Some of her tension eased. She touched his face. “Yes, I know. I love you and I trust you, Tobias.”

He exhaled deeply. “Thank God. You had me worried for a moment.”

She raised her brows. “I do not know Mrs. Gray, however, and I have no particular reason to trust her.”

He shrugged. “You need not concern yourself with the subject of Aspasia.”

“Yes, well, I am concerning myself with that subject. Furthermore, the fact that I trust you does not mean that I relish the sight of you standing in your shirtsleeves with another woman’s arms draped around your neck.”

He smiled slowly. “You make yourself quite clear, my dear.”

“You are not to make a regular practice of that sort of thing, sir. Is that understood?”

He raised one hand to trace the engraving of the goddess Minerva that decorated the silver pendant she wore at her throat. “You are the only woman whose arms I want around my neck.”

She got almost no warning, just a brief glimpse of the candle flame reflected in his eyes, before he kissed her. The urgent, driving hunger in him thrilled her senses. But it also made her wonder again about the precise nature of his conversation with his new client.

She had experienced this incendiary desire flowing from him often enough in the past to recognize it. His dark passions had their source in a well of midnight buried deep within him. He kept the channel to that place closed and locked for the most part, but it had been opened tonight. She suspected that was Aspasia Gray’s doing.

“Tobias.”

He locked her hard against him, one arm around her neck, the other anchoring her waist. “When you told me not to bother coming here tonight, I felt as if you had plunged that spear you carried straight into my heart.”

“I did not mean it,” she whispered against his neck. “Indeed, I was only biding my time up here until I went back downstairs to your bedchamber.”

“You had every right to be angry.” He kissed her mouth, her cheek, and then her throat. “But there was no need, I swear it.”

“She did it deliberately, didn’t she? She heard the door open and she put her arms around you at that instant so that I would see the two of you together.”

“No, I’m sure that she meant only to convey a token of her gratitude, because I had just agreed to make inquiries on her behalf. You happened to open the door at the wrong moment.”

“Rubbish.”

“Devil take it, forget that damned embrace. I do not care about Aspasia.” He lifted her off her feet and started across the small room. You are the only one I care about and this is the only embrace that matters.”

“Tobias, the bed-”

“I am getting us there as swiftly as possible.”

“But it is much too narrow for the two of us.”

“You and I are nothing if not resourceful, madam. We have, upon occasion, made do with the seat of a carriage. I feel certain we can manage a small bed.”

He spilled her carefully onto the cot and came down on top of her.

She felt herself crushed into the bedding. The skirts of her expensive new gown, purchased especially for the jaunt to the country, were getting crushed, but in that moment she did not care a jot.

Tobias lowered her bodice and kissed her until her skin burned hot. She framed his face between her palms and responded with a passion that never failed to astonish her. Until she met Tobias, she had not dreamed that she was capable of such intensity of feeling. Even at times like this, when he was in the grip of his darker passions, she responded to him. No, it was more than that, she thought, she needed to respond to him, especially at such times.

On these rare occasions when he opened the path to that deep wellspring of midnight inside himself, she glimpsed an aspect of his true nature that he allowed no one else to know. She recognized the powerful, elemental force within him all too well because it called to an opposite but equally strong aspect of her own being.

In the past few weeks she had slowly begun to accept that she and Tobias were linked in some metaphysical fashion that she did not yet fully understand. Perhaps she would never entirely comprehend the nature of the connection between them, but she knew now that she could no longer deny it.

She had not dared to speak of these matters to Tobias. She knew that he had no use for metaphysics and would not welcome such a discussion. But sometimes, when he was deep inside her, holding her as though he would never let her go, not even in death, she wondered if he, too, sensed the bond between them.

He pushed her skirts up with a rough, impatient motion of his hand and slid his fingers between her thighs. She was aware of the hunger pulsing through him. Her own need rose to meet his. She opened his shirt to his waist and flattened her palm on his chest, glorying in the feel of him.

He probed gently until he found the exquisitely sensitive bud. When he stroked slowly, she heard herself whisper the most shocking words, words she would never have used in polite company, words that, until she had met Tobias, she had not realized she knew.

He let his finger glide deeper.

“Tobias.” She tightened and moved against his palm.

He reached down to unfasten his trousers.

A blood-freezing scream sliced through the summer night, shattering the moment with the impact of a thunderclap. Lavinia flinched and opened her eyes just in time to see a dark shadow plummet past the open window.

“What the bloody hell?” Tobias rolled off the bed and onto his feet just as the dreadful cry ended with appalling finality.

“Dear heaven, what on earth was that?” Lavinia scrambled up off the bed. “Some sort of night bird? A large bat?”

Tobias was already at the window, having covered the distance in two strides. He gripped the edge and stood looking down into the gardens.

“Merciful God,” he whispered.

“Lavinia hurried toward the window. What has happened?”

Somewhere in the distance, another scream rent the night. A woman this time. Lavinia leaned out the window and glanced to the left, seeking the source of the second scream. She saw the occupant of a neighboring bed chamber, clad in a dressing gown and nightcap, standing on a stone balcony. The woman stared, transfixed, into the garden.

Lavinia braced herself and looked down. A figure garbed in formal evening attire lay crumpled on the grass like a broken clockwork doll. Horror turned her stomach ice-cold. The shadow hurtling past the window a few seconds earlier had been a man.

“He must have fallen from the roof,” she whispered.

“I wonder what he was doing up there?” Tobias said. “He is certainly not a member of the household staff.”

Lavinia looked down again and saw a bald pate gleaming in the moonlight. “Oh, no. Surely not.”

She heard more windows thrown open. Shocked exclamations echoed in the night. Down below, a footman, lantern in hand, appeared and walked with great reluctance toward the dead man.

“I will go and see if there is anything to be done.” Tobias turned away from the window. “Wait here.”

“No, I am coming with you.”

“There is no need,” he said gently. “It will be extremely unpleasant.”

She swallowed. “I cannot be certain until I get a closer look at him, but I fear that there may, indeed, be a reason for me to accompany you.”

He paused at the door and glanced back, frowning. “What is that?”

“I may have been one of the last people to see him alive.” She adjusted the bodice of her gown and reached up to feel for her hairpins. “Except for the maid, of course.”

“What the devil are you talking about?” Tobias opened the door and went out into the hall. “Do you know that man?”

“Not exactly.” She followed him out into the dim corridor and paused to close the bed chamber door. “We were never introduced, but I believe I saw him a short while ago, when I went to meet you in your bed chamber. To be more precise, I hid behind the staircase while he went by in the company of one of the maids.”