Page 33 of Lady Diana's Lost Lord

“I would be delighted to send you letters,” Diana interjected, and he fancied he heard just the slightest trace of sadness in her voice. “Will you sendletters back to me?”

“I suppose.” Hannah gave a little shrug. “But I don’t know how to write one.” She bent a little closer, one of her plaits sliding over her shoulder as she peered at Diana’s paper. “Can I see?”

“Of course,” Diana said, and slid the paper a bit closer to her. “This one is to my brother, Rafe.”

She was writing to her brother? Why?

“I didn’t know you had a brother,” Hannah said in a tone of mild chagrin, as if Diana had deliberately kept that fact from her.

Diana laughed lightly. “I’ve got two, in fact. Marcus and Rafe. I also have a sister-in-law, Lydia. She’s married to my brother Marcus, and together they have a son, Edward, who is my nephew.”

“I don’t have any brothers or even sisters,” Hannah said. “Are they nice?”

“Mine are usually the best of brothers,” Diana said. “But just occasionally—now, for example—they can be exasperating indeed. It’s why I’ve got to send a letter back as soon as possible. The post only comes twice a week here, and I must write back to Rafe in time.”

“In time for what?” The words slipped out of their own volition, and Diana’s gaze sheared from Hannah to him.

“Ah—well—” She gave a little wince, a sort of abashed expression that planted the seed of suspicion in his mind. “Marcus has discovered that I am not where he expected me to be,” she said at last.

Not where he’d expected her to be? What the devil was that supposed to mean? “You left London without telling him?”

“Oh, no,” she said. “He was entirely aware. It is only that I led him to believe that I would be staying in Scotland with Mother. Unfortunately, I also promised to write to him regularly. And when the promised letters failed to arrive, I suppose he must have sent a letter to Mother, who naturally told him I was not with her.” Another tiny wince. “Of course, Rafe knows precisely where I am, since it was from him that I received your address. It is just that Marcus is making quite a fuss—really, it is very bad of him—and Rafe says that I must write within the week to assure him of my safety or he’ll have no choice but to come drag me home again.”

Ben scrubbed one hand over his face with an irritated sigh. “Somehow, I feel that you and your brothers hold rather conflicting opinions on who, exactly, is exasperating.”

Hannah tilted her head over Diana’s paper and read aloud, haltingly, “Dear Rafe. Please do tell Marcus that I am well, and I do not…” She paused and pointed to a word. “That one.”

“Appreciate,” Diana said, obligingly.

“Appreciatebeing treated like a child. I will return home when I am ready to do so, and not before.”

Diana beamed. “Wonderfully done,” she said. “Soon enough you’ll not need my tutelage. Just look at how far you’ve come in your reading.”

Ben smothered a groan in his palm. “God help you if you bring your brothers down upon my head,” he said. Had he wanted tokissher? He’d been mistaken—he wanted tothrottleher.

Oh, all right, perhaps a bit of both, then.

Diana waved away his disquiet. “Oh, I promise you they’ve both better things to do than to fetch me back,” she said. “Marcus might fuss a bit, but he’d never endanger my reputation by speaking openly of my absence, and he hasn’t the slightest idea of where I’ve gone, besides.”

That did not comfort him in the least. “And Rafe?”

“Rafe would only consider snitching in the direst of circumstances,” she said. “Thus the letter. So long as Rafe is assured of my safety, he’ll keep my whereabouts to himself.” To Hannah, she confided, “Brothers can be a dreadful nuisance.”

“So can sisters,” Ben muttered.

“How would you know?” Diana tipped her chin upward in the tiniest expression of superiority. “You’ve got neither.”

“Let’s just say that my sympathies, such as they are, rest firmly with your brothers in this regard.” He’d assumed she had reached that nebulous age at which unmarried women were permitted to do largely as they pleased, that she had gone traveling with her family’s blessing.

If Rafe discovered that she had been living in his home for well over a month now, unchaperoned, she would be lucky if she did not find herself dragged to the altar by the collar of her gown. Such a thing would be far worse than the sullying of her reputation—it would ruin her life. She would have to give up everything of her life in London for an uncertain future with a man whose greatest aspiration at present was to strike a vein of graphite large enough to provide him with an income of perhaps two hundred pounds per year. She probably spent thrice that on gowns each Season alone.

He couldn’t afford her, and she—she deserved better than to be forced into a marriage that she had explicitly come to escape. But he couldn’t protect her from that, if her brothers came charging to her rescue like white knights on horseback.

And as she bent her head to put the final, flourishing signature to the flagrantly obnoxious letter she intended to send, he could only hope that Rafe would find it convincing.

∞∞∞

Diana sipped her cup of tea as she sat on the kitchen porch, reading by the light of a single candle. It was such a quiet evening. A brief storm had rolled through only an hour or so before, and she had enjoyed the sound of the rain beating down upon the roof, though it had drowned out Ben’s voice as he had read to Hannah from the aged book of nursery rhymes.