Simply Love (15 page)

“May I show you the house?” he asked her, getting to his feet.

“Yes, please,” she said. “I have been looking forward to it all day.”

And then he did something terribly distressing that he had not done for a long time. He offered her his right arm to take.

Except that nothing happened.

It was not there.

She fell into step beside him, not even knowing he had made the gesture.

For a fraction of a moment he had forgotten that he was only half a man.

She was terribly aware of him as they entered the cool, silent
house and he showed her each of the rooms upstairs and down. She was aware of him as a man, as a sexual being for whom her own woman's body ached.

She was half terrified by the feeling, half fascinated by it.

She had been very careful as she kissed him not to touch his right side. But she had been very conscious of that right side, afraid that she would reach out and touch him after all—rather as people who are afraid of heights are terrified that they will jump from a tower or cliff.

Yet it was not his right side she most feared.

She had also been very aware as she kissed him of his masculinity, of the intimacy that had lain just a heartbeat away, though his lips had not moved against hers, and his hand had not touched her.

It was his masculinity she most feared.

Or, rather, her own damaged femininity.

“It is a lovely house,” she said after a while. “I can understand why you are so attached to it. The rooms are square and high-ceilinged and almost stately, are they not? And the windows fill them with light.”

The back windows looked out on the vegetable garden and the wooded slope, while those in front faced onto the flower garden and the rest of the park. The house was enclosed by beauty. And yet all the splendor of the sea and the coast lay just a mile or so away.

“I fell in love with it the first time I came here to visit,” he said. “There are some places like that, though there is not always a rational explanation of why they grab the heart when other places, equally lovely or even more so, do not. I am very fond of Glandwr and of the cottage where I now live, but they do not cry out
home
to me.”

No place had ever done that to Anne, though she had grown up happily in her parents' home in Gloucestershire and had felt as if her cottage at Lydmere was a blessed sanctuary. And she loved Claudia's school, where she now lived. But it was not
home
. Again she envied Mr. Butler that he had Tŷ Gwyn and hoped the Duke of Bewcastle would agree to sell it to him. Tŷ Gwyn was a place where a person could set down roots that would last for generations. It was a place where one could be happy, where one could raise children, where one could…

But Mr. Butler would live here alone.

And she would never live here. There was no point in weaving dreams about it.

“The house feels blessedly cool,” he said when they had seen every room and were standing in the tiled hallway again. “Shall we eat our picnic tea in here? Or would you prefer to sit out on the lawn?”

“In here,” she said. “Let me fetch the basket.”

“We will take one handle each,” he said.

She ought to have opted for the lawn, she thought ten minutes later as they set out their little feast on the small table in the morning room. It was true that they had become overheated by the sun. But outdoors there were more sounds from nature to distract one's attention and more to look at and less awareness that they were a man and woman together and that there was something going on between them that both of them were aware of and uncomfortable with.

Something that made the air about them taut with tension.

His cook had made little meat pasties for them and cucumber sandwiches and an apple tart. She had included generous slices of cheese and the inevitable lemonade. Anne arranged it all on the table with the dishes that were also in the basket. She poured their drinks.

They ate in near silence, and when they did talk, it was on the sort of inconsequential topics that strangers would have chosen. They must have spent ten whole minutes discussing how long they expected the hot, sunny spell to continue.

“I heard one member of the chapel congregation remark to someone else after the service last Sunday,” he said, his eye twinkling, “that we are bound to suffer for all this sunshine and heat with terrible weather later on. The eternal pessimist, I would say.”

She had been there with him again.

“But they were all speaking Welsh,” she said.

He looked arrested for a moment.

“And so they were,” he said. “Perhaps I understand more of the language than I realized. Goodness, soon I will be a full-fledged Welshman. Before long I will be playing the harp. But no.” He glanced down at his empty sleeve. “Perhaps not that.”

They both laughed, and some of the tension dissipated.

Finally she talked about the house.

“If it becomes yours,” she asked, “will you keep everything as it is?”

It was fully furnished.

“For a while, yes,” he said, sitting back as she cleared up the remains of their picnic and put everything away in the basket before crossing the room to stand looking out the front window. “I fell in love with it as it is, and it would be foolish to change everything merely because I could. I would make changes gradually as I became convinced that I wanted something different. The prevailing browns in the hall can be gloomy on a gray winter's day, for example. They might be the first to go.”

She watched the sheep grazing in the meadow and felt the pain of a nameless longing tighten her chest. The longing to see the hall as it would be, perhaps? And the certain knowledge that she never would.

“What would you change if it were yours?” he asked.

“Nothing much,” she said. “It has been well and tastefully furnished. But perhaps I would replace the reds in this room with primrose yellows. It is a morning room with windows facing both south and east. It is the room in which one ought to be able to start the day in a sunny mood—even a stormy day in January.”

“Perhaps,” he said, chuckling, “I will change the predominant colors in here to primrose.
If
the house is ever mine, that is.”

He had come up to stand just behind her right shoulder, she realized. She turned her head and smiled at him, only to find that he was closer than she had thought. She swallowed and turned back to the window. But there was no cliff to climb and no hill to run down this time to break the tension.

“You must be looking forward to getting back to Bath,” he said.

“Yes.”

There was a silence that pulsed with discomfort.

