by Mary Balogh
She had been there with him again.
“But they were all speaking Welsh,” she said.
He looked arrested for a moment.
“And so they were,” he said. “Perhaps I understand more of the language than I realized. Goodness, soon I will be a full-fledged Welshman. Before long I will be playing the harp. But no.” He glanced down at his empty sleeve. “Perhaps not that.”
They both laughed, and some of the tension dissipated.
Finally she talked about the house.
“If it becomes yours,” she asked, “will you keep everything as it is?”
It was fully furnished.
“For a while, yes,” he said, sitting back as she cleared up the remains of their picnic and put everything away in the basket before crossing the room to stand looking out the front window. “I fell in love with it as it is, and it would be foolish to change everything merely because I could. I would make changes gradually as I became convinced that I wanted something different. The prevailing browns in the hall can be gloomy on a gray winter’s day, for example. They might be the first to go.”
She watched the sheep grazing in the meadow and felt the pain of a nameless longing tighten her chest. The longing to see the hall as it would be, perhaps? And the certain knowledge that she never would.
“What would you change if it were yours?” he asked.
“Nothing much,” she said. “It has been well and tastefully furnished. But perhaps I would replace the reds in this room with primrose yellows. It is a morning room with windows facing both south and east. It is the room in which one ought to be able to start the day in a sunny mood-even a stormy day in January.”
“Perhaps,” he said, chuckling, “I will change the predominant colors in here to primrose. If the house is ever mine, that is.”
He had come up to stand just behind her right shoulder, she realized. She turned her head and smiled at him, only to find that he was closer than she had thought. She swallowed and turned back to the window. But there was no cliff to climb and no hill to run down this time to break the tension.
“You must be looking forward to getting back to Bath,” he said.
“Yes.”
There was a silence that pulsed with discomfort.
“You must be looking forward to getting your quiet life at Glandwr back,” she said.
“Yes.”
There was another silence in which even breathing was uncomfortable because it was audible.
She turned determinedly to face him. She thought he might take a step back since she could not do so without going through the window, but he stayed where he was.
“I want you to know,” she said, “that you are not ugly. I know you must sometimes see people flinch when they first set eyes on you. I actually ran away from you. But it is because people instantly understand that you have endured something unspeakably painful and will never be quite free of it. When people see you for a second and third and thirty-third time, they no longer really notice. You are you, and the person shines through the appearance.”
She felt horribly self-conscious then and wished he would step back or turn away.
“I wish,” he said, “we did not live in a society that is so ready to judge others on one single fact concerning their life. I wish you were not judged on the fact that, through no fault of your own, you are an unwed mother. I wish you were not lonely.”
“Oh, I am not,” she protested, feeling the heat rise to her cheeks. “I have friends. I have my son. I have-”
“Too late,” he said. “You admitted to me weeks ago that you are lonely.”
Just as he had admitted to her that he was. She drew a slow breath.
“For ten years,” he said, “there has been no man in your life-merely because one scoundrel forced himself on you and destroyed your dreams before he died. It is an empty feeling, is it not-knowing oneself untouchable but wanting to be touched?”
It was even worse, she thought, to be afraid to be touched. But she would not say it aloud. And perhaps there was a way to get past her fears. Perhaps there was.
She blinked her eyes and swallowed against the telltale gurgle in her throat.
“You are not untouchable,” she said.
“Neither are you.”
“I will…remember you after I have left here,” she said.
“And I you.”
She swallowed again. He gazed steadily at her. She shut her eyes tightly suddenly and mustered all her rash courage.
“I do not want to be lonely any longer,” she said almost in a whisper. “I do not want you to be lonely.”
She kept her eyes shut until he answered, his voice as low as her own.
“I cannot comfort you, Anne,” he said. “You can look at me without revulsion, perhaps, but…what we are talking of is intimacy. I cannot inflict myself on you for that.”
She opened her eyes and looked at him. How could she know if he was right? How could she know what it would be like to be touched by any man-but especially by him?
She raised her hand to touch the right side of his face, but instead she laid it flat against his shoulder-and even then she wondered what disfigurements lay beneath his clothing. But there was something in her more powerful than the physical reluctance to touch him-or the reluctance to be touched.
Life, she realized, so often became a determined, relentless avoidance of pain-of one’s own, of other people’s. But sometimes pain had to be acknowledged and even touched so that one could move into it and through it and past it. Or else be destroyed by it.
“I am someone to arouse revulsion too,” she said. “I have been raped. I have borne another man’s child without ever having been married to him. I am not a virtuous woman. I have seen men cringe from me when they discover the truth.”
“Anne,” he said. She saw his eye brighten with unshed tears. “Oh, Anne, no. But the same consequences might happen again, you know. Though I would, of course, marry you. Imagine if you will what a dreadful fate that would be for you.”
“Don’t,” she said. “Don’t belittle yourself in that way.”
