Veils of Silk(125)

When she was finished, Ian said pensively, "The maharani was right. Passion denied can become so overpowering that nothing else matters. I should have realized that myself, but I was too close to be objective. We owe Kamala a considerable debt. Life will be easier for both of us now, as well as far more pleasurable." His arms still around her, he drifted off, his breathing becoming slow and regular.

But for Laura, sleep wouldn't come in spite of her languid satisfaction. Their physical union   had been deeply rewarding and promised to get even better in the future.

Her fears of being swept away to madness were largely gone, so remote it was hard to remember how vivid they had been only a few days before. And though she knew her capacity for possessiveness was great, she didn't believe Ian would give her cause for jealousy. Not for him the casual sex in which her father had so thoughtlessly, and disastrously, indulged.

She would have been blissfully happy, if it hadn't been for Ian's chilling rejection of her declaration of love. Though he had expertly tried to cover that brief, devastating remark, she knew in her bones that it had been profoundly significant.

For a moment, as his words echoed in her mind, she hovered on the verge of tears. Then her face hardened. She must not surrender to the pain of his rejection. This was simply one more problem, one more veil of the past, that must be removed before they could be fully happy. Clearly there was still darkness inside him. It was not the despair he had been suffering from when they first met, nor was it anger. This was more like the stark withdrawal of the week before, when she had revealed the reasons for her fear of passion.

She found it ironic that her fear was gone, but not his bleakness. Thinking back, she remembered his occasional oblique references to shame and unworthiness. Perhaps he had always felt that way about himself, but she doubted it. From the way people who had known Ian before his imprisonment spoke of him, he had once had confidence in abundance.

What had Srinivasa said about him? That he had a warrior's weakness, which was the inability to accept that his strength had limits. That he tormented himself because of his own perceived failings.

Yes, that fit. It must have been prison that had changed him. She wondered if there had been one specific incident, or whether the cause was simply the cumulative effects of months of degradation, abuse, and helplessness. For someone like Ian, being helpless must be the cruelest torture of all.

But even if her analysis was true, she had no idea what she could do about it. He had walled part of himself off from her, and she guessed that as long as that wall was in place, he would be unable to love her as she loved him.

The thought filled her with aching grief. She loved him with every part of her being, and she wanted, most desperately, for him to love her the same way. Yet what right had she to complain? In his proposal, he had offered friendship and support. She had those things, and now physical delight as well. To demand love was far beyond the limits of their bargain.

For one brief, raging instant, Laura experienced the passion that destroyed her parents' marriage. She wanted to possess her husband's heart as well as his body, and her failure filled her with the same kind of fury that Tatyana had shown when she discovered her husband's betrayal.

The surge of anger left Laura shaken by the power of her own emotions. It was a sharp reminder that her past fears had not been wholly unfounded, for she was indeed her parents' child. Thank heaven she had avoided the worst of their folly. No, thank her stepfather and Ian and Kamala, who had helped her steer through the stony rapids where she might have come to grief.

But her surmise that Ian couldn't love her was acutely painful. She had read books where proud ladies renounced the men they loved because the love was not returned. Though Laura had never understood that in the past, now she did in an utterly visceral way.

There was anguish in knowing that she and Ian might never be as close as she wanted. She wondered if the imbalance in loving would prove unendurable, if someday frustration would drive her to leave Ian rather than stay and yearn for what she would never have.

As soon as the thought surfaced, she almost laughed aloud at the absurdity. Perhaps a proud English beauty would refuse to stay where she was unloved, but Laura was Russian, with all the stubbornness of her race. The endless sky and harsh climate had tempered her ancestors, giving them vast patience, tenacity, and a refusal to surrender what was theirs.

That fierce determination had been in Pyotr, who had burned Moscow to keep it from enemy hands. It had been in Tatyana, who survived emotional devastation to build a new life for herself and her daughter in a distant land. It had even, in a tragic form, been in her father, who had taken his own life in a savage testimonial to the strength of his love and his regret.