Page 45 of Yearning

“It is only a kiss,” she said.

“It would not be, and you know it. It might be only a kiss today, but then it would be another kiss, and each kiss would beget more, and each one would be easier to justify because the last had already been permitted, and then our hands would stray and then…” At this, his hand did indeed stray, all the way around her belly, all the way down. Down, down, and he came dangerously close to touching her somewhere entirely untoward, and she let out a little sound that was like a whimper, and he pulled his hand back and set it in his lap.

He found that he had somehow become rather winded.

She put the biscuit she was still holding in her mouth, the entire thing. She chewed and she chewed and she was not touching him anymore either. Eventually, she swallowed. She brushed at crumbs on her lips. “What would my hands find if they strayed?”

“Oh, Lizzy, don’t.”

“There was not nothing there,” she said.

He swallowed noisily. He did not respond.

“Does it…? Can you feel…?”

“Yes,” he said.

She sank her teeth into her bottom lip.

“But let us leave this. This is beneath us both.”

She laughed a bitter sounding laugh. “You and your sacrifice, sir. You and your honor. You take some perverse pleasure in feeling discomfort, I think.”

“No,” he said.

“You congratulate yourself on suffering if you think it is worth it.”

“You have a child, my lady!”

“And there could have been no way to get me with child with the two of us together, of course?” She glared at him. “You know of the way they seed farm animals, I suppose, do you not? I have heard of such things, and it would have been—”

“Not mine.”

“But no one would have had to know,” she said. “We could have asked someone related to you, maybe the colonel, although he told me he never wanted in the midst of us—”

“What sort of conversations were you having with Richard?” He was incensed. How dare Richard engage with her in that way? Utterly inappropriate, truly, and Richard should have known better—

“Oh, you are one to talk. You tried to give me to him.”

“I…” He hung his head. The anger washed away in a rush of shame. “I never meant to make you feel as if you were a thing or a possession that I could give away. That was thoughtless and selfish of me. I thought of myself, not of your feelings.”

“So, it was as the colonel said, that you felt as if you could have me yourself if you were arranging it?”

He felt his face heat up. “Richard is too observant.”

She sighed again. “But I was so convinced you did not want me. And now, here, this…”

“You have a child, my lady,” he repeated. “In some way, no matter how we have both endured pain for it, it has been worth it.”

She nodded slowly. “Perhaps.”

“Definitely,” he said firmly.

And she did not contradict him.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

ELIZABETH CALLED ON him daily, and they did not speak of such things again.