Page 16 of Lady Diana's Lost Lord

“Papa!” Hannah cried again, her voice rising into an appalled screech. She burst into a noisy bout of tears that wrenched at his heart, and though she jerked fiercely at Diana’s hold, she found herself propelled across the floor toward the stairs regardless.

Guilt hung heavily upon his shoulders. His daughter hadscreamedforhim, and he—he had done nothing.

Something of it must have shown on his face, for Diana paused just briefly as she dragged the struggling child away. “Sometimes,” she said, “kindness is doing what is necessary.”

Probably she was right. But that didn’t soothe the ache in his heart—or the shrill of his conscience—as she hauled Hannah bodily up the stairs. Hannah’s sobs echoed in his ears until at last they were muffled by the heavy scrape of his bedroom door closing, and Ben scrubbed his face in his hands.

A bath. It was only a bath. She certainly wasn’t going to drown his daughter in the bathing tub. Was she?

∞∞∞

Diana hadsomehowmanaged to wrestle the child out of the muddy dress, which lay in a pile upon the floor. Stripped down to her threadbare chemise, her hair half-removed of its plaits with fuzzy little strands clumped together with mud, Hannah glared at her from across the room.

The copper washing tub lay between them; a fresh battleground to be won or lost.

Diana pointed an imperious finger at it, and commanded, “In.”

“I won’t!” This was accompanied by a stamp of a small foot and the intractable thrust of a small, determined chin.

“If I must make you get in, you will find that decidedly less pleasant,” Diana advised. “You can choose to cooperate, or you can choose to be difficult. Either way, you will not leave this room without a proper bath. It is only your own time and energy you will be wasting. Choose your battles wisely.”

Ben chose that moment to shove open the door without so much as knock, carrying in a jar of soap and a length of clean—if somewhat stained—toweling. A muscle flexed in his jaw, and his gaze darted between them, clearly torn between two sides. No doubt he’d heard his daughter’s caterwauling all throughout the house.

Hannah’s face changed in a moment, sliding from defiant rebellion into pitiful misery. “Papa, she’s mean to me!” she said, swiping away tears that had yet to materialize with one fist. Diana rolled her eyes at the dramatics.

“Hannah, sweetheart—”

Diana lifted one hand to stay the words, leveling a hard stare at him, willing him to understand that he could not allow himself to be drawn in to this battle. If she were meant to establish herself as an authority figure, it would have to benow. At this very moment. Or every one thereafter would be a perpetual struggle. She might not have had overmuch experience with children herself, but Emma had told her enough of the trials she had weathered with the children in her foundling home to have learned this much at least.

She could not manage an unruly child without his support. Yet he struggled with it, with the desire to comfort his daughter, no matter how obnoxious, how unmanageable her behavior.

“Leave,” she instructed coolly. “This is between Hannah and me.” And Hannah needed to know it, to understand that it would avail her nothing to pit her father against her. “If you would leave her in my care, you mustleave her in my care.”

He uttered a foul word beneath his breath, barely audible. Probably he was already regretting his ill-advised bargain. But he dumped the soap and the toweling into her hands as he turned for the door. “Make it quick,” he muttered. “I’m soon to leave. I’d like to say a proper goodbye before I do.”

He was out the door so quickly, Diana suspected it had taken every bit of his self-control to force himself to do it.Good.

“Now,” Diana forced herself to say cheerfully as she turned her attention once more to the recalcitrant child staring her down. “Which is it to be? Pleasant, or otherwise?”

∞∞∞

Ben reassured himself that Hannah had eventually stopped screaming. Still, it had taken every bit of will he could musternotto run to her rescue. If he hadn’t known better—if there hadn’t been even the slightest sound that might have suggested a strike—he would have sworn his daughter was being murdered on the floor above.

What in God’s name had he done? He dropped his head into his hands, sinking into the chair at the kitchen table as if the weight of all the world rested upon his shoulders. Perhaps he had coddled Hannah a bit beyond reason, with the meager resources at his disposal. But surely it wasunreasonableto allow her to be handled in this fashion, to abandon her when she had cried outfor him—

“Ahem.”

Ben turned so swiftly that he nearly overset the chair. He’d been so wrapped up in his misery that he had not heard the door above open, hadn’t heard footsteps on the stairs. But Hannah stood there in the doorway, Diana a watchful guardian at her back, and she looked—

Clean. Hale and hearty andclean. Of course she had regular baths, and he made certain to wipe down her face and hands before meals, but he had grown so accustomed to the usual occurrence of streaks of dirt across her nose and cheeks that it was somewhat of a shock to see her now, face scrubbed until it glowed, hair neatly bound into perfect plaits without even the tiniest flyaway strands.

But for the fraying hem of her dress, she could have been a proper lord’s daughter.

“Well?” Diana inquired archly, and Hannah’s brow knitted in barely-restrained anger.

“I’m sorry for throwing a tantrum,” she said sulkily.

Tohim. She apologized tohim—not Diana. She had been instructed to, he realized, becausehehad been the one who had nearly allowed himself to be swayed by it. Whereas Diana had merely accepted the disobedience as a matter of course.