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.”
“Oh,” the duchess said, her hands clasped to her bosom, “Wulfric will be pleased-about Mr. Butler painting again, that is. And so will Morgan. I must write to her.”
“And it appears that it is all Anne’s doing,” the countess said. “We must thank you, Christine, for inviting her to Glandwr during the summer and giving Sydnam a chance to meet her.”
“But it was Freyja who invited her,” the duchess said. “Joshua and David’s father were cousins, you know, and Joshua is very fond of the boy. But I will take credit if you insist. If I had not decided to go to Wales with Wulfric after James’s christening, after all, then no one else would have gone there, would they? And Anne would not have been invited.”
“We have grown exceedingly fond of her,” Lauren said.
“We all tried very hard to bring them together during the summer,” the duchess told them. “All except Wulfric and Aidan, who have the peculiar and very male notion that true love never needs a helping hand.”
They all laughed again.
“I do wish they had stayed here a little longer,” she added.
“They are on their way to Gloucestershire,” the countess explained, “to visit Anne’s family.”
“Indeed?” The duchess looked interested. “Joshua told us she was estranged from them. I do think it is sad to be estranged from one’s family. I know from experience, though it was in-laws in my case-in-laws from my first marriage.”
“We have guessed,” Lauren said, “that it is Sydnam who has persuaded Anne to go home.”
“Ah.” The duchess sighed and sat back in her chair, her hands warm again, “it really is turning into a good marriage, is it not? But they did not have much of a wedding for all that. When I broached the matter with Wulfric last evening, he insisted that Mr. Butler would probably hate any fuss, but he did finally relent and agree to allow me to organize a grand wedding reception for them. I came to consult you about it. But I am too late-they are gone. How very provoking!”
“Oh,” Lauren said, “how wonderful that would have been. I wish I had thought of it myself.”
The duchess sighed. “Wulfric will look smug when I go home and tell him they are gone,” she said.
“It was a very good thought, Christine,” the countess told her.
“Well,” she said, looking from one to the other of them, “there can be no wedding reception at Lindsey Hall within the next few days after all. But I am not discouraged. How many people could be assembled there at such short notice, after all? Perhaps it was not the best of plans.”
“You have another?” Lauren asked.
The duchess chuckled. “I always have another plan,” she said. “Shall we put our heads together?”
Mr. Jewell lived with his wife in a modest square manor just beyond the village of Wyckel in Gloucestershire, a picturesque part of the country.
It occurred to Sydnam as the carriage drove through the village and then turned between two stone gateposts and covered the short distance across a paved courtyard to the front door that they must be no more than twenty-five or thirty miles from Bath.