Page 93 of Discovering Her Earl

He nodded. “As will I.”

Chapter Twenty-Nine

Julian spent the last hour watching Elaina sleep. There would be plenty of time for him to rest later. For now, he wouldn’t give up a second of her. Occasionally he’d lean close enough to brush his lips across her temple or touch her hair.

He worried he would forget the way the soft light made her curls look like burnished copper. Or the pattern of freckles across her nose and the one on the corner of her lips he loved to kiss.

He breathed in her vanilla and cinnamon scent knowing he would think of her anytime he smelled them in the future.

The future.

How could he marry someone else when his heart would always be with her?

He pushed away the familiar rage, not wanting the hatred to intrude on this moment and take away his final hour with her.

She would need to leave soon to go back to her room. If she was found here in his bed, naked and ravished, he would have no choice but to marry her to save her from ruin. He looked toward the wooden door, secretly wishing someone would come knocking, and find them there together.

To take the choice out of his hands.

There had to be a way to save the mines and have her. Some simple solution he hadn’t thought of yet.

How would he give her up? How would he spend his life with another woman in his bed? A stranger that shared his name and bore his children, but who would never be Elaina.

His future wife would never truly know him. His insecurities and fears. She wouldn’t know of his past. She would only see the charming smiles he would keep pasted to his lips until he was freed from his torture with death.

“You are thinking too much,” Elaina whispered, startling him.

He smiled and kissed her as she blinked sleep away.

“I can’t seem to help it.”

“I know a way to make you stop thinking,” she hinted, her lips pulling up on the corner where his favorite freckle teased him.

It was both the easiest and most difficult thing to sink into her warmth for the final time. Their fingers clasped together as if nothing could ever separate them.

They stared into each other’s eyes as they moved together, giving and taking pleasure, sharing everything.

He kissed away the tears that slid over her temples into her hair as her legs pulled him closer. He smiled when he felt her body tighten and pulse around him. Proof of how perfectly they fit together.

As his climax grew closer, he briefly considered releasing inside her body, claiming her as his. A child would mean they’d have to marry. Another way to have the choice taken from him. But that way led only to guilt. He couldn’t do that to her.

Pulling from her body brought tears to his eyes. And when she pulled him to her, he pressed his face into her hair already salted by her tears.

And his heart shattered.

*

Julian was still asleep when Elaina slipped out of his room. She’d been afraid to wake him for a final farewell. She worried what she might do or say in that moment of vulnerability, when she’d wanted everything with him.

She knew if she’d asked him to choose her, he would.

But later, he would come to resent her. When his mines were lost and the people working in them were forced to pay the price for her selfishness.

She couldn’t allow that to happen, and yet she feared she wouldn’t have been able to stop herself from asking.

Knowing she wouldn’t be able to sleep with her heart so twisted in pain, she wrapped her robe tighter and went up on deck. With morning still hours away, the stars shone brightly in the night sky.

“It’s late, I didn’t expect to find anyone on deck at this time of night,” Bentley said as he stepped up to the rail.