“We’re not going to sleep just yet.” Nick pulled his shirt over his head and toed off his house boots. “Not if my arguments are persuasive.” When he was standing beside the bed clad only in his breeches, Leah stared at his naked chest then closed her eyes.

Then opened them again and stared some more.

Thank you, Jesus, Nick thought, sitting at Leah’s hip and reaching forward to undo the ties of her night robe. He knew when a woman was interested, and Leah Lindsey—soon to be Haddonfield—was far more interested than she wanted to admit, maybe even to herself.

“Nicholas Haddonfield.” Leah’s gaze was glued to his chest. “What are you doing?”

“We’re going to be intimate, Leah Lindsey,” Nick replied as his hands divested her of the night robe. He liked the sound of his own words: he was going to be intimate with her, to give her all manner of pleasure. “But we will not copulate. You have my word on that.”

“And if I want to copulate?” Despite her bravado, Nick knew she’d never said the word aloud before, probably never heard it spoken either.

His countess was a brave woman. Nick left his hand resting on Leah’s abdomen, one thin layer of cotton between his palm and her skin. “I cannot allow it, and I will not ask it of you ere you consent to be my countess, in any case.”

She raised unhappy brown eyes to his face. “You and your allowing. Can’t you see that’s the very thing I object to most strongly?”

His countess was also stubborn. He liked that about her too.

“You do not have enough information on which to base your decision, Leah.” Nick’s hand trailed down, so that his thumb brushed over the crests of her hip bones, then back up, to trace her ribs. “You see us, nodding politely when we pass on the dance floor, and that isn’t how it has to be.”

She watched his hand follow the same pattern, again and again, without pausing. Then, while Leah’s frown had shifted to a look of bewilderment, Nick lifted her against his chest with one hand behind her back. With his free hand, he gathered her hair and collected it to one side, his fingers brushing her neck, her collarbones, and the soft curve of her shoulders.

Oh, yes, they were going to be intimate.

“I have tried to consider how I might be your friend.” Leah got one entire sentence out and fell silent. Nick felt a gratifying sense of progress.

“I would like to be your friend too,” Nick murmured, easing her down to the bed again. “Tell me how to do that.”

“You can’t,” Leah said through clenched teeth. Nick trailed the backs of his fingers down her bare arm, from her shoulder to her wrist and back up again. “You are too cuddly.”

Cuddly. Nobody had accused him of this previously. He rather liked the notion, coming from her. “This is a problem, how?” Nick asked, stroking her arm with deliberation.

“You are always touching people,” Leah said in a rush. “You hug, and pet, and kiss, and clasp hands…”

“I do like to touch.” Nick leaned down and brushed a kiss over Leah’s forehead. He sat back up and smiled down at her in the waning firelight. She looked vaguely puzzled and disoriented. Like she was trying to recall what, exactly, had been coming out of her own mouth. Nick smoothed her hair back from her face and kissed her again, this time on the cheek.

“You smell good,” he murmured. “Like spring.”

“That’s another thing. You always smell delicious, better than a man should, and it isn’t just your shaving soap.”

“No?” She spouted the oddest, most endearing notions when she was flustered.

“No. You are clean about your person and in your habits.”

“And this disqualifies me from friendship?” Nick queried, his lips landing on the unbruised side of her jaw, slowly working their way up to her cheek before he lifted back up to sitting position.

“You smell too good to be just my friend,” Leah informed him desperately. “You kiss too well, your touch is too… too…”

“Yes?” He pressed a chaste kiss to her lips and retreated one half inch. “You were saying?” Lazily, he brushed her hair back again, his gaze following the caress of his fingers.

“Kiss me, Nicholas.”

“What are friends for?” Nick whispered, claiming her lips gently. He plied her with easy, relaxed strokes of his tongue, burrowing his hands under her shoulders and bracing himself on his forearms. He nibbled, he tasted, he teased until Leah’s tongue entered the lists and her fingers winnowed through his hair and her body began to shift on the bed in slow, needy undulations.

“Please, God… Yes, more…”

“Easy, lovey,” Nick crooned, drawing back one half inch again. “We have all the time in the world.”

They did not. If she didn’t stop moving against him like this, if she didn’t stop touching him everywhere he’d exposed his skin, he would soon lose his wits entirely.

Leah whimpered into his mouth and half rolled to hook her leg over his hips. “What, lovey?” Nick murmured. “Tell me.”

“Come. Here.” Leah’s hands went dodging south, to try to encircle Nick’s waist and drag him over her, but fortunately for his flagging self-restraint, she got distracted on the vast plane of his chest, delineating slabs of muscle, ribs, sternum, and… nipples.

“Easy.” Nick tried to catch one of those hands as it skimmed directly over a nipple, paused, and returned for closer investigation.

Leah left off plundering his mouth long enough to gaze up at him. “Will I hurt you? Here?” Another feathery, shivery brush of her fingers.

“Never. Not ever.” Though she would kill him dead, dead, dead with her innocent explorations. He closed his eyes and waited for her to set her hands loose on him again.

She used both hands, and Nick lifted a few inches to allow her free run of his chest. Kissing paused as the fascination of caressing and being caressed became too absorbing, then too frustrating.

“Nicholas, get in this bed, please.”

He knew a moment’s indecision—did he get under the covers with her? Try for the nightgown now? Shuck his bloody, bedamned, infernally too-tight breeches? No, not that, because the sight of his erect cock would give her the vapors, virgin or not—and do nothing to calm the riot in his body. He stood, lifted the covers, and budged in as Leah obligingly shifted to the center of the bed.

“Better,” Leah muttered, turning her face into his bicep.

“Let me hold you.” Nick smiled at her shyness, having already seen enough—felt enough—to know he could coax her past that and have a wonderful time doing it, too.

“No.” Leah kept her nose pressed to Nick’s arm. “I want you to…”

“You want me to what, lovey?” Nick heard a novel note of tenderness in his own voice, some humor, and a hint of puzzlement.

“Here.” Leah threaded an arm under his neck and pulled at his waistband until she conveyed her general intent. “Over me. Please.”

The last was whispered against Nick’s collarbone, but he heard her, oh yes, he most assuredly did. Slowly, he let her tug, pull, wiggle, and whisper him into position over her, his weight braced on his knees and forearms.

“This is where you want me?” Nick asked, crouched above her. He kissed her forehead again, needing to kiss her somewhere. Anywhere.

“For now,” Leah replied, her tongue running along his jawbone. “Don’t worry that you’ll crush me.”

“I’m tangled in your nightgown,” Nick said, his frustration real. He bunched the cotton in one hand and drew it up to Leah’s hips. “Lift up, Leah, it’s coming off.”

“But then I’ll be naked.”

“You’ll be naked under the covers,” Nick reminded her, not sure how that made things any better. “I can’t see you, and I can’t get tangled in your nightgown.”

She lifted her hips, and the nightgown went sailing to the foot of the bed. Nick’s reward for this bit of swashbuckling was to feel Leah’s naked chest pressed to his, and to feel his control go careening across his mental decks like so many loose cannon.