Page 43 of Lady Diana's Lost Lord

Diana crept quietly up the stairs, avoiding the fourth and seventh, which tended to creak when stepped upon too firmly. In muted tones from the upper floor, she could hear Ben spinning some sort of bedtime tale for Hannah, coaxing both giggles and exaggerated gasps in turn from the girl.

There was something remarkably cozy about listening in on them. The quiet of the countryside contributed to the peaceful atmosphere, she supposed. There was always the clatter of carriages in London, and privacy could be difficult to find in a house that was full of servants moving through their paces, but here—here there was only the dark of late evening settling over the world, the glow of a candle on the nightstand, and the murmur of voices together in this familiar nightly ritual.

She had never actually intruded upon them, but she suspected that Ben, at least, knew that she lingered without the room just occasionally. Though she always bid Hannah good night, she had left this one tiny part of their lives sacrosanct—a little world just for the two of them.

And so she stood in the hall outside the room, and listened, and smiled fondly, standing just in the shadows where she could peek in through the crack of the door and yet not risk disturbing father and daughter together. But it warmed her heart even to be this close to them in these quiet moments. To watch them with their heads bent together, so very obviously fond of one another. They looked—

Absolutely nothing alike.

Diana felt a frown pinch her brows at the stray thought that had come upon her so suddenly, so unexpectedly. How had she never noticed it before now? But it was true, upon reflection. There was nothing of Ben’s dark hair and eyes or sun-kissed skin in his daughter. She didn’t even have his dimples.

But he had said she did not resemble her mother, either. Or at leastnot especially. And he would have cause to know, would he not? Who, then, did Hannah resemble, if not either of her parents? Unless…

“Oh my dear Lord.” The words slipped from her lips in a hoarse croak, more suited to a frog than to a lady.

Hannah wasn’t his daughter at all.

Chapter Sixteen

Out with it.”

Diana flinched at the terse command, her gaze dropping to the cup of tea cradled in her hands. The words had held more than a hint of a threat behind them, but she thought, unless she was much mistaken, it hadn’t beenangerthat had provoked the sharpness to them. It had been fear.

Ben tapped the tips of his fingers upon the scarred surface of the table and traced a deep gouge with the pad of this thumb. A nervous gesture, she thought. An excess of energy brought about by stress, relieved only slightly by these unconscious motions. Probably he would have quite liked to put his fist through something.

“Whatever it is that you think you know,” he said, his voice pitched to a carefully monotone inflection. “Out with it.”

So he had heard her, then, before she had turned tail and fled downstairs. She ought to have expected as much. It had been impossible to hold those words in. In the long minutes that had followed, she had paced the floor of the kitchen, wrestling with herself. It was only a suspicion, and probably a foolish one. And she would have succeeded at banishing it to the very back of her mind to be forgotten, had he not stomped into the kitchen thereafter with the truth of it scrawled across his face.

She had nearly upended the teapot, so severely had her hands been shaking. And now the candlelight flickered over his face, carving forbidding grooves into the hollows of his cheeks. He looked like an inquisitor prepared to coerce a confession from her, however it had to be done.

“Diana.”

She jumped at the muted snarl, and at last she said in a shred of a whisper, “Hannah isn’t your daughter.”

“Sheismy daughter.” The force behind those words could have commanded the sun to wink out of existence. His jaw tightened, and his shoulders set into stern severity. “Sheismy daughter. In every way.” His knucklespopped as he flexed his fingers, and he tugged at his hair with that same hand. “In every way but one.”

She hadn’t truly expected the admission, and now that he had laid it into her hands, she didn’t know what she was meant to do with it, what she was meant to say to it. She had gleaned but little of Hannah’s mother, of the circumstances that had driven them here, to this tiny village so far away from London. It had never been her intention to pry into matters that did not concern her.

But she had learned enough of them to know that if he had concealed the truth, then he had done so for good reason. And whatever those circumstances had been, hewasHannah’s father—in every way that truly mattered.

The last of the nerves that had strung every muscle so tight that they had ached faded away, and she let out the tension on a little sigh. “I won’t tell anyone,” she said. “But—I wish you would tellme.” How it had happened, she meant. How Hannah had come into his care.

For a long moment, he said nothing. He stared into the flame of the candle that lit the table between them as if he were staring instead into the past. Slowly, Diana reached once again for the teapot and poured—gently, this time. Steadily. A small splash of milk, two lumps of sugar. A stir so delicate and precise that the spoon didn’t so much as tap the side of the cup. At last she set the cup before him, and that small gesture drew his notice.

His fingers closed around it. “Everything that I’ve told you is true,” he said at last, and his voice was so low that she had to strain to hear it. “I haven’t lied to you about any of it.” A slight flicker of his lashes. “But none of it was the whole of the truth.”

“I suppose it’s not the sort of thing one goes around telling to perfect strangers,” she said, and hoped she had sounded encouraging.

He gave an absent nod and took a sip of the tea she had prepared for him. She doubted he had even tasted it. His eyes were distant, troubled. “I met Hannah’s mother,” he said, “at a literary salon in Paris. My father had sent me on my Grand Tour some months earlier—probably he leveraged some asset to afford the expense of it. God knows how he scraped together the funds. But it was just…”

She understood. It was just what wasdone, for the sons of the aristocracy. Rafe had had his own, and so had Marcus. It was what was expected. For a marquessnotto send his only son on a Grand Tour would have been a terrible blow to his public appearance, tantamount to admitting publicly that his finances were less than stable.

“I was one and twenty, then,” he said, “and…painfully shy. Hannah’s mother—Grace—was a little older, perhaps five and twenty. She was the daughter of an English merchant who lived abroad with his family. She was beautiful, well-educated, and she had recently become the mistress of an Italian count.”

But she hadn’t beenhismistress.

“Her family had disowned her, of course. They had chosen a husband for her already—an ancient old man who had scads of money but little in the way of social graces, and Grace rebelled the only way she knew how. She took a lover.” Ben gave a little roll of his shoulders. “Of course, such things are more…acceptable in France. She had ruined herself for the marriage her family had planned for her, but her lover gained her entrée into higher social sets than she would have managed otherwise.”