At last an answer occurred to her but it was not one that made her happy or feel good about herself or give her any hope of having some sort of life with him. He was allowing her to sleep with him because he thought of her as a child. Why else? That meant that everyone else thought of her as a child as well, so that it was safe for her to sleep with him.
At once she felt a deep sense of disappointment and a slight urge to get up and go to her own room. But she was very tired, the bed was warm, his body was warm and comforting against the soft, yielding length of her own. What would it feel like, she wondered, if this hard, uncompromising man beside her were to be kindled into passion, if he were to decide to make her his own for life, if he was to put his child into her?
The thought sent a delightful thrill through her, making her loins tingle with an anticipation of shared pleasure. It was both an exhilarating and frightening thought, wondering what it would be like to be his, and at the same time what it would mean to be taken by him.
Sighing, tumbling downwards towards slumber, she reasoned that if he had let her get this far into his life, there was always the hope, always the possibility that he would let her the rest of the way in. Clinging to that hope as though it were all that was making life bearable, she released her hold on wakefulness and clung to his side as though he were the only solid object in the sweeping tide of her life, aware all the while that somewhere, out in the wood and the night, Albert Askrigg too, watched and waited.