“You cannot pretend,” he said, “that you would wish to be bound to me for life.”
She had not been talking or even thinking of marriage. Or-foolishly-of being got with child again. She did not want to think of either. By this time next week she would be back in Bath with David, resuming her old life and duties at the school though it was still vacation time. Mr. Butler would remain here alone-everyone else would have left too.
He would be all alone.
And so would she-surrounded by people, by friends.
But there was today. There was now.
“I just do not want to be lonely any longer,” she said again. “I do not want you to be. I want the memory of this lovely afternoon and of this whole month to be complete.”
“Anne,” he said. “Anne.”
Only now did she realize that he was calling her by her given name. It warmed her heart to hear him say it.
And then he lifted his hand and set his palm against her cheek, his fingers pushing up into her hair. She leaned into his hand and closed her eyes again.
“Forgive me,” she said. “Please forgive me. Here I stand trying to seduce you and proving that I am indeed what many people call me.”
He demonstrated then what she had observed earlier, that his left arm was as strong as both were with many other men. He circled her waist with it and drew her hard against him, making a sound very much like a growl as he did so. She stood pressed against him, her face against his left shoulder.
“There is no seduction here,” he said, his voice low against her ear. “Not on either side. Good God, Anne, you must know that I want you every bit as much as you can possibly want me. And I do not wish to be lonely any longer either. Let us take away each other’s loneliness, then, at least for this afternoon so that it may be made perfect.”
She wrapped her arms about his waist.
Perf
ect.
…so that it may be made perfect.
Please, God. Please, God.
The master bedchamber had green brocaded walls with gilded friezes below the high ceiling. Heavy burgundy velvet curtains hung on either side of the long window from frieze to floor. The great four-poster, canopied bed was hung with burgundy-and-green-striped draperies. A matching spread lay over the bed. A Persian carpet covered most of the floor. Paintings of horses in heavy gilded frames hung on the walls.
It was not a pretty room, but it had struck Anne earlier that it had character, that it was indeed a master bedchamber. It was where Mr. Butler would surely sleep if he purchased Ty Gwyn, she had thought.
The window looked out over the meadow to the trees on the slope opposite. Looking out through it as she stepped into the room now, Anne could see the five-bar wooden gate and the stile in the distance.
The stile-where this had all started.
She shivered slightly. But she was not allowing her thoughts to speak too loudly to her. She did know, though, that she had wanted-and dreaded-this almost from the beginning of their acquaintance. Perhaps from the moment when they had admitted their loneliness to each other.
It was a mutual loneliness that impelled them now. It was not a bad motive, surely, for what they were about to do. There was compassion in sharing and alleviating another’s loneliness. There was a certain tenderness in it.
She felt an overwhelming tenderness for Sydnam Butler, who had demonstrated almost incredible courage and suffered so much yet had pieced his life back together with determination and dignity though he had believed himself untouchable ever since.
Now she would touch him and prove that he was mistaken about himself. And he would touch her and she would feel again like a desirable woman. Perhaps.
Please, God.
She turned as she heard him close the door and looked uncertainly at him. But her resolve had not weakened in the distance from morning room to bedchamber. She did want him with a knee-weakening desire.
“Please,” he said, smiling at her and closing the distance between them, “may I be the one to take down your hair? You could do it ten times faster with your two hands, I daresay, but may I do it?”
She smiled and stood still while his fingers fumbled awkwardly with the pins that held her hair up. She looked deliberately into his face as his hand worked. She did not even know, she realized, what lay behind the black eye patch. But she was struck again by the extraordinary beauty of the left side of his face. He was twenty-eight years old-one year younger than she. He could never have been a rake, she thought, even if this had not happened to him. He was a serious, gentle, affectionate man. He would have been married by now to some woman with a beauty and social rank to match his own. He would have had children. He would have had a family to bring with him to Ty Gwyn.
But no-he would never even have come to Wales if he had not also gone to the Peninsula against the advice of everyone who knew and loved him.
She would never have met him.
And if she had not been raped, she would be married to Henry Arnold now and living in Gloucestershire. She would not be standing here in the master bedchamber at Ty Gwyn, having her hair taken down by a one-armed man who had become strangely precious to her.
How strange were the ways of fate.
But she was mentally prattling, she thought, when her hair came cascading down over her shoulders and he reached behind him to set her hairpins down on a table without taking his eye off her.
Her thoughts came crashing to a halt then, and she felt horribly, horribly vulnerable-not because she did not believe in her own beauty but precisely because she did. Beauty could blind the beholder to all else, even the personhood of the one who possessed it. And she could see in his eye that he found her beautiful.
I am Anne, she wanted to cry out to him. Please do not forget that I am Anne.
Please, please, please do not call my hair my crowning glory.
He leaned forward and kissed her mouth with closed lips. Desire shot through her like a lightning bolt, almost causing her knees to buckle. And with it came the return of thought.
All was going to be well. Surely it was.
