On returning to town, they carried the kids up to bed at Romana house's and tucked them in snug as bugs under mountains of blankets. They'd hardly roused when the train pulled into the station and only muttered in s lumber as they were taken from train to taxi. They were all of them heavy, happy sleepers. The hall lights were left on for them.

As Romana embraced her from behind, Jordie phoned home to let Mrs. Bosley know she and the children wouldn't return till morning. If the older woman suspected anything, she wisely kept her own counsel. Jordie didn't care what she suspected. She had cared for too many years what other people thought of her.

Jordie drifted behind Romana, an ardent ghost as Romana locked all the doors and doused the ashes in the fireplace. They extinguished the lights on the main level and climbed the stairs to Romana's bedroom hand in hand. There wasn't any need for them to rush; they had one another now, and they had till morning's first light.

Jordie followed Romana to her bed, and she didn't leave for the rest of the night.

Hours later, Jordie fell backward into the bedsheets,  sated and sticky from Romana's amorous attentions. She blinked, bleary-eyed, at the starlit ceiling. There was only enough illumination to see by from the unshuttered windows and a single white candlestick burning on the nightstand beside the bed.

The fire threw shadows on the walls and on their bodies. Jordie swore she could see Romana's fingerprints on her chest and stomach, trailing like breadcrumbs down her thighs.

Romana lazed at her side, observing Jordie's haphazard, languorous sprawl with the air of a cat who had got and quite enjoyed her cream. She had the look of someone well-loved: swollen lips and mussed hair; love bites littering her collarbones and half-moon shaped marks on her hips.

"Don't look so pleased with yourself," Jordie remarked once she'd rediscovered her voice.

"Then allow me to look pleased with you." Romana twisted forward to kiss Jordie till they forgot words again, resorting to action to show what they still hadn't been able to say.

When they were still again, bodies cooling where sweat had dried on their skin, they found each other's hands in amid the bedcovers and held fast to one another. Romana's red hair spilled across the sheets in a copper halo. Jordie brushed it from Romana's eyes.

"I love you, Romana. I was afraid at first of how I felt about you, that it was too fast to be true. It isn't. It's real."

Romana turned her head to kiss Jordie's freckled shoulder. Her voice was a hoarse facsimile of the normal, velvet sanded suede.

"I love you very much. I don't know when I realized. Maybe when I thought you didn't love me enough to come back. You wouldn't be the first."

Jordie's heart twisted. She hated that she had made Romana doubt her. She hadn't had the confidence of her convictions back then. She had them now.

"I love you more than enough."

"I know. You've got me convinced."

Romana stretched and snuggled nearer. Her pendant spilled from the sanctuary between her breast into a puddle of delicate chain on the sheets. Jordie touched it. When Romana didn't balk, she cradled it in her palm.

"Tell me about it?"

"My father gave it to me when I completed my medical studies. He believed in me."

"My father believed in me as well. I like to think my mother did too."

"Seems our fathers had the right of it." No further discussion was given to Ella Casares or what she'd believed. She had given Romana hell in life; yet Romana's life was no more heaven without her.

"How are you able to accept it so easily, feeling this way about women?" Jordie by no means thought it was wrong. The love of women was as true and real as there could be--she'd felt it herself. That didn't mean part of her didn't struggle all her life to accept it.

"It was difficult initially but over time, I realized of all the reasons I might consider loving a person unacceptable, their being a woman would never qualify. I don't see love as wrong." She cupped Jordie's cheek. Jordie kissed her hand and settled her head beside Romana's on the single pillow.

"I don't want to be married to him anymore. I don't want to lie about who I am. I know I have no choice, but I can't live that life anymore. Don't ask me to."

"I'm the last one to ask you to live for anyone bar yourself when I couldn't." They kissed to settle Jordie's demons and momentarily quiet her fears. "Whatever you want, Jordie, I want for you."

"I want you and to be with you."

"Then you'll be with me. In case you haven't noticed there's room enough here for all of us." The Gentry homestead was large enough for more children than the successful couple had ever had, even before Troy joined them last year. It was a home for a house a of children. 

"You'd have me, here?" There'd be gossip, much of it true, and none of it kind. There would be consequences if Elliot should ever choose spite over pride.

Romana pushed Jordie onto her back and moved to sit astride her thighs. The soft hair between her legs tickled Jordie's sensitized skin. "Jordana Freemantle, you are all mine. Woe betide any man who tries to separate us."

"Or any woman."

"Anyone at all." She kissed Jordie, slow and sweet, and then deeper. All that possessive adoration she'd kept under lock and key came out in this kiss. Jordie swept her hands up and down Romana's naked back. Romana was hers equally as much. It hadn't been a man or someone else Romana had primped for in Harrods but Jordie. Romana's fire burned for her.

When they rose in the morning to begin their day, Jordie looked a happy fright. Her hair was a right mess. Her lips were a bruised, loved-upon crimson. But her eyes were bright. She smiled, thinking of Romana belting Christmas standards in the shower, in English and Spanish, blowing her kisses through the veil of steam and stealing kisses once Jordie had cleaned her teeth.

Romana emerged from the bath, scrubbed pink, clean. She smelled of jasmine and lemons, a touch of bergamot. Seductive, musky, tart and sweet. It wafted after her out of the en suite. Shalimar, Jordie remembered. The bottle Jordie had given her. That scent would remain with her the rest of her days, Romana's trademark haunting any room she entered.

Romana snuck up on Jordie to hug her from behind. Contemplations were lovely but living here in the present in Romana's arms was leagues beyond daydreams.

"Mmm, shouldn't we wake the children?" she asked Romana.

"It's nearly Christmas, let them sleep in."

Romana treated Jordie to a filling breakfast and a protracted session of kissing on the counter, against the refrigerator, in the storage cupboard. They were reenacting last night's lovemaking on the parlor sofa when the first shout of maternal duty sounded upstairs.

"Mummy, I'm hungry," shouted Daniel from the top of the stairs.

This was familiar.

Jordie dropped her head on Romana's chest where her heart had already begun to slow from their previous activities. Romana propped herself up on her elbows. Her lips were kissed deep pink and her breasts was bare and mottled with love bites blooming in the shape of roses.

"You get them dressed and I'll get started on breakfast."

"Can't we just ignore him?" Daniel would bang on until he was fed. Jordie couldn't say which of his parents he inherited his obstinance from.

"At your own peril." She patted Jordie's bum and gave it an affectionate pinch. "Go on, or the boy's going to have quite a tale to tell when he goes back to primary school."

Jordie rolled off Romana and started to make herself decent. Romana slipped off to the kitchen to wash up and get ready for the children. Jordie was sure she'd got the rotten end of this bargain. Once the children were dressed in their new clothes and sitting round the table with their mothers like family, Jordie realized there was no rotten end. This was the bargain. This was why she'd come home.