“You approached her?” She couldn’t imagine an eighteen-year-old earl’s bastard approaching a thirty-year-old comtesse, but Black was assertive.
Black laughed again. “Heavens, no.”
“Then how?”
Black looked at her, and hesitated, and then he seemed to give a shrug, not with his shoulders, but with his mouth, the tiniest movement, a faint compression of his lips, as if he said to himself Why not? “Cécile was the most beautiful creature I’d ever seen. L’incomparable, everyone called her, and she was: Incomparable.” His eyes were smiling, as if he dwelled on a fond memory. “I’d never been intimate with a woman—although God knew I wanted to. Of course I had fantasies about Cécile. Every man who wasn’t a eunuch was having fantasies about Cécile.” His mouth twisted up at one corner, wryly.
“Fa
