by Mary Balogh
The music failed after a few minutes.
"Well, Diana," he said into her ear, "you must slap me very hard and right now if you do not want what seems about to happen."
She did not move. She had her eyes closed. "I don't care," she said after a few moments of silence, "about tomorrow or about propriety or about anything except tonight and this place. And you."
"You should care," he said, beginning to feather kisses along her temple and down one cheek. "I am not at all the sort of man for you, Diana."
"Jack," she said. "Jack, don't reason with me. Make love to me."
He lowered his head until his lips met hers. "You should stop me," he murmured before opening his mouth over hers. "You should stop me, Diana."
She should stop him. He could not stop himself. She was soft and warm and yielding. And she was there with him inside the warm lantern-lit pavilion with a storm crashing around them. And her mouth invited him, and her body was shapely and feminine against his. And her breasts were firm and womanly beneath his hands. And her thighs were pressed intimately to his. Her fingers were in his hair. She was making low sounds of appreciation in her throat.
And she had asked him to make love to her.
She could not stop him. She did not want to stop him. She knew there would be only that night. She knew to whom she had surrendered herself and she held no illusions about the future. But it was a night for love. And she did love him. For despite everything, he was Jack. He was more than just a rake who seemed to feel it necessary to conquer any presentable female who came within his line of vision. He was witty and amusing, and he hid a very real person behind the mask of his wit. She had grown to like that person even if she did not know him well.
She did not want to stop him. And she lost the power to do so after his mouth had claimed hers and his hands moved over her and held her to him. She wanted him to make love to her. She wanted him. More than anything else in life.
She should stop him. He could not do it alone. She was so warm. So desirable. So very eager. Diana.
"Diana. Diana."
"Yes." Her head was thrown back to feel his lips at her throat. "Oh, yes."
And then she was standing alone, disoriented and bewildered. Lord Kenwood had taken several strides to the door and thrown it open. The wind had died down so that the rain poured straight down in a heavy sheet. A draft of cool air came into the pavilion.
He set one shoulder against the doorframe, and stood looking out into the storm, drawing deep steadying breaths. There was silence for a full minute until Diana swallowed painfully and sat down rather heavily on the sofa.
"Do you have no sense at all?" the marquess asked eventually without turning around. His voice was harsh. "What do you think you are about, Diana, surrendering your virtue to a man like me?"
She sat straight on the sofa, not touching the back of it, her hands clasped very tightly in her lap. "How am I supposed to answer that?" she asked.
"How?" He continued to stare out into the darkness. "You are supposed to tell me that I misunderstood you. You are supposed to be angry. You are supposed to tell me to stay exactly where I am until this storm stops, or even to go out into the rain."
"You did not misunderstand me," she said quietly. "And I am not angry. Only very shaken. Why do you hate yourself so much?"
He laughed harshly. "You ask me that?" he said. "You know what I am, Diana. You know that I have nothing of any goodness or worth to offer you. And you don't even know me worst about me."
"I think I know the best about you, though," she said. "You have a strong sense of decency and honor. Otherwise you would not be protecting me more than I am protecting myself."
"Don't try to put reins on me," he said. "It can't be done, Diana. No one will ever own me. I am incapable of being committed to anyone."
"I think perhaps you have misunderstood after all," she said. "I had no thought of trapping you, Jack, or of putting reins on you, as you put it. I knew it would be for this night only. I never for a moment thought otherwise. I accepted that. I wanted this one night.'' She dropped her voice almost to a whisper. "And I am still sorry that it is not to be."
His head joined his shoulder against the doorframe. "God," he said very quietly, "I have never been so terrified in my life."
"What?" Diana frowned.
He turned to look at her, and his face looked pale in the reflection of the lantern light. His eyes strayed down to her hands, which were trembling quite noticeably in her lap. He watched them for a few moments before pushing himself away from the doorframe and crossing the space between them. He lifted her hands and held them in a tight clasp.
"I said I am terrified," he said. "I think I am in love with you, Diana. I have never felt such a thing before or ever expected to do so."
"You don't have to say this," she said. "I told you I expected nothing beyond tonight."
"I want a lifetime," he said. "I want eternity. Diana, send me away."
She shook her head almost imperceptibly.
"You will be sorry if you don't." he said.
"Why?"
"I told you about my father," he said. "I am my father all over again."
She shook her head. "No one is ever someone else all over again,'' she said. ' 'You are not your father. You are yourself. You do not even have to be like him unless you choose to be so."
"I will hurt you," he said. "I will break your heart."
"Not unless you choose to do so," she said.
"There is my past," he said. He closed his eyes briefly. "Not to mention my present."
