“There,” Sheffield said, gently closing the library door shut. “Best to leave them alone together. I’m sure they’ll amuse themselves well enough without us.”
“Oh, yes,” Diana said, acutely aware now of how she and Sheffield were likewise alone together, without even a hovering footman or maidservant. In the carriage he’d pledged to be the model of honor and regard, but she did not trust him, or herself, either. “Yes, yes.”
“Yes,” he repeated, and smiled at the unintentional echo. “Yes.”
Diana nodded, smoothing her gloves over her hands. This was exactly, exactly why she’d wanted to excuse herself from this day. Sheffield was doing nothing but standing before her, as respectful as Lord Crump himself. But then Sheffield doing nothing was still a thousand times more seductive than Lord Crump trying his hardest to please—which, to be honest, she’d yet to experience. Sheffield simply stood there in the empty hall, his dark hair unruly from the wind, raindrops glistening across the broad shoulders of his dark coat, and the creases in his close-fitting breeches radiating from a place she’d no business looking. He stood before her, and smiled. That was all, and that was everything.
“I’d intended to show you my gardens,” he said. “Early as the season is, I understand that there are actually a few flowers to be admired, but alas, the weather is not cooperating.”
“It’s not,” she said, briefly glancing past him to where rain was drumming against the window at the end of the hall. If she’d any sense, or at least decency, she would demand to return to the carriage and sit there by herself, rain or not, until whenever Lady Enid was ready to go home as well. She should, but she didn’t.
Suddenly she heard a scrabbling of claws along the tiled floor behind her, and an overwrought canine panting. She turned just in time to see Fantôme propel himself up into Sheffield’s arms.
“Here you are at last, Fantôme, by all that’s wicked and unholy,” he said, catching the dog with a grunt. “I vow you’re getting fatter every day, old gentleman. Have you been begging in the kitchen again, eh? Everywhere you go you’re spoiled, aren’t you? Fantôme, Fantôme, Monsieur Le Gros, yes, yes!”
The dog wriggled joyfully in his arms, trusting Sheffield to keep holding him. Sheffield did, happily letting himself be covered with hair and slobber as he cradled his dog in his arms like an adored, oversized, and unattractive baby, and unabashedly lavishing baby talk on him, too.
“Do you like pictures?” he asked over Fantôme’s ecstatic snuffling. “I have a great many of those. I’ve as much French and Italian blood in my veins as English, which explains the collecting, you know. My ancestors must have been utterly helpless when confronted by paintings, because it seems they never passed by any that they didn’t buy. I could show them to you, as many as you’d like.”
She took a deep breath. Paintings were safe. March had paintings, too, and Hawke likely had more than the king himself. As long as she and Sheffield looked at pictures, she would be fine.
“Then please show me your pictures, Sheffield,” she said. “I wish to see them all.”
* * *
She wishes to see them all. Sheffield crouched down to set Fantôme on the floor, and to buy himself a few moments to think as well. He was determined to behave honorably, and he couldn’t forget it. Yet when he’d anticipated this afternoon, he’d intended to spend this time alone with her strolling through the garden. The flowers (for he’d been assured by his gardener that there would indeed be flowers in bloom) would have provided a genteel backdrop for what he would say to her.
But then the rain had come to confound him, and remind him of the ultimate futility of making plans. He should have known better; in his experience, planning never was very successful where women were concerned, given their nearly universal unpredictability, a fine match for the English weather. He’d always done better improvising, anyway, and letting the lady herself guide his words and actions. No lady could object to a gentleman’s behavior if she believed that behavior had been her own idea, and with Sheffield, they never objected.
But looking at pictures would be much more of a challenge to his honorable intentions remaining honorable than the flower gardens would have been. The house’s picture gallery was upstairs. Also upstairs, on that same floor, were the family’s bedchambers. Reaching the gallery would require passing several of those bedchambers, including his own, with its enormous ducal bed.
Fantôme whined, demonstrating his unwillingness to be put down by making his legs go limp beneath him. Sheffield swore beneath his breath, struggling as hard to make the dog keep his feet as the dog was determined not to.
“What is wrong with him?” Diana asked with concern. “Why can’t he stand?”
“Because he doesn’t wish to, that’s why,” Sheffield said, still wrestling with the dog, and with his own thoughts, too.
It wasn’t really the proximity of his bed that was the greatest challenge to behaving honorably. It was Diana herself. She’d rigged herself out as severely as a nun—he’d wager it was because of him, too, and not Crump—yet still he found her irresistible. The entire time they’d been in the carriage, he’d been trying not to think of how much he’d enjoy slowly unfastening every one of those little buttons on her bodice, like unwrapping some splendid gift. Even now, kneeling on the floor with his infernal dog, he couldn’t help but glance at her feet before him, her red leather shoes with curving heels and silver buckles and her neat ankles in white stockings. He wondered what kind of garters she wore, and if she tied them over the knee or below, which led him to imagine her thighs, and how soft the skin must be—
“Are you sure he’s well, Sheffield?” she asked, bending down beside him and gently stroking the dog’s head. “Poor Fantôme! What ails you, puppy?”
