“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 Ty 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.

The stile-where this had all started.

She shivered slightly. But she was not allowing her thoughts to speak too loudly to her. She did know, though, that she had wanted-and dreaded-this almost from the beginning of their acquaintance. Perhaps from the moment when they had admitted their loneliness to each other.

It was a mutual loneliness that impelled them now. It was not a bad motive, surely, for what they were about to do. There was compassion in sharing and alleviating another’s loneliness. There was a certain tenderness in it.

She felt an overwhelming tenderness for Sydnam Butler, who had demonstrated almost incredible courage and suffered so much yet had pieced his life back together with determination and dignity though he had believed himself untouchable ever since.

Now she would touch him and prove that he was mistaken about himself. And he would touch her and she would feel again like a desirable woman. Perhaps.

Please, God.

She turned as she heard him close the door and looked uncertainly at him. But her resolve had not weakened in the distance from morning room to bedchamber. She did want him with a knee-weakening desire.

“Please,” he said, smiling at her and closing the distance between them, “may I be the one to take down your hair? You could do it ten times faster with your two hands, I daresay, but may I do it?”

She smiled and stood still while his fingers fumbled awkwardly with the pins that held her hair up. She looked deliberately into his face as his hand worked. She did not even know, she realized, what lay behind the black eye patch. But she was struck again by the extraordinary beauty of the left side of his face. He was twenty-eight years old-one year younger than she. He could never have been a rake, she thought, even if this had not happened to him. He was a serious, gentle, affectionate man. He would have been married by now to some woman with a beauty and social rank to match his own. He would have had children. He would have had a family to bring with him to Ty Gwyn.

But no-he would never even have come to Wales if he had not also gone to the Peninsula against the advice of everyone who knew and loved him.

She would never have met him.

And if she had not been raped, she would be married to Henry Arnold now and living in Gloucestershire. She would not be standing here in the master bedchamber at Ty Gwyn, having her hair taken down by a one-armed man who had become strangely precious to her.