Cole did as he was told but found himself pacing in front of the fire. A footman deposited a laden tray on a table placed between two wingback chairs. Bread, cheeses, and cured meats were piled alongside dried fruits and a decanter of mulled wine and two glasses.
Diana’s laughter drew him to the door. Lettie was leading Diana to his door like a sacrifice. Her hair was loose about her shoulders. The dressing gown she wore was one of his. It was masculine and enveloped her. She’d rolled the sleeves up and held the hem off the floor so she wouldn’t trip. White flashed between the folds. Lettie had mustered a night rail from somewhere.
Cole smiled and ushered her in. “Come, let’s sup before the fire.”
“That sounds lovely. By the time I managed to strip my wet clothes off, I was thoroughly chilled.” A shiver ran through her. In contrast, heat streaked through him at the idea of her peeling her clothes off one item at a time until she was left bare.
He poured her a glass of mulled wine and retrieved the brandy decanter for himself. As they ate and drank and warmed themselves, their conversation turned quickly to the potential smugglers working a stone’s throw away.
“I worry about the twins. Together, their mischief multiplies. Mother has given up trying to tame them. What if they run across those men in their wanderings?” Diana buttered a slice of bread.
“If it’s locals trying to make extra coin, I wouldn’t worry so much, but I’ve heard of smugglers running more than just liquor. Some run messages to and from Napoleon’s spies to French sympathizers here. Those type of men wouldn’t blink over hurting two boys. War is a dangerous business.” He could feel her gaze on him, but he continued to stare into the flames. Images of the horrors he’d encountered danced in his mind’s eye like a macabre theater performance.
The touch of her fingers along the back of his hand broke his reverie. “I worried about you. Every night, I wondered where you were and if you were well.”
“Did you?”
She cleared her throat and snatched her hand away from his. “We all did.”
He ignored the qualification to her admission. “I thought of you as well.”
“You shouldn’t tell falsehoods.” She shot him a wry glance from under her lashes.
“I encountered a field of wildflowers that reminded me of the glen by the river in spring. I’ll never forget how you would lie in the middle and spin yarns about fairies and witches. Standing at the edge of that field a country away, I could almost imagine stepping into the flowers would bring me home to you like magic.”
Her eyes had widened and locked on his face. “I don’t believe you.”
He rose and retrieved a journal he’d kept while in Portugal. The pages fluttered open, revealing a set of pressed flowers. It had been mawkish and unlike him, yet through all the rough travel of the next year, he’d treated the pressed flowers like treasure.
She touched the crushed flowers lightly. “What happened earlier… that wasn’t a lark? Or a mistake?”
“Not to me.”
“But we agreed to forget it happened.”
“I’ll never forget,” he said fiercely.
“Nor I.” Her voice was a whisper now.
He was desperate to pull her into his lap and kiss her again. With impeccably good—or bad—timing, Lettie bustled into the room and cleared her throat. “I’ve sent word to your mother, Miss Diana, and she is content that you pass the night here, safe and warm. Your clothes will be dry and pressed in the morning. A warming pan is waiting in your room.”
“Thank you, Lettie.” Diana rose to follow Lettie but stopped in the doorway to send a glance over her shoulder to Cole. “I’m sure to get an earful tomorrow from Mother about going off at night and meeting strange men.”
“She’d be right to ring a peal over your head. You worry about what would happen to your brothers on the cliffs at night with a smuggling ring operating, but what about you? A beautiful, lone woman?”
Confusion knitted her brow. “I’m not—”
“Yes, you are,” he said, anticipating her denial. “Now go to bed and dream of mistakes you want to repeat.”
Chapter 3
Sleep eluded Diana. It wasn’t because of the accommodations. The mattress was soft, the sheets smelled sweet, and the warming pan made her wallow under the heavy covers like a contented cat. The problem was the bed was too big and empty.
