Page 50 of Lady Diana's Lost Lord
And Ben—Ben was transfixed. Slack-jawed with disbelief, though she couldn’t say whether it was due to her temerity or to her hair. Her hands fell to the sash of her wrapper, and she plucked free the knot and slipped it off. The cool air seeped through the thin linen of her nightgown, pebbling her nipples. A bow at her throat held the neckline demurely closed. It took only the tiniest of tugs to loosen the whole thing, sending it sliding off of her shoulders.
Ben popped up as if he’d been mounted to a spring, striding through the water. “Diana, youcannot—”
She whisked the nightgown off of her arms, and it slid over her breasts, down her hips, and straight to her ankles.
He jerked to a halt. Or he had tried to. Probably his foot had hit a patchof slippery silt, for he wobbled, unbalanced for half a moment, and then—he toppled backwards with a crash, and the water swallowed him beneath its rippling surface.
She shouldn’t have laughed. She certainly hadn’t meant to. It didn’t seem the sort of situation that ought to have lent itself to humor. But there was something undeniably farcical in the idea that simply the sight of her bared breasts could send a man’s feet sliding out from beneath him.
They looked more or less normal to her. They filled out the bodices of her gowns nicely enough, but she had never considered them particularly remarkable—or at least, not compelling enough to sweep a man clean off his feet. But then, she’d really only ever seen her own, so perhaps her judgment was flawed by lack of experience.
She had reached the edge of the pond before he resurfaced, and she let the gently-lapping waters slide up over her ankles. Cold, but not so mercilessly chilling as she had expected. As Ben sucked in a huge gasp of air and swiped his hair away from his face, Diana waded into the pond, one foot after the other, and the water slowly encased her calves, her thighs, her hips.
Her nerves settled, soothed by the cool water washing up around her shoulders, by the kiss of the moonlight on her bare skin. And there—peace. Found, however briefly, in the stillness of a late June evening, sharing the rippling waters of a small pond with the man she loved. A handful of happiness that would, eventually, trickle through the gaps in her fingers. But tonight it would be hers to hold.
Ben stared as she came closer, sliding through the water toward him. His jaw worked, as if he were struggling to find words. Struggling, she thought to separate those words he didn’t want to say from those he did. Fighting for the words heoughtto speak, the words a man of his position was meant to say to a woman of hers. A woman he could not marry. A woman he would have to leave. A woman who could never truly be his.
Those decent and honorable words slipped away from him in favor of words more pressing. He said, “How can you be so beautiful?” And he looked at her like a dream that had persisted past the bounds of waking, like a miracle that glided toward him through the cool waters. A siren, perhaps, if there was one to be found within a small pond in a smaller village in rural England with water spots upon her spectacles.
He let her come to him on a slow drift through the water, let her lay her palm on the damp surface of his chest, let her slide her fingertips along his skin. A shudder ran down his spine, but she knew it had not been due to thecool water.
“If you had any sense, you would leave now,” he said, and there was an odd undercurrent thrumming within his voice, the suggestion that the option to leave was swiftly disappearing.
“I know,” she said. But she would have the rest of her life for sense. She did not want to spend it wondering, when she mightknow. Her fingernails slid through the wet hair at the nape of his neck; a step closer and their bodies would touch. Finally.
“I have—I have nothing to offer you,” he said. There was something mournful in the words, something that tugged at the fraying edges of her heart. But what was a little more battering before it had to break entirely? The result would be the same.
“I know that, too.” Her breasts brushed the broad wall of his chest, and she gave into the temptation to lay her head against his shoulder and press her lips to the column of his neck. “I haven’t asked for anything.”
She felt his arm bracket her waist, his palm splay between her shoulder blades. He turned his head to touch his lips to her temple. “But you deserve so much better than this,” he said, “and I cannot give it to you.”
She knew that. She had made her choice knowing it. And she would make the same one again, because hewasthatso much betterthat she deserved, even if she could keep him only temporarily. “This is all I want,” she said, and lifted herself onto her toes to kiss him, to nibble at his lower lip. The chill of the water at her back—the heat of his body upon hers. She shivered at the contrast and felt a strange pulse in the hard flesh pressed against the soft skin of her belly.
His fingers gripped a handful of the damp ends of her hair, gently pulling her head back, and Diana gave a small sound of displeasure to have lost his kiss. “I want you to make me a promise,” he said, bussing a kiss to the curve of her chin. “When you return to London, I want you to find someone who will love you. Find someone with whom you will fall in love.”
Her heart gave a wretched little squeeze at the thought. “Why?”
“Because I need you to be happy. When I think of you, even years and years into the future, I want to imagine you are happy. Loved. Safe and secure.” His nose brushed hers, a gentle rub. “I don’t want to imagine that you are alone or lonely. Do that one small kindness—for me. For yourself.”
“I will,” she said, but she knew the words were a lie. There was no other man alive who could tempt her to say those words before a reverend. Her happiness would be found here and now and carried with her the rest of herlife. In her heart. In the memories they created together with whatever time was left to them. “In return, I want to do all of those things I never had the opportunity to do.”
His lips quirked a little, and she knew he was calling them to mind again. “I haven’t got a terrace to sneak out onto,” he said, “and I’m rubbish at flirtation. Never had much of an opportunity to learn it.”
“You have got a porch,” she said. “And a pond. And—” She leaned forward, felt her hair slip through the grasp of his fingers, and murmured against his lips, “I don’t think you’re rubbish at flirtation.”
A wry little sound puffed against the very corner of her lips. “Yes, well, you’ve hardly any more experience than I have to go by.” His palms settled upon her back, fingers tracing a leisurely journey down her spine toward her bottom. “I told you that my last such experience was before Hannah was born,” he said. “And that is true—but the whole of the truth is that it’s been a good deal longer than that.”
“Oh? How much longer?” But even as she posited the question, she thought she must already know. She’d known him once as an awkward, quiet boy, and he’d described himself as painfully shy, even into his twenties.
“Ever,” he said. “I know the semantics of such things. But I’m not certain—I don’t—” A wordless sound of frustration. “I don’t want to disappoint you.”
How could she possibly be disappointed? They were just the same; evenly matched in this. She had not thought to hope for it—while society in general expected chastity of women, it did not extend the same expectation to men. But it warmed her heart to know that they would make this step into the unknown together.
Whatever the future held for each of them when they had gone their separate ways as she knew they must,thismuch they would always share: a moonlit night, a summer breeze, a blanket on the bank of a pond beneath a starry sky, and a first time shared between them.
When everything else had been stripped away, this much would still belong only to them.
Chapter Nineteen
