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“Ouch!”

He stiffened. “Did I hurt you, my girl?”

She wriggled beneath him, and not seductively but as though she was uncomfortable. “No, I was just being poked in the neck by a sharp bit of hay. It was nothing.”

He kissed her mouth again, then buried his face in her slender neck, running his lips and tongue against the base of her ear while his hand took possession of her breast. As he worked his mouth along to the nape of her sweet-smelling neck, silky golden curls tickled his nose and lips. And then something not at all silky. Muttering a curse, he reared up and spat out bits of hay and brushed more from his nose. “Damnation.”

She looked up at him, blue eyes twinkling with mirth, and soon they were both laughing.

“How did we ever manage this before?” he asked as he sat up, brushing the hay from his shirt. “It’s like making love on the back of a hedgehog, for God’s sake.”

“I think we must have been so young that we never noticed how uncomfortable it was.”

Sam helped her to sit up, all the while thinking what a mess he’d made of this seduction. She must think him the clumsiest and most unsophisticated of men. No better than the callow youth she’d once known.

“Don’t look so forlorn, Sam.” She smiled and stroked his cheek. “I know it seems very romantic to think we have come full circle, from one hayloft to another, with two decades and more in between. But it doesn’t have to be a hayloft, you know. I have a perfectly comfortable bed back at the Blue Boar.”

Hope flared in his chest. “Are you inviting me into that bed, Willie?”

“Yes. I want to make love with you. Not for old times’ sake, but for now. For tonight.”

He kissed her. “For tonight. Come on, then. Let’s behave like two adults, get out of this damned prickly hay, and find that bed of yours.”

Once in her bedchamber, they lost no time in renewing their passion. They each plucked impatiently at the other’s clothes, and their own, until every garment had fallen into a tangle at their feet.

Wilhelmina was rather vain about her body. Indeed, she was quite proud of it. Because her face and figure had been her fortune, she had taken good care of both. She exercised to keep her muscles taut and youthful, riding and walking regularly, and working in her small garden. And she did not allow herself to overindulge in either food or drink, which helped to keep her waistline trim. It was not a girl’s body-there was only so much one could do to hold back time-but neither was it matronly. She felt no shame in displaying it to Sam.

And he had no cause for shame, either. He was no longer the beautiful young boy she’d known, but a magnificently beautiful man.

She stroked the hair on his chest. “There was a lot less of this on the boy I knew back in that other hayloft.”

“And a lot less girth around the waist.”

“Nonsense. You’re remarkably trim. With girth in all the right places.” Her hand traced the muscles of his chest and shoulders.

“I could say the same about you, my girl. In fact, you look better than you have any right to.”

“I wish you’d gone bald and run to fat, Sam. You’d be much easier to resist.”

“Running up and down riggings keeps one fit.”

“But I didn’t realize captains did that. I assumed you had young boys to climb up the masts for you.”

“I did, of course. Some officers give it up. I never did because I enjoyed it. There’s nothing like riding the give and spring of line rigging to make you feel like a boy.”

“Let me see if I can make you feel like a man.” She led him to the bed, where her own clean linen sheets were turned down. But they did not crawl under the covers. Willie lay on top of them and pulled Sam down to her. He took her in a torrid kiss, while she entwined her legs with his, putting every possible inch of her skin in hungry contact with his.

They kissed for long moments, and then Sam broke the kiss and looked deep into her eyes.

“You terrify me, Willie. I want you so badly, but I keep thinking of all those other men-”

She pushed him away, frowning. Hell and damnation. She had known in her gut that this was wrong. She should have listened to that nagging voice in her head. “Don’t,” she said, moving away from him. “This will never work. It was foolish of us to think it could. You will never be able to forget or forgive who I’ve become.”

He tugged her back to him. “Silly woman. I’ve told you more than once that I understand about all that. I stopped blaming you years ago.”

“And yet you can’t stop thinking about all those other men. I’m sorry, Sam. This won’t work. We can’t be together again. It sounded like a terribly romantic idea, but it’s too late for us.”

“It’s not too late. We have to try, Willie. If we don’t do it now, when at last we’re both alone and unencumbered, we may never get another chance. And it is romantic. Two lovers sharing passion again after all these years.”

“How can we, when you can’t stop thinking about all those other men? And how they made my life a disgrace in your eyes?”

“It’s not the other men in your life I’m worried about, my dear girl. It’s the life in this man. I fear I may not measure up to your worldly expectations.”

Her anger and disappointment evaporated in an instant. “Ah, Sam. You could never disappoint me.”

And he didn’t.

He loved her with hands and mouth and tongue as skillful as the most practiced London rake, without the edge of cynical hedonism. He gave pleasure and took it, in an honest expression of passion and desire. This was not the remembered innocence of their first youthful coupling-uncertain and bumbling-but the knowledgeable and unashamed sensuality of experienced maturity.

Sam’s lips trailed down her neck and along her shoulder, and lower still to the curve of her breast until, finally, he took her nipple into his mouth and curled his tongue around it. Her low moan of pleasure echoed through the room. Sam’s mouth became hot and greedy in response. His hands skimmed over her bare flesh, creating little sparks of erotic fire everywhere he touched. Wilhelmina kneaded his back and shoulders with restless desire, and in turn explored him more intimately with lips and teeth and tongue.

When at long last he drove himself into her in a single deep thrust, she welcomed him with inner muscles that closed tight around him.

There was no awkwardness between them, even after all these years. There was only ease and rightness as their bodies joined. Wilhelmina could not be certain what his thoughts were, whether or not he was still thinking of all those other men, but her thoughts were on Sam alone, and no one else. A potent warmth rushed through her, welled up, and filled her. She almost became lost in the drugging sensuality of his powerful thrusts, the way he lifted her hips for deeper access, but she never forgot that it was Sam who was inside her, Sam who was loving her.

He prolonged the loving, keeping himself in check, sometimes stilling inside her with a visible effort not to climax before she did. When her body finally stiffened, then convulsed into a succulent crescendo of passion, he followed close behind with his own release. Burying his face in her shoulder and his hands in her hair, he pumped faster and faster, calling out her name, until he collapsed on top of her.

Panting and wet, they melted into each other in sheer satiated bliss. After several long moments, Sam rolled off her and gathered her against him. He kissed her so tenderly, it made her want to weep. Within a moment, he fell into a deep sleep, but not before whispering in her ear: “I love you, Willie. I’ve always loved you.”

The cock’s crow woke him. Or maybe it was the barking dogs or the church bell. Sam soon became aware of a morning’s chorus of activity. The clank and clatter of harnesses being set to teams. The crunch of wheels on gravel. The whinny of horses anxious to be moving. The creak of windows being thrown open and people shouting to others below.