At Grambling Manor, she and Rose shared a room and a bed. Perhaps she missed her sister. Or, if she were perfectly honest with herself, perhaps she longed for someone else altogether. She reached out to the empty side of the bed and imagined Cole’s bulk in the space. He would fill the emptiness, and she wagered she wouldn’t even need a warming pan. What would happen if they were alone?
He would kiss her, certainly, but the mystery to be solved is what he would do to her next. Her mother and father shared a bed every night, and her mother intimated a wife was expected to perform some duty for her husband in their marriage bed. She pictured herself rubbing Cole’s feet. Which seemed utterly unexciting.
She forced herself to think of something else but found the new subject less than peaceful. Liam. Twice since coming home for Christmastide, Liam had snuck out of the manor after midnight. While her worry had been brewing, it boiled over now. Through the East India Company, he had made connections at the ports with a variety of seafarers, both respectable and not. What if he were involved with the smugglers?
After tossing and turning for another half hour or more, she rose and stoked the fire, enjoying the crackling burst of light and warmth. While Linley House was grand, it had never felt like a home. It had the coldness of a museum even when they were children playing hide-and-seek in the endless rooms and gardens. She had pitied Cole back then when comparing Linley House to Grambling Manor.
The room Lettie had given her was beautiful and twice as big as the room she shared with Rose. The bed hangings on her bed at home were tattered and moth eaten. Actually, Grambling Manor itself was tattered and a bit frayed around the edges. But in a comfortable way. Or so she’d always thought. Faced with the grandeur of Linley House, she wondered if Cole pitied them when he stepped over the threshold into the shabby chaos of her family home.
Poking her head out the door, she encountered a house at slumber. No one to witness her darting into Cole’s study for a book dressed only in the borrowed night rail. Adept at moving around without waking her siblings, she floated with nary a sound to the study. The fire had burned low but provided enough light for her to see the closest shelves.
“The novels are kept over here.” Cole’s voice made her jump and muffle a squawk.
Her heart accelerated and not entirely from the scare. His dressing gown had loosened, exposing the vee of his parted shirt and a peppering of dark hair on his chest. He was half hidden in the heavy draperies at the window and holding a snifter of brandy.
“I wasn’t expecting you to still be here.” Diana crossed her arms over her chest in a fit of modesty. There was time and space to retreat, yet her feet shuffled her closer until she was at his side and staring into the darkness. The clouds had broken and raced across a half-moon. The keyhole-shaped bay lay in the distance, and beyond it, the sea.
“No? Were you at least wishing I’d be here?”
Blast it, she had nursed a tiny flame of hope. It was scandalous and wrong. Except, everything felt perfectly right. The world went on outside the small study, but for her, time ceased to creep forward. Worries and expectations disintegrated. All that existed was him and her. Man and woman.
Their gazes held, and in the intensity, attraction kindled into an inferno. He took a step as did she, so when they met, it was halfway. They were equally invested in the passion brewing between them. She twined her arms around his neck, and he held her close, one hand on the small of her back, the other winding in her hair.
“Your brothers would call me out for this.” No tease lightened Cole’s voice.
“This has nothing to do with my brothers.”
A smile flickered across his face before he leaned in. Their kiss in the woods felt a lifetime ago, and Diana was parched for his lips. She closed the distance and sighed against his mouth in relief. How could he have become integral to her survival in an afternoon?
If he hadn’t kissed her in the woods, she might have lived without him. Perhaps even married another, but she would have always recognized something was missing. Now she understood what that something was, and she would never be the same.
His hands moved along her back, pulling and tugging at her night rail. It was several inches too short and worn thin, the ribbons holding it together frayed. He scooped her into his arms, closed the door with his foot, and settled into one of the chairs before the fire.
“I pictured pulling you into my lap earlier, before Lettie interrupted.” He ran his hands up and down her arms. “Are you warm enough?”
How to answer? While the air was chilly, she felt feverish and moved restlessly against him. Her breasts ached, and the throb between her legs was back with a vengeance. “I’m… frustrated.”
