She stepped onto the thick Axminster to stop it, and the moment she did, she chuckled. He sank to his knees, shaking back his hair and looking up at her with a quizzical glance.

Staring down at her feet, she said, "I thought it was only men who left their boots on."

He gave a shout of laughter, then tilted his head, thinking it over as he studied her. "I like it," he said, then slanted her a wicked look. "But I think I'd like it better if you came over here and let me take them off."

"Would you, now?" She licked her lower lip. She walked to the center of the carpet, sat down, and stretched out her leg toward him.

He moved closer, and sat back on his knees, taking her foot in his hands. He removed her short boot and tossed it aside, then took off her garter, peeled away her stocking, and settled her foot on the carpet beside his hip. He repeated this procedure with her other foot, spreading her thighs apart. But when he was done, he did not stretch out between them. Instead, he rested his palms on his knees and looked at her. "Your hair, Grace," he said, his gaze lowered to the muslin ribbon that held her braid together. "Let me see it loose."

She was melting beneath that dark, heated gaze. Her fingers fumbled with the end of her braid, where the ribbon lay against her bare breast. She untied the strip of muslin and began to unravel the plait of hair.

Dylan moved to stretch out and lowered his weight onto his elbows as he watched her fan her hair out loose around her shoulders.

"That," he said unsteadily, "is a sight I've dreamed about a hundred times. G.o.d, I wish it was daylight, and I could see all the colors in your hair. Come here."

She did, her palms sliding up his long, strong body as she moved to spread her legs wide over his hips, and he laid his head back against the carpet. She grasped his thick shaft and lowered herself onto him, crying out when he pushed up to meet her and his erection pushed hard all the way into her. He was big and filled her in that one, quick surge, then he sank back into the carpet as he lifted his hands to cup and cradle her b.r.e.a.s.t.s.

She flattened her palms on his chest and rode him. He moved with her, their gazes locked together. One of his hands toyed with her breast as he brought the other down to where she joined to him, flattening his hand across her stomach, the edge of his thumb brushing her in her most pleasurable place. She rocked up and down on him in quick, frantic moves to reach her peak.

She came first, and he followed her, his body going rigid as he thrust up into her one more time, then shuddering as she collapsed down onto him. Her hair fell all around his face.

He began to laugh, an exalted laugh and no mistake. She lifted her head, smiling as she brushed back her hair and looked at him through the blond curtain.

"If this is virtue," he said, his hands brushing her hair back to cup her face, "I could get used to it."

Her heart was filled with a warmth and happiness she had not felt in years. She had forgotten how wonderful falling in love truly was. "Thank you," she whispered and kissed him.

"What for, in heaven's name?" he asked as she pulled away and rolled to lay beside him.

"For-" She turned her face into his shoulder, oddly embarra.s.sed. "I don't feel like a dried-up widow any longer."

"You never were." He pulled her against his side and kissed her hair, but he didn't tease. Instead, he just held her there for a long time, one arm a pillow for her head, the other wrapped around her.

She couldn't sleep now, she was too full of tumbling emotions for that. But she felt his body slowly relax, and after a time, he slept.

She smiled, watching him, her face only a few inches from his. Even when his features were softened in sleep, he still looked the scapegrace. She reached her hand to his cheek, then stopped without touching. She didn't want to wake him. Instead, she lay on her back and looked up at the ceiling of the cottage. This was to be hers.

It was everything she had dreamed of during three long years of trying to find her way home. It was cozy and comfortable. It had a garden and a dovecot and everything else she could want. Yet, somehow, in a way she could not define, something was wrong with it.

Dylan shifted in his sleep, and with a sudden pang, Grace realized what was wrong with her cottage. She stared at the white coving of the ceiling, and she knew that when this love affair was over, she would not live here, for she would not be able to bear it.

When he woke, Grace was gone. He felt her absence before he even opened his eyes, the scent of her still filling his senses. When he did lift his lids, he blinked against the bright, unexpected sunlight that poured into the room.

"Grace?"

His call echoed through the cottage, and he looked around. Her nightclothes, stockings, and shoes were gone, but the ribbon from her hair still lay on the carpet, a strip of periwinkle blue muslin. He picked it up, rubbed it between his fingers.

He had slept. The realization whispered to him, sudden clarity in the daze of waking up. He had actually slept-for hours, he judged by the sunlight pouring through the windows.

With her beside him, he had slept the way an ordinary man sleeps, restful, contented sleep. Peaceful. The noise was there, of course, but it was softer than it had ever been before. He had no headache. He felt truly rested for the first time in years. Dylan rubbed the bit of muslin in his fingers and felt as if everything inside himself was right again. He pressed his lips to the blue ribbon, then put it in his pocket.

