Chapter 27
The sorrow of true love is a great sorrow
And true love parting blackens a bright morrow:
Yet almost they equal joys, since their despair
Is but hope blinded by its tears, and clear
Above the storm the heavens wait to be seen.
—Edward Thomas
The Sorrow of True Love
Ashley hadn’t cried when she was sent packing back to London, though her mother wept enough to fill the sea. She hadn’t shed a single tear as she sank deep into despair over losing Rook, nor had she sobbed on the shoulder of Tom’s sister, at the news of his passing.
Instead, she built a wall of brick and mortar to keep back all the tears she refused to cry, as though if one single drop seeped through a crack, the whole dam would burst and bring her crashing to her knees.
Rook’s magnificent return had threatened the integrity of that embankment since January, and somehow, slipping back into a semblance of old times, reminiscing with the captain about all the ghosts who had haunted the fringes of her life these last twenty years became the crack that would be her undoing.
She had no idea how long she’d been huddled at the foot of her grand bed, weeping hard enough to shake the walls of the great house, trying desperately to get ahold of herself, trying to force herself to remember how to breathe, when at last there came a knock.
Probably the beleaguered footman wanted to fetch a doctor or the young maid brought a draft to help her sleep.
Scrubbing at her tears, Ash rose on shaky legs and opened the door—only to find Rook standing on the other side, grey eyes haunted and stricken at the sight of her puffed and blotchy face.
“It’s nothing,” she said, turning away from him and pulling her wrap tight around her. “Only everything, after all this time.”
He followed her into the room and gently closed the door behind him. “Too much of you was left behind in France?” he blurted out, startling her back into her senses.
The time had come for a full and final confession—nothing but the whole unbridled truth—after which she’d beg him to remain her friend and forget about her feelings. “How could I be tempted to marry anyone? When there was never anyone for me but you?”
He exhaled slowly, eyes set like stone. Then he swept her up in his arms, wrapping her in warmth and heady bergamot and home.
Wiping a tear from her cheek, he traced the line of her jaw with his thumb before kissing her so tenderly it ached, then again, ravenously, like one small taste had ignited a voracious need.
His kiss grew almost frantic as he turned her back against the door, finally finishing what he began twenty years before.
The feel of the wood against her shoulders echoed the feel of the trench when another kiss had started, with a furtive glance over his right shoulder, and then ended with a look of horror at what he’d done: kissing a fellow soldier. The image was still singed into her brain.
She put her hands on his solid, heaving chest and he took a step back, rubbing his neck as though embarrassed by his ardor.
“I should apologize,” he whispered, almost to himself.
“I thought… you liked men…” she blurted her confusion.
The glazed look in his eyes turned clear and sober. “What if I do?”
More confused than ever, Ashley couldn’t help stating the obvious. “I… am not a man.”
A tiny smirk hitched the side of his fine lips. “No. It would make all this slightly illegal if you were.”
Ashley’s mind was reeling at the implication.
She had known some men preferred men, but upon learning it, she had assumed their preferences were binary—running to one or the other.
The possibility had never occurred to her he might like both.
Was he suggesting she had it wrong this whole time?
That he could care for her as she did him despite her gender? Even because of it?
“Ash,” he said, tilting his head to catch her eye. “I have loved you for nigh on twenty-three years. Man or woman, it makes no difference. You were always it for me.”
“Loved,” she gasped.
“Can you even doubt it? The word is too small to contain the depth of what I feel for you. You are…”
“A piece of my very soul,” she finished for him.
When he nodded, she fell against him, kissing him once more, her tongue searching for his as their spirits had searched through space and time.
He lifted her off the ground and spun her, still kissing, and she clung to him, like he was a raft and the world around them a raging sea. The spin threw him off kilter, his cane and her wrap forgotten on the floor as they toppled to the bed, still holding on for all that was dear.
Pushing himself up with muscular arms, he scooted backward to the head of the luxurious bed, and Ash followed, walking on her knees to straddle him while his gaze traced down her like fire.
He yanked his shirt free from the waistband of his trousers before ripping it off over his head, sending buttons flying.
“I’ll find them later,” he murmured when Ash looked to see where they’d fallen. “We can ask the maid to sweep them up.”
