Page 45 of Lady Diana's Lost Lord

“Then the monies he had been paid would be forfeit. Your violation, rather than my own.” But she hadn’t cared about it, anyway. Ben raked his fingers through his hair and sighed. “We couldn’t come to terms,” he said. “I would not give Hannah up, and Father would not accept any less than that. When I could not be bribed, he resorted to threats. He has my letters, proof in my own hand of Hannah’s origins.” Letters he’d threatened to use to remove Hannah from his custody if he dared return to London with her. “And when even that failed to achieve what he had hoped, he sent men to take her.”

“What?” Diana croaked, horrified.

“She doesn’t remember,” he said. “She was barely more than a year old at the time. But he’d managed to hire a pair of thugs to find us, and they succeeded in forcing open her bedroom window. If she hadn’t screamed her tiny little lungs hoarse—” He shuddered to think of it. “I managed to wrestle her away from them, chased one off with a fireplace poker and cornered the other long enough to ascertain their purpose and who had sent them.” But even though he had won out over that set of villains, he couldn’t trust that there wouldn’t be more sent after them. That the next wouldn’t attempt something worse than simple abduction. “We ran. I left Hannah with her nanny at a boarding house only long enough to collect our belongings, and then we wereoff. I sent one last letter to my father to tell him I would never return to London, and the best he could hope was that you might see fit to end our engagement. I haven’t heard from him, or written tohim, since.” He’d deliberately left no address, and in those early days they had traveled beneath assumed names. They had never stayed in any one place overlong, out of an abundance of caution. It had never happened again, but he could not have taken the risk that those days were behind them. One wrong move might have spelled disaster.

“I’m so very sorry,” Diana said, and her hand stretched across the table to him, fingers outstretched. “I’m so sorry for the both of you.”

All he wanted was to lay his hand within hers and to take comfort from that simple touch. But he didn’t think she yet comprehended all that he had said, all that it meant. “You must understand,” he said, “that I can never take Hannah to London.”

Diana’s lips trembled. Hesitantly, she offered, “It’s not uncommon, I think, for a gentleman to take a child under his wardship.”

Perhaps if that child were the heir to some property or other valuable assets. “I am her father,” he said. “The only one she has ever known. My father could ruin us in a hundred different ways. He could have her taken, legally or otherwise. He could have my letters printed up and disseminated to the public, make it known that I have no legal rights to her. Or he could simply proclaim her a bastard and I—I haven’t any particular social influence or even the funds to protect her from the consequences of any of it.” He would never gamble with Hannah’s safety. He’d underestimated his father before, and the results had nearly been disastrous.

His hands were tied. They had been for years. The most for which they could ever hope was a quiet life in the country, where they would remain unknown. And even if, by some miracle, Diana could find her way to accepting just that, she would lose everything else in the doing of it. She would not be able to visit her friends or her family in London, nor allow them to visit her. She could not let it be known even to her nearest and dearest where she resided, lest they inadvertently reveal information that might lead his father to them. There would be no letters, no visits, no happy Christmases gathered together as a family. She wouldn’t be able to use his title—or even her own, for the attention it would draw.

Ben didn’t want that for her. Hannah had never known any life but this, and he—he had long grown accustomed to hard labor and to circumstances far less pleasant that those to which he had been born. But Diana had beenmade for better, and she had been ill-used by both him and his father already. She had a good, kind heart, and she deserved cleaner hands,softerhands than his own to hold it.

“I hope you can understand,” he said, and at last he took the hand she had extended to him, and curled his fingers into her own. “It’s not the sort of life I would have chosen for Hannah, had I any other option. But there is no other way to protect her.” He shifted in his seat, uncomfortable. “I can’t even take her to London to fulfill my part of our bargain.” He could only hope that she had managed to repair Hannah’s reputation within the village sufficiently before then, that someone might be prevailed upon to look after her in the interim.

Diana managed a weak laugh. “I think you must know,” she said, “that I will not hold you to it. How could I, given the circumstances?”

It was beyond generous of her to release him from his obligation to her, given that the purpose in a mutual public dissolution of their betrothal had been to salvage both her reputation and her pride. Without his show of support, without at least a public appearance or two to show their peers that it had been a mutual decision, probably it would be assumed that he had found her in some way lacking, unsuitable to be his wife. It was another layer of guilt he would have to live with—but then, he’d grown accustomed to the weight of it.

