Chapter Twenty-Nine
Julian spent the last hour watching Elaina sleep. There would be plenty of time for him to rest later. For now, he wouldn’t give up a second of her. Occasionally he’d lean close enough to brush his lips across her temple or touch her hair.
He worried he would forget the way the soft light made her curls look like burnished copper. Or the pattern of freckles across her nose and the one on the corner of her lips he loved to kiss.
He breathed in her vanilla and cinnamon scent knowing he would think of her anytime he smelled them in the future.
The future.
How could he marry someone else when his heart would always be with her?
He pushed away the familiar rage, not wanting the hatred to intrude on this moment and take away his final hour with her.
She would need to leave soon to go back to her room. If she was found here in his bed, naked and ravished, he would have no choice but to marry her to save her from ruin. He looked toward the wooden door, secretly wishing someone would come knocking, and find them there together.
To take the choice out of his hands.
There had to be a way to save the mines and have her. Some simple solution he hadn’t thought of yet.
How would he give her up? How would he spend his life with another woman in his bed? A stranger that shared his name and bore his children, but who would never be Elaina.
His future wife would never truly know him. His insecurities and fears. She wouldn’t know of his past. She would only see the charming smiles he would keep pasted to his lips until he was freed from his torture with death.
“You are thinking too much,” Elaina whispered, startling him.
He smiled and kissed her as she blinked sleep away.
“I can’t seem to help it.”
“I know a way to make you stop thinking,” she hinted, her lips pulling up on the corner where his favorite freckle teased him.
It was both the easiest and most difficult thing to sink into her warmth for the final time. Their fingers clasped together as if nothing could ever separate them.
They stared into each other’s eyes as they moved together, giving and taking pleasure, sharing everything.
He kissed away the tears that slid over her temples into her hair as her legs pulled him closer. He smiled when he felt her body tighten and pulse around him. Proof of how perfectly they fit together.
As his climax grew closer, he briefly considered releasing inside her body, claiming her as his. A child would mean they’d have to marry. Another way to have the choice taken from him. But that way led only to guilt. He couldn’t do that to her.
Pulling from her body brought tears to his eyes. And when she pulled him to her, he pressed his face into her hair already salted by her tears.
And his heart shattered.
*
Julian was stillasleep when Elaina slipped out of his room. She’d been afraid to wake him for a final farewell. She worried what she might do or say in that moment of vulnerability, when she’d wanted everything with him.
She knew if she’d asked him to choose her, he would.
But later, he would come to resent her. When his mines were lost and the people working in them were forced to pay the price for her selfishness.
She couldn’t allow that to happen, and yet she feared she wouldn’t have been able to stop herself from asking.
Knowing she wouldn’t be able to sleep with her heart so twisted in pain, she wrapped her robe tighter and went up on deck. With morning still hours away, the stars shone brightly in the night sky.
“It’s late, I didn’t expect to find anyone on deck at this time of night,” Bentley said as he stepped up to the rail.
“I couldn’t sleep.”
In truth, she hadn’t tried. She’d lay beside Julian, listening to his heartbeat wishing she could hear it every night as she fell asleep. She didn’t know how she would give him up. But she had to.
“You don’t want tomorrow to come.” It wasn’t a question. He spoke as if he’d heard her very thoughts.
The tears she’d kept tightly reined in when she’d been with Julian leaked from her eyes and ran down her cheek now.
Bentley offered a crisp handkerchief and she took it with a whisper of thanks.
“I don’t want to burden Lord Melville with my feelings, but it is becoming ever more difficult to keep them restrained. If he saw me now, blubbering mess that I am, he’d surely be relieved to part ways.”
She tried to laugh at her poor attempt at a joke, but it sounded painful.
“I’ve known him all his life and I can assure you, relief is the last thing he would feel in this situation.”
Lainey nodded.
“Perhaps you wish to spare him seeing your pain?”
She swiped at the tears on her cheeks and nodded.
“What we wish doesn’t matter. I am not proper and therefore we cannot be together.”
“I believe there are many different versions of proper. I am not of noble birth, yet I touched a king’s tomb. And I set out a finely dressed lord, if I do say so myself.”
She laughed, grateful for his attempt to cheer her. Even if it wasn’t working.
“I’ve thought myself dry of ideas,” she admitted. “I considered asking my uncle to send me to finishing school.” She laughed sadly. “At my age, could you imagine? But I would learn everything there was to know about how to run a proper household and be a countess if it would change anything.”
“You speak of the scandal regarding your mother’s legitimacy?”
She nodded. “My aunt thinks it a bunch of poppycock. They looked so much alike many people thought them to be twins. But then they also looked like my grandmother so that doesn’t clear up anything now does it?”
“I think there are many people who would be surprised to find out their blood is not as pure as they think it is.” He winked. “Servants talk.”
She smiled briefly.
“Unfortunately, my legitimacy has been called to question publicly. And by my own grandfather.” Though Elaina still wondered if the duke hadn’t spoken out in anger at his daughter marrying a third son of a third son rather than the truth.
It didn’t matter now. The damage was done.
“Even if I managed to learn the ways to act like a proper countess, there is no way to purge the suspicion of my birth. There is too much at stake. The person the late earl selected to make the determination would surely find me unsuitable and Julian would lose everything.”
Mr. Bentley patted her hand.
“Your sacrifice speaks of your suitability, Miss Bantham. Whomever is called on to make this fateful decision would be a fool to see anything unacceptable about you.”
She offered a watery smile.
“Thank you. It means so much that you think so. Julian loves you as he would a true father. And I understand why. You want him to be happy, just as I do. It is my only wish that he be happy and loved. Doesn’t he deserve that after everything he’s endured?”
“Indeed, he does, miss.”
Elaina nodded with a thread of thought that quickly wove into a plan.
She couldn’t be with Julian, but she could help him find someone proper that would also make him happy and truly care for him.
He thought he would have a cold marriage, of duty only. But it didn’t have to be that way. He could have happiness.
It might be the hardest thing she’d ever done, but it was the last thing she could do for him.
She would find the man she loved an adoring wife.