To Love and to Loathe (The Regency Vows #2)(74)
She stifled a yawn against the back of her hand, and Jeremy cast a glance at the clock hanging above the mantel. It was nearly two, and his body was beginning to recognize that fact, growing slow and languorous from the combined effects of a long day and an active evening. “I should go back to my room,” he said reluctantly, easing his arm out from behind her and rising to his feet. “I can’t risk falling asleep here and being discovered by one of the housemaids.”
“I think they’ll know I had a visitor,” she said with a significant glance at the bedsheets. “But you’re right—it’s likely best if they don’t know it’s you. A loose widow is far less interesting than a loose widow engaged in licentious acts with the master of the house himself.”
Jeremy was moving about the room as she spoke, gathering his discarded articles of clothing. He hastily began to dress. “Shall I come again tomorrow evening?” he asked over his shoulder as he did up the buttons on his breeches. He caught her eyes fixed on him in rapt attention, and she smiled, entirely unashamed to be caught gawking.
“Yes—hopefully in both senses of the word,” she said; he paused for a second, then burst out laughing, almost in unison with her, and as he laughed helplessly, the thought rose to his mind unbidden: he loved her.
That, at least, was sufficient to bring his laughter to an abrupt end, and he was able to finish dressing in a hurry by the time her own giggles had trailed off. He tried not to look too carefully at her—naked and tousled, giggling helplessly at her own bawdy joke—for the sake of his dignity; if a thought like that could pop into his mind out of nowhere, it seemed only a matter of time before it popped out of his mouth, and he shuddered to think what her reaction to that would be, given her earlier response to the merest mention of marriage. And marriage, after all, was a far sight less serious than love.
Mastering herself at last, she added, “I want to start painting tomorrow.”
“I’m at your disposal, madam,” he said, offering her a courtly bow—a barefoot courtly bow, it was true, but he still thought he made a rather good show of it.
“I know,” she said cheerfully, dimpling at him. “I’m still feeling a bit wobbly as a result of that fact.”
He gave her a knowing smirk as he backed out of the room to the sound of her renewed laughter, and it was only once he was in the hall, having shut the door quietly behind him, that he allowed his smile to fade. He braced his forearms on the wall next to her door and allowed his forehead to fall forward to rest upon them with a muffled sort of thud.
“Bloody buggering fuck,” he said with feeling.
Twenty
Diana slept even later than usual the next morning, and when she awoke she was gloriously, blissfully sore in certain muscles that hadn’t received any exercise in quite a few years—and which had never been worked so thoroughly, at that. She stretched her arms above her head and pointed her toes, staring up at the canopy over her bed, which was dappled with enough sunlight to tell her it was late morning. She contemplated ringing for Toogood and dressing in a hurry, but instead, when her maid responded to her summons, requested a breakfast tray.
“It would be too much effort to actually leave the bed to eat, I suppose,” Toogood said with her typical utter lack of grace. “Some of us have been awake for hours, whilst others lie abed until noon, a day slipping by outdoors whilst they slumber off the evening’s excesses.”
“Some toast and chocolate, Toogood,” Diana said serenely, too pleased with the success of the previous evening to even work herself up about her maid’s typical rudeness.
Toogood, unsurprisingly, ignored her. “Whilst you’re not as bad as Lady Helen, I’ll confess, I still think it a sign of a lack of moral fiber to spend quite this much time in bed.”
Diana’s ears perked up at the sound of Lady Helen’s name. “What do you mean?” she asked.
“You see, if you weren’t so lazy…” Toogood began, with the closest thing to joy Diana had ever seen in her manner. Evidently, the opportunity to expand upon her mistress’s character failings was akin to Christmas come early.
“No, I meant about Lady Helen,” Diana interrupted, waving her hand impatiently. “She’s usually at the breakfast table before I am in the morning.”
Toogood muttered something that might have been, “That’s not saying much,” but followed it up with the information Diana desired before any reprimand could be directed at her. “She’s awake early enough in the morning, but she takes to her room in the afternoon almost every day—some nonsense about becoming overtired, and from what, I ask you?—and she insists her maid remain with her the entire time. Can’t even nap alone! What sort of person can’t nap alone?”
Toogood, having discovered a new target for her irritation, expanded upon this subject with great fervor, and at considerable length, but Diana stopped listening, distracted by what Toogood had just told her.
How odd. Diana wasn’t surprised that Lady Helen rested in the afternoon—it was just the sort of insipid thing society ladies did with great frequency, as though the effort of eating a meal and exchanging conversation over tea was so taxing that an afternoon nap was necessary to recoup one’s strength—but her insistence on her maid remaining present seemed peculiar in the extreme. She supposed the lady wouldn’t hesitate to inconvenience one of her servants, but it still seemed strange to be so desirous of her maid’s company while sleeping.