The Earl Takes A Bride (Elbia Series Book 2)

by Kathryn Jensen

  She couldn’t make her voice work for a full two minutes. “All right,” she said at last. “I’ll go.”

  Three

  There was more to packing Diane’s children off to their grandparents than Thomas had anticipated. All three had minds of their own, and each had specific ideas as to which clothing was “cool,” which favorite stuffed animals or toys they simply could not leave behind. In the end the three suitcases Diane had planned expanded to six. One each for clothing and a smaller one for beloved teddy bears, pillows and playthings.

  Elly arrived the morning of the trip flushed with excitement, her blond ponytail swinging like a metronome in time to the music playing through the earphones of her portable tape player. As lively as she was, she was a responsible girl, and Diane trusted her implicitly.

  “They are definitely going to exhaust my parents,” she said, laughing, as she waved all four of them through the boarding gate later that morning.

  “I expect so,” Thomas agreed, although he hadn’t had much experience with youngsters.

  In his view, children were a loud, frequently sticky, inexperienced tribe that interfered with an ordered adult life. You couldn’t discuss politics with them without their eyes glazing over. You couldn’t brawl with them the way you could with your mates on a football field. You couldn’t talk about sex or Verdi or high-caliber weapons in their presence without generating scowls from other adults in the room. Children didn’t seem of much use to him.

  Yet Thomas had grown surprisingly fond of Jacob and Allison’s babies. Cray was now three years old and called him Toms. The child just couldn’t seem to get his mouth around that second syllable. Kristina was a delicate, squirming creature of six months. Thomas had been terrified of her at first. He was convinced that touching her with his big, awkward hands would instantly crush the child. But one day Allison simply plopped the baby in his arms as she took off across the garden after a runaway Cray. And there they’d been—the two of them. Thomas and Kristina. Staring at each other.

  Thomas had instantly lost his heart to the blue-eyed mistress of the nursery.

  Now he found excuses to hold her, to spend a few minutes of every day in the nursery soaking up the smell of talc and baby sweetness. He was convinced that little Kristina saved one special gurgle that sounded like ta-ta just for him. And she did something special for him whenever he held her. She relieved some of the torment he felt every time he looked in a mirror and saw his mother’s face looking back at him. His mother, who had deserted him. He had always been convinced they were alike in ways other than physical, that he was as incapable of strong attachments as his mother had proved to be. But when he held little Kristina, he believed he might be a gentler, kinder, better person. For just those few minutes…the doubts and agonizing guilt went away.

  But surely, these two royal children were different from all others. Diane’s boisterous threesome were small strangers to him and likely to remain so. He told himself he was just doing what was necessary to help the prince’s sister-in-law out of a jam. That was all.

  No, he thought with sudden, grim clarity as he walked beside Diane through the terminal. There’s more to it than that.

  There was this maddening attraction that even now plagued him with prickly urgency to touch her as they walked through the terminal crowded with travelers. He remembered their kiss. He ached to repeat it. The thought of his lips on hers brought a sudden rush of heat to the nether regions of his body, and now a needy groan escaped his lips before he could stop it.

  “Anything wrong?” Diane asked placidly, looking around at the busy airport shops with interest. Her eyes were a vivid, excited emerald today, full of anticipation of the adventure ahead. She seemed totally unaware of his torment.

  “No. Nothing,” he grumbled. He wistfully eyed a crowded bar to their right called Port of Call. A double scotch would take the edge off. But he was driving and couldn’t indulge himself.

  “It’s too bad the flights couldn’t have been closer together,” she mused, stopping to finger a pretty Irish wool shawl at an import shop. “We might have been able to leave directly after putting the children on their plane instead of having to drive back to Nanticoke.”

  “I had thought about that,” he admitted. “But there was a delay in completing the maintenance check, then new flight plans had to be filed. Your passport won’t be delivered until later this afternoon. Seven hours’ wait in an airport would be a bore.” On the other hand, even an hour alone with Diane at the little Cape Cod wasn’t likely to be relaxing. He felt wound tighter than Big Ben’s spring.