Chapter Eighteen.

The following night, Grace and Dylan camped out in the cottage again, but this time, Dylan was prepared. He brought a straw mattress for the floor, sheets, and a blanket, which would remain in here from now on. At some point, he would get the place decently furnished for her, but for now, these things would have to do.

He also brought fruit, wine, and the red silk bag in which he always kept a supply of French letters. He had brought one of the condoms with him in the pocket of his dressing gown the night before, but the moment Grace had kissed him, he had forgotten everything but the feel and taste of her, and he'd lost his head. To protect Grace from pregnancy, he had to remember to use them from now on.

He brought a lamp to the cottage as well, for he wanted to see Grace's body in true colors, not the silver and gray shadows of moonlight.

When he made love to her that night, it was with the fierce, hot intensity of absolute possession, driven until he was drowning in the waves of her pa.s.sion, until she was sobbing his name as she came again and again.

The second time, he did everything with exquisite slowness, kissing her face, her nose, her cheeks, and making leisurely explorations of her body, as if time had stopped everything just for them. He sought out the secret places that gave her pleasure, and he exploited them. The backs of her knees, the sensitive skin on the underside of each breast, the base of her spine, and the back of her neck. He murmured words to woo her, pretty compliments, suggestive remarks, and blatant s.e.xual indecencies, until she was blushing all over and moving beneath his caresses in ardent, purely feminine agitation. He entered her slowly and teased her with his body, flexing his hips to barely move within her, increasing the power of his thrusts only when she demanded it of him, arching upward in frantic desire for completion.

Afterward, he asked her if she wanted to sleep, and when she shook her head, they went outside. He teased her about putting her nightclothes back on, but she looked at him with such shock when he almost walked out the door naked that he slipped on his Cossacks and his dressing gown. They lay under the stars in a patch of soft gra.s.s, where they listened to the singing of the nightingales and the roar of the sea. "I'm not sleepy either," he told her.

"Is it because you are accustomed to sleeping during the day?" she asked.

"No. The time of day doesn't matter. I sleep only when I am so exhausted I can't stay awake a moment longer. I used to go out every night to drive myself to exhaustion."

"That is a hard way to gain rest." She leaned on her elbow and laid a hand against his cheek. "Do you know why you can't sleep?"

He didn't answer, and after several moments, she settled back into the gra.s.s and shifted the topic. "I always wanted to sleep outside at night and listen to the sea, but I wasn't allowed. This is heavenly." She reached for his hand, entwined their fingers.

"My ears ring," he said.

Grace turned her head. He was in profile, his face looking at the midnight blue drifts of a few clouds that pa.s.sed over the moon and the stars, not looking at her. "That is why I do not sleep well."

"Your ears ring?" She didn't quite understand what he meant. "When?"

"All the time." He spoke through clenched teeth. "Twenty-four hours a day. It's not even ringing, not like bells or anything pleasant. No, it's a steady, unwavering whine. It sounds like an off-pitch tuning fork. The only thing that varies is the amplification. There are moments when I barely hear it. Other times, it is like a searing screech in my brain."

She sat up and looked into his face, her mind skipping back over odd things that had made no sense at the time. How he would press his hands over his ears. His headaches. How he said he did not like the quiet in the country. She tried to imagine what it was like to live with a noise like that all the time, how intolerable it must be to lay in bed, trying to sleep with that noise in one's head, but she could not imagine it. She did know it would be torture.

"It was a fall from my horse that caused it. In Hyde Park, five and a half years ago. I was racing far faster than I ought, took a tumble, and hit my head on a rock. My left ear bled for two days. And then the whine started. G.o.d, I hated it. I still hate it. I can hear it now."

Grace's hand tightened around his. "That is why you wanted to kill yourself, isn't it?"

"Yes. The noise was driving me mad. I could not hear music anymore. That was why I could not compose."

"But this happened five years ago. You have published some extraordinary works since then."

"No. I have not."

"How can you say that? What of your opera, Valmont? Your Piano Concerto Fourteen? What of your Fantasia On Sunrise? What of those?"

"Grace, have you not guessed the truth? Those are old pieces, some of them going back to my boyhood. I trot one out every now and then so no one will know the truth. I wrote Fantasia On Sunrise when I was fourteen. That concerto I wrote when I was twenty, I just hadn't named it yet. I completed Valmont just one day before the accident." He pressed the heels of his hands to his eyes. He gave a short laugh. "Pieces I never thought were good enough to publish."

