Page 49 of Lady Diana's Lost Lord
She gave a small nod, and the movement made her plait twitch where it lay over her shoulder. “I’ve been thinking,” she said, her dark eyes hidden behind the reflection of candlelight in the lenses of her spectacles. “I am not going to take on the marriage mart.”
“Don’t say that—”
“I mean to say, I do notwishto take. I can’t imagine—” She shook her head with a small sigh. “There was a time I wanted it. Or at least one that IthoughtI did, or perhaps that I could make myself want it.” A low, light laugh slipped off her tongue. “We’re meant to, you see. Ladies, I mean. We’re born for it, bred for it—for finding a suitor over a dance set and in fifteen minute morning calls. For wedding man we hardly know, one carefully selected by a father, an uncle, a guardian for impeccable bloodlines or as high a title as it is imagined we can snag.” Her white teeth nibbled at that lush lower lip. “I would have married to please my father,” she said. “And after he died, then I would have married only not to be alone. But I think—no. Iknowthere are things worse than loneliness. Marrying a man I don’t love would be one of them.”
Ben swallowed down a burst of impotent fury. At his father, hers. At the wretched situation in which they had been placed. At the knowledge that for some problems, there was simply no solution. That sometimes, there simply was nowinning.
Perhaps he was selfish enough to want her despite that fact, but he was not so selfish as to want a life of loneliness for her because he could not have her. He was not so selfish that he did not wish for her happiness, even if she found it with someone else. “I have every confidence that when you return to London unencumbered, you’ll have suitors. You will have reason enough to enjoy your next Season.” It would change her perspective upon all of it, to no longer be the girl waiting at the edges of a ballroom, wishing for someone to ask her to dance. When she was truly free at last, she would find someone, hewas certain of it. Someone who would appreciate her for who she was. Someone who would treasure that heart capable of such boundless love.
She had to. Because he needed her to be happy. Or he would be miserable.
“It’s not what I want for myself,” she said. “Perhaps once I could have contented myself with what I imagined to be my lot in life—but now I have learned better. I could never marry a man without knowing what sort of husband he would be, what sort of father. I could never marry for less than love.”
But she would never have to. Because there was simply no possibility that existed in which a gentleman spent any significant amount of time in her company and didnotlove her. She would have only to smile that intoxicating smile, and she could have any gentleman she favored eating from the palm of her hand. “You’ll have that,” he said. “You will find someone who loves you. You will find someone you will love.”
The smile she turned on him was soft, sweet—a little sad. She said, “I already have.”
∞∞∞
Another day wound down past the dying embers of sunlight as night drew its dark shroud across the sky. Diana wondered how many more of them she might have. It was impossible to say, but she knew that however many there were, she would always long for just one more. Tomorrow could bring the strike that would put an end to her time here, and she knew it was beyond selfish of her to hope that it would not—more selfish still to wish for a lifetime of tomorrows.
For the third evening in a row, Ben had tucked Hannah into bed, bid Diana good evening, and strode out of the cottage for a brisk wash in the pond. She thought—at least she suspected—that he believed himself to be doing the honorable thing. To keep a careful distance between them when nothing could come of it. To send her back to London with what she had wanted when she had first arrived. Thehonorablething, thedecentthing, because he was an honorable and decent man.
She could see it there from the window, the moon-silvered surface of the pond peeking through the trees. Little catches of water here and there,between a branch or a tree trunk. Not so very far from the house after all. And there she stood, peering through the night, searching for—something. A hint of a shoulder, perhaps, or a slice of his chest visible in the water.
Perhaps there was something in her a little less than decent. Something just a bit wicked; some sort of carnality she would never have expected of herself before now.
She would have too many regrets when she left.Thiswould not be one of them.
Rooting through the cabinet he had raided that first night she arrived, she found a moth-eaten quilt. Not ideal, perhaps, but better than nothing. A pinch of her fingers snuffed out the wick of the candle, plunging the kitchen into darkness.
The kitchen door swung open quietly beneath the pressure of her fingers, but the old boards of the porch creaked as she stepped outside. Hannah was a sound sleeper, and she knew the noise would not disturb her. The ground beneath her boots was steady, solid. The last of the mud puddles had baked away in the summer heat, and the night air was cool and soft. The moon overhead poured its light in silky streams through the leafy canopies of the trees as she wended her way through them.
The distant splash of water burned her ears, prickled the tiny hairs at the nape of her neck. Boldness had never been much her forte, but she summoned every bit of it she could find within herself as she passed the last of the trees and broached the space that Ben had claimed for himself.
He hadn’t noticed her, and that—that was good. For the moment she was free to look her fill, even if that view was somewhat impeded by the shadows that clung to him with the moon at his back. The light limned his shoulders in silver, cast hollows into his cheeks and the cleft of his chin. With a huge swallow of air he dunked himself beneath the water and surfaced once more, scrubbing his hands through the thick, wet locks of his hair. With one hand he scraped the water from his face, and then he turned—
He froze for one moment, two, three. She thought he might have blinked once or twice, as if he could not quite believe what he was seeing. “Diana,” he said at last, sinking down in the water to his shoulders like a bashful water nymph. “What the hell are you doing out here?”
Exactly as she pleased. Before she had to return to a place where there was nothing left she wanted. Even just once would be enough—but she would hope for more. She would hope those kisses had meant as much to him as they had to her. Even if he had not said as much. Even if hecouldnotsay as much.
There upon the bank, not too very far away, was his clothing, which had been folded into a neat pile. A length of toweling. A comb. A jar of soap. She turned toward them with slow, easy footsteps.
An odd, desperate thrashing sound, as if he’d sensed her intention. “Diana.”
“Oh,” she said, lightly, bending to lift the length of toweling from where it had been left. “Did you want this?” She couldn’t be certain, but she suspected his cheeks were burning.
“Yes.” He slid one arm out of the water, extending it toward her. “Toss it here.”
She tossed it behind her instead, casting it into the tree-sheltered darkness.
A thoroughly satisfying few beats of silence followed. He made a sound—dark, desperate—and whilst he wrestled with himself there in the depths of the pond, Diana shook out the quilt and laid it upon the grassy earth.
“You don’t want to do this,” he said at last, and from the deepening of his voice, she guessed that he had gleaned her intentions.
She gathered up his discarded clothing and placed it, very deliberately, beyond the quilt. “I do,” she said. “I really,reallydo.”
Her heart beat a harried little rhythm in her chest as she bent to unlace her shoes, pulling them off of her feet one after the other. They landed near his clothing, haphazardly abandoned. The hair ribbon next—she shook loose the plait she’d bound her hair in for bed, and it came tumbling down over her shoulders.
