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served was untouched. They had finished a bottle of madeira between them and were working on another. Since their encounter at Windsor, she had dreaded this meeting, th inking o f every excuse imaginable to avoid it.
    "Don't you have somewhere else to go?" she asked rudely. "Isn't there a mistress waiting for you in a parked carriage?"
    He took a sip of wine, unruffled by the insult. "I prefer the company in this room. I've never been much of a womanizer."
    She snorted in disbelief.
    He smiled. "It's true. Not before and certainly not after I met you, although I do admit to a string of meaningless liaisons the year following your marriage."
    "What stopped you?"
    "I was only making myself and those other women miserable," he said in amusement. "Who wants a lover who wants someone else? Perhaps I was hoping to find another girl like you."
    The ormolu clock on the mantelpiece chimed the hour. Anne wriggled in her chair. "Where is she?"
    "I don't know. I hope she doesn't come." He leaned back in his chair, his lanky frame relaxed. "I could look at you for hours."
    "Well, don't. It reminds me of things I don't want to remember."
    He stroked the stem of his glass with his thumb. "It pleases me to remember you."
    She frowned. "Don't."
    "I can't help it. Our affair was the highlight of a verra unhappy period in my life. I had lost my mother to cancer two years before I met you. I look back now and realize that her death was when my hell-raising began. For my father it was the opposite. He withdrew to grieve. I misbehaved, and if I'd been in my right mind or possibly more mature, I would have pursued you, your parents be damned."
    She heard the clip-clop of a horse-drawn carriage outside. "That was sex," she said quietly, not daring to move. "That was madness."
    "Was it?"
    Anne swallowed, remembering against her will. He had practically tom her clothes off the instant she walked into the ruins of the medieval keep, and she hadn't done a thing to stop him. Reckless idiot that she was, she had submitted to everything he demanded.
    He hadn't been satisfied with merely kissing her. He had devoured her. He had eaten her up from head to toe. They'd made love in the sun and in the rain, and he'd introduced her to positions that would have made Lucifer blush. Their desire was so intense they didn't feel the chill of autumn in the air or the inevitability of their parting, that like a long winter shadow, loomed just around the co rn er. They had never stopped once, in their delirium of lust, to consider the consequences of their behavior.
    "You have no children," he said gently, a statement of fact more than a question.
    "No." And she should have left it at that, preferring him to think her barren rather than reveal that she and David had barely shared a bed in their years of marriage. "I was only pregnant that one time," she added quietly. "I never conceived again."
    "That is a shame, Anne." He hesitated. "I suppose it is a blessing I did not get you pregnant . If I had gone off with the infantry and you had married David, I would have been in the unpalatable position of having to kill my own cousin to claim my bairn and woman."
    "Dear God," she exclaimed.
    He rose from the table to refill her glass. The clatter of traffic drifted from the street, a car riage driver shouting on the corn er.
    "I'll wait," he said, brimming with male bravado. "I'll find a way to prove I am not the man you remember. You'll see."
    She smiled at him over her shoulder. "The only problem with your plan is that I cannot tolerate the sight of you."
    He leaned over her, his voice deepening with laughter as his arms imprisoned her in the chair. "And even that doesn't have to be a problem, depending on one's perspective."

 
     
     
     
    6
     
     
    T hey were playing cards on an overstuffed poplin sofa when Nellwyn joined them. Anne threw down her hand in relief. "Auntie Nellwyn, at last. Do you know what time it is?"
    Nellwyn peeled off her gloves in irritation. "Have I