"Not good enough? Dylan, they are beautiful." Her heart ached for him, for what it must cost him every day. "Not good enough for you, perhaps, but they are not just for you, you know. They are also for the pleasure and enjoyment of the rest of us. Some people think Valmont is your best opera."

He took his hands from his face and lifted one to brush back her hair. "Until I met you again, I had not written a single piece of music in over five years. Not one."

She remembered his words the night they had met. I will never write music again.

She thought of Etienne, who had forever been saying he would never paint again, only to be hard at work a few days or weeks later, pa.s.sion renewed.

Her reply to Dylan that night at the Palladium had been so confident. Yes, you will. One day. She hadn't understood.

His hand tightened in her hair, fisted around the long, loose strands. "Then you came, and gave me hope."

"Oh, Dylan, it isn't because of me." She leaned over him and laid her hand against his cheek. "It is all inside of you. You do not know how strong you are!"

"Strong?" He shook his head. "The night you met me, I was trying to kill myself, for G.o.d's sake. That is as weak and cowardly as a man can be."

"We all have our weaknesses, Dylan, but you have proven that you are strong. You have the will to live when living is h.e.l.l and hope is all you have left." She paused, then she said, "My husband was a volatile man, a man subject to abrupt, inexplicable changes of mood. He was a brilliant man, but he allowed the weaknesses in his character to take him over until they dominated everything he did."

"The same could be said of me, Grace."

"No. There is one great difference. I left my husband not because he had weaknesses but because he did not have the will to fight them. He lost his hope. If I had stayed, I would have lost mine, and he would have destroyed me. He died a year later."

"Grace." He pulled her down to him and kissed her. "Grace, you are the most compa.s.sionate person I have ever met. Whenever I am with you, you soothe me. Your voice," he said and touched her throat. "Your eyes, so green. Fresh and green." He touched her lashes with his fingertips. "Like spring, I thought, when I saw them in daylight. You quiet the noise in my head. Last night was the first night in five years I got a full night's sleep. When I am with you, the noise goes low and far away and I can hear music."

She smiled. "I thought you were just being torrid, and making love to me. Pouring the b.u.t.ter over me to get me into bed."

"Well, I was doing that, too." He lifted her onto him and smiled that pirate smile at her in the moonlight. "And it worked," he said, unb.u.t.toning her nightgown. "Didn't it work?"

"Dylan, stop," she whispered, glancing around as she tried to pull the edges of her nightgown back together. It was futile, for he was already sliding it off her shoulders. "We can't! Not out here!"

Impervious to her sensibilities, he ignored the hands that pushed at him, and he cupped her b.r.e.a.s.t.s. "Yes, we can," he murmured, teasing her with his thumbs and his voice. "Come on, Grace. I dare you. Make love with me naked in the moonlight. I won't tell on you."

And she did. A pagan dance with him in the dark. Wicked man, to tempt her with such delights.

In the cottage afterward, he slept soundly beside her, lying on his side, one arm around her waist, his other arm pillowing her head. Grace watched him, glad he could sleep. She loved him. He made her laugh. He made her glad to be alive.

She turned her head and whispered her secret against his palm, her voice so low that she could barely hear it herself. "I love you."

She kissed his palm and folded his relaxed fingers over, gently, so as not to wake him. She did not fall asleep. Instead, she lay there with her lips pressed to his fist, where her secret was caught inside. She was alive in every part of her body and soul. She was thankful for each and every moment of happiness. But fear still cast a shadow over her, fear born of past pain and the dread of what she would feel if it all fell apart.

May turned to June. By tacit agreement, they were discreet. During the day, in front of others, they were polite and perhaps a shade more distant than they had been before. When they were alone, the things he did to her ignited the flames banked by daytime discretion and antic.i.p.ation.

It was not only he who could inflame desire. She began to discover some of the secret things that drove him to ecstasy, and loving him as she did, she loved doing every one of them.

There were moments when it was hard to keep their secret. Sometimes, she would look up from one of Isabel's lessons and find him watching her, and she knew he was thinking about their nights together in the dark, of the words he murmured in her ear and the words he wrung out of her when he made love to her.

He liked that, she discovered, wordplay in bed. She discovered that she liked it, too. She had never known that such a wanton side of herself existed, but when he murmured hot, shocking ideas to her as he touched her, she wanted him to do them. He wanted her to tell him what she wanted, just for the sheer pleasure of hearing her voice. She did it and reveled in it.

He loved her hair. She put it up every morning, and he took great delight in taking it down every night. He ran it through his fingers, he pulled it down to fall over his face when she was on top of him. Sometimes, he would walk by her when no one was looking and s.n.a.t.c.h away a comb, bringing one of her braids tumbling down. Worse, he would walk away and leave her with the comb in his pocket and no way for her to put her hair back up.

