start. I thought it was simply desire.’
‘I do not think there is anything simple about desire, my love.’
Laura twisted so she could drop a kiss on his wrist, feel the pulse beat against her lips. He loved her. Miracles happened. ‘Perhaps that connection between us made the mistrust more extreme.’
‘It would take a better philosopher than I am to understand the mysteries of the heart,’ Avery said. ‘Who would have thought that I could fall in love with Alice’s real mother?’
‘Who would think I could learn to love the man who stole her from me, the man who told the world he was her father?’ Laura laughed at the sheer wonderful inevitability of it.
‘Papa?’
The small voice from the doorway had them twisting round, clasped in each other’s arms like guilty lovers in a melodrama. Alice stood there gazing at them, her face pale, her eyes wide, hair ribbons trailing from her fingers like some misplaced carnival decorations. ‘You are not my father? I don’t understand.’
‘Alice!’ Avery got to his feet and held out one hand to the child as he helped steady Laura with the other. ‘Come in. We need to talk.’
Laura’s heart bled for him as she saw the look in the child’s eyes: doubt, anxiety, trust wavering on the edge of betrayal, but this was no time for displays of uncontrolled emotion. They had to reassure their daughter, nothing else mattered. She moved briskly across the room, closed the door and took Alice by the hand. ‘Come and sit down, Alice,’ she said with as much calm firmness as she could muster. ‘This is going to be a very big surprise and it is a good thing you are such a big girl now and can listen carefully and try to understand.’
‘We’ll sit on the floor,’ Avery said, folding down to sit cross-legged on the carpet. ‘Then we can all hold hands and look at each other.’
‘I am your mother,’ Laura said without preamble when they were settled, Alice’s cold little hand in her right hand, Avery’s big warm hand in the left. ‘Your real mother.’
‘You left me.’ Alice bit her trembling lower lip.
‘I lost you,’ Laura corrected gently. ‘You know that people have been unkind to you sometimes because Papa was not married?’ A nod. ‘People get very cross if a man and a woman make a baby before they are married and I’m afraid that is what your father and I did. We loved each other and he had to go to war. And then, darling, I’m so sorry, he was killed. He was very brave and he was doing his duty.’ Avery’s hand squeezed tight around hers.
‘Like Cousin Piers?’ Alice was looking steadier now.
‘Cousin Piers was your father, sweetheart,’ Avery said. ‘So I thought I must look after you. Only when I found you I knew at once that I loved you and that I wanted to be your papa. So I let you believe that I was.’
‘But...’ Alice turned to Laura, her forehead crinkled with the effort of working it all out. ‘If you are my really mama, why didn’t you marry Papa?’
‘Because I didn’t know where you were,’ Laura told her. ‘You see, my mother and father thought it was best if they sent you away so no one knew I had been in love with your father and that we had had a baby.’
‘Because silly people get cross because of you not being married.’ Alice nodded, obviously having sorted that out to her satisfaction.
‘It took me six years to find you,’ Laura explained. ‘And I pretended to be Mrs Jordan because I didn’t know what your papa would think of me.’
‘So why didn’t you tell me? And who was the bad man you were running away from?’
‘Er...’
‘Mama did not tell you because I was cross with her, too, which was exceptionally silly of me,’ said Avery firmly. ‘And the bad man frightened Mama in the park, but he has gone now and will never come back.’
‘So it is all right now?’ Alice asked, the anxious quaver back in her voice. ‘Even though Papa isn’t my really father and Mama is...Mama?’
‘It is perfectly all right,’ Avery said. ‘Grown-ups make a lot of muddles about things sometimes and we can’t tell everyone about who really is who because otherwise some people will be horrid to Mama. But now we are a family and nothing is going to spoil that.’
‘Would Cousin...Cousin Piers be pleased? Can you tell me more about him?’ Alice jumped up and put her arms around Avery’s neck and kissed him. ‘I don’t love him like you, Papa, but I’d like to know about him.’
Laura found she was looking at her husband and daughter through a mist of tears. Avery appeared to have lost the ability to speak. ‘We will talk about him lots,’ she promised. ‘And he would have been very, very proud of you, Alice.’
And then Avery opened his arms and pulled them both close and they clung together, murmuring disjointed reassurances to each other. There were tears, but when Laura finally stood up and took her daughter’s hand and went upstairs so they could wash their faces and brush their hair it seemed as though none of them could help the smiles and the laughter of sheer happy relief.
* * *
‘Are you tired?’ Avery asked when finally Alice, who had been allowed to stay up for dinner, had fallen asleep with her head on the tablecloth and had been carried up to bed.
‘Exhausted,’ Laura admitted as she walked unsteadily into Avery’s bedchamber and collapsed on the bed. ‘I can’t face going downstairs for tea. But I do not think I will ever sleep either.’
‘Happy?’ Avery asked. He kicked off his shoes, then leaned against the bedpost and began to untie his neckcloth. The dressing-room door opened and he called, ‘That will be all for tonight, thank you, Darke.’ It closed again and he joined her on the bed.
‘Happy? I do not think I know the name for it. It is as though someone has swept away all the doubts and worries and pain and loss and I’m like a newly whitewashed house. Empty. And yet full. Confused,’ she added when he laughed. ‘Happy, content, terrified I will wake up and this is all a dream.’
Laura turned on her side and propped herself up on her elbow. Avery was lying on his back, eyes closed, mouth curved into a smile of pure content. ‘How do you feel?’
He opened his eyes and studied her for so long that Laura felt herself grow rosy with the intensity of the look. Then Avery sat up. ‘There are not the words. Let me show you how I feel.’
Time stood still as he kissed her, caressed the clothes from her body, then lay and allowed her to strip him and caress in her turn. All the urgency, the heat, that had driven their lovemaking before had gone, replaced with a tenderness that went far beyond the erotic. Avery made love to every inch of her body with lips and teeth and tongue and gentle, relentless fingers.
Laura was swept from one peak to another, her body saturated with sensation. When he finally took pity on her and fell back beside her she summoned what remained of her energy and moved on top of him, straddling the narrow hips.
