Beautifully Forgotten Read Online Free Page B

made them glaze over. He gripped her hips and pulled her close as he moved deeper and faster. The orgasm rippled through her and brought tears to her eyes seconds before Lucien called out her name and emptied himself deep inside of her.
    Afterward, he would hold her; and sometimes it seemed to Darcy that he liked the holding as much as the lovemaking. It was like he was seeking the same feeling of connection that she was.
    “What’s wrong?” His soft voice interrupted her thoughts.
    “Nothing.”
    He leaned up on his elbow. “Come with me.”
    Her heart leaped. “What do you mean?”
    “When I leave, come with me.”
    “Do you mean it?”
    “I love you, Darcy, and I want you in my life. I don’t know where we’ll live or how we’ll get on, but I do know that I don’t want to go without you.”
    She threw her arms around him, and he chuckled as he fell onto his back, his arms tightening around her. “I’ll take that as a yes.”
    Words wouldn’t come, so Darcy responded by holding him even more tightly.
    “You thought I was going to leave without you, didn’t you?” His voice was whisper soft.
    She nodded her head.
    “Why?”
    Her eyes were bright when she looked at him. “I never understood why someone like you would choose to hang out with someone like me.”
    He rolled so that she was pinned underneath him and he looked almost angry. “Why do you do that? Why do you always think so little of yourself? Never mind, I know it’s because of your fucking mother. I shouldn’t need to say this, but I will: I never had any intentions of leaving here without you. How could you possibly think I could?”
    “I was trying to be realistic. You’re moving on. It isn’t unreasonable to believe that you’d forget me in time.”
    “Forget you? How the hell could I ever forget you?”

    Darcy was yanked from the dream when her alarm went off, but it took a minute for the memory of it to fade. She climbed from bed and shut the buzzer off. Lucien had forgotten her; just how soon after he’d left had she slipped from his mind? It wasn’t a question she needed an answer to.
    She splashed some water on her face and reached for her toothbrush, her eyes falling on her Manhattan College mug on the counter. Her life had definitely gone in a direction she had never seen coming.
    At sixteen, she’d planned to run away with Lucien. As an adult, she now understood the flaws in their plans; he’d been almost eighteen, so he could have left with no problem, but would she have escaped so easily? Probably not, but the idea of it had been so romantic that she hadn’t seen the pitfalls in their plan, only the happily-ever-after they would have had.
    But the day they’d planned to leave, fate stepped in. She didn’t know the man who came to see her, but he’d confirmed her secret fear that though Lucien wanted to take her with him now, when they were out in the real world he would grow tired of her. She wavered in her intent to go. Her worry wasn’t for herself, but for Lucien. The man knew all the right things to say, held the mirror to her face, so to speak, and her sixteen-year-old self wasn’t strong enough in her convictions to fight for Lucien. She’d let him go, and what hurt more was how easily Lucien had walked away.
    The year after Lucien had left was the hardest of her life. Darcy had hounded Sister Margaret for any news about him, and when she’d learned how much he was struggling, it had enraged her. The man who had promised her he’d look out for Lucien had been lying. She wanted to seek Lucien out and beg him to forgive her, to take her back, but then her life took another turn: one that left her broken.
    She’d struggled to get through each day, and then a year after she left St. Agnes she got a summons from Sister Margaret. Seeing St. Agnes again after being away for so long had left her with the same feeling of awe she had felt the first time she had seen it. The old brownstone looked its age and yet