"Rather as if I lost a fight with a bull elephant. Apart from that, I feel wonderful. In fact, better than wonderful."
Laura inhaled, her eyes widening. "It's gone! That darkness inside you is gone. What happened to heal it?"
"I should have guessed you knew it was there." Ian was unsurprised that his wife understood what was going on inside his head better than he did. For she was right. The vein of sorrow and shame that had run through the depths of his soul was gone.
Experimentally he probed around inside his mind. Though he found much that he regretted, there was nothing that he couldn't live with.
"The darkness was fear," he answered, brows knit as he tried to define the mysterious shift that had taken place during his passage through the underworld. "In Bokhara, I was buried alive and died. This time, though I came within a hairsbreadth of destroying myself, I managed to survive all of the things I feared the most, including fear itself. For the first time since I was taken captive in Bokhara, I feel as if I am truly free."
"Even though you're married?"
He laughed. "That's the greatest freedom of all, Larishka, because you've seen me at my worst and are still here."
He paused to give her a deep, leisurely kiss. "The pieces I thought were broken beyond repair seem to have cobbled themselves together again. Almost as good as new, if you don't mind a plate with lots of seams and scars."
"That just means you're stronger in the mended places." She inhaled with pleasure as he found a particularly tender spot beneath her ear.
"I must be, because before I wasn't strong enough to say how much I love you." He opened the front of her gown, exposing her breasts, and kissed one sensitive tip. "And I do love you, Larissa Alexandrovna, my fierce, bewitching, tenacious Russian lady. I can't believe the good luck that brought us together in the face of so many unlikely circumstances."
She caught her breath as joy spiraled through her. "I love you, too, doushenka, my heart and my soul. But I don't think luck had much to do with bringing us together. Kamala's astrologer said there were no accidents. Everything that happened was meant to be."
"You may be right. The last few months have been too improbable to be the result of blind chance." He tugged off his robe and tossed it on the floor. "Now that you and I have peeled away all the layers of each other's secrets and fears so that we are finally down to our bare selves, the only thing left is to be happy. And speaking of bare selves..."
As Laura laughed, he deftly pulled her nightgown over her head so that they were flesh to flesh. Voice husky, he whispered, "To everything there is a season..."
As he eased into her body, his lips touched hers, warm and infinitely sweet. "And now is the season for love."