Page 66 of To Love and to Loathe
“I wantyou,” she snapped back. “Therealyou. I don’t want to be your damned lover whilst you’re married to another lady—I don’t want to be someone who has no expectations of you.”
“If it’s expectations you have, I’d recommend revising them,” he said with a hollow laugh. “What haven’t you seen over the past week? I’m a degenerate marquess who’s trying his best to fill the shoes of the man who was meant for the role. I don’t have anything to offer anyone. I’ve grown far too attached to you for my own goodoryours, and I’m trying to arrange things so that we can continue seeing each other without it ending in disappointment.”
She stepped forward, lifted a hand, and laid it gently on his cheek—truth be told, he would have been less shocked if she’d slapped him, given the way the conversation had gone thus far. “No, you’re not,” she said, her voice suddenly quiet. “You’re a man who’s still in pain, and grieving, and who thinks too little of himself. You’re a man who is angry at his brother but doesn’t want to admit it.”
“I’m not—”
“You are,” she said simply. “I’ve been trying to tell you every time we’ve discussed him all week.”
“I suppose we got too sidetracked discussing my shortcomings in the bedroom to focus on this other, larger defect in my personality,” he said bitterly.
“Jeremy, it’s not a shortcoming!” she said, her tone sliding from tenderness to exasperation in a split second. “You’re allowed to beangry at your brother—it doesn’t mean you love him any less. It doesn’t make you any less worthy of a man. But if you can’t see yourself as you truly are, then I don’t want to waste my time trying to convince you otherwise.”
“Perhaps I’d better go, then,” he snapped angrily, “and you can summon me back to your bed once you’ve worked out what, precisely, it is that you want from me.”
“I thought I’d spent the past five minutes explaining just that,” she said coldly, her voice gone deadly quiet. He would have been less alarmed had she been shouting. “You just don’t seem to be listening.” Out of the corner of his eye, he saw her flexing her hand at her side, as though she were positively itching to slap him. He couldn’t say he blamed her—hehadjust announced his intent to propose to someone else—and yet he could not control the anger that coursed through him at the moment. He was following the rules, and she had changed them.
“You should be thanking me,” he said, gripped by that relentless desire to have the last word in every argument they’d ever shared. “If I marry Lady Helen, you’ll win our bloody wager.” He sketched an ironic bow. “Isn’t that what you wanted? I’m always happy to assist.”
“You think you’re fooling everyone when you use that tone,” she said, crossing her arms—regrettably—over her chest. “But just so you know, you’re not fooling me. You’re more than a charming rake, Jeremy, and you’ll realize soon enough that you’re not fooling yourself, either. But don’t expect me to wait around for that moment to arrive.
“Now,” she added quietly, her eyes never leaving his, “get out.”
He clenched his jaw, let himself out of the room, and just barely resisted the urge to slam the door behind him.
Twenty-Three
The weather the next morningsuited Jeremy’s mood perfectly. He awoke after tossing and turning for much of the night to find the sky full of heavy gray clouds, a halfhearted drizzle spitting against the windows already, with no end in sight to the gloomy weather. He was torn between the desire to remain in bed indefinitely, burying his head beneath the pillows and blocking out everything and everyone in the world around him, and jumping on his horse and riding like hell until he collapsed from exhaustion.
Unfortunately, the presence of a number of houseguests and the inclement weather made both of these fantasies unworkable and, as little as he wished to speak to anyone at the moment, he more or less had no choice in the matter. He should, he knew, ring for his valet and dress and make his way downstairs—a glance at the clock on the wall confirmed that there were likely already guests at the breakfast table—but he delayed, hoping to put off the moment he’d have to see Diana for as long as possible.
Instead, he rose from bed, ignoring the slight chill in the room that bit into his naked skin. He stood at the window, watching the clouds roll in, his thoughts full of the angry words he and Diana had exchanged the night before.
You’re not fooling yourself, either.
It was that parting shot that dug deeper than all of her other verbal barbs combined. Because wasn’t that precisely what he had been attempting to do—not just for the past fortnight, but for the past six years? He had been trying to fool everyone around him, yes—convince them that the Marquess of Willingham was no one to be listened to, no one to take seriously, nothing but a pale imitation of the brother who had rightfully held the title before him. No one to pin any hopes or expectations on. But, more important, he’d been trying to fool himself, too—to convince himself that the fact that David was dead didn’t matter, that he was standing here in his brother’s house, wearing his brother’s title, was fine, when of course it wasn’t. It would never be fine. Restoring the family fortunes hadn’t made it fine—sleeping with half of the women of theton, drinking his body weight in brandy every night for years hadn’t made it fine, either. And it hadn’t made the barely suppressed anger—that anger which he’d never dared admit to, and yet which Diana had spotted so easily, from the first moment he’d discussed David with her—vanish, either.
Leave it to Diana to make him excruciatingly, clearly aware of these facts.
And now he’d cocked things up so royally that he was unlikely to ever hear anything from her ever again, other than his name paired with a curse—and then only if he was lucky.
On the bright side, he would not be losing one hundred pounds to Diana today—or, likely, any day. Because not only was henotgoing to propose to Lady Helen—what was the point, if he’d lost Diana anyway?—he found it difficult to imagine himself proposing to anyone. Ever. He would continue with his string of conquests with nostrings attached, and he would never again risk feeling as he did right now: like he had been punched repeatedly in the chest.
He should have known, of course. He should have known that he could not be trusted around her, that any sort of arrangement with Diana would become complicated entirely too quickly. He’d been fascinated by her for years—their verbal sparring matches had been his favorite part of every social event he’d ever attended—and he should have known that an affair with her would only lead to trouble.
He’d made a mistake, and he was suffering for it now. But he would not make such a mistake again.
With a determined nod, he turned from the window to ring for his valet and begin the day.
Diana had slept like a baby.
Well, that might not have been strictly accurate. Because while she had, on occasion, observed a baby in a heavy slumber, she doubted that this effect was achieved by the application of a dose of brandy, administered rather liberally. Rather, she hoped not, for the baby’s sake.
Because no baby deserved to be feeling how she was feeling at the moment: like she had been run down by a carriage. Or as though a flock of sheep milled about on her head.
“Ouch!” she said, clapping a hand to the aching head in question after a particularly sharp tug of the hairbrush as Toogood dressed her hair.
“Apologies, my lady,” Toogood said, not sounding sorry at all. She gave her mistress an assessing look in the mirror, and Dianastraightened her shoulders, attempting to appear bright-eyed and refreshed. Like a heroine from a romantic novel.
