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Rodrick caught her around the hips. She inhaled sharply against his mouth as he drew her toward him. The borrowed breeches slid beneath his palms, warm from her body and thin enough to make him groan.

Rodrick drew her across his thighs. She shifted to balance herself, and the movement pressed her against the erection he had made no attempt—and possessed no remaining ability—to disguise.

She threaded one hand into the hair at his nape, while the other remained twisted in his neckcloth as though she feared he might escape. Something primitive and delighted rose in him.

Rodrick angled his head and took control of the kiss. He slowed it first. Louise tried to chase his mouth when he withdrew, and the tiny movement nearly destroyed what remained of his restraint.

He swept his tongue along hers. Louise shivered in his arms, and he felt it from her shoulders to the place where she sat across his thighs. He tightened his hold and kissed her deeper, tasting her, learning what made her lean toward him and what drew that broken little breath from the back of her throat.

She pulled back. They were both panting. Her eyes were wide—the expression of someone who had gotten exactly what she reached for and hadn't quite planned for it. He knew the expression because he suspected he was currently wearing something adjacent to it.

He was, with the detached interest of a man observing his own collapse, thoroughly stunned. He was not sure he cared for it. He was even less sure he cared about stopping.

"You talk too much," she said.

"So you stuck your tongue in my throat."

"It worked, didn't it?" She planted one hand against his chest and pushed herself to her feet. "Nothing changes between us."

She gave him the imperial look, the blade held flat, then walked away across the field toward the château, her back straight and her borrowed breeches doing their excellent job.

Rodrick touched his lips. "Oh, Lou, I wouldn't dream of changing anything between us."

Louise sat opposite him in Gaetan's drawing room with her spine worthy of an imperial portrait, one hand curled around a cup she had barely touched. When necessity forced her to address Rodrick, she looked somewhere near his left ear. Once, when he shifted in his chair, her gaze dropped by accident to his lips and fled so quickly that Rodrick almost admired the maneuver.

Almost. He didn't need years of intelligence work to understand the strategy. Louise had kissed a dishonorable man, enjoyed the experience rather more than her principles permitted, and was now retreating toward duty with all the speed of a routed army seeking defensible ground.

Sensible of her, really. Rodrick had reached much the same conclusion by a less dramatic route. The kiss had been appetite. Appetite required no allegiance. A man could want a woman without assigning philosophical significance to the matter, just as he could want good brandy without composing sonnets to the vineyard.

Admittedly, brandy had never put its tongue in his mouth and then informed him that nothing had changed. Rodrick inspected his glass—perhaps with a better vintage.

Hélène sat on the sofa, embroidering something small and white that Rodrick suspected belonged to the child upstairs. She looked from him to Louise with shrewd eyes, and he wondered how much she knew of their afternoon escapade.

Gaetan lowered the dispatch in his hand and leaned back in the armchair beside the hearth. The banked fire caught the lines drawn across his forehead, making him look older than he had that afternoon among his horses.

"Bad news?" Rodrick asked.

"D'Erlon reports that cartridges issued from the stores at Lille were found packed with bran instead of powder. He has placed the colonel responsible for the ordnance under watch, but the ranks suspect sabotage."

"Is that why you look as though someone has misplaced France? A few soldiers will attempt to shoot the enemy and produce bread instead. Inconvenient, certainly, but hardly apocalyptic."

Gaetan did not smile. "The cartridges are not what concerns me. The troops remain fiercely loyal to the Emperor, but they distrust the senior officers who served the Bourbons." He clapped the dispatch on the table. "Some swore allegiance to Louis XVIII when the Emperor abdicated. Now they have returned. The rank and file remember."

Rodrick considered this. "Then give the officers a raise. Medals. Titles. A particularly attractive ribbon. If their loyalty is so essential to morale, Bonaparte has the means. Buy it."

Across from him, Louise finally looked up.

There she was.

For the better part of an hour she had conducted an admirable demonstration of how little had changed between them. Apparently insulting loyalty had accomplished what his face, voice, and several perfectly innocent remarks had failed to do.

"If it can be bought, it is not loyalty," she said.

"Whatever philosophy you attach to it, the problem remains. If the men distrust their commanders, they will question orders. A war cannot be won like this." Gaetan pushed away from the table and began to pace.

The image of his friend trampled over a muddy field flashed behind his eyelids, and Rodrick gripped the glass hard enough to shatter it. He would not allow Gaetan to die because Napoleon Bonaparte had escaped Elba and rediscovered his appetite for Europe. He only had this one friend, and he refused to lose him to the soil.

While Gaetan paced, Louise kept her tedious discourse about loyalty. One could not create a strategy to save one's only friend while the woman who claimed nothing had changed kept speaking about the dreaded word.