Was this the all-powerful, self-contained, always-confident aristocrat who had so awed her when she first encountered him? She blinked back tears.
“Yes,” she said. “You once told me, Avery, that your dearest dream was to have someone to love.”
His eyes gazed back into hers, wide-open, very blue in the fading evening sunlight and the flickering light of the candles. “Yes,” he said.
“Can I be that someone?” she asked him.
His eyes dropped from hers. He set his palms against her ankles and moved them up to her arms clasped about her knees and along them to her shoulders. He raised his eyes to hers again and got to his feet. He gathered up an armful of cushions and tossed them down in a heap beside her, beneath the windowsill. He knelt beside her, turned her, and laid her down on the cushions. He unclothed her with swift, skilled hands and then untied the sash at his waist to shed his jacket and then the loose trousers. The sun was gone suddenly, but candlelight remained, and it seemed to Anna again that this large, mainly empty space was the warmest, coziest, happiest room she had ever been in.
Her hands moved over him as he kneeled between her thighs. He was a perfectly formed, utterly beautiful, and all-powerful, attractive, potent male.
“Anna,” he murmured as his hands and his mouth went to work on her. “My duchess.”
“My love.”
Dreamy blue eyes gazed down into hers for a moment. “My love?”
“My love,” she repeated. “Of course. Did you not know? Oh, Avery, did you not know?”
He smiled then, a look of sweetness so intense that it took her breath away. And he entered her and lowered himself onto her and turned his golden head to rest against her own.
They made love, and there were no words. Not even thoughts. Only a sweetness and a rightness and a gathering need and a pain so pleasurable that when it crested they could only cry out together and descend into a nothingness that was somehow everything.
Ah, there were no words. No thoughts. Only love.
They lay among the cushions, spent, relaxed, still joined, their arms about each other. Candlelight wavered, forming moving patterns on the walls and ceiling, and the world seemed very far away.
“I wish we could stay here forever,” she said.
He sighed and withdrew from her and sat up. He reached out for the white trousers and pulled them on and sat cross-legged beside her again, the trousers riding low on his hips.
“But this is just a room, Anna,” he said, turning his head to look down at her. “You and I, we go beyond the room and beyond time.” He touched a hand first to his own heart and then to hers. “We have only to be aware of it. It is very easy to lose that awareness—when one gets caught up in the busy life of fashionable London during the Season, for example. I learn and relearn my awareness. And I will teach you if you wish.”
“I do,” she said. “What I really want, though, is the white outfit.”
He laughed at the unexpectedness of her words, and he was transformed into a warm, relaxed man. Her husband.
“But we will be leaving here soon,” she said, looking around the room, “and going to Morland Abbey.”
“You will love it, Anna,” he told her, his face lighting up. “You will adore it. I promise. And I have a room there just like this.”
She smiled up at him, at his eagerness, his unexpected boyishness, the person he must have been from the start, made whole and happy.
His smile faded, though it lingered in his eyes.
“When I left school,” he said, “and said a reluctant farewell to my master—actually it was goodbye. He died in his sleep just one month later. When I went to take my leave of him, he told me I was whole except for one thing. There was still a hollow at the center of my being, he told me, and only love could fill it. But he would not explain. He never would. It was all about finding out for oneself with him. He could be very annoying. He would not tell me if it was love of humanity or love of nature or love of family or romantic love. All he would say was that I would know it when I found it and it would make me whole and finally at peace with myself. I have found it, Anna. It is romantic love.”
She touched his knee, which was pressing lightly against her stomach.
“I fell in love with you,” he said, “and married you. And suddenly I was filled to the brim and to the innermost depths with love. Love of you and love of everyone and everything. But then I doubted and I stumbled. I doubted the power of love and happiness to last. I doubted your feelings; I doubted my worthiness to be loved. And then and at last it occurred to me that I had to bring you here, that I had to bring you fully and completely into myself and trust that you would not simply laugh or—worse—not understand at all. Oh, you cannot know how vulnerable I am still feeling, Anna, mouthing such absurdities. But if I do not say them now I never will and I may have lost the missing part of myself forever.”