Once, three weeks or so ago, she had set her fingertips against his cheek-and then removed them as if she had scalded her hand.

Today she had almost kissed him-and then moved jerkily away.

He was aware suddenly that she was standing in front of him. He looked up at her, prepared to smile and suggest that they go and look at the house. But her eyes were huge and deep, giving him the curious impression that he could see right through to her soul. And she set her fingertips again just where they had been that other time.

“You are not ugly, Mr. Butler,” she said. “You are not. Truly you are not.”

And she bent her head and set her lips against the left side of his mouth. They trembled quite noticeably, and he felt her breath being released in awkward little jerks against his cheek. But she did not give him just a token little peck of a kiss to prove that she had the courage to do it. She kept her lips where they were long enough for him to taste her, to want her with a yearning so intense that he gripped the arm of the seat almost hard enough to put a dent in the wood.

When she lifted her head, she looked down at him again in that peculiar way she had of focusing on both sides of his face. Her eyes were swimming with tears, he noticed.

“You are not ugly,” she said again almost fiercely, as if, perhaps, to convince herself.

“Thank you.” He forced himself to smile, even to chuckle. “Thank you, Miss Jewell. You are very kind.”

He understood fully what it must have cost her to touch him thus. But she was a woman of some compassion. It was not her fault that he felt bleaker than he had felt in a long, long while.

She had tasted of sunshine and woman and dreams.

“May I show you the house?” he asked her, getting to his feet.

“Yes, please,” she said. “I have been looking forward to it all day.”

And then he did something terribly distressing that he had not done for a long time. He offered her his right arm to take.

Except that nothing happened.

It was not there.

She fell into step beside him, not even knowing he had made the gesture.

For a fraction of a moment he had forgotten that he was only half a man.



She was terribly aware of him as they entered the cool, silent house and he showed her each of the rooms upstairs and down. She was aware of him as a man, as a sexual being for whom her own woman’s body ached.

She was half terrified by the feeling, half fascinated by it.

She had been very careful as she kissed him not to touch his right side. But she had been very conscious of that right side, afraid that she would reach out and touch him after all-rather as people who are afraid of heights are terrified that they will jump from a tower or cliff.

Yet it was not his right side she most feared.

She had also been very aware as she kissed him of his masculinity, of the intimacy that had lain just a heartbeat away, though his lips had not moved against hers, and his hand had not touched her.

It was his masculinity she most feared.

Or, rather, her own damaged femininity.

“It is a lovely house,” she said after a while. “I can understand why you are so attached to it. The rooms are square and high-ceilinged and almost stately, are they not? And the windows fill them with light.”

The back windows looked out on the vegetable garden and the wooded slope, while those in front faced onto the flower garden and the rest of the park. The house was enclosed by beauty. And yet all the splendor of the sea and the coast lay just a mile or so away.

“I fell in love with it the first time I came here to visit,” he said. “There are some places like that, though there is not always a rational explanation of why they grab the heart when other places, equally lovely or even more so, do not. I am very fond of Glandwr and of the cottage where I now live, but they do not cry out home to me.”

No place had ever done that to Anne, though she had grown up happily in her parents’ home in Gloucestershire and had felt as if her cottage at Lydmere was a blessed sanctuary. And she loved Claudia’s school, where she now lived. But it was not home. Again she envied Mr. Butler that he had Ty Gwyn and hoped the Duke of Bewcastle would agree to sell it to him. Ty Gwyn was a place where a person could set down roots that would last for generations. It was a place where one could be happy, where one could raise children, where one could…

But Mr. Butler would live here alone.

And she would never live here. There was no point in weaving dreams about it.

“The house feels blessedly cool,” he said when they had seen every room and were standing in the tiled hallway again. “Shall we eat our picnic tea in here? Or would you prefer to sit out on the lawn?”

“In here,” she said. “Let me fetch the basket.”

“We will take one handle each,” he said.

She ought to have opted for the lawn, she thought ten minutes later as they set out their little feast on the small table in the morning room. It was true that they had become overheated by the sun. But outdoors there were more sounds from nature to distract one’s attention and more to look at and less awareness that they were a man and woman together and that there was something going on between them that both of them were aware of and uncomfortable with.

Something that made the air about them taut with tension.

His cook had made little meat pasties for them and cucumber sandwiches and an apple tart. She had included generous slices of cheese and the inevitable lemonade. Anne arranged it all on the table with the dishes that were also in the basket. She poured their drinks.

They ate in near silence, and when they did talk, it was on the sort of inconsequential topics that strangers would have chosen. They must have spent ten whole minutes discussing how long they expected the hot, sunny spell to continue.