"At the present," she said, "you are here holding my bands. Your past has nothing to do with me. Just as mine has nothing to do with you."
He stooped down onto his haunches suddenly so that he was looking up into her face. "Why would you have anything to do with someone like me, Diana?" he asked. "You could have almost anyone you want."
"I don't understand what is happening any more than you do," she said. "I don't know, Jack. I only know that I love you."
"And were prepared to pour out all that love in one single night with me?"
"Yes. And don't, please, ask me why. I don't know why. And I did not even know that I would be willing to do something so rash until it happened. And I did not know that I love you until tonight."
He released one of her hands and touched the backs of his fingers to her cheek. "Perhaps the countess is not such a madwoman after all," he said. "Perhaps she knew very well what she was doing, sending us out here like this. Though why she should choose me for you, I will never know. She loves you as dearly as if you were her daughter."
She held his hand to her cheek and turned her head to kiss his palm.
He got to his feet and crossed the room to close the door. The storm, they both realized, had passed into the distance, though the rain was still beating down heavily. When he turned back, he held out a hand for hers, and she rose to her feet and took it.
The old mocking smile was somewhere at the back of his eyes and twitching at the corners of his lips. "This is your last chance to send me away," he said.
She looked at him in inquiry.
''Very well, then,'' he said. ''You do not have the wisdom to do so, it seems. Will you take a chance on me, then, Diana? Will you marry me and give me a chance to shower your universe with stars? And to cram an eternity into what is left of a lifetime? Will you let those children you want be mine too? I would strongly advise you to say no."
Diana could not stop herself from laughing, and she watched as the laughter took complete hold of his eyes and mouth and eventually emerged to mingle with hers.
"I have never made an offer of marriage before," he said. "I don't know how to go about it. I made the devil of a mess of that one, didn't I?"
"Yes," she said.
He winced. "You don't have to agree with me, you know."
"I was answering your first question," she said.
He sobered immediately. "You don't think you will be sor
ry, Diana?"
"No," she said. "Do you think you will be?"
"Only if I see you unhappy," he said. "I will never forgive myself if I make you unhappy."
"I have the advantage of you," she said. "I have been married before. Marriage is what you make it, Jack. I was never unhappy with Teddy, though I might have been. He was rarely at home, and I had no children to take away my loneliness, and I did not really love him when I married him. Not as I love you, anyway. But I was not unhappy for all that. I spent my days trying to make sure that he was happy and contented."
He framed her face with his hands. "I swear to you, Diana," he said, "that I will try to do that for you. Every day for the rest of my life. I can't promise to succeed, my dear. I have had so little experience with trying to make other people happy. But I will promise to try."
"And I will too," she said, her hands smoothing up his coat and under his lapels. "Jack, am I going to wake up soon?"
"As you did at the inn to my eternal regret?" he said. "No, Diana, I am sorry to say that this lover is very real and very inadequate and very nervous and uncertain of himself. And very much in love with you. And very much hoping that you will renew a certain request you made some minutes ago."
"That you make love to me?"
"Yes, that's the one."
"Make love to me, Jack. This night has been so very special. So very like a dream except that I know you are real and I know I have just agreed to marry you. Make it even more special. Make love to me."
"Are you sure, Diana?" His hands rested on her waist. He lowered his head to set his mouth against her throat.' 'Are you sure? I can wait if you want. I can wait until our wedding night. But you must tell me now if that is what you want. Now or sooner."
"Make love to me," she said, resting her forehead against his shoulder while his hands began working the buttons down her back free of their buttonholes.
"Make love!" he said softly. "This will be the first time for me, Diana. I swear it will. I have never made love before." He eased her gown over her shoulders and held her slightly away from him so that it could drop to the floor. "Come on, then, my love, let's see if the universe will hold together over the next minutes or not."
It did not. He unclothed her and laid her down on the blankets and cushions they had used for the picnic. And he unclothed himself with her help and lay down beside her. And brought his mouth to hers. And lost touch with all the reality about him—the storm, the pavilion, the ball taking place at the house. All his reality was centered in the woman he loved with all the expertise of years.
But for the first time in all those years she was not just a woman to pleasure and be pleasured by. She was Diana, the woman he had fought not to love, and failed. She was his world, his universe, his very life. It was her name he spoke as he brought them both to the brink of sexual ecstasy and beyond.
And the reality of her surroundings receded for Diana too. But there was reality. It was focused on the man who loved her slowly and gently and expertly, and fiercely at the last. The man who taught her to relax and to enjoy, to reach out and touch. The man who she knew from the moment of his first touch would not leave her empty and dissatisfied. The man who finally took her to the mindless moment of ecstasy.
He was no dream lover. He was Jack. And she loved him. And would no longer believe that it was a misplaced love. She loved him. No matter what. For always.
