She pushed thoughts of him out of her mind. If she was only to have a few days more with Luke, she would make the most of them. She was not fool enough to deny the possibility that he would change his mind while they were apart. People fell in and out of love all the time. Arthur had.
As had she.
“I won’t,” he growled. “I won’t change my mind if that’s what you’re thinking.”
“But you can’t promise something won’t happen to you.”
“No. I can’t. The sooner I speak with my commander at the War Office, the better, but I don’t want to do that until I’ve met with my brother.”
“Your brother’s opinion matters greatly to you.” As did her sister’s. The thought sent a pang of sadness through Naomi, knowing Theo would never barge into her room in the morning again to wake her, nor would her mother be present to encourage her when the baby was ready to be born.
She even missed her father, for all his overbearing decisions. She was beginning to suspect he’d been right in his assessment of Arthur, after all.
“My brother…” Luke paused as though to consider his words. “Not many understand him. Our parents were killed in a fire while Blackheart and I were away at school. Servants barely managed to save my sisters, who were four at the time, and Blackheart… he always believed he should have been there. There was no funeral, the bodies were never recovered, and so rather than allow me to return home with him, he insisted I finish my schooling while he dealt with the solicitors and the care of Lucinda and Lydia. While he dealt with everything.”
“How old were you?”
“Ten and three. Blackheart wasn’t much older, ten and seven, and yet he became an adult that spring, for all intents and purposes. I resented him for it at first. He immersed himself in running the dukedom while I fooled around at school, got into trouble simply because I resented him making decisions for me, decisions my father ought to have made. I didn’t realize his sacrifice until I graduated.” His voice trailed off in self-recrimination.
“Did you like school?”
“I didn’t give myself a chance to. Perhaps I might have if I’d been any good at it.”
Naomi pondered the image of a young man coming of age, not allowed to mourn his parents in any real way, struggling to meet academic expectations of a domineering older brother.
Luke could build almost anything with his hands. He understood military strategy, and he showed compassion and empathy for those who served under him.
He was a doer. Not one who spent hours reading or studying or debating. If he saw a problem, he went right to work fixing it. If Naomi, or even Ester, was in need of anything, he’d set himself immediately to providing it.
He raised one hand to pinch the space between his eyes.
Luke’s brother wasn’t the only person who’d emerged from their parents’ deaths with a heightened sense of responsibility. Luke had become yoked by his brother’s expectations. Knowingly or unknowingly, Blackheart had burdened Luke to fulfill the scholastic endeavors he himself had been denied. When Luke hadn’t excelled there, he’d pursued other jobs at his brother’s suggestions. The church, the military.
This would explain the anxiety that arose whenever the subject of talking to his brother about selling out came up.
Apparently, the Duke of Blackheart hadn’t spent much time with his younger brother over the past decade. Had he done so, he would realize Luke was a man of hidden depths, but also a natural-born manager, gifted in the ability to rebuild and maintain. He’d casually offered several suggestions for the land itself, improvements that could make her property more profitable.
“At some point,” she said gently, “we must shed the expectations of others.”
He didn’t answer but she sensed his reluctance to be consoled. When beliefs, even mistaken ones, entrenched themselves into people’s souls, it was difficult to shed them.
Talking with her wouldn’t automatically erase his worry. Nor was it going to help him fall back to sleep.
Naomi burrowed into Luke’s bare chest, smoothing her hand over his skin, teasing the smattering of hair that circled his taut nipples.
She didn’t want to abandon him yet to the darkness of his dreams. She wanted to provide the comfort he’d so often provided for her.
“You do not sleep in a nightshirt?” She should return to her own chamber. Hadn’t she learned her lesson before? Apparently not, because lying beside him like this, she acknowledged willingly, to herself anyhow, that she was, indeed, something of a wanton. Her fingertips walked a teasing path from his sternum to just above his navel.
And then she swirled gentle circle in the short curling hairs there.
Luke groaned and turned on his side so that they were face to face. “I want everything with you.”
Naomi held herself perfectly still, her senses heightened where he dragged his hand over her shoulder, and then down her side. He lingered in the valley of her waist, but then coasted his palm to lay flat on the swell of her hip.
Not for the first time, she considered that he might be repulsed by her swollen belly.
“You’re so beautiful, Naomi.” He gathered the fabric of her night rail into his fist, drawing the hem up her legs. “Everything.”
