"Goodness. Your winter evenings must be really terrible, if that is all your people have to entertain them."

"Oh, we have ways of relieving them."

They did. She could tell by the heavy way he breathed what they were too. And it wasn't the ways last night had been relieved with him either.

"Really?" She quelled the unexpected desire to throw herself at his feet and beg for mercy and instead offered her most ingenuous stare. "And do they involve the sort of thing ...