Chapter 26
Sebastian followed her into the sea, cutting through the waves with powerful, assured strokes. Darcy watched him with open admiration and laughed when he turned in the water and offered her his back.
“You mean to carry me farther out?” she asked, though she was already wading toward him.
“Only far enough to show you what you came to see. I shall not let the sea steal you from me.”
She wrapped her arms around his shoulders and pressed herself along the strong length of his back as he carried her into deeper water.
The sea stretched endlessly around them, dark beneath the rising moon, its restless surface catching glimmers of silver with every swell.
Each movement of his body beneath hers made her newly conscious of his strength, of the heat he seemed to retain despite the cool water, and of how naturally she trusted him to bear her wherever he chose.
“This is so beautiful,” she said softly, her voice filled with wonder, “and also a little terrifying.”
He laughed, the sound low and unrestrained. “My father brought me here when I was a boy. He had already taught me to swim in the lakes, and when he allowed me into the sea, several people declared him reckless. My mother was convinced I would be swept away and never seen again.”
“And yet he allowed it?”
“He believed I could do it,” Sebastian said simply. “And I did.”
Darcy studied him. Moonlight silvered his damp, disordered hair and sharpened the proud lines of his face.
There was something almost elemental about him in the sea, his powerful body moving easily against the waves, his expression stripped of the polished indifference he wore in society.
The raw sensuality of him made her pulse quicken, and her hold upon his shoulders tighten before she could prevent it.
“You have good memories of your father,” she said quietly.
“I do,” he replied, though his gaze had turned distant, fixed upon the horizon.
“I am sorry he deceived you for so many years.” Despite their many conversations in the library, this was the first time Darcy had dared offer him sympathy so plainly.
A faint, humorless scoff left him. “There was no obligation for him to confess his infidelity to his son. Men of his rank are almost expected to keep a mistress discreetly tucked away, as though betrayal becomes respectable when concealed behind money and good breeding.”
Darcy fell silent, her chest tightening. Mistress. Society would reduce her mother to that single word and strip away every tender, complicated truth Darcy had known of her. “I am sorry for my mother’s part in it,” she said at last, her voice soft with sincerity. “I am deeply sorry.”
“Why should you be?” he returned. “You had no hand in their choices.”
Moved by something she could not quite name, Darcy leaned forward and pressed a gentle kiss to the corner of his nape.
“I have other letters,” she admitted after a moment.
“Exchanges between my mother and your father. They are intimate, though not in the manner one might suppose. There is tenderness in them. Friendship, even. They spoke to one another as though each had become the person before whom the other need never pretend.”
He said nothing, though she felt the subtle tension that passed through him.
“There is one,” she continued, “stained with my mother’s tears. She wrote of her anguish that he was married and asked why he had permitted her to fall in love with him when he could never truly belong to her.”
The waves shifted around them, a steady rhythm beneath her words.
“He replied that his marriage had been arranged rather than born of love, though in time he came to love his wife deeply. He wrote of respect, admiration, loyalty, and the life they had built together. Yet he told my mother that the first sight of her had struck him like lightning and that he could not imagine his life without her presence in it.” Darcy hesitated.
“He also wrote that ceasing to love his countess would be like cleaving a limb from his own body.”
“Damnable nonsense,” Sebastian said, his voice turning cold.
“Marriage is a vow. A man’s willingness to honor it speaks to his integrity, his character, and his worth.
It matters very little what he felt. He should have mastered himself.
He should have turned away from whatever tempted him to betray a woman who trusted him and believed herself loved. ”
Darcy tightened her arms around him. “I agree,” she said softly. After a moment, she asked, “Was that why you brought us to Derbyshire? Not merely because of the scandal sheet, but because your mother intended to return to town?”
He turned his head enough to meet her gaze. The chill that entered his blue eyes unsettled her, reminding Darcy of the man she had first encountered: distant, controlled, and determined to reveal nothing he had not chosen to give.
“The scandal made our departure prudent,” he said. “Though I have no notion when my mother will return, I would not have her learn of my father’s other family through whispers, conjecture, or some damned scandal sheet.”
She swallowed against the tightness in her throat. “I understand.”
“Nor do I wish her to speculate upon your place in my life before I have decided how such speculation is to be answered.”
“Then you never intend to tell her the truth,” Darcy said carefully. “Not about your father. Not about Emelia, Jane, or Sarah.”
“Never.” The certainty in his tone was absolute.
Darcy’s heart twisted, not for herself, but for her sisters.
It meant he would never openly claim them as family, never acknowledge the blood they shared, even if he ensured they would never again know financial uncertainty.
Gently she said, “Please remember they are your family, Sebastian. They are entirely innocent, and they have already begun to love you.”
His jaw tightened. “I know.” The admission emerged rough and unwilling. “I will remain in their lives. I will see them protected, educated, and provided for. They will never want for anything.”
“Provision is not the same as being claimed,” Darcy said quietly.
He went still beneath her. “No,” he answered after a long moment.
“It is not. But I will not destroy my mother merely to ease my own conscience. I do not yet know how to reconcile what they deserve with what the truth would do to her.”
Darcy could offer no easy answer. How could she ask him to weigh a few short weeks of newfound affection against the mother and sister he had loved all his life? Yet neither could she forget that her sisters’ hearts were now among the things he held in his keeping.
A breeze stirred across the water, cooler now, and she lifted her head, tucking a damp strand of hair behind her ear as she gazed upward. The sky stretched vast and dark above them, the stars scattered in quiet brilliance, and beneath it all, she felt suddenly, acutely small.
Never.
Darcy felt the word settle deep within her, a quiet and aching confirmation of everything she had already begun to understand. Their worlds would never truly meet. She would never be more than she was now—his lover.
