“But what has been the cost to you of your secret life?” she asked him.
He gazed at her for several moments before answering. “Everything in life comes at a cost,” he said. “One has to weigh what one gains against what one gives up. I have gained immeasurably more than I have lost, Anna. Freedom from bullying was the most minor benefit of my transformation.”
“But no one knows you,” she said. “You have deliberately shaped your adult life so that you are unknown and unknowable.”
“I was unknown before,” he said. “I was not that timid, puny little boy any more than I am now the invincible warrior. Not inside myself. Inside myself I am still me, as I have always been. I do my living in here, Anna.” He patted one lightly clenched fist against his breastbone. “But I am not a hermit.”
She gazed at him, still hugging herself.
He leaned to one side and grasped another cushion, which he set down in front of him. “Come,” he said, reaching up a hand for hers.
“Oh, I cannot sit like that,” she protested.
“With those skirts? No,” he agreed. “I shall have an outfit like my own made for you to wear here in this room, Anna, if you wish. I have let you in, you see, to this room where no one comes except me. The room is a sort of symbol. What I have really let you into is my life, myself as I am, and at the moment, Anna, I am that little boy again. For I cannot control you or the way you will deal with what I have told you and shown you, and I would not if I could, but I am terrified. Yes, sit thus. I like looking across at you rather than up—or down.”
She was sitting on the cushion, hugging her knees, which were drawn up in front of her. Her feet were touching one of his ankles. He looked at them and then raised them one at a time to remove her slippers and her silk stockings before tucking her feet beneath his crossed ones.
“Shoes keep one at a remove from reality,” he said, looking up into her eyes. He smiled and leaned across his folded legs and hers to kiss her. “I am still terrified. I have been since we returned to London and I was faced with the reality that I am a married man and have absolutely no idea how to proceed. I am in deep and out of my depth. And I have not been doing well. The wonder of those two weeks after our wedding has vanished and I fear it has gone forever. I want it back. How do we get it back, Anna? Have you felt its loss too?”
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.”