The universe exploded.
It came together again only very gradually several minutes later. Diana lay snug and warm in Lord Kenwood's arms.
"Well," he said, after bending his head to kiss her lingeringly on the lips, "if I had known it was to end like that, Diana, there is no power on earth that would have stopped me at that inn. What an amiable fellow that innkeeper is, by the way, not to put locks on his doors. I shall have to stop there on my return to London and shake his hand. And who did you think I was, Diana Ingram?"
"You were my fantasy lover," she said. "And I realize with every ounce of foresight in my body that I will be teased about this for the rest of my life."
"By me?" he said, looking down at her, one eyebrow raised. "Me tease the woman I love? You malign me, Diana. I have one question, though. How do I compare with my competition?"
He grimaced as she punched him in the stomach.
''I shall certainly kick him out of bed every time he tries to climb into it," he said, closing his eyes and settling his cheek comfortably against the top of her head. "There will be room in our bed for only two persons, one male and one female. And I intend to be the male. Perhaps we can set up a truckle bed for him, Diana. Oof! That is quite a powerful fist you have there."
"You will feel it," she said, "every time you are odious enough to mention that topic. I am already sorry that I was honest with you."
"Will you be willing to be married in St. George's in London?" he asked. "With all the world present, of course. I am afraid that only so will I be able to convince everyone that I really am married. I have been written off as a hardened case for a long age, Diana. All the anxious mamas gave up laying siege to me years ago."
"That is doubtless because of your shocking notoriety," Diana said. "But yes, I think a large wedding would be splendid, Jack. Will it be soon?"
"Or sooner," he said. "I must be greedy and have a few days with you here, but I will leave early next week and make all the arrangements at lightning speed and break my news to my mother and the girls—they will have forty fits apiece and hug me so hard they will crush every bone in my body— and gallop as fast as hoof will travel to your papa's door to claim you. Will he let me have you, do you suppose?"
"I am of age," she said. "But how could any papa resist you? You are, after all, a marquess."
''I sometimes forget that I am such an exalted personage,'' he said. "I suppose that is the reason you
are marrying me, Diana, is it? So that you may be a marchioness?"
"Yes," she said. "You mean you thought there might be some other reason?"
He removed the arm which had been around her shoulders and propped himself up on his elbow. "I see I am going to have a saucy wife," he said. "I hate to say this, Diana, but there is suddenly a dreadful hush outside. I fear the rain has stopped and it is time to squelch our way back through the grass to the house."
"If you were a gentleman," she said, "you would carry me."
"If I were a gentleman," he said, bending to kiss her nose, "I would not have you naked on the floor here having my wicked way with you merely because you have had the misfortune to be trapped with me here during a storm."
She sighed. "Well," she said, "if I had the choice between lying naked here with you and then having to get my feet wet on the one hand, and not lying here with you and being carried back to the house on the other, I don't suppose I would choose to keep my feet dry."
He grinned, scrambled to his feet, and reached down a hand to her. "Someone has to keep a cool head," he said. "On your feet, woman, and get some clothes on before we also have the dawn light to show us the way home. And we still have the countess to face. Can you imagine how she will react to our news? I may have no bones left for my mother to crush. Get dressed."
"Yes, my lord," she said meekly one moment before he jerked on her hand and brought her right into his arms.
"On second thought," he said, "people with cool heads rarely get much enjoyment out of life."
"My sentiments exactly, Jack," she said while she was able.
Epilogue
During an evening a little more than a week after his betrothal, the Marquess of Kenwood strolled into White's. He stood looking into the card room for a while, and nodded to those acquaintances whose attention was not entirely engrossed in a hand of cards. He glanced in at the reading room, which was almost entirely deserted at that particular time of day.
He found the person he had hoped to see in the lounge. And as luck would have it, there were several more of his acquaintances there too. He raised his quizzing glass to hi
s eye, perused the group at his leisure, and sauntered across the room.
"Rittsman?" he said, nodding amiably. "Hartley? Bedard? Quincy? Maurice?"
"By Jove, it's Jack come to liven us up," the last named gentleman said. "Pull up a chair, Jack, and join us."
"I am just passing through," the marquess said languidly. "I have promised to put in an appearance at my mother's soireé. Rittsman, my good fellow, I have something for you."
He leaned down and set a piece of paper on the table before Elwood Rittsman. "It is a draft on my bank for five hundred guineas, as you will see. It is an unfortunate fact that we frequently become boastful when in our cups. The last month has proved you quite right, it grieves me to report. Not all women are susceptible to my superior charms. Mrs. Diana Ingram's virtue, it seems, is quite "unassailable."
