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  His kisses seared her flesh like glowing brands as his mouth moved from her lips to her neck and breasts, his hands sliding along her back and sides, making her moan and writhe beneath his gentle assault. He raised up on his hands, his face above her, his voice hoarse with passion. “Please touch me—let me feel your hands on me.”

  It had never occurred to Victoria that he would want her to touch him as he touched her, and the knowledge was thrilling. She put her hands against his tanned chest, slowly spreading her fingers, amazed when her simple touch made his breath catch. Experimentally, she slid her hands lower, and the taut muscles of his abdomen jumped reflexively. She put her lips to his tiny nipple and kissed it as he kissed hers, flicking her tongue back and forth against it, and when she pulled it tightly into her mouth a groan ripped from his chest.

  Heady with her newly discovered power over his body, she rolled him onto his back and brushed her parted lips over his, sweetly offering him her tongue. A funny little laugh that was part groan, part chuckle sounded in his throat and he drew her tongue into his mouth, one hand cradling the back of her head as he crushed his lips against hers while his free arm wrapped around her hips and lifted her fully atop his aroused length.

  Without thought, Victoria moved her hips against his engorged manhood, circling herself on him, until she was faint with the pleasure she was giving him and taking for herself. She moved downward, lost in her desperate eagerness to please him, trailing kisses along his chest, nuzzling his abdomen, until his hands suddenly tangled in her hair and pulled her face back to his. Beneath her she could feel the pulsing of his rigid shaft, the fiery touch of his heated skin, the violent hammering of his heart against her breasts. But instead of taking her, as she expected, he gazed at her with desire raging in his eyes and humbly said the words he had tried to force her to say last night. “I want you,” he whispered. As if he didn’t think he had humbled himself enough, he added, “Please, darling.”

  Feeling as if her heart would break with the love bursting in it, Victoria answered him with a melting kiss. It was answer enough. Jason gathered her tightly into his arms, rolled her onto her back, and drove swiftly and surely into her. His arms wrapped around her shoulders and hips, pulling her more tightly to him, forging them into one as he drove into her again and again.

  Victoria arched herself upward in a fevered need to share and stimulate his burgeoning passion, pressing her hips hard against his pulsing thighs, crushing her lips against his, while the waves of sensation shooting through her built into a frenzy and began exploding through her entire body in piercing streaks of pure, vibrant ecstasy.

  A shudder shook Jason’s powerful frame as he felt the spasms of her fulfillment gripping him, and he plunged into her one last time. His body jerked convulsively, shuddering again and again as Victoria’s body drew from his a lifetime of bitterness and despair. She drained him of everything and replaced it all with joy. It burst in his heart and poured through his veins until he ached with the sheer bliss of it.

  After all his farflung financial triumphs and aimless sexual exploits, he had finally found what he had unconsciously been searching for: He had found the place he belonged. He owned six English estates, two Indian palaces, and a fleet of ships each with a private cabin for his exclusive use, yet he had never felt he had a home. He was home now. This one beautiful girl, lying contentedly in his arms, was his home.

  Still holding her, he moved onto his side, then he combed his fingers through her rumpled, satiny hair and brushed a tender kiss against her temple.

  Victoria’s lashes fluttered up and he felt as if he would drown in the deep blue pools of her eyes. “How do you feel?” she teased, smiling as she asked him the same question he had once asked her.

  With tender solemnity, he replied, “I feel like a husband.” Bending his head, he took her sweet lips in a long, lingering kiss, then gazed down into her glowing blue eyes. “To think I actually believed there were no such things as angels,” he sighed, relaxing back against the pillows and reveling in the simple joy of having her in his arms, her head resting on his shoulder. “How incredibly stupid I must be—”

  “You’re brilliant,” his wife declared loyally.

  “No, I’m not,” he chuckled wryly. “If I had even the slightest intelligence, I would have climbed into bed with you the first time I wanted to and then insisted you marry me.

  “When was the first time you wanted to do that?” she teased.

  “The day you arrived at Wakefield,” he admitted, smiling at the memory. “I think I fell in love with you when I saw you standing on my doorstep with a piglet in your arms and your hair blowing in the wind like flaming gold.”

  Victoria sobered and shook her head. “Please—let’s never lie to each other, Jason. You didn’t love me then, and you didn’t love me when you married me. It doesn’t matter, though, truly it doesn’t. All that matters is that you love me now.”

  Jason tipped her chin up and forced her to meet his gaze. “No, sweet—I meant what I said. I married you because I loved you.”

  “Jason!” she said, flattered but nevertheless determined to set a pattern of honesty and frankness for the future. “You married me because it was the wish of a dying man.”

  “The wish of a dying—” To Victoria’s astonishment, Jason threw back his head and burst out laughing; then he wrapped his arms around her and pulled her up onto his naked chest. “Oh, darling,” he said, chuckling, rubbing his knuckles tenderly across her cheek, “that ‘dying man’ who summoned us to his bedside and clung to your hand was clutching a fistful of playing cards in his other.”

  Victoria reared up on her elbows. “He was what!” she demanded, torn between laughter and fury. “Are you certain?”

  “Positive,” Jason averred, still chuckling. “I saw them when the blanket moved. He was holding four queens.”

  “But why would he do such a thing to us?”

  Jason’s broad shoulders lifted in a shrug. “He evidently decided we were taking too long to get around to the business of marriage.”

  “When I think of how I prayed he would get well, I could murder him!”

  “What a thing to say,” Jason teased, laughing. “Don’t you like the end result of his scheming?”

  “Well, yes, I do, but why didn’t you tell me—or at least tell him you knew what he was up to?”

  Jason nipped her ear. “What? And spoil his fun? Never!”

  Victoria gave him an indignant look. “You should have told me. You had no right to keep it from me.”

  “True.”

  “Then why didn’t you tell me?”

  “Would you have married me if you didn’t think it was an absolute necessity?”

  “No.”.

  “That’s why I didn’t tell you the truth.”

  Victoria collapsed on his chest, laughing helplessly at his unprincipled determination to get what he wanted and his complete lack of contrition for it. “Have you no principles at all?” she demanded with laughing severity.

  He grinned. “Apparently not.”

  Chapter Thirty

  VICTORIA WAS SEATED IN THE salon late that afternoon, waiting for Jason to return from an errand, when the elderly butler who presided over the London house appeared in the doorway. “Her grace, the Duchess of Claremont wishes to see you, my lady. I told—”

  “He told me you were not in to visitors,” her grace said gruffly, marching into the room to the horror of the butler. “The silly fool doesn’t seem to understand that I am ‘family,’ not ‘visitors.’ ”

  “Grandmama!” Victoria burst out, leaping to her feet in nervous surprise at the unexpected appearance of the gruff old lady.

  The duchess’s turbaned head swiveled to the shocked servant. “There!” she snapped, waving her cane at the butler. “Did you hear that? Grandmama!” she emphasized with satisfaction. Mumbling abject apologies, the butler bowed himself out of the room, leaving Victoria apprehensively confronting her relative, who sat d