Page 29 of Lady Diana's Lost Lord

“Well, it’s just a bit…bitter,” he conceded.

More than just a bit. “I suppose I steeped it too long,” she said, settling her chin in her palm with a sigh. “It occurs to me that I truly can’t fend for myself at all.”

“You’re a lady,” he said. “You don’t have to.”

It was true enough. Things merelyhappenedaround her to make her life more comfortable. Meals were prepared elsewhere by unseen hands and then delivered straight to her plate. Her discarded clothing was whisked away by servants as she slept, to be laundered and returned to her dressing room. Fires were lit before she had even set foot within a room, and her bed made up and turned down for her whilst she had been occupied with other things.

Her time was largely spent in leisure, because her family had always hadthe funds to ensure that it was so. Even her father had notworked. He had had men who workedforhim, managing his money and his assets to ensure that the family coffers were always filled.

“I can read and write,” she said. “I can cipher and play the pianoforte. I can speak French tolerably. But I can’t even make a pot of tea. The most I can do is pour it properly. How did you learn to do it all?”

Ben took a sip—more like aglug—of his tea, no doubt in an effort to rid himself of it as quickly as possible. “Necessity,” he said. “The answer is always necessity. Hannah was not quite a year old before the money I had remaining began to run out, and then—I had to let what servants I had go, one at a time. Our needs weren’t great, so there weren’t many of them. But their duties, as they left, began to fall to me.” A slight smile touched just the corner of his lips. “If it’s any consolation, I’ve acquired my fair share of scars that can be attributed to kitchen clumsiness.”

Somehow, itdidmake her feel better. Perhaps not quite as useless, or as hopeless, at least.

“The nanny was the last to go,” he said. “By then, I’d learned, for the most part, how to take care of the both of us. Hannah was too young to remember having servants,” he said, “or a roof over our head that wasn’t predisposed to leaking with a good, hard rain. Or when I was home more often than I was away.”

“Does she—” Diana hesitated, knowing she was a hair’s breadth from overstepping. “Does she know anything about her mother?” She pressed her lips together, expecting a firm shutdown to the prying question.

Ben sighed, setting down his cup. “Yes,” he said. “As much as I could tell her. She passed quite soon after Hannah was born, so she’ll never have the opportunity to know her. I thought she should know about her, at least.” He dragged one hand through his hair. “She knows we weren’t married,” he said. “I don’t think she quite understands what that means.”

“I think if I had been in your position,” Diana said, “I would have simply lied. It’s done often enough. Women with natural children claim to be widows, and no one refutes it. It would be far too difficult to prove any different. And you—you’re an earl. You could simply say that you’d been married abroad, and your wife had passed away, and no one would ever consider suggesting otherwise.”

“It’s not so simple as that,” he said, and something dark passed behind his eyes, some suggestion of an ordeal she couldn’t possibly hope to understand.

“But if you did,” she said. “If youdid…I would never tell anyone otherwise.” Her hands curled around her cup, and the pressure stung against the cut on her palm.

Ben blinked, startled. “Why would you suggest such a thing? You do realize it would hardly reflect well upon you?”

To have the man who was to have married her return with some other woman’s child, she supposed he meant. And he was right, of course. She’d be the subject of much gossip, and still more pity. “Do you know,” she said softly, “I don’t think it matters much what anyone thinks of me anymore.”

“But why? You could return to London, find a husband—”

With a rueful laugh, she gazed down into her cup. “This will not surprise you, but I am not much in demand.”

“Why wouldn’t that surprise me?” To his credit, he sounded genuinely perplexed. “You must know you are beautiful.”

Beautiful? No one had ever thought so—or told her so, at least. Aside from perhaps her sister-in-law, who hardly counted. “I’m eight and twenty,” she said. “Most girls are married by twenty, perhaps two and twenty at the latest. Every year there is a fresh crop of pretty young ladies eager to make matches. I’m ten years older than they are; no one is looking in my direction.” She managed an awkward little laugh. “No one has ever much looked in my direction, anyway.”

“I find that exceedingly difficult to believe,” he said. “Why wouldn’t they?”

“Because—because no gentleman searching for a wife is inclined to waste his time on a lady that is spoken for already,” she said. “There was never anything to be gained by dancing with me, paying calls upon me…even speaking with me.” Once, it had made her terribly sad. Then, of course, had come the anger to have wasted so much of her life upon so futile an endeavor. “It’s all I really have, you know. The balls, the parties, the musicales. And there was a time I enjoyed it, that first Season. Perhaps even the second. But my dance card was always empty, and I have always been placed with the dowagers and the elderly gentlemen and the chaperones. It’s always been difficult to sit with the chaperones for hours at a time, knowing that no one was ever coming to collect a dance with me.”

“Christ.” Ben swiped a hand down his face. “Diana, I am so sorry—”

“Don’t. Please.” She managed a smile, though she had the sense that it had come across a bit sadder than she had intended. “In retrospect, perhaps you saved me. Probably, if you had ended our engagement earlier, I wouldhave leapt at the chance to marry the first man who offered for me.” And that would undoubtedly have been a monumental mistake. “I would have done practically anything to escape my father’s household. I might have ended up in a disastrous marriage, every bit as much a prisoner as my mother was. As Marcus, Rafe, and I all were.” She pushed away her teacup at last with a little sigh. “Though it would have been nice,” she said, “to have had the opportunity to do all of those things silly young girls do. Flirt a little. Slip my chaperone and sneak out onto a secluded terrace. Kiss someone unwise.”

“Is that what the girls are doing in London these days?” he asked, with a little chuckle.

“Oh, yes,” she said. “I suppose, when one is not in the thick of things, there’s so much time to observe. I’ve seen things that would sully a score of otherwise lily white reputations. Marcus married an actress, and they are not what anyone would call discreet in their affections. I’ve blundered into more…let’s sayunseemly activitiesthan I’d care to admit.”

“Butyou’venever so indulged,” he said.

Diana felt her brow scrunch into a frown. “Of course not,” she said. “I told you, I hadn’t the least opportunity. There was no sense in anyone flouting propriety for me, not even for so much as a kiss.”

A moment of silence drew out, and even the candles flickered, almost as if the air had been sucked from the room. Ben splayed his fingers out upon the table before him, and she had the strangest sense that he was…speculating. Mulling over something within the depths of his mind that she couldn’t have hoped to read upon his face.

He pressed his shoulders back against his chair, lifted his head, and looked her straight in the eyes. His jaw tensed, as if he were mustering up his nerve. At last, he opened his mouth and asked, “Would you like to?”