  “I suppose.” She sighed. “It’s just as well. I still have some cleaning to do before I can lock up the house for the summer.” She fell silent for the remainder of the hike to the short-term parking garage.

  He wished he knew what she was thinking. Could she possibly guess how alert his body was to every move she made? The subtle sway of her full hips was enough to send sweat trickling down his spine under his clean white dress shirt. The purposeful tilt of her chin made his heart hammer. She seemed driven by a fresh supply of energy today—and he could think of dozens of ways to help her expend it.

  Until now the children’s presence and obstreperous enthusiasm for the trip had made it impossible for any real sense of intimacy to develop between them. Diane had been busy with laundry and packing, and he’d needed to verify the children’s travel arrangements, then secure a car and driver to whisk the foursome directly from the arrival gate in Orlando to the grandparents’ home.

  The night before they were all to leave, ten o’clock had rolled around before Diane had been able to get all three children settled in their beds. This admittedly had been an awkward time for him. Thomas had felt a restlessness growing inside as he’d contemplated their being alone at last. He hadn’t realized how much he’d longed for a chance to have Diane to himself.

  But before he’d been able to decide how best to handle the situation, Diane had announced she was “totally done in” and would be calling it a night. She’d handed Thomas a pillow and blanket, then nodded toward the couch. Disappointed, he’d stretched out on the lumpy cushions. Minutes passed. He’d thought about Diane lying in her bed in the other room. Tried to ignore the insistent cravings of his body. It had seemed impossible to find a comfortable position for his long body on the too-short sofa. He’d listened to the softly seductive sounds of Diane turning restlessly between her sheets, to her sighs as she drifted off to sleep…to his own heart racing in his chest. He hadn’t slept at all.

  But now an empty house awaited them. Thomas didn’t know how he was going to keep his hands off Diane. If he’d been a religious man, he’d have prayed all the way from Long Island to Nanticoke. Instead, he concentrated on driving.

  The traffic on I-95 was relatively heavy for a Sunday morning. He expected that was due to the season. During the summer, vacationers would be on the road and locals on their way to the beaches. Whatever the reason, he felt deeply grateful for the distraction the weaving cars and speeding RVs provided. He didn’t have time to dwell on the hunger building inside his body.

  As soon as he pulled the sedan into her driveway, before his hands even left the steering wheel, Diane threw open the passenger door and bounded toward the house like an Olympic sprinter. He followed her inside, wondering why she was in such a rush. When he walked through the kitchen door, she was already on the telephone, speaking in regretful tones to the only child’s mother she hadn’t been able to reach the day before.

  Thomas pressed the heels of his hands down on the back of a kitchen chair and waited until she finished giving the woman the name of two other day-care providers in town and hung up. “Was she giving you a hard time about leaving for the summer?”

  Diane jumped as if she hadn’t realized he was in the room. “Oh…not really. It’s unsettling for a parent to have to alter child-care arrangements on short notice. The problem is, she may be so happy with one of the women I’ve recommended, I mig
ht not get her back in the fall.”

  “Perhaps you’ll decide to choose another kind of job by the time you return.”

  “I know. I’ve been thinking a lot about alternatives.”

  Thomas couldn’t seem to drag his eyes away from that expressive mouth of hers as she bubbled on about careers she’d once dreamed of having—a translator for the U.N., liaison for a diplomatic mission, member of a negotiating team on assignment in a foreign country. He didn’t for a moment doubt she’d be good at any of them. But since she’d never had a job outside of her home, he feared she would need some time to work herself up the governmental ladder. Her lips twitched with emotion when she spoke, settled into a firm line of determination, pouted, trembled subtly, then lifted on a strand of hope. They were constantly moving. He longed to press his mouth over them, quiet them. Force them to respond to his own lips.

  Diane laughed. “You aren’t hearing any of this, are you?”

