“It is bright and sunny here,” she said. “It feels…clean here. I want to feel clean again. I don’t believe I have felt quite clean in ten years. How foolish a thing is that? I feel so…soiled.”
“Shh, Anne.” He turned onto his side and set his mouth to hers. “Don’t upset yourself again.”
“Make love to me,” she said. “Make me clean again. Please make me clean.”
“Anne,” he said. “Ah, my dearest.”
“But perhaps,” she said, “you do not want to. I have not been—”
He kissed her into silence.
She had not even known that about herself—that she felt unclean. The hurt, the ugliness, the injustice, the pain had all been pushed ruthlessly inside her, beneath the necessity of living on, of maintaining dignity and integrity, of earning a living, of raising a son.
She had never talked it all out before now. She had never even allowed herself tothinkit all through. She had denied her own suffering. She had never wept—until now, today.
But the weeping had eased the pain, had enabled her to put it all in the past—Albert Moore, Henry Arnold, Sarah, her parents.Allof it.
And now what was left was the Anne who had survived it all and found solace with another lonely soul, whose life had been as turned inside out as hers had been by circumstances beyond his control. He was here with her now—Sydnam Butler, her husband, her lover.
They were here in this lovely place, just the two of them, surrounded by natural beauty and solitude.
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, beautifulbecauseof 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.
Simplylove.
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.”