Smiling, he nipped her bottom lip, sucking it into his mouth. “I understand.”
“No, you don’t. You can’t.”
“Then explain it to me.” His voice rumbled with what sounded suspiciously like humor, but she couldn’t see his expression. He was kissing her behind her ear in a place that sent tremors through her.
“It’s embarrassing.”
He raised his head and smoothed her hair back from her face so she couldn’t hide from him. “How long have we known one another?”
“Years. All my life.”
“Above all else, I hope you consider me a friend.”
“Friends don’t kiss with their tongues,” she said tartly.
His smile crinkled his eyes. “True enough. All right then, we’re something more than friends.”
“Something more,” she repeated softly, wishing the definition weren’t so murky but able to accept it. Closing her eyes, she cupped her hand around his and rubbed her cheek against his palm, rougher than any London dandy, but then Cole had ridden all his life and gone off to war. She lay a kiss right in the middle.
His intake of breath was followed by her name coming on a long exhale. He kissed her again and again. Any gentleness or consideration he’d shown for her innocence was gone. He plied her mouth open and demanded a response.
She reveled in the wantonness and shifted to press her breasts against his chest, seeking a measure of relief. His hands left her waist to fumble with the neck of her night rail. The ribbon had become knotted, much like her cloak ties.
“Blast it all,” he muttered against her cheek.
With their lips separated, she was able to take a deep breath, and her brain turned like a windmill in the slightest of breezes. “Perhaps it’s a sign.”
“Yes. A sign you should stop wearing clothing that can knot.”
How could she not laugh? Her head fell back with her giggles, and Cole took the opportunity to rip the night rail from neck to waist, cutting off her laughter. The fabric hung off one shoulder, leaving a breast exposed. She stiffened, too shocked to even cover herself.
“My apologies, Diana.” Even as he offered them, he didn’t cover her or look away. His half-lidded eyes took her in, and his mouth slackened.
Her nipple was budded and grew even tighter in the chilly air. Cole skated his warm, callused hand along the bare skin of her side, stopping to caress the underside of her breast with his thumb.
“You’re even lovelier than I imagined.”
“You imagined me like this?”
“Many times. So many.” He slid his hand up, cupping her breast and lifting as if testing the weight and shape. The squeeze he gave her had her grabbing hold of the lapels on his dressing gown and squirming. “Do you remember two summers past when I came across you and Rose at the brook attempting to catch turtles? You were knee deep, your skirts around your thighs, your damp bodice almost translucent.”
She would never forget. She and Rose had been sent to gather turtles for soup. Wearing one of her oldest gowns, which was too short and worn for receiving company, Diana had waded into the brook, her skirts held high, laughing with Rose who had remained on the bank with her ankles demurely covered.
Cole had ridden up on them before Diana could even take a step toward the bank and respectability. She’d frozen and hoped enough silt clouded the water to mask her bare legs. There was nothing she could do about her wet, too-tight scooped-neck bodice.
He’d remained on horseback, the stallion pawing the ground as if ready to charge her. Instead of covering herself, she’d put her shoulders back and returned his stare with a defiance her mother’s lessons in ladylike deportment had never been able to quell.
The moment had sharpened her awareness. The cool rush of water on her bare legs. The constriction of her bodice making it difficult to take a deep breath. The tickle of fallen locks of hair along her neck and across the slopes of her breasts exposed to his gaze. Nothing and no one had existed outside her and Cole.
With only a tip of his hat, he’d whirled his horse and galloped away. Diana and Rose had shared a laugh, but Diana hadn’t missed the flush coloring Rose’s cheeks. Had her sister held a tendresse for Cole then? Later that night, long after Rose had dropped off to sleep, Diana had told herself she had imagined his roaming, appreciative gaze. A gauche girl like her could hold no attractions for a worldly man like Cole.
“Did you not think me uncouth and wild?” she asked.
