First, or one of many; gentle, passionate, hungry, demanding, or affectionate; welcome or not so much: hit me with a kiss from your work-in-progress.

Here’s mine, from the book that is with the editor and currently called Prudence in Love (which may, at any moment, become Revealed in Mist.)

Mrs. Allen was just enquiringly anxiously about whether she should hold dinner when Allen opened the door to Prue and her sister. David was in the hall in moments, barely aware of moving, but he halted, unwilling to embarrass Prue by embracing her in front of her sister and the servants.

Prue had no such qualms. She stopped in the midst of untying her bonnet and flung herself towards him, her face alight with welcome, stopping just within arms reach.

“You are here! I thought perhaps tomorrow… Oh, David, I am so glad to see you.” At that, as if she could not contain herself any longer, she held out both her hands, and he lifted them with both his own and pressed a kiss on the gloved backs, all the time drowning in the glow of her eyes.

“Let us give them a moment,” Prue’s sister murmured to the Allens, and she climbed the stairs while they went back downstairs to the service rooms.

David drew Prue into his study, and carefully shut the door before seizing her for the kiss he had been imagining this past month. She met his passion with her own, returning his assault on her lips with a bruising assault of her own, her hands meanwhile sliding up under his waistcoat to clutch him to her as if she would pull herself right inside his flesh.

He pressed her against the wall beside the door, one of his own hands cupping her buttocks and the other, at first clasped around her shoulders to hold her to him and protect her back, now creeping to lift her skirt that they might, indeed, bury themselves in one another.

Impatiently, she dropped one of her own hands to fumble at his buttons.

“Prue,” he murmured. “Oh, Prue, how I’ve missed this.”

A knock on the door froze them both. “Mrs. Allen will be serving dinner shortly, Prue,” her sister called. “Do you not wish to change? Or at least take off your bonnet and coat, and wash your face and hands?”

David met Prue’s eyes, smiling tenderly. Her redingote was in a heap on the floor behind her, and her bonnet was gone. Ah yes. There it was, tossed onto his desk on the other side of the room, though he had no memory of removing it.

“I had best take my hands off you, Prue, or I shall make us both late for dinner, and your sister shall scold.”