Page 36 of Lady Diana's Lost Lord
Ben set a bowl and a spoon before her, and slid a plate containing several thick slices of bread in the center of the table. “Eat quickly,” he said. “It’s close to bedtime.”
Hannah dug her spoon into her bowl and took a bite far too large, though somehow she managed to keep her mouth closed around it. “I can’t go to bed yet,” she said, when she had finished chewing. “Diana’s going to teach me how to broider.”
“Embroider,” Diana corrected. “And your papa is right. It’s too close to bedtime for embroidery.”
“Embroider,” Hannah repeated, scrunching her nose. “Did you know Diana can’t sew?” she asked of her father. “But she can make pictures. It’s like sketching, but you do it with string.”
“Thread, sweetheart. You do it with thread.” Diana poked her spoon into her bowl and fished out a carrot, which had been cooked to tender perfection. “I can’t sew a dress,” she acknowledged. “I have a seamstress in London who does such things for me. I can manage a passable seam, but it’s likely that your Papa is more proficient at it than I am. Perhaps he can teach the both of us to sew.”
“I can’t imagine where I would find the time,” Ben demurred, bending his head over his own bowl as he took a seat. He snatched a piece of bread off the plate and broke off a corner to pop into his mouth. “What will you embroider?”
“Handkerchiefs!” Hannah said gleefully, kicking her feet beneath the table. “With lace on the edges!”
“More lace?” Ben’s gaze swung toward her, and Diana felt herself flush beneath the perusal.
“To go with her new dress,” she said, and bit through a piece of potato. “But first we must stitch samplers to practice our needlework.” Though she would no doubt find the tiny stitches necessary to perform such a chore tedious, Hannah had quite an artistic bent—and forming the letters would likely help improve her penmanship besides. “Once you have mastered stitching your letters, we’ll move on to other things.”
Hannah crammed a piece of bread into her mouth, chewed, and swallowed. “Like what?”
“Oh, flowers, flourishes, trees and leaves if you like. All sorts of things. You can stitch a monogram into your handkerchiefs—your initials, so that everyone knows that your handkerchief belongs to you.” She gave a delicate little twirl of her wrist. “Perhaps your father will allow you to monogram hishandkerchiefs as well.”
“I haven’t got any handkerchiefs.”
“I’ll make one for you,” Hannah said, bouncing in her chair with delight.
“As long as it hasn’t got any lace,” Ben said. “I don’t think lace would suit me.”
“Will you keep it in your pocket?”
“Of course,” he said easily. “I would like nothing better.”
And he truly meant that, Diana knew—he would genuinely adore keeping something Hannah had made for him close, when he could not be with her.
∞∞∞
Naturally, Diana was waiting at the table after Ben had put Hannah to bed, clad in that same green wrapper. Ben paused only long enough to set a fresh bandage and the little jar of ointment near her on his way to the kitchen door.
“You won’t help me tonight?” she asked softly, just as his hand fell upon the handle.
A sigh collected in his throat, and he swallowed it back. “I don’t think that would be wise,” he said.
“It’s just a bandage,” she said, her voice tripping along the syllables, a hint of something vulnerable and aching there within it.
She was so damned wrong. Nothing about her wasjustanything, and she would never know how difficult it was to pretend a distance he did not feel. Forhersake. “Diana—”
“You could sit. Talk.” A tiny whisper of a sigh; he could so easily imagine her cradling her chin in her hand. “I don’t bite, you know.”
He wouldn’t have placed a wager on that, and he couldn’t imagine that her bite would be any less devastating than her kiss, besides. He couldn’t even bring himself to look at her for fear that she would see the hunger for it on his face. “I shouldn’t have asked you to stay,” he said. “It was wrong of me to prevail upon your generosity in such a fashion.”
“In fact, you did not ask,” she said. “We had an agreement. A mutually beneficial arrangement, as it were.” He heard the chair legs scrape across the wooden boards of the floor.
“Yes,” he said. “And if you wish to secure an end to our engagement,you’re going about it the wrong way entirely. It would be unconscionable of me to—to—”
“To what? Kiss me?” The words, spoken too close to his ear, lifted the tiny hairs at the nape of his neck. A shiver started at the base of his spine, sliding up his back. “Who is going to know?”
Hewould know. And God help him, he would never forget. She’d ruined him with only a kiss—but any more than that would ruinher. One of them had to be sensible, goddamn it all. “That’s not going to happen again.” It was an effort only to get the words out, when every bit of him wanted to surrender to the temptation she presented. Once had been ill-advised, twice was too many, but thrice—thrice might well be beyond what he could bear. A fine film of sweat had broken out upon his forehead, and he lifted one hand to wipe it away on the cuff of his sleeve.
“Don’t pretend you don’t want to kiss me,” she said, and a light laugh trickled through the air; a sweet shimmer of sound rife with satisfaction. “I won’t believe it.”
