How strange were the ways of fate.

But she was mentally prattling, she thought, when her hair came cascading down over her shoulders and he reached behind him to set her hairpins down on a table without taking his eye off her.

Her thoughts came crashing to a halt then, and she felt horribly, horribly vulnerable-not because she did not believe in her own beauty but precisely because she did. Beauty could blind the beholder to all else, even the personhood of the one who possessed it. And she could see in his eye that he found her beautiful.

I am Anne, she wanted to cry out to him. Please do not forget that I am Anne.

Please, please, please do not call my hair my crowning glory.

He leaned forward and kissed her mouth with closed lips. Desire shot through her like a lightning bolt, almost causing her knees to buckle. And with it came the return of thought.

All was going to be well. Surely it was.

“Anne,” he murmured so softly that she almost missed it.

And then he turned away and shrugged out of his coat and sat down on the side of the bed to pull off his Hessian boots. It was a hard thing to do one-handed-she could see that. His valet must, of course, do it for him at home. She did not know if she should offer to help, but she did not do so, and he managed. She guessed that he managed most tasks that a two-armed person would find impossible to do one-handed.

His right shirtsleeve was pinned to his side just as his coat sleeve was.

She waited tensely.

But when he got to his feet again, he drew back the bedcovers and turned to reach out his arm to her, and she realized that he did not intend to remove any more of his clothes.

“Anne,” he said, “will you take off your dress yourself? It would take me too long.”

He watched her until she stood before him in just her shift and her stockings. She sat on the bed to take off the latter, but he kneeled before her and removed them one at a time himself.

“Ah,” he said, sitting back on his heels and gazing up at her when the task was complete, “you are incredibly beautiful, Anne. I am sorry. I am so very sorry-”

“No.” She leaned forward and set her hands on his shoulders, and her hair fell forward to frame both their faces. “Please don’t be. Please, please do not. I would never have met you if you were not like this. I would not be here with you now. And I would not be here if I were not as I am. I want to be here with you. And if you say you are sorry, then I must say it too. I do not want either of us to be sorry for anything this afternoon.”

“Anne,” he said, “I am not very experienced. And I have had no experience at all since…this.”

It was somehow reassuring to know that he felt his own insecurities and anxieties just as she felt hers. Perhaps that was why she had found the courage to come this far.

“I am not very experienced either.” She smiled at him.

He closed the gap between their mouths and kissed her. And this time he deepened the kiss, parting his lips, passing his tongue over her lips until she opened her mouth and his tongue came warm inside and she wrapped both arms about his neck and pushed her fingers up into his hair, making a sound of appreciation deep in her throat as she did so.

Or perhaps it was he who made the sound.

“Lie down,” he whispered against her mouth as he raised his head. “Will you remove your shift? But only if you feel comfortable doing so.”

She crossed her arms and pulled it off over her head before lying down and moving over so that he could lie beside her. And strangely she did not feel uncomfortable though he stood looking down at her for several moments. He had called her beautiful and he desired her. But he had also called her by name, and she knew somehow from the look in his eye, though there was desire there, that it was her he saw, not just her voluptuous beauty. Beneath his gaze she could feel simply herself.

And this at least was new. She had never been naked with a man before.

She throbbed with wanting him.

He lay on his right side facing her, and his hand moved over her, warm, sensitive-and trembling. She turned toward him, smiled at him, and caressed him through his clothing with her own hand-and on his left side.

He was all warm, hard-muscled masculinity. She could feel the muscles in his arm and shoulder and rippling along his back. She could feel the muscles in his buttock when she rested her hand there while her eyes drifted closed and she licked her lips. He was doing exquisite things with his thumb and forefinger at the nipple of one breast and then the other.

Curiously, the presence of his clothing against her own bare skin excited her as much as nakedness would have done. Perhaps more.

Desire pooled hot and sharp between her thighs. And she moved closer to him, pressing her breasts to his shirt while his hand moved lower, slid between her legs, and found that aching spot and caressed it.

He set his mouth to hers and his tongue came inside again and circled her own slowly before moving to the roof of her mouth.

“Turn onto your back for me,” he whispered against her mouth.

He was, she realized then, unbuttoning his pantaloons at the waist and opening the front flap.

She almost forgot his disabilities as he rolled on top of her and his legs pressed between her own, spreading them wide until she twined them about his powerful thighs encased in the warm fabric of his pantaloons. His weight was heavy on her. She felt him position himself against the sensitive opening to her desire and her womb and spread both hands over his buttocks as he slid his hand beneath her.

He came into her with one slow, hard, deep thrust.

And memory flooded every inch of her body.

She did not fight him. She did not call out or try to push him away. Her mind was sharply at work with a different message from the one her body was sending her. Her mind told her that he was Sydnam Butler, that he was filling her with himself because it was something they both wanted, that until the very moment of entry she had been filled with wonder and pleasure and the desire for more.

Her body was rigid with tension, she realized, and his was heavy on her. He was deep inside her-and holding still.

“Anne,” he said. “Anne?”

“Sydnam.” She had never spoken his given name aloud before, even to herself. But it saved her now, the knowledge that that was who he was. “Sydnam, it is all right. It is all right. Don’t stop.”

She moved her hands up his sides until she became suddenly, horribly aware that there was no arm on the right side.

But at the same moment he moved in her, withdrawing to the brink of her, pressing in again, smooth and hard against the slickness of her inner passage.

It was all terribly, terribly carnal, terrifyingly intimate.

Body and mind waged a war-and both won, both lost. She knew he was Sydnam, she recognized the beauty of what he did with her, she still desperately wanted it, she relaxed and opened to him.

And yet physically, sexually, she felt nothing. Not horror. Not pleasure. Only the mental satisfaction that this was happening to her again and that perhaps the memory of it would replace the memory of the other time.

His left hand took her right, twined fingers with hers, and lifted their joined hands over her head as he worked in her for several minutes until finally he sighed against the side of her face and she felt liquid heat at her core.

His fingers relaxed about her own.

She felt like weeping then. It had been beautiful, yet somehow she had missed the beauty. It had been intimate, yet she had hidden away from it in some deep, secret part of herself. She might have shared something deeper than their joined bodies with him, but she felt very separate from him.

He rolled awkwardly off her almost immediately and sat up on the side of the bed facing away from her without looking at her. He buttoned the flap of his pantaloons and got to his feet to cross to the window, where he stood looking out.