“You must be looking forward to getting your quiet life at Glandwr back,” she said.

“Yes.”

There was another silence in which even breathing was uncomfortable because it was audible.

She turned determinedly to face him. She thought he might take a step back since she could not do so without going through the window, but he stayed where he was.

“I want you to know,” she said, “that you are
not
ugly. I know you must sometimes see people flinch when they first set eyes on you. I actually ran away from you. But it is because people instantly understand that you have endured something unspeakably painful and will never be quite free of it. When people see you for a second and third and thirty-third time, they no longer really notice. You are
you,
and the person shines through the appearance.”

She felt horribly self-conscious then and wished he would step back or turn away.

“I wish,” he said, “we did not live in a society that is so ready to judge others on one single fact concerning their life. I wish you were not judged on the fact that, through no fault of your own, you are an unwed mother. I wish you were not lonely.”

“Oh, I am not,” she protested, feeling the heat rise to her cheeks. “I have friends. I have my son. I have—”

“Too late,” he said. “You admitted to me weeks ago that you are lonely.”

Just as he had admitted to her that he was. She drew a slow breath.

“For ten years,” he said, “there has been no man in your life—merely because one scoundrel forced himself on you and destroyed your dreams before he died. It is an empty feeling, is it not—knowing oneself untouchable but wanting to be touched?”

It was even worse, she thought, to be afraid to be touched. But she would not say it aloud. And perhaps there was a way to get past her fears. Perhaps there was.

She blinked her eyes and swallowed against the telltale gurgle in her throat.

“You are not untouchable,” she said.

“Neither are you.”

“I will…remember you after I have left here,” she said.

“And I you.”

She swallowed again. He gazed steadily at her. She shut her eyes tightly suddenly and mustered all her rash courage.

“I do not want to be lonely any longer,” she said almost in a whisper. “I do not want
you
to be lonely.”

She kept her eyes shut until he answered, his voice as low as her own.

“I cannot comfort you, Anne,” he said. “You can look at me without revulsion, perhaps, but…what we are talking of is intimacy. I cannot inflict myself on you for that.”

She opened her eyes and looked at him. How could she know if he was right? How could she know what it would be like to be touched by any man—but especially by him?

She raised her hand to touch the right side of his face, but instead she laid it flat against his shoulder—and even then she wondered what disfigurements lay beneath his clothing. But there was something in her more powerful than the physical reluctance to touch him—or the reluctance to be touched.

Life, she realized, so often became a determined, relentless avoidance of pain—of one's own, of other people's. But sometimes pain had to be acknowledged and even touched so that one could move into it and through it and past it. Or else be destroyed by it.

“I am someone to arouse revulsion too,” she said. “I have been raped. I have borne another man's child without ever having been married to him. I am not a virtuous woman. I have
seen
men cringe from me when they discover the truth.”

“Anne,” he said. She saw his eye brighten with unshed tears. “Oh, Anne, no. But the same consequences might happen again, you know. Though I would, of course, marry you. Imagine if you will what a dreadful fate that would be for you.”

“Don't,” she said. “Don't belittle yourself in that way.”

“You cannot pretend,” he said, “that you would wish to be bound to me for life.”

She had not been talking or even thinking of marriage. Or—foolishly—of being got with child again. She did not want to think of either. By this time next week she would be back in Bath with David, resuming her old life and duties at the school though it was still vacation time. Mr. Butler would remain here alone—everyone else would have left too.

He would be all alone.

And so would she—surrounded by people, by friends.

But there was today. There was
now
.

“I just do not want to be lonely any longer,” she said again. “I do not want you to be. I want the memory of this lovely afternoon and of this whole month to be complete.”

“Anne,” he said. “Anne.”

Only now did she realize that he was calling her by her given name. It warmed her heart to hear him say it.

And then he lifted his hand and set his palm against her cheek, his fingers pushing up into her hair. She leaned into his hand and closed her eyes again.

“Forgive me,” she said. “Please forgive me. Here I stand trying to seduce you and proving that I am indeed what many people call me.”

He demonstrated then what she had observed earlier, that his left arm was as strong as both were with many other men. He circled her waist with it and drew her hard against him, making a sound very much like a growl as he did so. She stood pressed against him, her face against his left shoulder.

“There is no seduction here,” he said, his voice low against her ear. “Not on either side. Good God, Anne, you must know that I want you every bit as much as you can possibly want me. And I do not wish to be lonely any longer either. Let us take away each other's loneliness, then, at least for this afternoon so that it may be made perfect.”

She wrapped her arms about his waist.

Perfect.

…so that it may be made perfect.

Please, God. Please, God.

                  

The master bedchamber had green brocaded walls with gilded friezes below the high ceiling. Heavy burgundy velvet curtains hung on either side of the long window from frieze to floor. The great four-poster, canopied bed was hung with burgundy-and-green-striped draperies. A matching spread lay over the bed. A Persian carpet covered most of the floor. Paintings of horses in heavy gilded frames hung on the walls.

It was not a pretty room, but it had struck Anne earlier that it had character, that it was indeed a
master
bedchamber. It was where Mr. Butler would surely sleep if he purchased TÅ· Gwyn, she had thought.

The window looked out over the meadow to the trees on the slope opposite. Looking out through it as she stepped into the room now, Anne could see the five-bar wooden gate and the stile in the distance.