To Love and to Loathe (The Regency Vows #2)(48)

“No,” he said, still in that soft, serious voice so unlike his usual laughter-filled tone. “My father had everything covered in sheets after my mother died—said there was no point in paying servants to clean a room no one used.” His tone was mild, but Diana could hear the bitterness underneath. “My brother had it opened back up again, after my father’s death,” he continued. “He never used it, I don’t think, but he had servants come in and clean, made sure everything was in immaculate condition, should it ever be wanted. I’ve often wondered if he was preserving it for his wife.”

Diana held her breath, scarcely daring to breathe, lest she break this spell. After their conversation the previous night, she didn’t want to push him too much on the subject of his brother, but she found herself curious.

“Did your brother have an… attachment, then?” she asked hesitantly. She had never heard the previous Marquess of Willingham’s name mentioned in connection with any lady in particular, unlike that of West, whose aborted courtship of Sophie she assumed to be another casualty of that blasted curricle accident.

“Not that I’m aware of, no,” Jeremy said with a shrug. “He had a mistress at the time of his death—I know, because I paid her off rather handsomely once he died. He hadn’t thought to make any provision for her himself, of course—he was only twenty-four. Why would he think about dying?” There was a faint note of bitterness to the words.

Diana decided to press her luck. “When you speak of your brother, you seem… angry,” she said hesitantly, after trying and failing to come up with a better adjective.

Jeremy recoiled as if he’d been physically struck. “I’m not angry,” he said, an unmistakable note of defensiveness in his voice. “It’s hardly his fault that he died.”

“No one forced him to get in that curricle that day,” Diana said, and nearly wished the words unsaid a moment later, when something raw and dark flashed through his eyes. “I don’t mean to say that you blame him, just—”

“In any case,” Jeremy said loudly, drowning her out entirely, “I think it was more of a hypothetical future wife who might use the room.” Diana opened her mouth, then closed it again; if he didn’t wish to discuss this subject, who was she to press him on the matter? After a moment, seeing that she was going to allow him to return to the original subject of conversation, he gave her a crooked sideways grin that almost, almost fooled her into forgetting the pained expression on his face moments before. “Gentlemen aren’t opposed to the idea of wives in theory, you see. Just so long as the theoretical wife never seems any closer than a decade in the future.”

“Does that mean, theoretically, that had I extended the time frame of my wager with you, you might not have been so quick to take it?”

“My dear Lady Templeton,” he said, “since spiting you is one of my life’s great pleasures, you could have bet me that I’d be married within the next twenty years and I’d still have remained a bachelor, just for the satisfaction of thwarting you.”

She narrowed her eyes at him. “You’re a marquess, you know,” she said. “You will need to sire heirs at some point.”

He widened his eyes in mock horror. “Are you implying that, at the ripe old age of eight-and-forty, I will be unable to, shall we say, rise to the occasion? I might as well kill myself now, if that’s the fate that awaits me.”

“You are quite insufferable—you are aware of that?” she said conversationally.

“So I’ve been told, many times,” he said, unruffled. “Most of them by you, though, so perhaps I should seek a wider sample of opinions.”

“You do that,” she said placidly. “I’ll just wait right here.”

“On second thought,” he said, shifting with a slight wince—his current seating position could not be terribly comfortable—“I’m not sure I trust my knees to hold my weight at the moment, so perhaps I won’t.”

Diana didn’t know what it was that possessed her in that moment—some madness inspired, no doubt, by the slight dimple in his right cheek, or the way, in his current position, his jacket stretched very appealingly over his broad shoulders. Or perhaps, most likely of all, it had been that faint crease between his eyebrows that she had never noticed before, and the ragged note in his voice when he spoke of his brother. Regardless of what caused it, the fact was that Diana took momentary leave of her senses and said, “You can make yourself more comfortable, you know.”

He quirked a brow at her yet again, all seductive innuendo. “Is that so?”

She rolled her eyes. “Not like that. But if you should like to use my lap so that you might stretch out more comfortably, you are welcome to.” When she issued this invitation, she had a mental image of him toeing off his boots and resting his feet in her lap, which, while certainly inappropriate, was rather lacking in romantic charm.

He, however, had other ideas. “Better yet,” he said, and there was a light gleaming in his eyes that she didn’t like one bit, “why don’t we use my lap?”

Diana opened her mouth—to issue some cutting set-down, she assured herself—but before she could speak, in a sudden flurry of movement, Jeremy dropped his knees, seized her waist, and lifted her bodily onto his lap.