Page 60 of Lady Diana's Lost Lord
“Then we would simply have to find her a gentleman who doesn’t wish to select a wife as he would a horse.” Her palm flattened over his chest, and each steady beat of his heart drew to mind another moment they would never share—weddings and births, winter holidays and summer garden parties, dances in a crowded ballroom and stolen moments in the darkened corners of a deserted terrace. They winked out one by one, like stars ceding the sky to the break of dawn.
Itwouldhave been beautiful.
Too soon, there would be the pain of losing him—but not before the pleasure of having him. Only until the coming dawn stole away the rest of her dreams.
He whispered her name against her lips as she turned her body to pull him over her, and they slid together like the pieces of a puzzle, her thighs widening to accommodate the width of his hips. His heady warmth blanketed her, and the crisp hair gilding his legs rasped the tender softness of her own. A teasing sort of abrasion that kindled a low, intimate heat deep in her belly.
“God, I love you.” The fierce, low words rumbled against the curve of her breast, sank straight through her skin and into her heart, rousing a bittersweet sort of ache within it. The cool strands of his hair clung to her fingers as she raked them through it, and he gave a deep groan as she dug her nails into the muscled flesh of his shoulders.
She loved those helpless, impassioned sounds he made. Every time there was a delightful symphony of them; the sighs, the moans, the harsh, panting breaths. Probably she made just as many of them, but she loved each of his. She loved the heavy burst of his breath against her skin, the shudder of his chest as he struggled to reclaim it—as if she had knocked it straight from his lungs with only the smooth slide of her leg along the length of his, the press of her knee to his hip.
The hard ridge of his sex pulsed against her, and he groaned again, tongue curled around her nipple, as she lifted her hips into the instinctive thrust of his. He had to have felt that revealing dampness there between her thighs, the liquid heat that would let him slide within her so easily and touch the deepest part of her.
He rocked against her in exquisite little nudges that sang along over-sensitized nerves until she had to bite her lower lip against sounds of her own. Until it was all too much, until she peppered the air with little gasps that slipped out through her clenched teeth anyway, until that tension had strung her limbs tight and aching.
“Ben. Please.” Her hands slipped across the sweat-misted surface of his skin, and she lifted her hips in entreaty, coaxing him to end the torture.
A long, slow, soul-shattering glide—he filled her in a single stroke that tingled straight to her toes, sent her senses scattering to the winds.
I love you. She mouthed the words against the hot skin of his shoulder.I love you. I love you.
His body stroked her inside and out, and she returned the favor as much as she was able, clinging with arms and legs and hands, finding the rhythm he set and moving to it. A delicious dance to their own music, made of her sighs and his moans.
The culmination of it came too soon, in a great crashing crescendo of sensation, sweeping her away into a sky that twinkled with millions and millions of stars. For a few beautiful moments she tumbled through it, breathless and exhilarated.
Then there was Ben’s agonized groan, half-buried in the spill of her hair over the pillow, the wet pulse of his pleasure against the soft flesh of belly. Hehad to leave her; he always had to leave her.
Neither one of them could risk a child.
She shoved that deep sense of loss back down and concentrated instead upon the tender kisses Ben lavished upon her nose, her cheeks, her chin—all the affection she would soon have to surrender. In turn, she soaked up the heat of his body, explored the myriad textures of his skin, committing the feel of him beneath her fingers to memory, one slow stroke at a time.
Long minutes later, the candle upon the nightstand guttered out at last, plunging the room into darkness. The last they would ever share between them. And she pressed him to his back, threw one leg over his hips, and whispered, “Again.”
Dawn would come far too soon.
∞∞∞
The carriage was somewhat less luxurious than that to which Diana was accustomed, but she supposed that Ben had had to settle for what could be gotten on short notice. At the very least it was nondescript, which meant that she was unlikely to draw attention on her journey back to London.
There was little evidence of yesterday’s storm, excepting the thick mud that the carriage had struggled through to reach the cottage. The day had dawned lovely and clear, the sky a crisp and glowing blue without so much as a single cloud to mar its beauty. The coachman was in his seat; her trunk had been loaded. All that was left to do was climb within the carriage and be on her way. Instead she waited, shading her eyes against the summer sun as she peered up to the small window in the upper floor, where a little girl glared down at her through the border of tattered curtains. She caught a scowl the likes of which she hadn’t earned from Hannah since the early days of their relationship—right up until Hannah turned her back and let the curtains fall.
Probably she wasn’t going to come down to say goodbye. Ben had been trying to get her out of her room ever since he’d returned home from his early morning jaunt to secure the carriage, but his pleas had fallen upon deaf ears. Hannah had locked the door and wedged the chair beneath the handle, and attempting to force it open would have been a futile endeavor.
Long moments passed before at last Ben came striding out of the cottage, his jaw taut and tense. Diana felt her shoulders sink as he approached,Hannah notably absent still. She would blame the glitter of her eyes upon the glare of the sun on the lenses of her spectacles.
Ben stopped a few paces before her, his hands flexing at his sides. “I couldn’t—” His jaw worked, and he sucked a breath in through his nose. “She wouldn’t come down,” he said. “I’m sorry. I tried.”
“That’s all right.” It would have to be. Nobody liked goodbyes, and Hannah was just a child. Diana hoped she could hold onto that anger, at least until the grief behind it had faded. “Would you give her this for me?” Fishing in her pocket, Diana withdrew the handkerchief that Hannah had asked for. She’d finished the last of it just this morning, laboring at the kitchen table from the very the break of dawn. “And give her a hug, and tell her—tell her—tell her I love her.”
Ben squeezed the handkerchief in the iron grip of his hand; a reflexive gesture of distress. “She knows that,” he said, risking a step closer, crossing that invisible boundary of distance propriety demanded. “She loves you, too.”
She wasn’t going to cry. She’d promised herself that the moment she’d awoken to find him already gone. Stuffed deep within her pocket was the handkerchief that Hannah had made for her, and she clutched it in her fingers now, feeling the rough, childish stitches beneath her fingertips. “You will write?”
Ben swiped his disheveled hair away from his face with one hand, and a muscle flexed in his jaw. “When we’re settled. I don’t know how long that will be, or where we’ll go.”
Weeks, then, probably. Perhaps even months. If he truly intended to write at all. “Somewhere by the sea.” Diana managed half a smile. “With a ginger cat and a circulating library.”
“Yes.”
