Simply Unforgettable

“You will be glad to get back to work?” he asked.

“Mmm,” she said again. But really she would. She had always been happy at the school, and the work there had always brought her satisfaction. Her fellow teachers were the closest friends she had ever had. She loved them—it was as simple as that.

“The rest of the school year will be busy?” he asked. He took her earlobe between his teeth and rubbed his tongue over the tip, causing her toes to curl up.

“There will be final examinations to set and mark,” she said. “There will be farewell teas for the senior girls who are leaving, and placements to arrange for the charity girls in positions for which their education and personal inclinations qualify them. There will be the selection of new girls for next year—Claudia always involves all her teachers in those decisions. And there is the end-of-year prize-giving evening and concert for parents and friends. Several of my music pupils will be performing and all my choirs. There will be daily practices from now until that evening comes. Yes, I will be too busy to think of anything else.”

“Will you be thankful for that?” he asked.

She kept her eyes closed and did not answer him for a while.

“Yes,” she said.

He turned her head with their interlaced hands and kissed her on the lips.

“And you will be busy,” she said, “attending all the balls and parties for the rest of the Season.”

“My mother and the girls do seem to enjoy dragging me about,” he said.

“And you will be wanting to meet someone new,” she said. “Perhaps—”

He kissed her again.

“Don’t talk nonsense, love,” he said. “In fact, don’t talk at all. I feel another energy attack coming along.”

He took her free hand in his and brought it against him. She could feel him harden into arousal again and wrapped her hand about him.

“But I am too lazy to come over on top of you,” he said, “or to lift you on top of me. Shall we see if there is a lazy way to love?”

He turned her onto her side against him, lifted one of her legs over his hip, pressed himself against her and wriggled into a better position, and pushed inside her. She pivoted her hips in order to give him deeper access.

And they loved slowly and lazily, their warm, almost relaxed climax coming several minutes later.

He lifted her leg back off his hip, and they drifted off to sleep for a while, still joined.

The sun was up and shining in her eyes when she next awoke.

Tomorrow you will continue on your way to Bath . . . I will return to London. . . .

Tomorrow had indisputably arrived.

She should be coming back to London with him. She should be going back to stay with her great-aunts, allowing them to fuss over her as she prepared for her betrothal celebrations and then her wedding before summer was out.

She should be going back to speak with Heath, to make arrangements with him for the concert he wanted to plan for her. She should be practicing her singing and preparing for the career that was just waiting for her to reach out and grasp.

But there was something far more important that she should be doing.

She should be going back to Bath, back to Miss Martin’s, back to her pupils and her teaching duties and all that had made her life rich and meaningful during the past three and a half years.

She might have crumbled all that time ago, caught as she was between the ultimatum the Countess of Fontbridge had given her and the ruthless exploitation of her talent that Ralston and Lady Lyle had engaged in for two years.

But she had not crumbled despite a sheltered upbringing. Rather, she had had the strength of character and purpose to turn her back on a rather disastrous start to her adulthood and to make a new life for herself.

He had been wrong to call her a coward, Lucius had come to realize, to accuse her of settling for contentment when she could be reaching for happiness with him—and with her singing.

She had not run away from her old life.

She had run to a new one.

It was wrong to expect her to give it up simply because she loved him and he wanted her to marry him. It was wrong to expect her to give it up for the prospect of a singing career even though she had dreamed all her life of such a career.

She had a life and she had a career, and she owed both of them her presence and her commitment at least until the end of the school year in July.

The hardest thing Lucius had done in a long while was to allow her to go on her way without trying to persuade her to go back to London with him—and even without begging her to allow him to come for her in July.

For she was right. Even though he knew now that he could not possibly marry any woman for whom he did not care, he also knew that the blessing of his family—his mother’s and his sisters’ as well as his grandfather’s—was important to him.

Whether his love for Frances would outweigh their disapproval if it should come to that he did not know, though he rather thought it might. But he did know that he must do all in his power to win their approval.

It would be easier to do that if he returned alone, if they were not simply confronted with a fait accompli.