“Determined sloth,” Sheffield said with resignation. Giving up, he finally let the dog loll over onto his back, and stood upright himself. “I’ve told you before he is the laziest creature in Christendom. Come, leave him. If he wishes our company, he’ll find his legs fast enough and join us.”
She gave the dog one final pat, then stood, too.
“Shall we look at pictures, then?” she asked, clearly determined to keep to a definite agenda. That was wise of her, considering how Sheffield had been studying the way her skirts had tucked in beneath her as she’d sat beside his dog, how even that grim gray wool could look beguiling when it was pulled taut over the rounded swell of her bottom.
“We shall,” he said. “The picture gallery is upstairs, but we should have plenty of time. I was counting on granting the lovebirds at least an hour alone.”
He offered her his arm, the way he would any lady.
She pretended she didn’t notice it, instead walking slightly ahead of him, back the way they’d come.
It was not an auspicious beginning.
“An hour will likely seem as nothing to Lady Enid,” she said, looking about the house rather than at him. “Earlier I’d feared there was something amiss between her and Dr. Pullings, she seemed so distressed, but obviously there was some other cause.”
“Obviously,” he said, determinedly walking beside her. “I’d venture it was due to Lord and Lady Lattimore insisting that she spend so much time in my company this past fortnight. Poor Enid learned what manner of gentleman I am, and that must have been what nearly did her in.”
She laughed. “Most mothers would not wish their daughters in your company, while most ladies would be charmed by it.”
He sighed dramatically, hoping to keep her smiling. “Most ladies are not Lady Enid. I fear she finds me an empty-headed dullard, a tedious fellow who has read nothing and knows even less.”
“Then it’s fortunate for you both that she’ll marry Dr. Pullings and not you,” she said, the smile disappearing. “Your house is very handsome, Sheffield, inside as well as out. You impress me.”
She’d stopped in the front hall to gaze about her, taking the time now that they hadn’t had when they’d first enter
ed with Lady Enid. The space was open and soaring, designed to impress guests even as they were welcomed into the house. The floor was black and white marble, inlaid in the pattern of a spreading compass rose, and directly overhead was a splendid oculus through which the sun shone, or would have if the rain hadn’t been drumming against the leaded glass. Even without the sunlight, the gilded carving on the balustrade of the great stair gleamed like burnished old gold, and the huge old hunting tapestry that hung on the landing gave everything a certain palatial air.
It was all warmly familiar to him, for it had been his home for as long as he could remember. But Diana would be accustomed to the more modern grandeur of March’s house, and uneasily Sheffield wondered both what she honestly thought of his house and why he should care so desperately.
“Do you mean that I impress you by my own splendor,” he said, striving to keep his voice light, “or that I impress you because my house impresses you?”
She smiled again, making him realize he’d do most anything necessary to keep that smile beaming in his direction.
“I suppose I’m impressed on both counts, Sheffield,” she said. “I find your house most elegant and original, but I’m also impressed by how well it is kept, considering how seldom you’re in residence.”
“Of course I keep it up,” he said. “Why should I not?”
“Because men generally don’t pay heed to housekeeping matters,” she said with a small shrug that hinted at many other reasons that she’d rather not share. “And you, Sheffield, are a man.”
“I’m also my parents’ only child,” he said. “They were proud of this house, making endless improvements and refinements, and that’s reason enough for me to keep it as they’d have wished.”
She smiled and nodded: evidently that was the right answer, though he’d be damned if he knew why. At least it made for a genteelly safe conversation, and he plunged on.
“Do you see that oculus?” he asked, pointing up toward the ceiling. “My mother was especially proud of that. My father called it the apple of her eye. Being too young to understand, I would stand about beneath it, waiting for apples to drop. Ah, I told you Fantôme would join us soon enough.”
The dog ambled across the black and white floor toward them. He stopped beneath the oculus and snuffled at the floor, finally beginning to lap at the small puddle that had gathered in the center of the compass pattern.
“Oh, hell,” muttered Sheffield, staring up at the leaking oval glass. Here Diana had just praised him for looking after his property, and then this had to happen. A footman hurried forward, accompanied by a scullery maid with a wooden bucket and a bundle of rags. The footman bowed—an apologetic bow if ever there was one—and the maid curtseyed before she dropped to her knees, pushed Fantôme aside, and began to wipe up the puddle. Looking upward, the footman strategically aligned the bucket beneath the drip, pushing it across the floor inch by inch with the toe of his shoe.
“The oculus has always leaked when it rains,” Sheffield said by way of apologizing to Diana, just as the footman had silently apologized to him. “It always did in my parents’ time, and I expect it always will.”
“Have you any pictures of them?” Diana asked.
“Pictures of what?” he asked, still distracted. Why was it the windows had never leaked when he’d been with a mistress? “Of this mess?”
“No, of your parents,” she said. “I should like to see your parents’ portraits, if they are here.”
“They’re here,” he said, relieved. “The best ones are in the Sultana Room.”
“The Sultana Room,” she repeated with relish. “I like the sound of that. Would you show me their portraits, Sheffield? I should like very much to see them. Please?”
“Very well,” he said. “This way.”
