To Love and to Loathe (The Regency Vows #2)(31)

With great effort, he extricated his hand from hers.

“It was indeed a soulful moment,” he agreed solemnly, “but perhaps best saved for some occasion other than a picnic, you understand.”

“Picnics cannot be soulful?” Diana inquired, all innocence.

“Oh, to be sure, Lady Templeton,” he said, never breaking eye contact with Lady Helen. “But I prefer my more soulful picnics to be a touch more… private.”

“Oh, of course!” Diana clapped a dramatic hand to her chest. “Shall I just go… over there?” She gestured vaguely in the direction of the blanket currently occupied by West, Belfry, and Emily. “I don’t wish to interrupt, you understand.”

“That won’t be necessary,” Jeremy said hastily, looking away from Lady Helen at last, in time to see the flash of laughter in Diana’s eyes before she quickly hid it behind her usual mask of lazy indifference. “The mood has been spoiled.”

“How tragic,” Diana said, the laughter that had been in her eyes a moment ago now evident in her voice.

“Yes, how tragic,” Lady Helen echoed in an entirely different tone. Jeremy had nearly forgotten that she was there, despite the fact that, until moments before, he had been staring at her face, holding her hand. The moment he began to speak to Diana—to banter with her, to engage in their constant game of one-upsmanship—everything else around him faded in significance. He had the distinct impression that the woodland they had recently emerged from could have burst into flames and he would not have noticed, had he been occupied with baiting Diana. It was a profoundly unsettling thought.

“Lady Helen, I find myself restless,” he said suddenly, springing to his feet, nearly upsetting his own glass of wine. At the moment, it no longer held any appeal for him—he was too alarmed by the potential dangers attached to dulling one’s wits in the company of Lady Helen Courtenay. He had not forgotten that hand creeping up his thigh. He felt like a fussy virgin, but really, they were in public.

At a picnic.

In a meadow.

There were things that decent English people simply did not do.

Jeremy had not considered himself to be counted among the ranks of “decent English people,” but he was coming to realize that he had more scruples than he realized. Disturbingly sexual advances from eligible virgins appeared to be his limit.

Of course, had the eligible virgin been Diana, he doubted that he would have reacted with such horror. But Diana had not been an eligible virgin in a very long time. That was the reason he was able to anticipate another late-night visit to her bedchamber.

Shaking these thoughts away, he said, “Would you ladies care to accompany me on a walk?”

Lady Helen wrinkled her nose. “Exercise? My dear Lord Willingham, you must be joking.”

“For once, Lady Helen and I are in complete agreement,” Diana chimed in, helpful as ever. “Unnecessary movement is frightfully bourgeois, Willingham.”

In a moment of clarity, however, Jeremy realized that Diana was lying. Or not lying, precisely, but putting on the public persona of Diana, Lady Templeton, that he knew was only a small fraction of who she truly was. She had been playing the role for so long that it had become more and more difficult to distinguish between the public Diana and the private Diana, and he counted it as a small victory each time he was able to catch the deception.

He could, of course, say none of this aloud—it would have made him sound like a raving lunatic, or at the very least oddly fixated on his friend’s sister.

Which, of course, he was not.

He turned away from Lady Helen to face Diana instead. Offering her his best courtly bow—the one he employed only on very select, important occasions, lest it send all the ladies in his presence into swooning fits—he extended a hand. “Will you walk with me anyway, Lady Templeton?”

Diana, of course, appeared to be in no danger of swooning. Instead, she looked mildly irritated. “Lady Helen does not wish to walk,” she said, giving him a mildly terrifying smile. “Why do you not remain here to keep her company?” She cast a look about them. “I had something I wished to speak to Violet about, anyway.”

“It can wait, I’m certain,” Jeremy insisted.

“But I know you would relish any opportunity to spend even a moment longer in Lady Helen’s company,” Diana said, her deranged smile widening even further. “I am certain the lady would be amenable to… to…”

She trailed off, clearly attempting to think of an activity that would meet with Lady Helen’s approval. Jeremy waited, amused; with a glance to the side, he saw that Lady Helen was watching Diana curiously as well. There was something shrewd in her gaze, he noticed with a slight pang of alarm; given Diana’s and his desire to keep their liaison a secret, he did not think anything that drew unnecessary attention to them was at all a good sign. And Lady Helen, at the moment, was definitely attentive.

His concerns were relegated to the back of his mind a moment later, however, when Diana burst out with: “Poetry!”

“Poetry,” Jeremy repeated, drawing the word out into more syllables than naturally inhabited the six letters.

“Lady Helen clearly has a poetic soul,” Diana said; it was a testament to how convincing she could be when she put her mind to it that, even now, clearly scrambling, putting in far from her best performance, she did not sound entirely absurd. Largely absurd, yes, but not entirely so.