Pleasure and Purpose (41 page)

He looked so eager she couldn't refuse, though she insisted upon bathing quickly, first. She had no lady's maid to help her as she would have had she been as grand a lady as the gowns would insist, but Alaric was as swift tying laces as he was untying them.

"Practice provides perfection," he told her with an unashamed grin. There were many choices but only one she could imagine making at that moment. With its simple cut, the lack of lace and frills, the gown would have been plain but for the color. Crimson silk, hemmed in gold. It was not the gown for a Handmaiden. It was the gown, however, for a woman.

When she stood before him in the dress, her high-heeled shoes a perfect match, the soft gloves rising to just above her elbow, Mina thought no mirror could better reflect her than Alarics eyes. Men had gazed at her with wonder before this, and with adoration, but none had ever looked upon her with such utter satisfaction.

She was brand-new before him.

"This gown ... it fits me. Perfectly." None of the others she'd ever been granted had done so. All had sagged or pinched, needing tailoring. Many had been the wrong color, what her patron preferred and not what would suit her. But this dress hung on her as though it had grown from her own skin. The shoes fit so well she scarcely noticed them. Mina twirled, slowly, to bell the skirt. "How did you do it?" Alaric looked confused. "Do what?"

"How did you know exactly what I would like best? How did you make sure it would fit me just so?"

"I gave the seamstress measurements." His brow furrowed, as though her question made no sort of sense. "And as for choosing what you'd like the best, I simply . . . well, I simply thought about it.

She smoothed the fabric with her fingers and looked down at it. So simple a thing and yet so full of meaning. "But how did you know the measurements?" He shrugged and held up his hands slightly apart. "I showed them. I said, 'This is the span of her hips, this the shape of her breasts.' They fit them from that. And I told them to use their finest stitches, as my lady deserves nothing but the best." This might have been his duty, part of the requirement of having her, but he'd done so much more. Mina blinked again to clear her eyes and swallowed hard. Alaric stood, clad now in the peasant trousers in which she so enjoyed him.

"It was no great effort," he said. "Because I know you." She'd had patrons who'd bent themselves to her, the bending giving them what they required to find peace. Patrons who'd obeyed her and followed her lists. She'd never had a patron who so simply became everything she required without her having to ask it of him.

"You do know me," she whispered. "Oh, yes. You do." It happened. Mina had said it was no mystical, magical thing, the finding of solace. And she no mystical, magical person. Yet when it fell between them, sudden as a cloud passing across the sun or a wave licking at the shore and retreating, she felt it. They both did. But it was not Alaric's solace they'd found.

It was hers.

Mina didn't know the moment he went to his knees before her, only that he was there. Alaric bent his head over her hands. When he looked up at her, his eyes gleamed, his mouth wet.

"How could I have spent so many years believing I had everything I needed?" Mina asked him. "When I was only waiting to find it?"

Alaric smiled and stood. "Let me give it to you."

"Sweetheart," Mina said, "You already have."

Purpose and pleasure. It had brought solace to them both. Neither of them needed to ask if it had arrived.

They both already knew.