  “Hmm?” He hastily brought his eyes up to meet hers. “Actually, I was listening. It’s just that I was wondering—” He was wondering what she would taste like. Her lips…the soft valley between her breasts…her nipples…her honeyed thighs. “—just wondering why you never took a job in New York City or even Hartford. You could have made a lot more money working for a large corporation or the Federal government.”

  “Mostly I didn’t want a career to eat up all my time and energy. The kids were more important to me.” Diane swung around so quickly he was sure the maneuver was calculated to keep him from questioning her further. He stood as rigid as one of the sixteenth-century sculptures at the entrance to the palace garden as she swept out of the room. Her footsteps padded across the living room, then faded toward the far end of the house.

  Thomas gripped the chair back all the harder. If he let go, he’d be tempted to follow her into her bedroom. An absurd and totally inappropriate impulse, he knew. Dangerous, he warned himself. Very, very dangerous, Thomas. Don’t even think about it.

  But through the thin walls, he could hear her moving about, rummaging in bureau drawers, tossing something that sounded clinky, like metal bracelets, onto her bed. Humming to herself.

  He lowered his head and gritted his teeth. “No.” He ground out the word. “No, you are not going anywhere near that woman!” He counted to ten, tried it again, but only reached five before he was cut short by a loud thud followed immediately by a scream of pain.

  Thomas bolted through the living room and ducked into the hallway that led to the bedrooms. “Diane, are you all right?” His heart pounding in his chest, he stopped in front of the first door on his left. From behind it came moaning sounds. He twisted the knob and rushed into the room.

  She was sitting on the floor in very provocative underwear.

  Thomas told himself he should get out, fast! But before he could move, Diane whipped her robe from the edge of the bed and threw it around herself.

  Unfortunately, that didn’t stop him from saving the image of her he’d seen. Thomas closed his eyes against the delicious vision and only then remembered his reason for bursting into her bedroom.

  “Are you hurt?” he whispered hoarsely.

  “No, I’m just lounging around on the floor half-naked, holding my foot for the fun of it.” A tear rolled down her flushed cheek.

  He forced himself to look away for an instant, which was long enough to take in the rest of the room and sum up the situation. An enormous, hard-sided suitcase had fallen off the bed. “You dropped that thing on your foot?”

  She nodded.

  He swore under his breath. “You should have called me to move it for you if it was in your way.”

  “I had already started to change clothes and I— Oh, wow, this really hurts.” She winced and gripped her foot tighter. The tender flesh of her instep looked as if it was beginning to swell.

  He shook his head, irritated with himself for reacting to the situation so slowly. “Hold on, I’ll get some ice.”

  A minute later Thomas dashed back into her bedroom holding a plastic bag filled with ice cubes, a kitchen towel draped over his arm. She had somehow moved herself onto the bed, slipped her arms into her robe and securely knotted the tie around her waist. Her injured foot was propped on a pillow.

  Even suffering, she was a stunning woman. The clothes she wore every day might be practical and inexpensive, her lifestyle simple and home centered…but underneath it all there was a woman of beauty and intelligence to rival any Continental socialite. He wanted her at that moment more than he’d ever wanted another.

  “I should probably just stick my whole foot in a bucket of ice water,” Diane said, gazing up at him with a vulnerable expression that melted his heart.

  “No, this is more effective.” He sat facing her on the bed. Gently he transferred her foot to the folded towel, then laid both on his thigh. Taking a single cube from the bag, he placed it against the puffy inner curve of her foot and started sliding it in small circles over the skin. “Tell me if this becomes too cold or if I hurt you,” he said.

  She nodded.

  The ice massage did wonders for cooling down the inflammation. He stopped after ten minutes to inspect the tender skin, prodding it softly with his long fingers. “Nothing seems to be broken. And I doubt you’ve sprained it, since no twisting motion was involved. The weight of the luggage was probably enough to bruise you pretty badly, though. Can you stand on it?” He looked up at her for the first time since he’d sat on the bed. Her eyes were a liquid-gold, shot through with emerald sparks.

