Finally she was simply woman.
Simply perfect.
No, she thought as she gradually began to return to herself, she would not go back and change a single detail of her life even if she could. There were all sorts of complexities, complications, impossibilities to face when she had been restored entirely to herself and sanity, but that time was not yet. There was this moment to live.
He inhaled deeply and audibly, and then let the breath go on a sigh.
“Ah, Claudia,” he murmured. “My love.”
Two words that she would treasure for a lifetime. Even the costliest jewel could not tempt her if it were offered in exchange for them.
My love.
Spoken toher,Claudia Martin. She was one man’s love. Just a few weeks ago all this would have been quite beyond the bounds of credibility. But no longer. She was beautiful, she was desirable, and…She smiled.
He had lifted his head and was looking down at her with heavy-lidded eyes, one hand smoothing back her hair from her face.
“Share the thought,” he said.
She opened her eyes.
“I am woman,” she said.
“Hard as this may be to believe,” he said with laughter in his eyes, “Ihadnoticed.”
She laughed. His kissed her eyelids one at a time before kissing her lips again.
“It only astonishes me,” he said, “that it seems like a novel idea to you.”
She laughed again.
“You have no idea,” she said, “how a woman’s femininity becomes identified with an early marriage and the production of a number of children and the running of an orderly home.”
“You surely might have had those things if you had wished,” he said. “McLeith cannot have been the only man who showed an interest in you when you were a girl.”
“I had other chances,” she admitted.
“Why did you not take any of them?” he asked her. “Because you loved him so dearly?”
“Partly that,” she said, “and partly an unwillingness to settle for comfort over…over integrity. I wanted to be a person as well as a woman. I know that may seem strange. I know it is hard for almost anyone else to comprehend. It is what I wanted, though—to be aperson.But it seemed that I could not be both—a personanda woman. I had to sacrifice my femininity.”
“Are you sorry?” he asked her. “Though you did not do it with any great success, I might add.”
She shook her head. “I would do it all again if I could go back,” she said. “But itwasa sacrifice.”
“I am glad you did it,” he said, feathering light kisses along her jaw line to her chin and then lifting his head again.
She raised her eyebrows.
“If you had not,” he said, “you would not have been there to call upon when I was in Bath. And if I had met you elsewhere, you would not have been free. And I might not have recognized you anyway.”
“Recognized me?”
“As the very beat of my heart,” he said.
Her eyes filled with tears again, and she bit her upper lip. She heard the echo of what he had said in the carriage on the way to London when Flora and Edna had asked him to share his dream.
I dream of love, of a family—wife and children—which is as close and as dear to me as the beating of my own heart.
