Page 71 of Give Him a Chance

Then she groaned. “Oh, dear God!”

“What—What is it?” Bernard stretched out and grasped her hands as Lucy dropped her head into them, the embarrassment far too overwhelming for words. “Lucy!”

“I assumed you couldn’t read!” she whimpered, laughing into her hands as she dropped them and looked into Bernard’s all-too-knowing face. “I presumed you wouldn’t know how to address an earl—I taught you to dance!”

“Well, yes,” he said, laughing in turn, “but you weren’t to know—and just because I was raised a gentleman that doesn’t mean I come from money, Lucy.”

“I was astonished you’d even heard of Wordsworth!” she cringed, raking over their past conversations and wincing at each moment when she had attempted to ‘educate’ the ‘criminal’ about polite Society. “Why didn’t you stop me? I mean, I did think you took to it all rather quickly. I thought I was a great teacher! There I was, thinking I was giving a working-class criminal a chance to be reformed and you were letting me play the fool!”

“Your heart was in the right place,” Bernard said, and at the horror she felt displayed on her face, he added, “No, truly, Lucy. You saw an opportunity to make my life better and you took it. How could I tell you that I didn’t need such instruction?”

Memories were racing through Lucy’s mind, snatches of them too quick for her to capture, but mostly, all she could think about was how she had been so eager to teach Bernard abouther way of life that she had never paused to think that he might know a great deal about it already.

After all, if he was a gentleman…

Her expression sharpened as she looked up. “You say you are a gentleman, but your family was not rich?”

Yes, she had not dreamed it. There was the tension back in the corners of his eyes. Bernard Dixon clearly did not have a good relationship with his family, poverty-stricken gentlemen and ladies of lost fortune or relatively comfortable middle class. Whichever was true, and she tended to believe the latter, Bernard had little love lost for his family.

Which was a strange thought. Oh, Percy might have been the most irritating thing in Brighton at times, but he was still her brother. Even if she wanted to throttle him when he cheated at cards.

“My family,” Bernard said slowly, “was—”

“‘Was’?” Lucy could not help the interjection, but she regretted it now. He swallowed and his face contorted—pain caused not by her, but by her questioning. “I am sorry. You don’t have to tell me.”

“Good. Because I do not intend to, not in full,” came his quiet reply. “Lucy, your family is…is rare, I think. My parents did not… My father did not love me as yours cares for you. My mother was not encouraged in her eccentricities as yours is—”

“I don’t know what you mean,” interjected Lucy in a desperate attempt to lighten the mood.

Bernard turned his head to pointedly look at the opposite corner of the tablecloth, where the Countess of Lindow usually sat. There was a mathematical equation scribbled on it in pencil.

“Fine, she’s a little eccentric,” Lucy admitted with a small smile. “But… But your mother was not loved in that way?”

A shortness of breath, the way he refused to meet her eyes. Yes, there was pain there. For the first time, Bernard was sharingsomething of himself, and it was pain. All Lucy wanted to do was pull him into her arms and kiss away the hurt, but it would only mask it for a time. She could never truly remove it.

“There is none of my family left. They are all gone,” Bernard was saying quietly. “I always swore I would never… That I would die a bachelor. And then…you.”

He spoke so simply, it was a moment before Lucy realized what he meant. Then her cheeks burned.

Me.

He loved her. And she loved him. He was a gentleman, and not a criminal, to boot, which would only endear him further to her father. Was it possible…? After all this wondering, and hoping, and longing, were the final barriers to them being together actually coming down?

“And now we really must eat some of this delicious food,” Bernard said, his voice brighter and losing all the tension and agony with which it had been filled when he’d spoken of his family. “Or else Cook will claim we do not appreciate her cooking, so she will take a break with your parents gone, and then where will we be?”

Lucy giggled but could not help but notice that her appetite for dry chicken and cooling vegetables had passed. No, the hunger that was twisting her stomach was…was quite of a different flavor.

She bit her lip.But I cannot ask for that, could I?

It was bad enough that she was dining with him alone. Asking Bernard Dixon for what she wanted…that would make her a hellion of the worst degree.

If only she had asked her sister how she had managed to…well, get things going with her viscount. The two of them had somehow gotten married so quickly that she had not thought to ask, but there must have been a point, mustn’t there, when her sister… When they…

Bernard looked up, his plate now full of food but his cutlery untouched. “Lucy? What do you want?”

And the word had slipped out before she could stop it. “You.”

He stilled at the single syllable, uncertainty clouding his eyes, and Lucy knew she had not been clear enough—but how could she say more? How could she tell him just what she wanted: his hands on her hips and his kisses down her neck and the knowledge that they were everything to each other and would never share this with another…