by Mary Balogh
"Did you?" she said. "It could not have been worse than the inn where I stayed. Some lunatics almost tipped my carriage into the hedge by overtaking us on the muddy road, and man someone mistook my room for his own in the middle of the night. And Bridget had the vapors—my maid, that is."
"No!" he said, looking down at her fondly. "Too bad, Diana. Those impatient drivers should be hanged. But you are safe at home now."
"Yes," she said. She smiled happily into his eyes, squeezed his hands, and turned away. "Aunt Hannah. How are you? Thank you for your letter of last month. I am afraid that I did not answer it, knowing I would see you here." She hugged Lady Knowles. "Oh, Claudia, I have been so looking forward to seeing you again. And that nephew and niece of mine. Have they grown beyond recognition?" Another hug.
"Anthony will never stay still long enough to grow," the Viscountess Wendell said, returning the hug. "How lovely it is to see you in a colored dress again, dear. Have you met Jack?"
"Jack?" Diana smiled. "I think not."
"The Marquess of Kenwood," Claudia said. "Such an exalted personage that I cannot speak to him without stammering. But a member of the family, of course, though you must not ask me how. He came down here with Ernest and Lester. Jack, may I present Diana, my sister-in-law?"
The marquess knew as he made his bow to Mrs. Diana Ingram that she was wormy of the chase. The smile and the color disappeared from her face and something flickered far back in her eyes. But there was no other sign whatsoever. And he had been half expecting to have to rush forward to catch her as she fell. She curtsied, looked him full in the eye—her eyes were a dark gray, he discovered—and murmured a polite "My lord?"
"Hello, Diana," he said, and noticed that flicker in her eyes again. But she had been introduced to him by her given name—bless Claudia! "I am happy to meet you at last. I have heard so much about you that I feel almost as if I know you already." And how close he had come to knowing her, indeed!
She did not venture a reply. She turned away to greet Lord Knowles, who was holding out a large hand for hers.
"Uncle Joshua!" she said, perhaps a little too effusively, and allowed him to pump her hand and kiss her cheek.
For the first time in many hours Lord Kenwood blessed the impulse that had made him raise his head from the fragrance of her hair the night before and question her identity. For the first time he was glad that he had not moved beyond the brink of her. It would have been too easy. Oh, far too easy.
The wager would have been won even without his knowing it. There would have been nothing more to be accomplished during these weeks except perhaps to indulge in a thoroughly pleasant and unexpected affair.
There would have been some triumph in winning such a wager within a week of making it. But no sense of personal accomplishment. He suddenly wanted the winning of this wager to be a moment indeed, a moment to remember. He hoped Diana Ingram would be cold and angry and thoroughly reluctant. He wanted to pursue her with all the skills of courtship and seduction that he had learned in the thirteen
years since he had lost his virginity at the age of eighteen in the arms of a courtesan old enough to be his mother.
He wanted it to be the chase of a lifetime. Something to liven up the dull boredom of a house party. Something to liven up the rather dull monotony of his life.
And then the bedding would be sweet. Oh, very decidedly sweet. She was exquisite. What the devil had she seen in Teddy Ingram?
"Very naughty eyes indeed, Jack," Lady Knowles murmured in his ear as she set a fresh cup of tea at his elbow and seated herself beside him again. "Diana does not come easy, so I have heard."
"And very glad I am to hear it, ma'am," he said, sobering. But when his eyes alighted on the face of the older lady, he could not resist adding a wink to his words.
* * *
"It would be perfect. Quite simply perfect!" The Countess of Rotherham, splendidly decked out for the evening in royal blue gown and turban, a fresh arsenal of rings on her fingers, a set of large sapphires around her neck, had been joined in her sitting room by her husband. It was still a little early to go down for dinner.
The earl chuckled. ''I have not heard tell that he is in search of a wife, dear heart," he said.
His wife made an airy gesture with one hand and clucked her tongue. "No man is in search of a wife until he finds one," she said. "Have you ever heard any man admit that he is looking about him for a bride? Of course not. Men are conceited creatures and fear rejection. But this is perfect, dearest. I feel it in my bones. And of course Lester is all wrong for her. I don't know how I could have considered him."
The earl lowered himself onto a love seat, being careful to arrange the tails of his evening coat in such a way that they would not become creased. "You know that I want what is best for our dear Diana," he said. "She was good to poor Teddy. But I am not sure this would be quite the thing."
"Of course it is the thing," she said. "Trust me. Such a handsome couple, dearest. And Jack needs someone to settle him down. Still unmarried and one-and-thirry years of age. He is much to be pitied."
The earl stroked his chin. "As far as I know, he has something of a reputation with the ladies," he said. "Not quite what we would want for our little Diana, dear heart. I would not wish to see her unhappy. And besides, I doubt if she would have him. She has very much a mind of her own. Remember how surprised we were when she chose Teddy five years ago?"
"Teddy was a saint," his wife said.
