“I will not have it, Dorian. You must talk to me! I’m your wife and I love you and I refuse to believe that is wrong. I refuse to let you believe it! I know you have been faithful to me in London, whatever other people might think and I want no legal separation. I want my husband back!”
His dark eyes seemed lost on hearing these passionate assertions, yet were full of unfulfilled longing.
“What is wrong with me, Rose? Why can I think of nothing but you? Why do I feel torn into pieces? Why did I almost hit Levi Collins, only for offering you his arm?”
Dorian’s voice was as overfilled with emotion as her own and Rose trembled with the truth she now knew with awful certainty. Yet she could not be the one to speak it. Dorian himself must bethe one to step back from the dark, forsaken path he had taken and return to the light.
“Who am I, Dorian?” she asked him in a shaking voice, her knees pressed tight to his sides and her face now close to his. “What am I to you?”
“You are Rose, you are…my wife…and I…dear God, I love you.”
Rose nodded with tears in her eyes as he finally admitted this both to her and to himself.
“Yes,” she said very quietly. “Love. I know love, Dorian, and I feel it whenever you are with me. It is in your words, your actions and your touch.”
The admission had been made but the crisis was not yet over. A fresh tension had entered the Duke of Ravenhill’s body and, again, Rose knew he would have fled if she had not held him.
“I cannot be like my parents. I cannot do to you what they did to one another, Rose,” Dorian stated with distress. “My father made my mother’s life hell and she returned the favor in equal measure. Every lover either of them took was only a faceless weapon in their battle to destroy one another. Yet their love would not let them part. I will not be such a man!”
“You are nothing like your father!” Rose cried out. “Look at yourself, Dorian. You are not him any more than I am yourmother, and you are not the Wolf of West London either, are you? You are kind and good and principled and…lovable.”
Her words seemed to cause Dorian new pain and Rose wondered if he would actually throw her off him now. Her hands looked so small on the large, capable hands of her husband and she knew there was no real physical force she could exert to keep him there. Rose had only her words and the truth in her heart.
“I met Jane,” she added. “I went to Haybridge Hall and met Jane and Charlotte. They love you, Dorian. So do I.”
This admission pinned him to the bed more effectively than any show of strength could have managed.
“My sister is a good woman,” he said, an instinctively defensive light in his eyes that warmed Rose’s heart. “I will not let the world pull her down.”
“Jane is a good woman and you are a good man,” Rose told him with conviction. “I was glad to make her acquaintance and hear her account of you, Dorian. I already loved and respected you before I went to Haybridge Hall. After meeting your family, I feel you are the best man I’ve ever known.”
“My family?” Dorian repeated, seeming puzzled by this simple description.
Rose gave a small laugh of incredulous realization at his blindness.
“Yes, Jane and Charlotte are your real family, Dorian,” she spelled out for him. “Not your poor broken parents who didn’t know how to love each other or their own child. What you have done for your sister and niece is love. What you have done formeis love. Love is good and powerful and worth striving for. Do you not see?”
Finally, there was something like a dawning of understanding on Dorian’s handsome face and then another relaxation in his limbs. Slowly, he nodded and then his hands moved, his fingers now actively grasping those of Rose.
“My wife,” he said, meeting her eyes with cautious inquiry. “My love.”
“I love you, Dorian,” Rose told him, this time with a smile that was acknowledged and returned.
For long moments, they gazed into one another’s eyes on the bed. The darkness of Dorian’s gaze seemed to transform from the terrified and terrifying blackness of his early paintings to the velvety, seductive shadow of his later pictures.
“Are you going to release me now?” he asked Rose, glancing to her hands on his at either side of his head but making no attempt to move.
“No,” Rose answered with cautious playfulness. “I am not.”
“Well then,” the Duke of Ravenhill replied, extracting one of his hands and stroking Rose’s leg through her dress. “I shall just have to enjoy my present captivity as best I can, shan’t I?”
Beneath her skirts a moment later, the caress of his fingers on her bare thigh made Rose moan loudly and look to her husband with a plea in her eyes. How long had it been since he last touched her like this? Far too long.
Rose’s body responded to Dorian’s explorations with its usual eagerness and her hands quickly joined his in loosening and pushing aside their clothing. When his large shaft found her slit and glided within, she closed her eyes and whimpered at the satisfying fulness and thrilling pleasure that accompanied his entrance.
“My wife,” he groaned at their deepest conjunction and Rose managed to nod, leaning forward again to kiss his lips, their hands tightly entwined.
“I am yours,” she affirmed, small instinctive motions of her hips soon matching the movement of Dorians rod. “I have always been yours, Dorian. Oh, Dorian…”
