“Please.” She sighed as his thumb worried her nipple. He was killing her.

“Please what?” he said, placing little chaste kisses around it.

“You know what,” she said, and he laughed.

“I do. And I confess, I am grateful we are here, alone, because I’m finally going to taste you, and no one is going to stop me.”

He lowered his mouth and took her, and she nearly came out of her skin at the sensation, at the way he licked and sucked and sent pleasure curling through her, pooling in a dozen places she had forgotten she had. She moved to clasp his head to her, and lost her balance in the water. He caught her without effort, but she returned her hand to the edge of the pool, not knowing what else to do. Not knowing what else to say, except “Dear God, don’t stop.”

And he didn’t, worshipping first one breast and then the other, until she thought she might die here, drowned in this glorious place and in him. When he lifted his head after what seemed like at once an eternity and a heartbeat, she was sighing his name and eager for anything he wished to give her.

He took her lips, capturing her sighs, and pulled her close to him again, pressing all of him against all of her, so that there was no space for the water that lapped around them, in time to her writhing. When he ended the kiss, she pressed her hands to his shoulders, eager for something that would help her regain her power. Regain herself.

He gave her an infinitesimal amount of space, as though he understood what she wanted and understood, too, that she would hate it. Which she did. Because she simply wanted him again.

She took a breath. A second.

Cast about for something to say, something that would distance him even as it kept him close. Settled on, “Why a swimming pool?”

He stilled, quickly recovering his surprise. “You don’t want to know that,” he said, the words graveled and dark and making her utterly wanton.

“I do.”

He lifted a long, wet lock of hair from her shoulder, rolling it between his thumb and forefinger. “I was not a clean child.”

She smiled, imagining him, a blond boy with mischief in his eyes and intelligence beyond his ears. “Few children are.”

He did not return her smile. Did not meet her gaze. “I was not dirty from play.” He spoke to her hair, his words lacking emotion. “I did a number of jobs. Bricklaying. Tarring roads. Clearing chimneys.”

She went cold at that. None of the jobs was fit for children, but the chimneys – it was dangerous, brutal work, small boys sent up chimneys to clean them, the smaller the better. He would have been no more than three or four when he was a prime candidate for the torture. “Duncan,” she whispered, but he did not acknowledge her.

“It wasn’t so bad. It was only when it was hot, and the chimneys were too tight. There was another boy – my friend —” He trailed off, shaking his head as though exiling a memory. A thousand of them, she was certain, each more horrifying than the last. “I was lucky.”

No child with that life was lucky. “Were you in London?” He must have been. In a workhouse, no doubt – forced to suffer at the hands of this great, burgeoning city.

He did not answer. “At any rate. I wasn’t allowed to bathe afterwards, as I was destined to be dirty again the next day. The handful of times I was allowed to bathe, I was always last. The water was always cold. Never clean.”

Tears came, hot and unbidden, and she was grateful for the fires at her back, for the way they hid her face from him.

She reached for him, wrapping one arm around his neck, threading her fingers through his beautiful blond hair, gleaming and soft and clean even now. “No longer,” she whispered at his ear. “No longer,” she repeated, wanting to wrap herself around him.

Wanting to protect him. The boy he was. The man he had become.

Dear God.

What she felt…

No. She refused to think it.

And she certainly would not admit it.

He caught her, and she noted the surprise on his face, as though he had just remembered that she was there. “No longer,” he agreed. “Now I have a thousand square feet of clean water. Warm and wet and wonderful.”

She wanted to ask more. To push him.

But she knew better than anyone that when Duncan West was through talking, he was through talking. So she found an alternative, kissing him, trailing her fingers over his shoulder and down his arm to where his strong hands held her open, pressed against him. She wanted to touch him, every inch of him. She wanted to touch some very specific inches of him. And she’d nearly shored up the courage to do it when he lifted her from the water, sitting her on the edge of the pool.

Water sluiced down her body, over its curves and valleys, and she resisted the position, on display above him. “Wait,” she began, but he stopped her, pressing a lush kiss to one of her knees.

“But it is not the swimming pool I am interested in this evening,” he whispered to the skin there, sliding his hand between her thighs, spreading her wide enough to press a kiss to the inside of her knee. “It is something else.”

There was an urgency in his words, as though touching her, kissing her, making love to her could erase his past. The talk of it.

And perhaps it could. Tonight.

His fingers moved again, teased until she opened further, until there was room for him to kiss deeper along the edge of her thigh, his tongue swirling there, his knowing touch spreading fire. “Something else,” he repeated, following a dark, wicked path up her leg, coaxing her open one devastating kiss at a time. “Something equally warm.”