Still, she would not retreat from every pleasure merely because society insisted a woman must surrender either her freedom or her heart.
Darcy had vowed that the life she carved for herself would be governed by her own needs and choices, not by constraints fashioned to preserve everyone’s comfort but her own.
She slid from Sebastian’s back, her feet finding the shifting stones beneath the water, and turned to face him. Moonlight glistened over the sea while the vast world remained indifferent to the small, perilous choice unfolding between them.
“I know you offer me no future,” she said, her voice steady despite the emotion pressing against her throat. “Only the present.”
His gaze sharpened upon her, something dark and conflicted moving through his expression, as though he recognized the danger in what she offered and could not bring himself to refuse it.
Darcy placed both hands against his chest, feeling his strength and the hard, steady beat of his heart beneath her palms. “I ask for nothing beyond this moment, if what you fear is that I shall one day demand more.”
The restraint he had guarded so carefully frayed beneath the weight of her words and the unmistakable invitation of her nearness.
Sebastian reached for her, one hand closing firmly around her waist as he drew her against him.
The contact was immediate and consuming, her wet gown clinging between them and revealing far more than it concealed.
“You should not tempt me with promises you may one day regret,” he said, though desire had already stripped the warning of its force.
“Then do not ask me to live according to regrets I do not yet possess.”
He bent his head and claimed her mouth. The kiss was fierce and unrestrained, the cool sea a startling contrast to the heat that surged wherever their bodies met. Sebastian held her as though he might anchor them both within that single moment and shut out every truth awaiting them beyond it.
Darcy answered with equal hunger, her hands sliding into his damp hair as she poured into the kiss every emotion she had not the courage to confess.
She knew it was reckless. She knew each surrender drew her deeper into a love he had never promised to return.
Still, she could not make herself choose safety over him.
Sebastian slid his hands beneath her thighs and lifted her against him.
Darcy wrapped her legs around his waist, her ankles locking behind him as one of his arms braced beneath her bottom and the other held her securely at the back.
With her breasts pressed to his chest and the tide moving around them, she combed her fingers through his hair and kissed him with all the love she dared not give voice.
Sebastian broke the kiss and freed his cock from his breeches with one hand while holding her steady with the other.
Darcy gasped when the broad, hard head pressed against her entrance.
She was swollen and aroused, but the seawater had washed away some of her natural slickness, making the first slow nudge of his cock feel sharper, and she felt every inch of his penetration into her pussy.
The mingling of sensation—pleasure edged with a sharp, almost unbearable intensity—sent a shiver through Darcy, and she whimpered.
He stopped at once.
“Too much?” he asked, his voice ragged.
“No,” she whispered, tightening her legs around him.
He eased into her by careful degrees. Darcy bit her lip as the thick stretch sent pleasure edged with a keen sting through her body.
Her breath turned unsteady, her heart racing wildly within her chest. Sebastian stilled again when he was only partly inside her and looked into her face. Something had altered in his gaze.
“Sebastian?” she whispered.
“I know you are Red,” he said, each word deliberate. “I knew when I kissed you in the cottage. I should have understood long before that. I believed myself enthralled by Miss Darcy Whitley and tormented by my hunger for Red, when all along I was wanting every part of the same woman.”
The words stole the breath from Darcy’s lungs. Heat, fear, and a relief so profound it nearly weakened her surged through her at once.
“You truly knew?” she breathed. “Why did you say nothing?”
His expression softened in a manner that hurt her heart. “Because you had not chosen to tell me. Your secret belonged to you, not to my curiosity.”
“And now?”
“Now I do not wish to keep pretending I do not know the woman in my arms.”
Darcy stared at him, overwhelmed by the gift hidden within those words. Then she drew his mouth back to hers. Sebastian kissed her fiercely, his hands tightening upon her as he moved her against him, working her onto his cock in a relentless, devastating rhythm that left no room for thought.
The sea lapped around them, cool and salt-tinged, while the heat of his body burned through her. Darcy wrapped her legs higher around his waist and drew him deeper. He groaned into her mouth, both hands now gripping her hips as his feet found firmer purchase among the submerged stones.
He broke the kiss only to drag his mouth down her throat, his breath warm against her damp skin. “You feel like heaven,” he rasped. “Tight, perfect, and mine. All mine, Darcy.”
“Are you mine too?” she whispered.
The question was nearly lost beneath the waves, but he heard it.
His gaze locked upon hers. “Yes,” he said, the answer rough and immediate. “More than I intended to be, though I have no notion what the devil that means.”
A low sound escaped Darcy as he began to move, each thrust made slow and deep by the resistance of the water.
The cool tide sharpened every sensation, making her exquisitely conscious of the hard drag of his cock within her and the strength of the hands holding her securely against him.
Pleasure coiled through her, intense enough to border upon pain, yet she did not wish him to lessen it.
“Look at me,” he commanded.
Darcy forced her eyes open and found his gaze burning into hers. “I want to see you when you come apart for me.”
His pace quickened, the water striking their bodies with each urgent thrust. The familiar pressure tightened low in her belly, building with every deep stroke of his cock. Darcy dug her fingers into his shoulders, leaving crescent marks upon his skin as she struggled to hold his gaze.
“Please,” she gasped, scarcely knowing whether she begged for more, harder, deeper, or simply everything he was willing to give.
He gave her everything. His mouth found hers and swallowed her cries as release crashed through her.
Darcy clenched around him, her inner walls fluttering and pulsing while he drove into her through each hot contraction.
The sea rose and fell around them until the world contained nothing but sensation, movement, and the overwhelming force of Sebastian holding her as though he could not bear to let her go.
Darcy surrendered to it.
In that moment, she finally acknowledged what her heart had long resisted. She was no longer falling. She had already landed, and she was irrevocably in love with the Earl of Raine.