“Yes,” she said, a little damply. Her heart was still pounding with fear, even now she was in the warm circle of his arms.

He pulled back and cupped her face in his hands. “We’re like your parents, sweetheart. If one of us is going to be lost, both of us will go. I would never, ever stop searching for you if our boat overturned.”

Then he was kissing her, the kind of possessive, loving kiss that she’d seen her father give her mother a hundred times. Tears welled out of her eyes, and Isidore wound her arms around Simeon’s neck and held on as tightly as she could, even as her tears made him a little wetter than he already was.

It sounded as if the cheers grew even louder when he lowered his head to hers again…but maybe that was just her imagination.

Two minutes later, Simeon picked her up again and carried her through the crowd, regardless of her wet, heavy dress trailing behind them. Isidore hadn’t paid much attention to what was happening around her, but when the groomsmen closed the carriage door behind them and Simeon deposited her on a seat, she looked about. She was placed in the most luxurious carriage she had ever ridden in, upholstered in red velvet with gold coronets sprinkled everywhere. The horses started and she could hardly feel the motion, so sweetly was the coach designed and calibrated.

“Where are we?” she asked, half laughing.

Simeon was wrestling off his wet shirt and didn’t look up. “The Duke of Buckingham’s carriage.”

“A royal carriage,” she said, watching him under her eyelashes. Her breath felt hot in her chest. Surely he couldn’t mean to…

He did mean precisely that.

Because a second later Simeon was tenderly peeling her drenched bodice down to her waist. There were red marks on her skin left by the diamonds as she struck the surface of the water. He kissed every little bruise, moving down her body like a man who knew exactly where those kisses were most needed.

And though Isidore had never imagined such a thing was possible—making love in a carriage, let alone a prince’s carriage!—she found herself laying back on red velvet upholstery as her husband deftly woke her body into the same trembling, vibrating state she had experienced on the yacht.

“We shouldn’t,” she whispered at some point, and lost her train of thought when a wave of pleasure swept her into a place where words were impossible.

And when he thrust into her, she plummeted into a state where she could do nothing but sob for the pure pleasure of it.

Simeon’s body begged him to follow her, but instead he chose to make love to Isidore slowly. It was only by kissing her, by stroking her, by stroking in her, that he could tell her in a way that scorched the truth into both their hearts.

Finally, he couldn’t keep to his slow rhythm. He began pumping hard and fast, keeping his eyes open so he could see the way she strained to meet him, the way she gasped and cried out, the sheer beauty of her eyes and mouth.

The carriage rocked as it rounded a corner, and the sensation just increased their pleasure. “Simeon,” Isidore gasped, “we must be nearly home.”

“I told them not to open the door,” he said, but he could feel his control slipping away.

“Simeon!” Isidore cried, pulling his body even deeper inside her own, forcing him to throw away the remnants of his control and surrender to something wilder and more beautiful. Something that left Isidore crying ( just a little), and Simeon’s eyes misty ( just a little).

In the moments that followed, broken only by their whispered endearments, he realized something his heart already knew. They were partners. She would always make impulsive decisions and he would make slow, reasoned ones. He would always be a little terrified that she would look at him with the scorn he saw in his mother’s eyes. And she would always be a little terrified that he would look at her and not love her enough.

In short, they were made for each other.

He thought of eloquent things he should say, all the tenderness and passion and hope in his chest, and distilled it to one sentence. “I love you.”

She kissed him. And kissed him.

“Whither thou goest,” he said to her, in a voice so quiet that she could hardly hear it over the clattering wheels. “There will I go too.”

Chapter Forty-two

St. James’s Palace

London

April 10, 1784

It wasn’t until two weeks afterward that Isidore understood the whole of what happened. She hadn’t realized that most of London saw their daring escape, and Simeon’s rescue of her. Nor that the King himself watched Simeon carry her from the water and kiss her afterwards, and then swore that he would never listen to another solicitor bleating on about one of his noblemen being mad, let alone annul a marriage on those grounds.

She didn’t understand that by knocking out the ringleaders of the prisoners’ rebellion, Simeon had enabled the king’s guards to trounce the uprising. And she certainly didn’t envision her husband being summoned to St. James’s Palace for a public proclamation of the nation’s gratitude, during which the Duke of Cosway declared that any success was the result of working together with his duchess.

It was the ball following the king’s declaration, and Isidore hadn’t seen her husband for at least an hour. She kept glancing over her dancing partners’ shoulders, wondering where he might be. She had developed a horror of the silver gown, and so Lucille had carefully removed all the diamonds—the ones that weren’t left behind in the mud of the Thames—and sewn them onto a presentation gown.

But she hadn’t chosen to wear that tonight; in fact, she thought it might be a long time before she chose to wear diamonds again. Her gown was a pale rose-colored velvet with Chantilly lace, and she wore it with a fortune in tiger rubies.

Her former suitors were out in force. Most of them hadn’t lost hope that she would find herself disaffected with Simeon. Even if she weren’t planning to annul her marriage, they hoped that she might turn to one of them by way of consoling herself for her husband’s eccentricities. They smiled, capered and bowed…She felt overwhelmed by their florid scent, by the way they “accidentally” brushed her chest, by the way their teeth showed when they smiled.

Somehow she’d decided that a man should smile gravely, smell faintly like cardamom soap, and touch her breasts only in the privacy of the marital bedchamber.

The nature of marriage is such that a woman no sooner formulates rules of this nature…than they are broken.

The Earl of Bisselbate was just bowing before her, flourishing his hand as if he were a peasant sowing seeds (Isidore thought uncharitably), when suddenly another hand touched her shoulder. She jumped and turned. Simeon. She smiled up at him, not even noticing that the earl had straightened and was expectantly holding out his hand to lead her into the dance.

“Simeon,” she breathed. “Where have you been?”

“The king had a private request,” he said, smiling down at her. “It seems the queen has taken a liking to tiger rubies.”

The earl cleared his throat.

“Do forgive me,” Isidore said, turning reluctantly back to her escort. “I—”

“As your Baalomaal,” Simeon said…His voice was low and meant for only her ears.

Without a second’s thought, Isidore sank backwards, throwing a hand to her brow, knowing that Simeon would catch her, feeling his arms go around her. “Oh!” she cried. “I feel so faint! It must be the heat.”