One Night for Love

Seconds or minutes or hours passed before she was aware of him bringing her body down onto his and straightening her legs to rest on either side of his own. But she was too close to sleep to respond, except that she tightened her muscles for one moment and could feel him, still warm, still inside. If only they never had to be separate again.

She wondered fleetingly how he could have known, how he could have felt her fear at the very moment she became aware of it herself, how he could have known the very words to use to coax her past it, how he could have controlled his own release so as to let his seed flow into her at the exact moment when she opened to it—she had felt the heat of it deep inside at the moment she had cried out.

She listened to their heartbeats slow to normal and felt filled with well-being from her toes to the crown of her head. She would have drifted completely off to sleep if the air had not felt chilly against her back and her legs. But it also felt good, as did the warmth of his body against her front. Both made her feel alive and tingling with the strangely opposite sensations of exhaustion and energy.

'We can sleep,' he said, his fingers playing through her tangled hair and massaging her scalp, 'or we can swim. Which will it be?'

They could sleep just like this, all twined together and still joined. He would pull up the blankets again and they would be cocooned in warmth. She was deliciously relaxed and sleepy. Or they could go outside in the chilly dawn and jump into the even chillier water of the pool.

She grimaced. 'Is that supposed to be a choice?' she asked without opening her eyes. But she grinned suddenly. 'The swim, of course. Did you need to ask?'

'Not really,' he assured her, chuckling and rolling with her so that they became disengaged and disentangled. 'You would not be Lily if you did not prefer a frigid bath to a civilized sleep. The last one in is a brazen coward.'

She could not risk incurring that opprobrious label by stopping to grab any clothes. She had the advantage of being closer to the door of the bedchamber. He had the advantage of longer legs. She had the advantage of thoughtlessness. He stopped a moment to grab up their towels. Even so he arrived on the fern-draped bank of the pool a full second ahead of her. But he paused to gloat. They hit the water at the same moment—or so they finally agreed to agree after they had surfaced gasping from the shock of the cold water and had argued the matter, breathless and with chattering teeth.

They swam and they frolicked, alternately sputtering and laughing, for perhaps fifteen minutes before the unrelenting chill of the water and the very definite arrival of day drove them regretfully out again to dry themselves off briskly and to rash for the cottage, where they dressed hastily.

It was the end, Lily realized, of a night when dream and reality had touched and merged. Those two opposites were about to separate again. The night was over and the day must take her and Neville back to Newbury Abbey, where they could not meet as equals in anything at all. And that had been the magic of the night, she understood in a moment of insight. They had been equals through this night, neither of them the other's superior or inferior. They had been equal as lovers. But two persons could not live on love to the exclusion of all else. And there was nothing else in which there was any equality between them. She was by far the inferior in every single regard at Newbury Abbey.

'Would you like to stay here and sleep while I go back to the house?' he asked her when they were both dressed. 'You did not have many hours of rest, did you?'

It was tempting. But she knew that she could not bear to watch the dream walk away from her. She must walk away from it. Only in that way could she hope to gain any sort of control over reality.

She shook her head and smiled. 'It is time to go home,' she said, using the word home deliberately though Newbury Abbey did not feel as she had always imagined a home must feel.

'Yes.' She did not believe she imagined the look of sadness in his eyes. He felt it too, then—the impossibility that one night of passion had tried to tease them into believing was perhaps possible after all.

He held her hand until they had climbed out of the valley. But though she was unaware of the exact moment when he released it, Lily noticed as they walked side by side up the lawn toward the stables that they were no longer touching. Neither were they talking.

They were going back home.

Chapter 14

Lauren had been having trouble sleeping since her ruined wedding day. And eating. And giving the appearance of being patient and cheerful and loving and dutiful. She had never in her life thought of ending it all. But there were moments during the days following that most dreadful one in her life when she had stood at one end of the church aisle and Neville had stood at the other and Lily had stood between them—there were moments when she wished that her life would somehow end itself, that she would simply fall asleep and never wake up again.

There were far more moments when she wished it were Lily who would do the dying.

She had taken to getting up at dawn, sometimes to sit in the morning room reading for an hour or more without ever turning a page, sometimes to wander alone outdoors.

Looking for Lily.

She remembered the morning after the wedding, when Lily had been down on the beach and had then walked across the rocks to the lower village and returned home by the driveway, meeting Lauren and Gwen on the way. She knew that Lily often escaped from the house in order to be alone. Watching Lily, observing all her dreadful inadequacies, trying to deny all her beauty and natural charm, had become something of an obsession with Lauren.

She had never thought of herself as a vain woman. But why had Neville left her and then married Lily? What was it about herself that caused everyone to leave her or reject her? What was it about Lily that attracted everyone? All the men at the house were half in love with her. And even the women were softening toward her. Even Gwen…

Her wanderings took her in the direction of the beach on that particular morning, as they had done before without any success. The beach had never been her favorite part of the park. She had always preferred the cultivated beauty of the lawns and flower gardens and the rhododendron walk. The wildness of the beach and the sea had seemed too elemental, too frightening to her. They had always reminded her of how close to the edge of security her life had always been lived. She did not belong at Newbury Abbey by right of birth, after all. They could turn her off at any time. If she was not good…