“Anne,” he murmured so softly that she almost missed it.
And then he turned away and shrugged out of his coat and sat down on the side of the bed to pull off his Hessian boots. It was a hard thing to do one-handed-she could see that. His valet must, of course, do it for him at home. She did not know if she should offer to help, but she did not do so, and he managed. She guessed that he managed most tasks that a two-armed person would find impossible to do one-handed.
His right shirtsleeve was pinned to his side just as his coat sleeve was.
She waited tensely.
But when he got to his feet again, he drew back the bedcovers and turned to reach out his arm to her, and she realized that he did not intend to remove any more of his clothes.
“Anne,” he said, “will you take off your dress yourself? It would take me too long.”
He watched her until she stood before him in just her shift and her stockings. She sat on the bed to take off the latter, but he kneeled before her and removed them one at a time himself.
“Ah,” he said, sitting back on his heels and gazing up at her when the task was complete, “you are incredibly beautiful, Anne. I am sorry. I am so very sorry-”
“No.” She leaned forward and set her hands on his shoulders, and her hair fell forward to frame both their faces. “Please don’t be. Please, please do not. I would never have met you if you were not like this. I would not be here with you now. And I would not be here if I were not as I am. I want to be here with you. And if you say you are sorry, then I must say it too. I do not want either of us to be sorry for anything this afternoon.”
“Anne,” he said, “I am not very experienced. And I have had no experience at all since…this.”
It was somehow reassuring to know that he felt his own insecurities and anxieties just as she felt hers. Perhaps that was why she had found the courage to come this far.
“I am not very experienced either.” She smiled at him.
He closed the gap between their mouths and kissed her. And this time he deepened the kiss, parting his lips, passing his tongue over her lips until she opened her mouth and his tongue came warm inside and she wrapped both arms about his neck and pushed her fingers up into his hair, making a sound of appreciation deep in her throat as she did so.
Or perhaps it was he who made the sound.
“Lie down,” he whispered against her mouth as he raised his head. “Will you remove your shift? But only if you feel comfortable doing so.”
She crossed her arms and pulled it off over her head before lying down and moving over so that he could lie beside her. And strangely she did not feel uncomfortable though he stood looking down at her for several moments. He had called her beautiful and he desired her. But he had also called her by name, and she knew somehow from the look in his eye, though there was desire there, that it was her he saw, not just her voluptuous beauty. Beneath his gaze she could feel simply herself.
And this at least was new. She had never been naked with a man before.
She throbbed with wanting him.
He lay on his right side facing her, and his hand moved over her, warm, sensitive-and trembling. She turned toward him, smiled at him, and caressed him through his clothing with her own hand-and on his left side.
He was all warm, hard-muscled masculinity. She could feel the muscles in his arm and shoulder and rippling along his back. She could feel the muscles in his buttock when she rested her hand there while her eyes drifted closed and she licked her lips. He was doing exquisite things with his thumb and forefinger at the nipple of one breast and then the other.
Curiously, the presence of his clothing against her own bare skin excited her as much as nakedness would have done. Perhaps more.
Desire pooled hot and sharp between her thighs. And s
he moved closer to him, pressing her breasts to his shirt while his hand moved lower, slid between her legs, and found that aching spot and caressed it.
He set his mouth to hers and his tongue came inside again and circled her own slowly before moving to the roof of her mouth.
“Turn onto your back for me,” he whispered against her mouth.
He was, she realized then, unbuttoning his pantaloons at the waist and opening the front flap.
She almost forgot his disabilities as he rolled on top of her and his legs pressed between her own, spreading them wide until she twined them about his powerful thighs encased in the warm fabric of his pantaloons. His weight was heavy on her. She felt him position himself against the sensitive opening to her desire and her womb and spread both hands over his buttocks as he slid his hand beneath her.
He came into her with one slow, hard, deep thrust.
And memory flooded every inch of her body.
She did not fight him. She did not call out or try to push him away. Her mind was sharply at work with a different message from the one her body was sending her. Her mind told her that he was Sydnam Butler, that he was filling her with himself because it was something they both wanted, that until the very moment of entry she had been filled with wonder and pleasure and the desire for more.
Her body was rigid with tension, she realized, and his was heavy on her. He was deep inside her-and holding still.
“Anne,” he said. “Anne?”
“Sydnam.” She had never spoken his given name aloud before, even to herself. But it saved her now, the knowledge that that was who he was. “Sydnam, it is all right. It is all right. Don’t stop.”
She moved her hands up his sides until she became suddenly, horribly aware that there was no arm on the right side.
But at the same moment he moved in her, withdrawing to the brink of her, pressing in again, smooth and hard against the slickness of her inner passage.
It was all terribly, terribly carnal, terrifyingly intimate.
Body and mind waged a war-and both won, both lost. She knew he was Sydnam, she recognized the beauty of what he did with her, she still desperately wanted it, she relaxed and opened to him.