Pleasure and Purpose Read online

  "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.