"But not, one must confess, the sort of man one would have expected Diana to choose,'' he said. "She would never marry a rake, if you will pardon my plain speaking."
"Then she will reform him," his wife said brightly. "A reformed rake makes the best of husbands, it is said."
"Are you speaking from experience?" the earl asked, tweaking her cheek as she sat down beside him.
"Nonsense!" she said. "You were just a little wild, dearest. I never heard anyone call you a rake. But yes, you have been the perfect husband since our marriage. I could not have asked for a better."
"And you think that Diana and Jack could be as happy as we are?" he asked with a smile.
She thought for a moment. "Yes," she said decisively. "There was a definite spark, dearest. I saw it the moment Claudia presented Diana to him. A definite spark, though they scarce spoke to each other. I shall go to work on the matter immediately. You may expect an announcement before everyone disperses in three weeks' time."
"Poor Jack," the earl said with a low chuckle. "If he only knew it, his bachelor days are numbered. I wonder how hard he will fight."
"He will thank me for it eventually," she said. "You will see. Of course, he will not really come right out and thank me, because I shall manage the matter with such subtlety that he will not even realize when the time comes that he owes his bride to me."
"And Diana?" he asked.
''Diana is probably in love with him already,'' the countess said. "What woman below the age of thirty could look at Jack and not fall in love with him? He is almost criminally handsome and quite irresistibly roguish. What a combination. It should not be allowed."
The earl pinched her cheek again. "I am growing more and more jealous by the minute," he said.
"Dearest," she said, "how absurd you are sometimes. But he is perfect for our Diana. Just perfect. Now what can we do for Ernest? He is eight-and-twenty already."
* * *
"It is quite, quite intolerable." Diana bent her head forward so that Bridget could clasp her pearls at her neck— the pearls that Teddy had given her as a wedding gift, and the only expensive gift he had ever given her.
"He is probably embarrassed too, mum," Bridget said, patting her mistress's neck to indicate that the task was completed. "After all, he is the one that made the mistake about the rooms, not you."
"Embarrassed? He?" Diana gave her maid an incredulous look in the mirror. "He was quite delighted by my discomfiture. He bowed and raised one insolent eyebrow, and he dared to smile at me
behind his eyes.'' She adjusted the pearls quite unnecessarily at her neck. She looked into the mirror with renewed indignation. "And he called me Diana."
"Oh, mum," Bridget said, shocked.
"He is enjoying the situation," Diana said, "I can tell. I know his type. Too handsome for his own good. Thinks that he is the answer to every woman's prayer. Thinks he has only to crook a finger to make a woman come running. Thinks he can make me flush and simper and flutter my eyelashes merely by raising that eyebrow. There should be a law that gentlemen can raise only both eyebrows together or none at all. There really should."
"He is a very handsome gent," Bridget conceded.
"That should not be allowed either," Diana said. "Gentlemen who are that handsome should not be allowed to run around free doing all sorts of damage to female hearts. Other female hearts, that is. It is a good thing that I spent a Season in London five years ago, Bridget, and know all about gentlemen like him. You can see now, perhaps, why it was I married the Reverend Ingram."
"He was an angel," Bridget said without hesitation.
Diana got to her feet and looked at herself full length in a pier glass. "Yes, he was," she said. "I felt quite comfortable with him, Bridget. He would not have raised an eyebrow and smiled behind his eyes at a lady whose bed he had climbed into by mistake one night. He would have done the gentlemanly thing and died of mortification."
"Yes, mum," Bridget said. "I think it very likely that I will come to blows with his man before many days have passed, I give you fair warning. Lifted his nose in the air when he saw me belowstairs, he did, as if I was a particularly grubby and ragged worm, mum. Nasty man! And I a lady's maid. I am not dirt under anyone's boots, I'm not."
"No, you certainly are not," Diana agreed, by now thoroughly out of sorts with the whole world. "And do you realize what this means, Bridget? It means that my brother-in-law, Lord Crensford, and Mr. Lester Houndsleigh were the imbeciles who almost upset us into the hedge. Why did I not suspect it when we were only ten miles from Rotherham Hall? I would wager a fortune his lordship was holding the ribbons. The Reverend used to tell me that the only time his brother was wild was when he was driving a sporting conveyance. But that was not wild. That was reckless. And he does not even know that he did it. Such drivers should be hanged, he told me. Well!'' She threw a world of scorn into the final syllable.
"You look lovely, mum," Bridget said, admiring the white silk of her lady's evening gown.
"Do I?" Diana frowned at her image. "I do not look too much like a young girl about to make her come-out? I want to look my best tonight, Bridget." She met her maid's eyes in the mirror and flushed slightly. ''It is the first time I have been in company, you know, since the Reverend's passing.''
"You look lovely, mum," Bridget repeated.
