Alex grimaced as he propped himself up on his elbows. Dear Lord, had no one explained this to her? “It’s because you’re a virgin. I have to break your maidenhead. It might hurt, but I promise that it will go away, and it won’t pain you next time.”

Emma gazed at his face. He looked so concerned for her, his eyebrows furrowed and his eyes a softer green than she had ever seen them. “I trust you, Alex,” she said softly, reaching up to put her arms around him.

Every last shred of self-control that Alex possessed snapped at that very moment and he surged forward. Emma let out a soft cry at the rending of her maidenhead but found that the pain was quite minimal and was soon replaced by the luxurious pleasure of Alex’s insistent lovemaking. With every stroke, she felt an urgent warmth shoot through her body until suddenly it all became too much, and her entire body tensed and almost froze. She couldn’t move, she couldn’t breathe, and then finally her entire world exploded, and she collapsed, purely and utterly spent.

A spasm of white-hot need shook Alex’s body as he felt her muscles clench around his manhood. The primitive rhythm of his body grew fast and frenzied, and then he plunged forward one last time, erupting with ecstasy as he poured himself into her.

Emma heard him cry out at the moment of his release, felt him collapse atop her, and as she drifted down from her own climax, she thought that she had never before felt so completely content. “I feel good,” she sighed.

Alex chuckled as he rolled off of her. “So do I, my love, so do I.”

“If I had known I was going to feel this good, I might not have kicked you out of my bedroom the day we met.”

Alex cupped her face in his hands. “It wouldn’t have been this beautiful, my darling, because we hadn’t come to care for each other yet.”

Emma snuggled closer to him at his tender words. Surely now he would tell her he loved her. But he didn’t. She sighed. She was too happy to worry about it just yet. He couldn’t have made love to her like he just had without loving her a little, could he?

They remained in that position for several minutes, Emma burrowed against Alex as he absently toyed with her hair. Finally, she tilted her face up and asked the dreaded question. “What time is it?”

Alex glanced over the top of Emma’s head to the clock that sat on his nightstand. “It’s nearly half past four.”

“I’ll have to go home,” Emma said regretfully. Dear Lord, she hated to think about reality, but she was going to have to get home sooner or later. Preferably sooner. “The servants will be up and about any time now, and I don’t want them to see me coining in. Their gossip rivals that of the ton, you know. If one housemaid sees me, it will be all over town by tonight.”

“Who cares?”

Emma twisted around quickly to look at him, shock and remonstration mixing in her eyes. “What do you mean, ‘who cares? ’ I would rather not see my reputation dragged through the gutter, thank you very much.”

Alex gave her a rather perplexed look. “What’s this about a gutter? We’ll be married by next week. In a fortnight, all the furor over a hasty marriage will have died down, and the only thing anybody will be calling us is ‘romantic. ’”

An irrational knot of indignation began to blaze within Emma at his high-handedness. It was just like him to declare that they were getting married next week without even bothering to consult her. “Was that supposed to be a proposal of marriage?” she asked tightly.

Alex stared at her, dumbstruck. “We are going to get married, aren’t we?”

“I certainly don’t know. No one asked my opinion.”

“For God’s sake, Emma. We have to get married now.”

“I don’t have to do anything I don’t want to, your grace,” Emma declared, scooting across the bed and clamping the quilt down under her arms.

“Emma, you asked me to marry you just two days ago.”

“And if you recall,” she sniffed, “you refused.”

“Hell and damnation, woman, are we going to go through that again?”

Emma didn’t say anything.

“Wonderful,” Alex muttered. “This is just what I need. A female in a snit.”

“Do not speak to me that way!”

Alex’s eyes flashed with arrogance. “I was not speaking to you, my dear, I was speaking about you. And if you weren’t acting like such a damned fool, I’d be kissing you, instead.”

Emma jumped out of bed at his insult, taking the quilt along with her. “I don’t have to stay here and listen to you defame me!” she exploded, tripping over the coverlet as she tried to pick her clothing up off the floor. Each piece had been flung aside passionately, so she had to cross the room several times to gather it all, painfully aware of how foolish she must look as she desperately tried to keep her body covered with the heavy quilt.

Alex tried a different tactic. “Emma,” he said softly, “after all we’ve shared, don’t you want to get married? I’ll go insane if I can’t hold you in my arms every night.”

“You are despicable!” Emma stormed, her cheeks pink with fury. “I cannot believe the nerve of you! How dare you try to seduce me into marrying you!”

“Well, it seemed to be working,” Alex said with a lopsided grin.

“Aaaargh! I could—I could—Oooooh!” Emma’s anger had reached proportions where her vocabulary retrieval was not quite what it should be.

“Kill me? I wouldn’t if I were you. It’d make a terrible mess.”