That was what had never been finished. And never forgotten. It was a hidden fire that had needed only a spark in order to ignite again and blaze to its finish.
A kiss was not enough—that was soon apparent. Not even when they were wrapped in each other’s arms, straining together, their mouths wide over each other’s, their tongues touching, circling, deeply exploring. Not even when their hands pressed hungrily over bare flesh and beneath their few remaining garments.
“Lie down,” he told her harshly, but he held her up long enough to peel her shift off over her head. He tossed it aside. He unbuttoned his breeches as she lay down, pulled them off hastily with his stockings, cast them onto the floor, and came down on top of her.
It was not an encounter for pleasure, for subtlety, for the erotic building of desire, for intimate play. Something needed to be finished, and that something was a passion that had smoldered for longer than ten years.
He thrust her legs wide with his knees, pressed his hands beneath her buttocks, held her firm while she lifted her knees and braced her feet against the mattress, and plunged deep. They both cried out.
A little sanity returned after that. He lay still on her and in her, pressed deep, his hands unyielding beneath her. She tilted and strained upward to draw him even deeper into herself. They were both panting audibly.
He withdrew his hands, braced himself on his elbows, and lifted himself enough that he could look down into her face from a mere few inches distant.
They gazed deeply into each other’s eyes.
“Oh, yes,” he whispered, “it will be finished between us.”
The passion in his face might have been love, might have been hate, might have been both.
And this, she thought, disoriented again, was not the marriage act with which she was long familiar. This was not passive endurance. This was not repugnant to her. This was the culmination of the dream she had dreamed at Vauxhall.
He lowered his head until his forehead was against the hair that had pulled loose from her chignon, and began to move.
At first there was merely an awareness of impossible intimacy, of incredible pleasure. But very soon there was only passion again—raw, mindless, heavy, panting, aching passion. And a frightening pain that was beyond either pleasure or passion, and yet was not quite pain, until—ah, then ...
She heard someone cry out—two persons. And then terror and peace clashed strangely together, leaving her with the sudden clear awareness that it had happened—that she was no longer herself, that he was no longer himself. That they were another being, a single entity that was the two of them and yet was different from either of them separately.
They had become one.
For the merest heartbeat of a moment.
Even as the awareness was speaking itself to her mind it was gone, beyond her grasp, beyond recall. A little flash of heaven, which was a something or a state of being beyond either place or time or the ability to be expressed in words and was therefore to be sensed fleetingly but never to be grasped.
But for a moment there had been heaven. Not for her. Not for him. Forthem. And then it was gone, and they were a man and a woman on a bed in a gamekeeper’s hut, at the end of a sexual coupling, their bodies still joined.
When he withdrew from her, moved to her side, and pulled the blankets over both of them, she felt relaxed, happy, and sadder than she had ever felt in her life before.
She turned her head to look at him. He gazed back at her. She could see his eyes, but she could not see into them. His face was blank. So, she guessed, was hers. Reason and time had come back and so had the future. There was too much to be lost bynotlooking blank.
They were two very separate people again.
They had finished what they had started long ago. Without understanding quite why, they had completed something that had haunted them both, something that had prevented them from moving happily along with their lives. Now it had been done. And everything was in the past.
“At last,” he said, echoing her thoughts, “it is finished.”
“Yes,” she said and closed her eyes.
Yes, it was finished. Now, everything was finished.
Everything.
She hit the frightening bottom of despair.
Chapter 12
“IAM glad,” he said, “that I came back—back to England and back to Thornwood. I thought it was all over but it was not. Now it is.”
“Yes,” she said.
