who is Pia?”
    She looked confused, then pretended she hadn’t heard or didn’t know or wasn’t going to answer. When he kept looking, waiting for a reply, she said, “An old friend.”
    “Do you love her?”
    She didn’t falter that time. She nodded once. “I do.”
    Sebastian pulled her closer against him and let her weep into his handkerchief.

Stupid, stupid woman! Anna must have cried out the only name she’d ever cried out in similar moments of self-forgetting and sensual oblivion. She wasn’t even sure. Why had she ever agreed to let Sebastian pleasure her in that way? That was never part of any plan.
    She had betrayed Pia unforgivably. Her mind was awash with guilt, a churning mess of missing Pia and wanting to rail at the injustice of it all—that something as seemingly simple as living a quiet life with the person she loved had forced her so far into this treachery. Still, even as she tasted the bitter guilt of having broken the single promise Pia had ever asked her to make, the residual pleasure of her climax confused her. Satisfaction and guilt. Indulgence and regret. She felt as if she were suffocating under the weight of it. Pia would despise her if she ever found out.
    “Did I say her name?” Anna asked between gulps, once the racking tears had begun to subside.
    Sebastian seemed almost amused, as if her torment were a mere trifle. “Yes. Quite lovely, really. Something for me to hope for one day.”
    “To hope for? Why?” Anna asked, wiping the damnable tears from her cheeks.
    “Why, to hear my name on your lips with the same delirious abandon and satisfaction, of course.”
    “You’re not angry?” She patted her face one last time with his handkerchief and then stared down at the beautiful needlework at the edge of the elegant linen, sewing with which she was so familiar. Hours and hours of her young life had been spent making perfect hems exactly like this one.
    “Angry?” He pulled her chin up so she was forced to look in his eyes. “I meant what I said earlier, you beautiful girl. It wasn’t only the physical acts . . .”
    Her face flushed in brief embarrassment. Had she really done all those things to him—with such fervor—and let him do all those things to her in return? Pia often said Anna took on a feverish intensity when