She speaks to him in a soft whisper against his ear.

"I always knew," she tells him, "that this would be the most beautiful moment of my life. This. With you. But I never expected it to happen."

Ah, Lily. I never knew.

"My sweet life," he tells her. "Ah, my dear love."

But he can no longer think only of not hurting his bride. His desire, his need, pulses like a drumbeat through every blood vessel in his body and focuses as exquisite pain in his groin and the part of himself that is sheathed in her. He withdraws to the brink of her and presses deep again, hears her gasp of surprise and surely of pleasure too, and withdraws and presses deep.

He holds the rhythm steady for as long as he is able both for her sake and his own, resisting the urge to release into pleasure too soon, before she can learn that intimacy consists of more than simple penetration.

She lies relaxed beneath him. Not out of distaste or shock or passive submission. He would know. Even if she were not making quiet sounds of satisfaction to the rhythm, he would know. She is enjoying what is happening. He finds her mouth with his own and it is warm, open, responsive.

"My love," he tells her. "This is what happens. Ah, you are beautiful, Lily. So very beautiful."

He can hold back no longer. He slows the rhythm, pressing deeper, pausing longer. He is enclosed by her, engulfed by her, part of her. Lily. My love. My wife. Flesh of my flesh, bone of my bone, heart of my heart.

He withdraws and delves deep again. Deeper. Beyond barriers. Beyond time or place. He releases deep into the eternity that is himself and Lily united.

He hears her whisper his name.

They have only a few miles to go before reaching the base camp. But there is a narrow pass to be negotiated before they get there. There can be no real danger of any French force being this far in front of its winter lines, but Neville is cautious. He sends men ahead to scout the hills. He arranges the line of his company so that he has the most dangerous position in front while Lieutenant Harris is at the rear and the rawest of his men as well as the chaplain and the two women are in the middle.

Lily is quiet today though no longer dazed. The reality of her father's death has begun to sink in. She has begun to grieve. But she made love with him for a second time in the early-morning darkness before he got up, and she twined her arms about his neck and told him that she loved him, that she had always loved him from the first moment she saw him, perhaps even before that, before her birth, before time and creation. He had laughed softly and told her that he adored her.

She is wearing a package on a cord about her neck. In the package is a copy of their marriage papers—the other copy will be duly registered by Parker-Rowe when they return to camp. Lily's package is a final precaution. Anyone opening it will see that she is the wife of a British officer and will treat her with the appropriate chivalry.

The French are clever. At least this particular company is. They have evaded detection by the advance British party. They allow the front of the British line to march through the pass and emerge on the other side before they attack the weak center.

Neville whips around at the sound of the first volley of shots from the hills. It seems to him that the world slows and his vision becomes a dark tunnel through which he observes Lily in the middle of the pass, throwing up her hands and tipping backward out of sight amid the smoke and the milling bodies of his trapped men.

She has been hit.

He calls her name.

"L-i-l-y!L-I-L-Y!"

Instinctively he acts like the officer he is, drawing his sword, bellowing out orders, fighting his way back into the killing field of the pass. Back to Lily.

Lieutenant Harris meanwhile has led his men from the rear up onto the hill. Within minutes the French are put at least to temporary flight. But during those minutes Neville has reached the middle of the pass and found Lily, who has blood on her chest. More blood than was on her father's yesterday.

She is dead.

He looks down at her slain body and falls to his knees beside her, his duty forgotten. His arms reach for her.

Lily. My love. My life. So briefly my life. For one night.

Only one night for love.

Lily!

He feels no pain from the bullet that grazes his head. The world blacks out for him as he falls senseless across Lily's dead body.

 

PART III

An Impossible Dream

 

Chapter 4

He was dazed, she knew, not quite conscious of where he was going or with whom. She did not try to break the silence.

In truth she was hardly less in shock herself. He had been about to get married. He had thought her dead—she knew that from Captain Harris. But it had been less than two years ago. He had been about to marry again. So soon after.

Lily had caught sight of his bride when she had burst into the church in a panic. She was tall and elegant and beautiful in white satin and lace. His bride. Someone from his own world. Someone whom perhaps he loved.

And then Lily had hurried past his bride and into the nave of the church. It had been like last night, like stepping into a different universe. But worse than last night. The church had been filled with splendidly, richly clad ladies and gentlemen, and they had all been looking back at her. She had felt their eyes on her even as her own had focused on the man who stood at the front of the church like a prince of fairy tales.

He was clothed in pale blue and silver and white. Lily had scarcely recognized him. The height, the breadth of shoulder, the strong, muscular physique were the same.

But this man was the Earl of Kilbourne, a remote English aristocrat. The man she remembered was Major Lord Newbury, a rugged officer with the Ninety-fifth Rifles.

Her husband.

The Major Newbury she remembered—Neville, as he had become to her on that last day—had always been careless of his appearance and impossibly attractive in his green and black regimentals, which were often shabby, often dusty or mud-spattered. His blond hair had always been close cropped. Today he was all immaculate elegance.

And he had been about to marry that beautiful woman from his own world.

