Oh well, if she was not to be teased into a good humour he would just have to climb up and hope she didn’t slam the window in his face. Alistair climbed another four feet before it opened wide again. This time a cloud of brown silk billowed out, settled, and revealed itself as Dita’s hair. His fingers clenched into the ivy as a wave of erotic heat swept through him. He had seen it down wet, sticky with sea salt, tangled into knots, and it had affected him deeply then. But now it was clean, glossy and smelled of rosemary.
Alistair fisted one hand into it and tugged gently. ‘Don’t you dare,’ she said, and swept it back and over one shoulder out of his reach. ‘I always wanted to do that as a little girl, but I never realised how painful the weight of a grown man on the end of it would be.’
‘May I come in?’ he asked.
‘Yes.’ Dita vanished, leaving the window wide, but as he breasted the sill she held out her hands to help him climb through. ‘Of all the idiotic things to do! You might have been killed.’
‘Easier than climbing rigging.’ It was interesting that that made her blush. ‘Dita, why are you here?’
It seemed, as she turned and walked back to the big table in the centre of the room, that she would not answer him. Alistair did not push her, but looked around. They were in the library, the walls lined with curving bookshelves to fit within the circle of the tower. On the table there were piles of books, maps weighted at their curling corners and pen and paper.
‘I am not going to marry,’ Dita said, her back still turned. ‘I realise I cannot compromise on what I need: marriage is too permanent, too important to settle for a lifetime of second best. And I don’t want to hurt someone by not being able to offer them everything that I have to give. So I came here to think about what I want to do and I decided that I will travel. I will find a congenial older woman as a companion and I will discover this country first. Then, perhaps, the war will be over and I can go abroad.
‘I enjoyed writing. I might well rewrite our novel, and I will write about my travels.’
‘You may hurt someone else, by deciding not to marry,’ Alistair said.
‘Who?’ She turned, puzzled.
‘Me.’ He said nothing more, but let her work it out for herself.
‘You? You would be hurt by my not marrying? You are saying that you care for me?’
‘You know that I care.’ His voice was rough, and he knew he was not gentle as he closed the distance between them and jerked her into his arms. ‘I am telling you that I love you.’
‘But you don’t want to fall in love,’ she wailed. ‘You don’t believe in it. Don’t do this to me, Alistair. Don’t pretend and say this just because you think you must marry me.’
He looked furious and more nearly out of control than she had ever seen him. ‘I will be all right, Alistair. I don’t have to marry—’
‘I. Love. You,’ he repeated. ‘Love: not like a friend, not like a neighbour—like a lover. I had no idea until I walked out of that garden knowing you were in love with someone else, and then I found I was shaking and sick and I realised that I had lost you because I’d had no idea that what I felt for you was love.’
Dita felt as though the tower floor was shifting under her feet, but Alistair was holding her. She would not fall while he was there. Alistair, who was telling her he loved her.
‘Then Evaline said you were not betrothed to anyone, so I guessed he either does not love you or is totally ineligible. Take me, Dita,’ he urged. ‘We’ll travel and I’ll take you wherever you want. We’ll write together—you can help me reconstruct my notes and I’ll help with the novel. We’ll make love. You like me, I know that. Desire me, too. I think you trust me. One day I’ll make that enough for you. I’ll make you forget him.’
‘You don’t know, do you?’ she said, looking into his eyes and reading the truth and an utterly uncharacteristic uncertainty in them. ‘When I saw you on the ivy I thought you must have guessed.’ He shook his head, not understanding. ‘It is you. I love you, Alistair. I’ve loved you all the time, even when I told myself I hated you, when I told myself it was just desire, when I knew it was hopeless.’ Dita smiled at him, trying, failing, to conjure an answering smile.
‘But you said you grew out of it.’
‘I lied. Do you think I could bear you knowing and not feeling the same? I would have sunk with mortification.’
And then he did laugh, his whole body convulsing with it. ‘I believe you—I can imagine how that would feel.’
‘But you were prepared to risk it,’ she said, sobering as rapidly as he relaxed. ‘You were prepared to risk your pride by coming here and telling me you loved me.’
‘Because I realise my task in life, Perdita my darling, is to cherish you and protect you and love you and if that means carving out my heart and my pride and my honour and laying them at your feet, that’s what I will do.’
‘Oh.’ Her voice broke as the tears welled in her eyes. ‘That is so lovely.’
‘Don’t cry, sweetheart, not before I tell you your duties. You are fated to give me purpose, make me smile and restore my faith in the world as a good place.’
‘I won’t stop you being an adventurer,’ she promise as she swallowed the tears. ‘I’ll never close the window and leave you to climb alone again or tell you to stay at home and be safe. But you’ll take me with you, always, won’t you?’
‘I promise,’ Alistair said. ‘Do you want to get married at the same time as Evaline?’
‘I don’t know. I didn’t know I was getting married until five minutes ago! Why?’
‘Well, she is not marrying for about three months and I have every intention of taking you to bed as soon as I can find one—and I really don’t want to be careful.’