  “I think so.” Diane’s whisper was low and husky as she shifted her gaze to the wide hands wrapped around her foot. Rich-chestnut strands of hair fell across her face, only partially hiding the telltale flush of her cheeks.

  He had kept his thoughts focused on treating her injury until now. Suddenly it was impossible for him to ignore the electric currents flashing between them. His lower body tightened; a sharp and sudden rush of heat coursed through his groin as their gazes locked. He’d been the object of that look from other women. It meant only one thing. And he’d never hesitated to take action.

  This time must be different, he told himself firmly. No matter how fiercely his body urged him to respond to the invitation in her lovely eyes, he didn’t dare surrender. The consequences for both of them would be disastrous.

  Thomas hastily lifted her foot away from his thigh and stood beside the bed. “Come on, let’s see if you can walk,” he said gruffly. “If not, we may need to have a doctor look at it.”

  Diane stared up at him bleakly. All the life seemed to drain from her face. The rosy tint fled her cheeks and brow, leaving her face as fragile and pale as eggshell porcelain. With quiet grace, she stood up beside the bed. Gingerly at first she put a little weight on the injured foot. Then a little more. “I think it’s okay,” she murmured.

  “Good. Wear sensible shoes for a few days. No spike heels for Mother Fields.” He grinned, trying to coax a smile out of her and lighten the tension between them. Instead, he was met by an icy glare.

  “You think that’s very funny, don’t you?” she snapped, her body stiffening with anger.

  He was at a loss. What had he said wrong? A moment ago she’d been weak with pain. Then she’d given him a clear signal that she would welcome an intimate follow-up to his bedside manner. And now the woman was balling up her fists in front of her as if she might actually come at him swinging! “What did I—”

  “I’m not your kind of woman, is that the message you’re trying to get across, Thomas? You can’t imagine Diane Fields in a slinky, black, nothing-of-a-dress, wearing five-inch heels, diamonds dangling from her earlobes. Is that it?” She hobbled closer to him, her eyes flashing threateningly. “Why did you kiss me yesterday? You obviously aren’t attracted to me. Was it a pity kiss? Were you under Jacob’s orders to take my mind off my troubles?”

  She turned her back to him but not before he saw the pained expression in her eyes.

  “No!” he protested.
“I only meant—” He took a hesitant step toward her.

  She flipped a hand at him, warning him off without bothering to look back. “Never mind,” she rasped. “I understand. No woman with a houseful of kids, an empty bank account and a department store wardrobe would ever interest a sophisticated bachelor like you.” Her shoulders started to tremble, and her voice dropped to a near whisper. “Lately I’m not sure what any man sees when he looks at me. Obviously, I’m no longer terribly alluring.”

  Her anguished words sank into his heart like pebbles dropped into a still pool. Ripples of amazement spread through him. How could this woman, whose mere presence in the same room inflicted such chaos on his insides, possibly think of herself as unattractive?

  “It’s not that,” he said woodenly. But he couldn’t explain the dozens of reasons keeping him from becoming involved with her—none of which had anything remotely to do with how she looked, smelled or felt in his arms. Even now, he was taunted by the bedroom lights playing off her rich-brown hair, the stubborn tilt of her narrow shoulders, the elusive fullness of her hips beneath her robe. It would be so easy to lay her down and divest her of that silly pink poof of a robe that was the only thing standing between him and the pleasures of her sweet body. Honest explanations were impossible.

  His best diplomatic voice came to his rescue. “I am the king’s emissary and friend. I’m just trying to do my job and help your family. I never meant to upset you.”

  She spun about to face him, and the anguish reflected in her eyes nearly destroyed him.

  “Go. Leave me alone.” Her voice was little more than a hoarse whisper. “I want to take a nap before the flight. It’s been a long two days.”

  “Of course,” he acquiesced.

  A long two days. Her words echoed through his mind as he gently closed the bedroom door behind him. And tonight will be the longest of nights, he thought grimly. The two of them, confined to the intimate passenger cabin of Jacob’s private jet. With no company for the eight-hour flight except their unfulfilled desires.