“Something wrong?” Jeremy asked as she pondered how precisely to begin. The lazy, seductive note in his voice was a clear indication that he expected a reply in the negative.

He therefore immediately stiffened when she said, “Since you mention it, yes.”

His hand was absent from beneath her skirts so quickly that she might have thought she’d imagined its presence there in the first place, and he made no move to stop her this time as she shifted forward slightly on the window seat so that she could turn to face him.

“That was… pleasant,” she said, searching for an inoffensive word. Judging by the appalled look on his face, she hadn’t quite hit the mark.

“Pleasant?” he sputtered.

“Now, Jeremy, don’t react like this,” she began, belatedly realizing as she spoke that employing the tones of a nanny scolding her young charge might not be the wisest tactic. “I’ve no complaints with the kissing, you see,” she added, stumbling over her words in an attempt to mollify him. “But… well… we might need to work on the other bits.”

“Other bits?” He leaned back against the window, crossing his arms over his chest. His cheeks were slightly flushed, though she couldn’t tell if that was a result of their kisses or this conversation.

“The bits that came after,” she hedged.

“And which bits would those be, precisely?” He fixed her with a look of polite inquiry. Damn the man, he was going to make her say it.

“The part with your hand under my skirts,” she said, brazening it out. She willed herself not to blush—she was not prone to blushing as a rule, but even ladies with unusual amounts of sangfroid had their limits.

“And what, precisely, was your complaint?”

Diana realized, perilously close to hysterical laughter, that she had possibly never heard him speak so formally to her, which was amusing, given the subject matter at hand.

“You didn’t have quite the right… rhythm,” she said, having searched for and located the most appropriate word.

His brow furrowed. “How so?”

“It was… well, too slow in one bit and too fast in another.”

“You’re not making any sense at all!”

Diana threw her hands up. “I don’t know how else to explain it, barring producing a medical text and beginning to throw all sorts of Latin words about!” She sighed. “You have to… well, you have to pay attention.”

Jeremy’s look of confusion would have been maddening had it not been so obviously sincere. Or perhaps its sincerity made it all the more enraging? “I don’t understand how I could possibly be paying you any more attention than I was at that moment, with my tongue in your mouth and my hand between your legs.”

Diana didn’t break eye contact with him, knowing that he was deliberately trying to embarrass her. And, damn it, she was a widow, albeit a distressingly uninformed one, not to mention one of the most notorious flirts in the ton. She would not be cowed by this… this…

“Strumpet.”

She didn’t realize she’d said the word aloud until both of Jeremy’s eyebrows shot so high toward his hairline that they were in danger of vanishing entirely.

“Did you just call me a strumpet?”

“I didn’t mean to say it aloud,” Diana said with as much dignity as she could muster, “but yes. Only a strumpet speaks the way you just did.”

Jeremy’s shoulders were shaking with barely suppressed mirth. “I’ve been called worse, I suppose,” he said, laughter evident in his voice as well.

“I don’t doubt that,” she said acerbically.

“You do realize some people enjoy a bit of lewd banter in the bedroom, don’t you?” he asked conversationally.

“I’m sure they do,” she said, lifting her chin. “But you won’t have the opportunity to engage in any if we don’t sort out our current issue.”

“Ah, yes,” Jeremy said, his mouth flattening into a line. “My… rhythm.” Something about the way he said the word instantly raised Diana’s hackles; it wasn’t precisely sarcastic, but his tone implied that she was the one being unreasonable, and that he, the man nobly suffering her whims, was exchanging weary winks with an unseen audience.

“Need I remind you that this was your idea in the first place?” she asked coldly, keeping as tight a leash on her anger as possible. “You are the one who received a complaint from a lady, and so you came to me to ask for my help in the matter. I don’t know why I’m surprised, though—if a gentleman’s response to hearing his bedroom performance critiqued is to instantly take up with someone new in the hopes of receiving a more favorable review, I shouldn’t have expected him to respond well to honest criticism.”

“I feel like I’m back at school again, about to be sent down for poor marks.” There was no heat in his voice, however, a fact Diana noted with relief.

“You’re the one who came to me as if you were proposing a business partnership,” she shot back. “You can’t complain about the tone when you set it.”

“Touché,” was all he said before waving a hand expansively to indicate that she should continue.

Diana, never one to waste a perfectly good opportunity to opine at length before a captive audience, continued. “The trouble with gentlemen,” she began, ignoring what she was fairly certain was a barely stifled groan from Jeremy, “is that they are too used to getting their own way.” She crossed her legs underneath her like a child, the last lingering hints of desire from their unfulfilling interlude driven away. Who could worry about kisses when there was a man to educate?