"Because I wouldn't want to stop at kissing, and you-well, you're young and-"

"Are you accusing me of being a virgin?" Pippa demanded hotly.

"It's not an accusation-"

"Oh, no! It's only like telling me that I'm a backward infant. In this day and age-"

"I suppose there are still virgins in this day and age," he observed. He was looking tenderly into her face, and his lips were twitching.

"Not in London," she said idiotically. She knew she was crazy, but she couldn't stop herself.

"It's just that there's something about you-something very sweet and young-that made me think-oh, hell!" Now it was his turn to be embarrassed, and Pippa seized her chance to regain the initiative.

"You know your trouble, Luke? You think too much. What a lot of fuss you make over something that's no big deal. The world is full of ships that pass in the night, and if…if people like each other…"

In later years, reliving that conversation, she'd heard the childish bravado and known that Luke must have heard it, too. He hadn't been fooled-of course not. But whatever defenses he'd rallied against her had collapsed in a heap. Suddenly she was in his arms, his fingers were working urgently on her buttons, and everything was happening as she had dreamed.

When he released her breasts she was almost ashamed of them. They were so proudly peaked, the nipples already firm, the aureoles dark, telling their own tale of the desire she'd been trying to hold back. What had happened to maidenly modesty?

Then he laid his lips gently against one, teasing it with his tongue, and she thought, when she could manage to think at all, to hell with maidenly modesty!

As his tongue nudged the nipple softly back and forth she thought she might go out of her mind. How could anything feel like this, and how had she spent so long not knowing? So much time wasted! It was a conspiracy.

She took a long, trembling breath and dug her fingers into him as his lips and tongue continued their tormenting work. With every rasp the world shivered into glittering fragments, blinded her, faded, began again.