He began up the stairs, and this time she slipped her hand into the crook of his arm, letting him lead her. She’d also inadvertently solved his dilemma for him. The Sultana Room was at the opposite end of the house from the gallery and from the bedchambers. Neither were the matching portraits of his parents in the same suggestive category as the nymphs and satyrs.
“Here we are,” he said, and as soon as she’d entered, he closed and latched the door after them.
She turned around at once, her blue eyes wide and troubled. “Why did you do that?”
“What, close the door?” he asked. “Because if I didn’t, some servant or another would come bumbling in to disturb us. You live with servants. You should understand.”
She swallowed, glancing back at the closed door. “But to be alone with you like this is—is not right.”
“Is it right that I don’t wish Fantôme to follow us in here?” he asked. “He will mistake the cover sheets for bushes, and misbehave. Besides, you would be alone with me anywhere in the house. No one will know unless you tell them. And didn’t I give you my word earlier that I would respect both you and your Lord Crump?”
She frowned, thinking. “Yes,” she admitted reluctantly. “Yes. All that is true. I suppose a single door doesn’t matter.”
“It doesn’t,” he said, looking around the room as his eyes adjusted to the murkiness. As in every great house, the furnishing in unused rooms were draped with linen cloths against dust and the heavy curtains closed tight against sunlight and fading, curtains that he now pulled open himself. Even on this gray afternoon, the view was magnificent, over the house’s gardens, orchards, and outbuildings, and further across the fields north of the city. The worst of the rain had passed, leaving rolling low clouds of mists and the palest of sunshine over the spring-green plantings and trees.
“How vastly beautiful, Sheffield,” Diana said, forgetting her wariness to join him at the window.
“This was my mother’s favorite room,” he said, “and because it was hers, it was my father’s, too. We often took breakfast together here, the three of us. It does have the best vantage in the house.”
She leaned her fingertips lightly on the window’s frame as she gazed out, her face delicately lit by the pale daylight. “I don’t wonder that your mother loved it.”
“I wonder if she’d like the view as much now,” he said. He hadn’t been in this room for years, and he realized now how much he’d missed it. “Look there in the distance, beyond the last of our walls. You can just make out the New Road, the turnpike built not long ago for the farmers coming to the London markets. A convenience, they say, but it means the town itself soon will follow, and with it will come an end to our green country view.”
“A convenience, and progress,” Diana said softly, her voice echoing his own melancholy. “It cannot be helped, to be sure, but still I often wish things would stay as they were and never change.”
She stood hugging her arms closely around her body, and he fought the almost irresistible urge to slip his own arms around her and pull her close. He’d never wanted to hold a woman more, nor desired one more, either, and restraining himself like this around her was a torment that, as a duke who’d always gotten what he desired, he’d never before experienced.
And as if she sensed it—or even felt the same—she abruptly turned away from the window and him to walk across the room to the pictures on the farthest wall.
“So these must be the portraits of your parents,” she said, her voice as full of deference as if she were meeting them. “By these I’d venture you’re the sum of them both.”
“That’s inevitable, isn’t it?” he said, chuckling. “Parents beget children in their likeness.”
He pulled the dust cover from the wide settee across from the portraits and sat, leaning back to look up at the portraits. Like his parents, the pictures had always been side by side and never separated. These weren’t the grand ermine-draped duke and duchess portraits that hung in the ballroom downstairs, but smaller and informal, the way he remembered his parents. His mother was dressed as if for a masquerade, in the red and gold spangled sultana’s costume that had given the room its name, and with a magnificent
green emerald on her finger. She was turned to look over her shoulder, laughing as if she’d just heard a merry tale or jest, or was simply reveling in the wonderful, wanton silliness of her costume. His father wore his country clothes, the same kind of wool jacket and buckskin breeches that Sheffield himself favored, with his two most devoted hunting dogs beside him.
But the likenesses went beyond mere clothing. It was eerie, and unless Diana had mentioned it, he doubted he would have seen it for himself. His mother’s smile and eyes, his father’s dark hair and jaw, all jumbled together to make his own face.
“They loved each other very much, didn’t they?” Diana continued. “You can tell by their faces. They’re happy, and they’re in love, and it shows.”
He’d never thought of the pictures quite in that way, but she was right. He remembered his parents’ endless affection for each other, almost as if they’d been lovers instead of husband and wife.
“It was a love match,” he said thoughtfully, looking at the painted faces and remembering the real ones. The longer he looked, the more he remembered, and the clearer his own thoughts were becoming in other ways, too. “They eloped, which must have been quite the scandal. But yes, they were happy. Always.”
She came to sit on the settee with him, albeit with a sizable distance between them. She leaned back, as he had done, and bumped her hat against the carved back. She unpinned the hat and pulled it off, and then, unencumbered, she leaned back once again with a sigh.
“My parents were the same,” she said. “Not that I can recall, for my father died before I was born. But Charlotte remembers, and says it was so. Mama has never remarried, because she says there will never be another man she’ll love as much as she loved Father.”
He nodded. Her reminiscences were a perfect match for his, as was so much else about her.
“The same,” he said. “The same.”
When the Duke Found Love Page 19
