“It is hard to understand,” she said, “how if all the bad things had not happened in both our lives, we would not have met. We would not be here now. But it is true, is it not?”

“It is true,” he said.

“Has it been worth it?” she asked. “Going through all we have been through in order that we may be together now like this?”

He could no longer imagine his life without Anne in it.

“It has been worth it,” he said.

“Yes,” she said, “it has.”

She gazed steadily at him.

“Make love to me,” she said.

He gazed back at her, and she licked her lips.

“It is bright and sunny here,” she said. “It feels…clean here. I want to feel clean again. I don’t believe I have felt quite clean in ten years. How foolish a thing is that? I feel so…soiled.”

“Shh, Anne.” He turned onto his side and set his mouth to hers. “Don’t upset yourself again.”

“Make love to me,” she said. “Make me clean again. Please make me clean.”

“Anne,” he said. “Ah, my dearest.”

“But perhaps,” she said, “you do not want to. I have not been-”

He kissed her into silence.

She had not even known that about herself-that she felt unclean. The hurt, the ugliness, the injustice, the pain had all been pushed ruthlessly inside her, beneath the necessity of living on, of maintaining dignity and integrity, of earning a living, of raising a son.

She had never talked it all out before now. She had never even allowed herself to think it all through. She had denied her own suffering. She had never wept-until now, today.

But the weeping had eased the pain, had enabled her to put it all in the past-Albert Moore, Henry Arnold, Sarah, her parents. All of it.

And now what was left was the Anne who had survived it all and found solace with another lonely soul, whose life had been as turned inside out as hers had been by circumstances beyond his control. He was here with her now-Sydnam Butler, her husband, her lover.

They were here in this lovely place, just the two of them, surrounded by natural beauty and solitude.

All was perfect-except this feeling of being unclean, spoiled.

Yet cleanliness, peace, joy were surely within her reach at last. They were contained in the power, the energy of love. She had reached out to Sydnam with a love that went far beyond the merely romantic, and now she knew that she could also receive love, that at last-oh, surely-she was worthy of being loved.

Even if he could not give her the sort of love that any woman dreamed of having from her mate…

It did not matter.

He was Sydnam, and he could…

“Make me clean,” she murmured again against his mouth.

He remained on his side facing her as he raised her skirts and unbuttoned his breeches and stroked her stomach and her hip and her inner thighs with his lovely warm, long-fingered left hand. She gazed into his face, so beautiful despite the burns and scars-no, beautiful because of them, because of the person they had made him into. Behind his head and all about them the sky was blue and sunfilled.

He touched the moist heat between her thighs.

“You are ready, Anne?” he asked her.

“Yes.”

He lifted her leg over his hip, adjusted his position, and pressed slowly into her. He kept his head back the whole time and held her gaze with his own.

It was exquisite. And it was Sydnam who was inside her. She closed her muscles about him, holding him deep, and smiled.

“Yes,” she murmured.

Perhaps, she thought over the next few minutes, he would not have chosen her as the companion of his life if he had been given a free choice, but he was nevertheless a man filled with love, with tenderness, with compassion. He loved her slowly, deeply, rhythmically, very deliberately, his eye on hers. She bit her lower lip as swirls of pleasure and of wonder radiated up through her womb to fill her whole being with warmth and light until finally there was no room left for ugliness or hatred or bitterness.

Only love.

Simply love.

He kissed her as he released into her and something in her flowed to meet him.

It was surely the most glorious moment of her whole life. She could smell grass and water and sunlight and sex.

“Anne,” he whispered to her. “You are so beautiful. So very beautiful.”

“And clean,” she said, smiling sleepily at him as he withdrew from inside her. “Clean again. And whole again. Thank you.”

His lips rested warm against hers again as she sank into sleep.


“They have gone? Already?”

The Duchess of Bewcastle sank into a chair in the drawing room at Alvesley and held her hands out to warm them at the fire.

“They left this morning,” Lauren said. “How disappointing that you missed seeing them.”

“You will be thinking me very rag-mannered,” the duchess said, smiling at the countess and Lauren, “as if I came here only to see Mr. and Mrs. Butler when in reality I came just as much to see you. But it is a disappointment to find them gone, I must confess, Lauren. It has been bothering me that they did not have much of a wedding.”

“We were upset about that too, Christine,” the countess said. “But they were in a hurry to marry, you know, because…Well, because they were in love, I suppose.”

The duchess dimpled.

“Yes,” she said, “David told us all about that. The poor child even had to endure the full force of Wulfric’s quizzing glass as a consequence.”

All three ladies dissolved into laughter.

“Sydnam is painting again,” Lauren said, leaning forward in her chair, “with his left hand and his mouth. And the one painting he showed us was wonderful, was it not, Mother, though he declared that it was perfectly dreadful. He said it with a smile, though, and it was clear he was pleased with himself and determined to try again. Father had to leave the room in a hurry, but we could all hear him blowing his nose very loudly outside the door.”