“We share the title, I am afraid. I did not like it anyway. I have never been fond of edible garments.”

“My hair is as wet as if I had taken the dunking instead of you. Oh, I am so sorry, Lord Vailmont, you are the one who must be so very cold and wet. I should be thinking of you instead of myself.”

Cold as he was, something warmed him, and it came from her. He wanted to pull her into his arms and keep her there. But he just smiled instead. “The rain was as cold as the stream, so there is really no difference. Come now, my dear, let me help you with your pelisse.”

She had unfastened the frogs on the pelisse, and he lifted the garment, heavy with water and mud, from her shoulders and hung it on a peg. Sudden terror struck him in the gut. He had not realized. It was so heavy from the water it had absorbed, it would have drowned her, had she fallen into the stream.

“A pity,” he said, as calmly as he could. “It was the only garment you possess that I like.” At last, he removed his own thoroughly soaked coat and found a peg for it. Clarence would be in a peeve for weeks when he saw it.

“And now it is as wretched as the others.” She scrubbed at the streaks with a wet cloth.

Then she fumbled with the tapes on her mud brown dress, which in the scheme of things had at least not much changed its color, for all that it clung to her like another skin, and gave him images he hoped to remember sometime later when he was not so soaked and cold.

“Just when you were making some progress. Allow me, madam. Then I’ll go into the sitting room.”

Wincing, she turned her back to him and Val pried the rain-swollen knots loose with his fingernails. “There,” he said. “I shall go down and have an ale in the common room, perhaps see the ostler about giving the horses an extra measure of mash. They earned their keep today. I shall return in an hour to see how you are doing.”

As she held her dress front to her body, she nodded, furrows of anxiety on her brow. But of course she would be concerned, with her reputation on the line.

He went to the stable and saw to the horses. The exhausted team would not travel farther tonight, but he had known that, and already arranged to change teams. He was just glad they had not suffered too badly. Nor was the whiskey any worse for all the weather. He returned to the little sitting room, where he stripped off his coat and boots, then the mud-streaked shirt and the breeches that had once been a fine doeskin. The boots were ruined anyway, and it did not matter if they stiffened, so he set them as close to the fire as he dared. Not even his cravat was salvageable, and wherever his stockings had gone, he had no notion. The innkeeper’s wife had produced a silk banyan, a regal blue and red brocade stripe that floated as he walked.

An hour had passed, and he knocked on the door. She did not answer. Val knew he shouldn’t, but then he had said he would check on her in an hour.

He turned the handle and peeked in, waiting for a sodden half-boot to bounce off his nose.

The room was strewn with feminine garments, over chairs, on pegs, draped over tables and bedposts, spread out in odd fashion for drying. The lady lay curled up on a fainting couch pulled before the fire, wrapped in a blanket, a pillow beneath her head where it rested on the couch’s high arm, and that strange locket dangling against her extended arm. Her dark hair had been brushed upward and let to cascade over the sofa arm, straight down, touching the floor in a flowing sheen like gleaming, polished ebony.

Val caught his breath. His body hardened. If he had even a grain of sense, he would leave. Now.

But she slept on. He eased into the chair across from the fainting couch and settled into its comfortable cushions, just to watch her. Silk the color of the half-consumed glass of claret enhanced the ivory delicacy of her skin, colored her cheeks and lips with rose, made him ache to touch the glorious fall of hair. He could almost feel its sleekness slipping through his fingers. He wanted to run his fingers over her cheek, catching the edges of the silken crescents formed by her dark eyelashes. He had never noticed her lashes before, so mesmerized had he been by her wonderful pale jade eyes.

His lurid thoughts spiraled downward, down, into the dismal pit of sexual desire, thoughts deserting rationality, that didn’t care if she was a lady or not, thoughts demanding fulfillment and would not go away, would darken until they took control, until they got what they wanted.

He was a man who was always in control, who managed his life within a hair’s breadth of a second. He should stop it. Must stop it. Yet he could feel his control slipping away like a slide down an icy slope, first creeping, then escalating to a hair-raising, scream-making ride into Hell. And there was nothing in his will, his power, not even his desire, he could muster to change it.

There was no question. He was bewitched.

***

A hot breeze touched her face. Sylvia blinked awake. It was his breath as he knelt before her, only a kiss away from her lips.

“Tell me to go away,” he whispered. But his eyes, dark, so dark she could not find his soul in them, begged something different.

“Tell me to leave.”

Sylvia couldn’t