' 'I just wish I did not have to face that man,'' Diana said, turning decisively to the door. "It is most degrading. And a marquess, no less, Bridget. He could not even be a simple mister or perhaps a baronet. Oh, no, he has to be a marquess. I would have gone home this morning from the inn if I had only realized. Or if I had even suspected that he was to be a guest here. And how could I not have? However, I did not go home, and I must face him. And I shall do so without a blush or a tremor. I shall not give him the satisfaction of knowing that I even remember yesterday and last night. I shall stay far away from him for the three weeks. It should not be hard to do with eighteen guests expected and most of them here already, should it?"
"No, mum," Bridget said doubtfully.
Of course, Diana thought less than half an hour later, one had to remember that one was not quite in control of one's own destiny when one was in company with the Earl and Countess of Rotherham. Somehow, through absolutely no fault of her own, she found her hand on the Marquess of Kenwood's splendidly muscled arm as they all moved from the drawing room to the dining room. And the natural result of that, of course, was that she sat beside him at dinner.
To do him justice, she did not think that he had maneuvered for such a thing any more than she had. But the countess's bright blue and flashing presence had swept through the drawing room, and there they were, his arm extended to her, her hand resting on it.
* * *
An amazing woman, the countess! Diana only hoped that it had been a passing whim to pair her with the marquess for dinner. But she had a horrid, stomach-churning premonition. Her mother-in-law wanted to find her a new husband. The marquess was almost glaringly eligible in every imaginable way. She hoped she was wrong. Oh, please God she was wrong.
She knew she was not wrong.
She sat beside him at the table undergoing the utmost torture with every passing minute. Her right arm positively burned and sizzled with awareness, though six inches of air at least separated it from his. And the memories! Oh, the memories were quite intolerable and must be suppressed with all the ruthlessness of which she was capable. Those very masculine, though well manicured hands that held his knife and fork. Gracious heaven, they had been all over her. All over.
"I trust you have recovered from your indisposition, Diana," he said suddenly from beside her, almost making her swallow a mouthful of fish unchewed. "The headache, was it? There is nothing like a relaxed home atmosphere to make one feel more the thing, is there?"
"I am feeling quite well, I thank you, my lord," she said as coolly as she was able. Not so easy a thing to accomplish when one had just looked up, startled, into a pair of very blue bedroom eyes. Gracious, he had no business looking at anyone that way. Not outside the bedroom, anyway.
"Traveling English roads and sleeping in English inns can be quite detrimental to the health, I understand," he said. If she could only be sure that that really was a tremor of amusement in his voice, she would be hard put to it not to smack his face hard. "Or at least disturbing to one's emotional equilibrium."
Well! Bridget had thrown the barmaid out of his room. Why did that detail suddenly pop into her mind? He had thought her the barmaid and treated her accordingly. And he was not even ashamed now to know how that he had done all those dreadful things to a lady.
"I am sure I have the strength of body and mind to make a quick and thorough recovery, my lord," she told her fish with what she thought was quite laudable coolness.
"Tell me." His voice was pitched low beneath a burst of laughter that greeted one of Sir Joshua Knowles's stories. And the voice was as inappropriate outside a bedroom as his eyes had been a few moments before. "Did you think I was Teddy? I met him only three or four times, but I must have seriously underestimated him."
"No," she said indignantly, and wished and wished a moment later that she had not dignified his words with any response at all, "of course I did not think you were Teddy."
"Ah," he said, his voice as much of a caress as the "Mm" had been the night before. And he smiled. She did not know for sure that he smiled because she was carefully cutting into her fish. But she would have bet a fortune on the conviction that he was smiling.
He turned away to talk with Paula Peabody on his other side. And Diana, almost sagging with relief, was left wondering what he had meant by that "Ah," and indignant that he had not explained himself. She had not thought he was Teddy, she had told him. And then that soft and caressing " Ah." Whatever had he meant by it? And how dare he mean anything!
"You had a difficult journey here?" Russell Peabody asked from her other side.
6
Most of the gentlemen were whiling away the morning three days later in the billiard room while the ladies were either still in bed or on a shopping expedition to the village two miles away.
Viscount Wendell had remarked rather sadly that billiards was the one unclerical activity that his youngest brother had been remarkably skilled at.
"Yes," Lord Crensford agreed. "You knew that once Teddy got the cue in his hands, you might as well go in search of a good book. The game was over."
''Diana seems to be doing well,'' Sir Joshua Knowles said, "considering how bewildered she was just a year
ago. She is in good looks. But then, of course, she is young. She will marry again."
"Mrs. Diana Ingram," Mr. Thomas Peabody said with some emphasis, "would be a prize well worth the winning."
"I loved Teddy dearly," Viscount Wendell added, clucking his tongue as he missed a corner pocket and relinquishing his place at the table to Lester Houndsleigh, "but I must confess we could never quite understand why Diana chose him. She might have had almost anyone. Pritchard was dangling after her and Honeywell and Darlington, to mention only some of the titled ones."
"She was overwhelmed by it all, doubtless," Sir Joshua said. "She was straight from me schoolroom and straight from the country, was she not, Clarence? Teddy had what she probably needed more than anything else—a kindly smile."