When it was fine, they lay outside at night, talking, sometimes making love in the gra.s.s. When it rained, they remained inside the cottage, lying on the mattress with the window open, listening to the rainfall. Dylan liked rain, she discovered. He said the sound of it, like her voice and the ocean, soothed him.

Sometimes he slept, sometimes he didn't. When she had her courses, he slept with her anyway if she felt up to it, content to simply hold her. She loved that about him. Sometimes, if she had pain, she wanted to be alone, and he let her. Sometimes, he wandered away when he couldn't sleep, took long walks in the hills or along the sea by himself. She didn't know what he did or where he went, but he always came back to lie beside her. Slowly, day by day, Grace forgot what it was like to be all alone.

The pretty days of June went by and became the hot, sultry days of July. Dylan composed while Isabel had her lessons each morning. Most of it was a struggle, one note at a time. Occasionally, inspiration came in a flash-he'd see Grace walk by, or Isabel would laugh, or the ocean would call him, and he would have music to write. Those moments were precious and rare, and when they came, they were sweet satisfaction. Bit by bit, he worked his way through the symphony into the fourth and final movement.

The end of any piece had always been the easiest part for Dylan to write, but not this time. He just could not find the right way to bring this symphony to a satisfying close. This opus was a watershed, representing the beginning of a new phase in his life, and it was important. He wanted the finale to be just right, but perhaps he was simply trying too hard.

He knew now that when he felt like this, when he was exasperated by hours spent getting nowhere, it was time to stop and relax, and he decided to seek out his best two sources of inspiration.

Today, when he went up to the nursery, he found Grace teaching Isabel how to dance a waltz to the tinny sound of a musical box on his daughter's desk. Not wanting to interrupt, he paused by the door and watched.

Grace happened to glance up as she led Isabel across the floor, and she saw him standing in the doorway. He put his finger to his lips, and she carried on the lesson as he looked on, un.o.bserved by his daughter.

Grace's golden head was bent slightly above Isabel's dark one. Dylan listened to her liquid voice count the cadence, a voice as melodious as the Weber waltz to which they danced. Or tried to dance, he amended to himself as his daughter stumbled.

A waltz was something Isabel understood from a musical standpoint, but actually dancing to one was something altogether different, as his daughter was now finding out. Grace tried with gentle patience to guide her along with the lilting melody, but Isabel was stiff and awkward, unable to relax.

Most people would have been surprised that someone with Isabel's ability at composition would be less accomplished with the dancing of it, but Dylan understood at once. She was frustrated by the notion of being led anywhere.

"I don't like this," Isabel said, and she confirmed his instinctive conclusion by asking, "why can't I lead this time?"

"A girl doesn't lead," Grace answered.

"You're leading me, Mrs. Cheval, and you're a girl. And anyway, who made up the silly rule that a girl can't lead?"

Dylan pressed a fist to his lips, smiling. So independent and strong-minded, his little daughter. Tenacious, too, forever questioning the world and everything in it just as he did, fighting its conventions and strictures with the same contrary nature he possessed. The reason for it was one he could not quite fathom, even for himself, let alone for his child. The need for drama to constantly replenish that creative well, or the restless, prowling energy that consumed him, too. Fighting the world, perhaps, because it was simply there, and life would be deadly dull if someone didn't fight it.

This was his connection with her, he realized, the true one, one deeper even than music. He understood her, and she made him understand himself. They shared character traits that were soul-deep, pa.s.sed from him to her in a kinship beyond the loveless act that had created her.

She was so strong-minded, in fact, that it worried him. The life of a woman with his temperament would not be easy. He almost wished she had been born a boy. But then he looked at her in her white dress trimmed with a crimson ribbon- a ribbon of victory in the battle over proper colors for little girls. And the hem had ruffles of lace- lace, that hateful stuff that itched.

"Papa!"

She careened to a stumbling stop, her big, dark eyes looking at him, her absurd, pretty, rosebud mouth smiling at him. Dylan banished any thought of boys.

"May I lead?" he asked.

Grace stepped away and walked to the musical box to start the waltz again as he came forward and took his daughter by the hand. "Do you trust me?" he asked.

"Yes, Papa."

No hesitation in that reply but a conviction she did not easily give, an inexplicable trust he hadn't yet earned. He would earn it, he vowed. "If you let me lead," he said, "I will not let you stumble. I promise."

She nodded, and he looked over at Grace. She was watching them, looking like a warm spring day, with her gold hair and her green eyes, with her peach-colored dress and her radiant smile. She was the most beautiful thing he had ever seen in his life, and the sweetest dessert he'd ever had.