“She’ll be scandalized.”
“Not as scandalized as the Old Man when I ask for a needle and thread to mend them.”
Ash giggled, opening the first button at the collar of her burgundy and floral dress, and Rook reached out, staying her hands, pulling them to his lips. He kissed first the right and then the left before releasing them and returning to finish the buttons himself, all the way to her navel.
The red identity disc she’d worn around her neck for two decades like a talisman swung out at him and he paused, staring at the name inscribed there.
When he realized it was his name, his identity disc, torn from his neck that fateful morning, kept close to her heart ever since, he leaned forward again, capturing her lips even more fervently than before, cradling her close, like he would never let her go.
She never wanted him to. He loved her—had loved her, all this time—for herself, and her alone.
Rook tucked a stray hair behind her ear, and then cupped her cheek. She leaned into the tender touch, savoring it. Savoring him. He ran one hand up over her satin brassiere, making her gasp at the caress she’d only dreamed of and longed for, while he worked his way down her remaining buttons.
She could feel him, hard and growing harder beneath her as they kissed, but when she reached for his trousers he stopped her, pressing his forehead to hers for a moment before he could speak.
“I don’t want you to see the leg,” he whispered, looking up at her with so much vulnerability in his grey eyes.
“The surgeons did right by me, but it can be a bit of a shock.”
Ash understood. She’d encountered her share of field amputations when they arrived back in Plymouth. “Rook,” she said softly, tracing his fine lips with her fingers. “It’s only me. But if you prefer to leave your trousers on, I’m certain we could manage.”
“I’ve killed the moment now,” he said, turning his face away, his ears as dark red as the flush spilling across his cheeks and down his throat.
“You’ve killed nothing,” she told him fiercely, sweeping her gaze down his chest to the bulge still straining to be free. “I have waited half a lifetime for you. I’ll wait another twenty years so long as you’re here by my side.”
His eyes blazed, the muscle in his jaw jumping as Rook clasped her left hand in his right while the other cupped her face, his long, musical fingers stroking along her cheek and down her neck.
He kissed her once more, tender and slow like he just might make good on her offer and kiss her every second for the rest of her life.
The soft, cool satin of her brassiere grew warm under his touch as he traced down the shoulder strap and stroked along the cup that held her breast, a look of curious fascination spreading across his face.
“They’re not much, I’m afraid,” she admitted self-consciously. “I used to bind them down with bandages, thankful they weren’t bigger.”
“They’re perfect,” he breathed, putting his mouth to one and then the other, licking over the satin, leaving the material damp enough to tease her tender, aching nipples as her breath juddered.
Emboldened, she ran her hands down his chest, softly tugging at the line of dark curls that formed a pathway to his waistband, allowing her palm to graze his bulging trousers, and he closed his eyes, exhaling a sharp huff.
“What do you like?” she whispered close to his ear, before tracing the delicate shell with the tip of her tongue.
His answer came as a ragged gasp, and Ash leaned over him to explore the other earlobe. He took another breath, not the sharp inhale of passion, but of speech, cut short before it could begin.
“You’ve only to ask,” she told him.
“Just thinking through logistics. It attaches above the knee. To remove it, I’m afraid my trousers would have to come down.”
“What a pity,” she teased, grinding against him as she kissed her way down his chest. Then more seriously she added, “Would it help if I stepped outside?”
He shook his head. “You could assist me with this last button so I don’t lose another.”
She grinned, doing as he asked, popping the button on his trousers free. Then she took her hands away and sat back on her heels, waiting to follow his lead.
Rook sat up to finish the rest himself with practiced ease, and his whole body seemed to breathe a sigh of relief when he unbuckled the leather straps and removed the prosthetic, for all he claimed it didn’t bother him.
He glanced over his shoulder, gauging her reaction, before propping the leg, still inside his trousers, against the wall, within arm’s reach.
Ash took the opportunity to shed the rest of her own garments, except for Rook’s identity disc, which had marked her as his since the day the army sent her home from France.
Then she stood before him, each of them more naked than they’d ever been with no more secrets or masks between them, just the magnetic pull that kept them forever circling like a planet and a star.