Page 63 of To Love and to Loathe
Except Jeremy,a voice whispered in her head. She ignored it.
Her painting, she sometimes felt, was what kept her sane. It gave her an outlet for her thoughts, her feelings, for everything about her that had no place in polite society. Everything rough and raw about her she poured onto canvas in bold strokes of pigment—and perhaps this was why she had always felt so uncharacteristically shy about her artwork. It was entirely acceptable—desirable, even—for ladies to dabblein art. A lovely watercolor or a particularly fine portrait was something to be unveiled in the drawing room to admiring oohs and ahhs.
Diana, though, had never felt particularly like showing her paintings to a drawing room full of people. She had no ability to look at her own work objectively—though she believed her brother and friends when they told her she was very good—but she somehow thought that there was no chance that the feelings she kept bottled up within her did not spill onto the canvas somehow. And those feelings were certainly not the stuff of polite drawing room chatter. They were nothing that anyone else had any desire to see.
“I’m not in any state at all,” Diana said, realizing she’d allowed the silence between herself and Penvale to drag out slightly too long. “Unless you mean a state of smugness over my superior card skills. Perhaps it runs in the family,” she added, lifting her teacup in a toast.
Penvale clinked his tumbler gently against the delicate china of her cup. “Is this about Jeremy?”
Diana, who had just taken another sip of brandy-infused tea, choked. Penvale, like the loving, sensitive creature that he was, thumped her on the back so hard he nearly knocked her into the sideboard.
“Why would it be about Willingham?” Diana asked once she had recovered her composure and her balance.
Penvale gave her a withering look, and she sagged. “Did he say something?” she asked in an undertone, hating that she had become a person who would ask such a question—and of herbrother, of all people. It was undoubtedly a low point.
“Not in so many words,” Penvale said, looking pained. “He seemed a bit distracted whilst we were out hunting today is all.”
“Perhaps he found pointing a gun at some fast-moving thing withantlers to offer insufficient intellectual stimulation,” Diana suggested sweetly.
Penvale gave her a speaking look. “Diana. This isJeremywe’re discussing. He requires approximately as much intellectual stimulation as a field mouse.”
All at once, Diana was angry. She was not routinely angry with her infuriating brother, as was usual, but instead felt a surge of protective rage on the part of someone else that she’d never experienced before. Logically, some part of her knew that Penvale was Jeremy’s friend—one of his two dearest friends, and someone who had been close to Jeremy for far longer than she had, in fact—but that knowledge did not do much to suppress the entirely illogical, out-of-proportion feeling of fury coursing through her.
“Has it ever occurred to you, Penvale, that Jeremy might have intellectual depths that he has chosen not to share with you?” she asked icily. “Perhaps because he might expect just such a reaction, in fact? Or,” she added, really getting into the spirit of the thing now, “perhaps because he knows that your pea-size brain couldn’t possibly hope to keep up?”
Rather than looking offended, Penvale grinned at her. “It’s ‘Jeremy’ now, is it?”
Diana mentally cursed. She had stubbornly continued to address Jeremy by his title long after she might reasonably have ceased to do so; her use of his given name now gave her brother far more information about the status of her relationship with Jeremy than she was comfortable with Penvale having. Nevertheless, she resisted the urge to rise to his bait, as she learned to do the hard way, and many times over, throughout the course of their childhood.
“What it is or isn’t is none of your concern,” she said in thehaughtiest tones that she reserved solely for her brother. She was naturally not about to inform him that she planned that very evening to lay her heart at Jeremy’s feet—possibly after enjoying a satisfying bout of amorous congress. She had no desire to have Penvale either warn her offormake the sort of threatening mutterings about his sister’s paramour that men seemed to believe was required of them in such situations.
“Just… be careful with him, Diana,” Penvale said quietly, and his tone was entirely serious.
“I can take care of myself,” Diana informed him.
“I know you can,” he said in that same low, grave voice. “I meant… take care with him. I’ve always been under the impression that he was rather carrying a torch for you all these years—I can’t think why else he would spend so much time provoking you.”
Diana simultaneously wanted to tell him that this was ridiculous and to admit that he was entirely right—for she knew, deep down, that she had always understood that there was something more to her relationship with Jeremy than mere antagonism. She had never allowed it, even to herself, of course. But she couldn’t say this. The words she held within her were for Jeremy, and no one else.
If this blasted evening would ever end and let her speak them, that is.
Jeremy, in some sense, hoped that the evening would never end—the longer it dragged on, the longer before he had to tell Diana of his plans to propose to Lady Helen.
He had spent a fair amount of time the past few hours in close proximity to the lady, and now that he knew her act for what it was—for an act it surely had to be—he was able to regard her performance appreciatively, like a theater-goer, rather than with the abject horror previously provoked by her fawning (and by her occasionally bold hands).
However, despite his newfound understanding that the lady was something more than the marriage-obsessed miss that she appeared, he did not look forward to the thought of informing Diana of his plan with any great enthusiasm. For the one, he hated being bested—particularly by her. And he was not eager to admit that he was surrendering in their wager. No, a smug Diana was not a prospect to be relished, even if a bet was worth losing if doing so earned him more nights in her bed.
Furthermore, however, he dreaded the possibility of other emotions he would see on her face. He wasn’t terribly certain he could tolerate seeing relief in her eyes—she would try to hide it, he was certain, but he’d become quite skilled at reading her expressions.
At last, however, the party broke up amid much grumbling at the vowels Penvale was collecting, though anyone who sat down at a card table with Penvale knew that he risked being fleeced out of a sizable share of blunt. The minutes seemed to trickle by as Jeremy dismissed his valet and paced his bedroom, waiting for the hallway to have been silent for long enough for him to risk venturing out. The moment arrived at last, and he scarcely had to scratch at Diana’s door before she flung it open and pulled him inside.
He had given a great deal of thought to how he would tell her—he’d let her work on her portrait of him for a bit, since he wasn’t entirely certain how this conversation would go, and he didn’t wish to distract her from her art. The look of peace mingled with concentration that spread across her face while she was painting or sketching was one thathe could happily look at every day for the rest of his life—and it was dangerous thoughts likethatthat had convinced him of the necessity of this action in the first place.
However, he thought it unwise to allow matters to proceed too far before telling her, so he planned to interrupt her painting after a while to share the news of his impending engagement. He wasn’t entirely certain what to expect when he told her, but rather hoped she’d appreciate this sacrifice on his part—she’d see that once he was engaged, they could continue their affair without any pressure of marriage or commitment. He hoped that she’d be so pleased that they could then immediately continue about their—considerably less clothed—evening’s business.
All of these thoughts, however, were wiped from his mind, because the second the door closed behind him, he found himself pressed up against it, Diana’s mouth on his own. And while plans were very well and good, he’d always liked to consider himself a man capable of flexibility—quite literally, on one memorable occasion—and he decided that he could allow this amendment to his agenda for the evening.
That was, naturally, the last intelligent thought to cross his mind for some time, so consumed did he become by the softness of her body pressed against his, the feeling of her mouth sucking on his neck. His hands ran over her curves greedily, the weight of a breast filling one hand, the roundness of her bottom occupying the other. He leaned his head back to rest against the door as she continued to move her mouth down the column of his throat, resisting only with great effort the temptation to roll his hips against hers. He felt as though there were flames licking at his skin wherever her body was touching his, and was so stiff in his trousers that he feared embarrassing himself like aschoolboy—which was, honestly, how he felt whenever his bare skin was in close proximity to hers.
