“I wish you had not told me,” she said. “I would have preferred to cling, at least in part, to my original impression of you.”
“Oh, cling away,” he said. He removed his arm from about her and sat forward in order to drink his tea before it turned quite cold. “I very soon became the man you think me, Imogen—and you do not know the half of it. That old innocent who was once me has long faded into ancient history.”
“Of course he has not,” she said. “We are made up of everything we have ever been, Percy. It is the joy and the pain of our individuality. There are no two of us the same.”
He set his cup down and looked at her over his shoulder.
“The world will be very glad there is only one of me,” he said.
“But you have told me far more than the fact that you were still a virgin at the age of twenty or so,” she said. “And it is something else that probably no one else knows. Your image of yourself has taken a severe battering during the past ten years. Your life has become unbalanced, perhaps because the first twenty years were almost unalloyed happiness and diligence and security. You were both fortunate and unfortunate in that, Percy. And now you feelinsecure and a bit worthless and not even sure that you like yourself. You need to find balance, but do not know quite how.”
He stared at her for several moments before getting abruptly to his feet, dislodging poor Hector again as he did so. He busied himself with poking the fire and putting on a few more coals.
“But not many of us ever do know quite how,” she continued quietly into the silence, and he had the feeling she was talking more to herself than to him. “Life is made up of opposing pairs—life and death, love and hatred, happiness and misery, light and darkness, and on and on to infinity. Finding balance and contentment is like trying to walk a tightrope between all those opposites without falling off on one side or the other and believing that life must be all light or all darkness, when neither one is the truth in itself.”
Good Lord! Whatwasit about late, late-night conversations?
“You and me,” he said, turning fully to face her. “Another pair of opposites.”
The cat was on her lap. She was stroking its back and ears, and it was purring, its eyes closed in ecstasy. He was envious.
“I do beg your pardon,” she said. “How presumptuous of me to try analyzing your life and preaching at you.”
He set one foot on the hearth and rested one arm along the mantel. Whatwasit about her? Her hair was scraped back so severely from her face that it almost made her eyes slant. Her shapeless dressing gown was belted about her waist like a sack. She had just been haranguing him like a prissy governess.
And he wanted her more than he had ever wanted any other woman.
She was not even particularly feminine—not in a frills and lace and powdered, fragrant, swelling bosom sort of way, anyway. She was not lisping and big-eyed and worshipful with a head stuffed full of fluff.
Devil take it, was he describing the sort of woman whose bed he usually sought?
She was... What was the word Sidney had used earlier—or yesterday, to be precise?Formidable.That was it. Shewasformidable. That fact ought to repel him. Instead it attracted. Ah, another pair of opposites—attraction and repulsion.
“You and me,” he said again. “But there has been no balance tonight, Imogen. It has been all me, as is only right for a domineering male lover.”
She smiled at him—and the uncomfortable suspicion grew again that he was falling in love with her.Somethingunfamiliar was happening to him, anyway, something that was attacking his gut. And it was not just the desire to take her to bed and have his way with her until they were both panting with exhaustion. It was what was left beyond the sexual desire that was unfamiliar and unidentified—unless thatwasbeing in love. He hoped not.
She should never smile.
She shouldalwayssmile.
He felt as if he were on her balancing scale of opposites.
“Yes, lord and master,” she said.
He pointed a finger directly at her.
“It will be your turn next time,” he said. “You have stripped me naked, Imogen, and I do not mean just abovestairs in your bedchamber. I will strip you next time—and I do not meanjustabovestairs in your bedchamber.”
He smiled at her even as her own smile faded.
“Not tonight, though,” he said. “I have a valet to consider. No matter what I say to him, he will insist upon waiting up for me. He will be sitting in my dressing room at this very moment, without a fire, without a light, like patience on a monument. It is time I went home.”
She lifted the cat gently off her lap and set it down beside her—the animal thanked her with an indignant meow. And she stood and brushed cat hairs from the ancient velvet of her dressing gown and looked up at him.
He closed the distance between them and kissed her, his arms about her. There was no desire, though, to take her back up to bed, and that in itself was a bit unnerving. There was only the warmth of embracing a woman with whom he was becoming increasingly comfortable, even if shedidharangue him when she could get him alone at two in the morning.
She saw him on his way, holding the lamp aloft with one hand to light the path to the gate and clutching her dressing gown to her throat with the other. He looked back after closing the gate behind him and tried to convince himself that she did not present the most appealing sight he had ever seen in his life.