“Uncouth, no, but most definitely wild. I wanted to scoop you up, ride away with you, and do very wicked things, but you were too young. Then.” He glanced his thumb over her nipple, and she let out a breathy moan. He continued to play with her nipple, pinching it lightly.
It was a pleasurable torment. She’d never experienced anything like the urgency quickening her blood and loosening her tongue. “I thrilled at the way you examined me even though part of me understood it was scandalous. Later I convinced myself I imagined the spark, but I didn’t, did I?”
“I made myself stay away from you after that. I knew we’d be combustible.”
“What’s changed?”
“Between going to war and the deaths of my brothers and father, I have a new appreciation for the fleeting nature of life, I suppose.” His serious expression flickered with a puckish twinkle. “Plus how could I possibly resist seducing a maiden in a dark, mysterious wood?”
His answer wasn’t satisfying. Cole had changed. How could he not after everything that had happened over the past year? Could she trust him? Was she a mere dalliance? Would he ruin her? Was she already ruined? Before she came to any conclusions, he took her lips in a kiss that rearranged her insides and disordered her thoughts with only one surfacing for a last gasp.
In his arms, she felt anything but ruined. She felt powerful and glowing and hot. So very hot.
Cole trailed his mouth down her throat, not stopping until his lips closed around her nipple. Now she wasn’t merely hot, she was on fire. His eyes were closed, his lashes casting crescent-shaped shadows on his cheeks. She wanted to close her eyes but couldn’t stop watching him. He laved her nipple, then pulled it into his mouth. Pinpricks of sensation rushed from her breast to between her legs, and the urgency that had assailed her in the forest turned into a compulsion.
She fisted her hand in his hair and forced his head up. His dark eyes opened into slits, and the smolder made her catch her breath.
“Cole. What does this mean?”
“It means you’re hot for my touch.”
How succinctly he summed her physical reaction to him. “Yes, but what about tomorrow?”
“The morning will come along with the consequences. Can you face them? If not, run back to your room now.”
He removed his hands from her body and curled them over the arms of the chair. Contrary to his seemingly casual slouch, tension threaded his body and reflected his internal turmoil. He
would allow her to scurry away with her dignity and maidenhead intact, of that she had no doubt.
Why did anyone except for the two of them need to know what happened? She could leave him in the morning and tell her mother and father nothing untoward had occurred. They would believe her. After all, Cole was an old friend and now an earl. No one would suspect he had dallied with the younger, less beautiful Grambling sister.
She would claim this night with him. Her one indulgence before the reality of marrying Hamish Hambridge or someone of his ilk. Perhaps she wouldn’t marry at all and become a companion or nursemaid or governess to a better family. Whatever her future held, in this moment, she wanted Cole. And she would have him.
Instead of covering her nakedness, she shrugged the borrowed night rail off her shoulders and pulled her arms out of the sleeves, baring herself to the waist. She shook her hair back and then did something that shocked even her. She glided her hand down his chest, over his flat belly, to touch the hardness in his breeches.
He sucked in a breath, his knuckles going white where he gripped the armchair like a drowning man. His gaze devoured her. “Diana, you’re driving me mad.”
His reaction emboldened her. She ran her fingertips up and down the length before pressing her palm against him. While her mother hadn’t explained what exactly happened in a marriage bed, Diana wasn’t a dunderhead. She had a feeling she wouldn’t be rubbing his feet but something else entirely.
“I want to please you, but I’m not sure what to do,” she said softly.
“You please me by being you, and we’ll learn together what pleases you.”
“Will it hurt?” She stared at where her hand covered him. Sitting on his lap with him still clothed and with her breasts exposed made her feel like an offering to the gods. Was Cole a benevolent or vengeful spirit?
He let go of the armchair and ran his hands up and down her spine, leaving a trail of heat. He kissed her until she was breathless, and her worries burned to ash. He moved to her neck, his words coming against her skin so she wasn’t sure if she felt or heard them. “I’ll take care of you, love. I’ll bring you so much pleasure you’ll forget the pain.”
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