He had thought Lily dead. He had forgotten about her. He had never spoken of her—that had been clear from everyone's reaction in the church. He had perhaps been ashamed to do so. Or she had meant so little to him that he had not thought to do so. His marriage to her had been contracted in haste because he had felt he owed it to her father. It had been dismissed as an incident not worth talking about.

Today was his wedding day—to someone else.

And she had come to put a stop to it.

"Lily." He spoke suddenly and his hand tightened even more painfully about hers. "It really is you. You really are alive." He was still looking straight ahead. His pace had not slackened.

"Yes." She stopped herself only just in time from apologizing, as she had done in the church. It would be so much better for him if she had died. Not that he was an unkind man. Never that. But—

"You were dead," he said, and she realized suddenly that the path was a short route to the beach where she had spent the night. They had left the trees behind them and were descending the hillside, brushing through the ferns at reckless speed. "I saw you die, Lily. I saw you dead with a bullet through your heart. Harris reported to me afterward that you had died. You and eleven others."

"The bullet missed my heart," she told him. "I recovered."

He stopped when they reached the valley floor and looked toward the waterfall, which knifed downward in a spectacular ribbon of bright foam over a fern-clad cliff to the pool below and the stream that flowed to the sea. The tiny thatched cottage that Lily had noticed the night before overlooked the pool. There was a pathway leading to its door, though there was no sign that the house was inhabited.

He turned in the opposite direction and strode toward the beach, taking her with him. Lily, who was feeling overwarm at the length and speed of their walk, pulled loose the ribbons of her bonnet with her free hand and let it fall to the sand behind her. She had lost hairpins during the night. The few that remained were not sufficient to the task of keeping her mane of curly, unruly hair confined on her head. It fell about her shoulders and down her back. She shook her head and allowed the breeze to blow it back from her face.

"Lily," he said, looking down at her for the first time since they had left the church. "Lily. Lily."

They were walking, not along the hard level sand of the beach, but down it. They stopped at the water's edge. If only they were still separated by the ocean's expanse, Lily thought. If only she had stayed in Portugal. It would have been better for both their sakes.

He would have married the other woman.

She would not have known that he had forgotten her so soon, that she had meant so little to him.

"You are alive." He had dropped her hand at last, but he turned to her now, gazed into her face with searching eyes, and lifted one hand. He hesitated before touching his fingertips to her cheek. "Lily. Oh, my dear, you are alive!"

"Yes." She had reached her journey's end. Or perhaps merely the beginning of another. He stood there in all the splendor of the Earl of Kilbourne.

***

Neville realized suddenly that he was standing on the beach, at the water's edge. He had no idea why he had come here of all places. Except that the house would soon be filled with guests again. And this was where he always came to be alone. To think.

But he was not alone now. Lily was with him. He was touching her. She was warm and alive. She was small and thin and pretty and shabby, her long hair blowing wildly in the wind.

She was—oh, God, she was Lily.

"Lily," he asked, and he squinted out to sea, though he did not really see either the water or the infinity beyond it, "what happened?"

He had been carried off unconscious from that pass. Lieutenant Harris had told him in the hospital that Lily and eleven of the men, including the chaplain, the Reverend Parker-Rowe, had died. But the company had been forced to make their escape carrying only their packs and their wounded with them. They had had to leave the dead and their belongings for the returning French to plunder and bury.

Guilt had gnawed at Neville in the year and a half since then. He had failed to protect his men from harm. He had failed Sergeant Doyle. He had failed Lily—his wife.

"They took me to Ciudad Rodrigo," she said, "and a surgeon dug the bullet out of me. It missed my heart by a whisker, he told me—it was the word he used. He spoke English. A few of them did. They were kind to me."

"Were they?" He turned his head and looked sharply down at her. "They found your papers, Lily? They treated you well? With respect?"

"Oh, yes," she said, looking up at him. He remembered then the large, guileless eyes as blue as a summer sky. They had not changed. "They were very kind. They called me 'my lady.' " She smiled fleetingly.

Relief made him feel slightly weak at the knees. The shock was beginning to wear off, he realized. He should be married now and on his way back to the abbey for breakfast—with Lauren, his wife. Instead he was standing on the beach in his wedding finery with—his wife. He felt a renewed wave of dizziness.

"They kept you in captivity and treated you well?" he said. "When and where did they release you, Lily? Why was I not informed? Or did you escape?"

Her gaze lowered to his chin. "They were attacked soon after we left Ciudad Rodrigo," she said. "By Spanish partisans. I was taken captive."

He felt further relief. He even smiled. "Then you were safe," he said. "The partisans are our allies. They escorted you back to the regiment? But that must have been months ago, Lily. Why did no one notify me?"

She was turning, he noticed, to look back up the beach toward the valley. Her hair blew forward over her shoulders, hiding her face from his gaze.

"They knew I was English," she said. "But they would not believe I was a prisoner. I was not confined, you see. And they would not believe that I was an officer's wife. I was not dressed like one. They thought I was with the French as a—as a concubine."

He felt as if his heart had performed a complete somersault in his chest. He opened his mouth to speak, but he could scarcely get the words out.