She had been tense in spite of herself when he had taken her into his arms, but he had merely drawn her over to a couch in front of the big bay window that overlooked the gardens, pulling her onto his lap. ‘We have all the time in the world,’ he’d murmured throatily, sensing her tension and understanding the reason for it. The window was open and the climbing roses on the stone wall outside perfumed the room with their sweetness, and gradually, as the shadowed night and Alexander’s kisses and caresses soothed her, it was she who turned more fully into his embrace.

He undressed her slowly and then himself, and she matched him caress for caress, wanting to touch every inch of him and glorying in his virile maleness. Their lovemaking was so different to anything she had known before, tender and passionate on his part as he brought all his experience to the fore in an effort to please her without rushing her, vitally aware that this night would cement their life together and wanting every moment to be perfect for her. She could hardly contain the pleasure he was bringing forth with his lips and tongue and hands, her body coming alive as though for the first time as he explored her curves and hollows; and when he found her most intimate place with his tongue she gasped his name, tangling her fingers in his hair. She hadn’t known that men and women did things like this to each other; Davey had been a kind but unadventurous lover and there had been little foreplay before the act itself.

When Alexander eventually took her she was ready for him, her body moving to draw him further and further in as he made her his at last, their mutual climax transporting them to another dimension of splintered light and sensation.

He had spent a long time afterwards just kissing and caressing her and murmuring words of love, and when his breathing had finally told her he was asleep, she had fought her own drowsiness, wanting to relive the most wonderful night of her life over and over again. She was his, body, soul and spirit, she told herself, and in that there was no fear, no concern about the loss of her own identity, but rather the knowledge that for the first time in her life she was who she had been made to be, a whole woman, fulfilled and at peace with herself, adored and loved.

She nestled further in to him, luxuriating in the closeness, her arm across the furry pelt of his chest as she breathed in the delicious, faintly lemony smell of the soap he favoured, and even in his sleep he murmured her name, loving her. And that was how, with her lips curved in a smile, she drifted off to sleep.

PART SIX

War and Peace

1914

Chapter Thirty