“Thank you for that,” he said, and the burn behind his eyes had nothing at all to do with the odor of the cheap tallow candle resting near his elbow. “Thank you,” he said. “For—” For having always treated Hannah kindly, irrespective of the circumstances of her birth. For staying, when they would have floundered without her. For being the closest thing to a mother that Hannah had ever known, even if it could not last. “For everything,” he rasped, his voice breaking over the words. And he had nothing to offer her in return for any of it, nothing that could equal the value of what she had already provided. He could not even ask her to stay. “If you wish to leave—”

“I don’t.” She said it with a smile that was perhaps a touch too wobbly to truly reassure. “I don’t wish to leave,” she said, in a reedy whisper. “Not yet.”

She would have to, eventually. And so would he and Hannah. Any chance of permanence had been skewered years ago, before he had ever suspected that one day he might have wished otherwise. Their farewell was inevitable, and now, he thought—now they both knew it.

The knowing whywould not make it easier to bear for any of them. Hehad never regretted—wouldnever regret—the choice he had made to raise Hannah. But he mourned the fact that there was no path that they might all walk together, that their roads had merely run parallel for a time before they would necessarily diverge.

And he thought, as she brushed away the last of the tears she had shed—for him, for Hannah—that perhaps she mourned it as well.

Chapter Seventeen

Diana hardly slept. In the not too distant past, the quiet of the countryside had been peaceful, soothing. Now it merely provided a blank canvas for the harried clatter of her thoughts, and they slung themselves up upon it like an artist gone mad with paints, hovering all around her in a bright, frenetic blur.

Somehow, she had let herself seize upon the notion that happiness was an inevitability. That one had only to find it, to wrap one’s fingers around it, and hold tight to it. Marcus and Lydia had found theirs, after all, despite everything that had come between them. There had been some hope in that—or so she had thought.

Only weeks ago, it had all seemed so very simple. When she had cut loose the dead weight of her unwanted engagement, there would be little to stand in the way of her own happiness. She hadn’t given much thought to where it might be found, but at least she would have had the freedom tolookfor it at last.

And she had found it, in the place she had least expected. It had simply dropped into her lap, and she had only to pick it up and tuck it into her pocket. Only, when she had mustered up the courage to make a grab for it, her fingers had slid straight through it. A mirage. A figment of her imagination; a beautiful, glowing dream that could never be substantial enough even to touch.

Still her mind worked in frantic bursts, swimming against the tide of futility, struggling to form a solution—any solution that would allow her to feel the weight of that dream within the palm of her hand at last.

They could marry. They could even return to London if they did. But Hannah—

Hannah could no longer be her father’s daughter in the eyes of the world. If they lied about her origins, Ben’s father could so easily reveal the truth of it. A little girl’s reputation, or perhaps even herlife, would be needlessly endangered. How could she live with herself if her actions separatedBen from the daughter for whom he had sacrificed everything?

She could go with them when they left. Marry in secret and live out the remainder of her days in some tiny town by the sea. But she would never see Rafe or Marcus or Lydia again. Never cuddle little Edward upon her lap. Never visit with Emma and Phoebe. Ben had been out of society for years and years; probably he could go the remainder of his life unnoticed, provided he kept to himself. But she—she wasknownin London. A chance meeting somewhere, an unwise word to someone who might in all innocence pass it along, and their whole ruse could come tumbling down.

Shewas the largest danger to their safety, to their future security. Wherever it was they intended to go next was meant to be their permanent home, and her presence alone could snatch it straight from their grasp.

Diana laid her hand across her pillow and stared at her fingers curled there. For a moment, beneath the veil of darkness shrouding the room she almost could see it—that beautiful bright dream hovering just above the open palm of her hand. Ephemeral, insubstantial. A happiness that had never been meant to be her own. Even so little as a light breeze could sweep it away and cast it to reaches unknown.

Ben hadlaboredfor his dream, and it was nearly within his grasp. She could never ask them to trade something real, something inches from fruition, for her own happiness. When that very happiness might well mean their own grief.

She had never been a mother, and now she knew she never would be. But she thought—thiswas what a parent was meant to do. To sacrifice for their children, when circumstances required it of them. Ben had made that choice already for Hannah, and she—she would never be Hannah’s mother, however much she would have liked to be. But she could do as Ben had, and put the needs of that precious little girl before her own.