To Love and to Loathe (The Regency Vows #2)(26)
Another distraction shortly arose in the form of the dowager marchioness, who wasted no time at all in settling herself beside Diana with a cup of tea and a disturbingly innocent smile.
“How did you sleep, my dear Lady Templeton?” asked the dowager marchioness, stirring sugar vigorously into her tea.
“Like a corpse,” Diana assured her.
“Good, good,” the dowager marchioness muttered, barely seeming to register her reply. “And have you seen my grandson yet this morning?”
“I can hardly see how I might have managed to evade him, given that we are sitting at the same breakfast table.” Diana held her breath, waiting; this was pushing it, she knew. The dowager marchioness might be diminutive in stature, but she could be quite terrifying when it suited her. This morning, however, she seemed to have her mind on other things—on one thing in particular, in fact, as Diana was coming to realize with creeping alarm.
“He is looking very well, is he not?” the dowager marchioness asked, giving Diana a beady-eyed stare.
“I suppose,” Diana hedged. “If one likes that sort of thing.”
The dowager marchioness pounced. “And what sort of thing would that be?”
“Oh, you know,” Diana said, affecting breeziness. “Blue eyes. Broad shoulders.” She faltered. “Cheekbones.”
“Yes, cheekbones,” the dowager marchioness agreed sagely, a clearly detectable note of glee in her voice. “I do admire a lady who properly appreciates cheekbones.”
Diana liked precisely nothing about where this conversation was going; not only did she have her own fixation on Willingham’s kiss to worry about, she apparently had a determined matchmaking grandmother to do battle with as well.
Diana knew herself, and prided herself on being able to honestly assess her own strengths. Willingham, she knew she could beat—no cheekbones or kisses would be powerful enough to defeat her. The dowager marchioness, however, was another matter entirely, and Diana had no desire to be on the receiving end of her scheming.
Diana cast her gaze around the room, as a drowning man might cast about for a raft, and her eyes caught on Willingham and Lady Helen, still cozily tête-à-tête at the other end of the table—and suddenly, Diana realized that the solution to her predicament had already presented itself.
She leaned back in her chair, directing her attention back to the dowager marchioness. “I believe Lady Helen appreciates cheekbones.”
The dowager marchioness blinked. “Lady Helen?”
Diana nodded serenely. “Yes, Lady Helen. You know, blond? Slender? Seated approximately ten feet away?”
The dowager marchioness’s eyes narrowed. “I am familiar with her, yes.”
“Oh, good,” Diana said, giving her an angelic smile. “Then surely you must have noticed the particular attention she is paying Willingham this morning. It’s really rather sweet.”
“I notice quite a bit, my girl,” the dowager marchioness said sternly, giving Diana a look that was vaguely reminiscent of the looks Diana’s governess had leveled at her more than once.
“Then of course,” Diana pressed, “you must realize the spark that I can see so clearly between them?”
The dowager marchioness appeared unmoved, which was, more or less, as Diana had expected; Rome hadn’t been built in a day, after all. But if the dowager marchioness was serious about seeing her grandson wed, then Diana was going to use any weapon at hand to ensure that the target of this grandmotherly matchmaking was anyone other than herself.
And, conveniently, Lady Helen’s presence at the house party provided just such a weapon.
Not that Willingham would be interested in Lady Helen, of course; she might question the man’s judgment at times, but he wasn’t completely deranged. But Lady Helen could certainly prove useful, if she kept the dowager marchioness’s sights off Diana herself.
In the hands of a lesser intellect, this would not be sufficient to propel a plan into motion, but Diana was decidedly not a lesser intellect, and she knew the bones of a perfectly good scheme when she saw them.
Fortunately for Diana’s plans, the gentlemen weren’t due to begin hunting until the following day; for today, a ride and picnic at Dauntsey Hill had been proposed. While she certainly could have used time apart from Willingham to cozy up to Lady Helen to further plant the seeds of romance, a picnic, too, presented its own sorts of opportunities. All that fresh air. Birds chirping, bees buzzing… Lady Helen could hardly fail to capitalize on such a romantic atmosphere.
Or at least, she could hardly fail to do so once Diana had prodded her in that direction.
Of course, it would be easier to focus on the matter at hand—redirecting the dowager marchioness’s speculative, matchmaking gaze far, far away from herself—if she weren’t still distracted by thoughts of her conversation with Willingham of the night before.
It had been… complicated. Complicating, rather, in that it had thoroughly muddled all the ways she thought about Willingham and herself and the way they worked together. All the neat boxes she had thought she could place the various aspects of their relationship into—intense attraction in this one, overpowering dislike in that one there—had been jumbled up. Now she had gotten a glimpse of a Willingham she didn’t just find interesting for purely physical reasons—and, more dangerously, she had also glimpsed a Willingham who saw more of her than she cared to reveal.