To Love and to Loathe (The Regency Vows #2)(75)
An idea was slowly beginning to take shape in Diana’s mind—a wild, improbable, utterly scandalous idea—and she was desperate to know if she had the right of it. And, if she did have the right of it, she was similarly desperate to know who the gentleman was. Langely? Monmouth? Neither of them seemed particularly likely candidates, and yet…
The idea of Lady Helen taking a lover—for would this not perfectly explain why she needed her maid to remain with her during her “naps,” to act as lookout?—was so preposterous that Diana was tempted to reject it as quickly as it had occurred to her. And yet, if there was one thing she loved more than gossip—and make no mistake, she was exceptionally fond of gossip, so long as it wasn’t about her—it was secrets so delicious and well-kept that no one even whispered of them. It wasn’t often one was privy to such a confidence, and she was positively desperate, all of a sudden, to know if she had been so lucky.
But how to find out? She and Lady Helen were hardly bosom companions—a less likely confidant Diana could scarcely imagine. But if she were correct in her wild supposition, then it was possible that she had badly misjudged Lady Helen, in which case…
Well, she didn’t know quite what.
“My breakfast, please, Toogood,” she said briskly, interrupting her maid’s diatribe, which seemed to have turned to the subject of naps in general, and the loose, reckless nature of those who took them. With a few last muttered grievances—and a very dark look—Toogood departed, leaving Diana alone with her suddenly quite fascinating thoughts. How best to approach this situation? She had nothing but a vague theory—and a wildly improbable one at that.
Although, if it were true, Diana was not at all certain where it left her plans to see Jeremy married. If Lady Helen was liaising with someone else, was her interest in Jeremy entirely feigned—a front to disguise her actual activities? Not that anything Jeremy had said to her had given her the slightest indication that he now considered matrimony—to Lady Helen, or anyone else—to be an appealing prospect, in any case.
But then, there had been that moment last night, in bed…
Diana lost track of her own thoughts for a moment, remembering. It should have been nothing more than an idle, curious comment, but there had been something in his expression—an intensity, an interest in her response—when he asked her if she intended to wed again that had made her take notice. Which was sufficiently alarming, for reasons she didn’t care to delve into very deeply, that she had wasted no time in shutting down that line of inquiry with one of her typical breezy jokes.
The fact was, her own intimacy with Jeremy did not seem to have given her any great insight into his mind. Did she understand him better than she had a week ago? Undoubtedly—and she liked him a dangerous amount, as a result. Did she know what he was looking for in a wife? Absolutely not—and the idea of such a person existing was suddenly more distasteful to her than she would have liked it to be. Some primal, traitorous part of her whispered, Mine, when she thought of him, and it simply would not do.
She knew it must be a simple result of their physical relationship—she had never taken a lover before, after all, and she had certainly never found so much satisfaction in the bedchamber, despite his early fumbling. She was, in fact, remarkably pleased on that front; she admitted that her own limited experience offered little by way of comparison, but she was certain that the previous night’s activities had been exceptional by anyone’s measure. He had needed a bit of guidance, of course—but Diana suspected this weakness was common to men in the bedroom, just as it was in so many situations outside of the bedroom, too. He had accepted her instructions with remarkably good grace, and it in fact did something strange and squirmy to her insides to think of him touching her, listening to her words, working his hardest to bring her release.
He had certainly succeeded spectacularly on that front, she reflected; had she known the marital act could be like this, she would have taken a lover before Templeton was cold in the ground. She, fool that she was, hadn’t even been able to maintain an aura of cool reserve after the fact; she had no idea what the size of Jeremy’s head would be today, but she’d no doubt that the man would be insufferably smug about the entire experience, and the worst bit was that he probably deserved to be.
The long and short of it was, Lady John Marksdale had clearly been exaggerating her complaints. There had been a bit of fumbling at the beginning, it was true, but things had improved considerably from that point. Diana liked to think that she was doing a sort of community service to all the future actresses and opera dancers and merry widows who would make their way into Jeremy’s bed; he knew how to pay a bit closer attention now, and she’d no doubt that women would be reaping the benefits of this lesson for years to come.
This thought was unexpectedly depressing, and she refocused her attention on the matter at hand: namely, that she still had no idea how she was going to get the man married, and the more she felt herself growing attached, the more necessary this goal became. If Jeremy was married to someone else, he was safe; she might be many things, but she was not the sort of hopeless creature to fall in love with another woman’s husband. Her scheme had taken advantage of Lady Helen’s blatant attempts to fling herself at Jeremy to make some other eligible lady look attractive by comparison—but Diana now, all of a sudden, was uncertain as to why, exactly, Lady Helen was behaving this way toward Jeremy. If she was liaising with another gentleman, shouldn’t she be attempting to marry him instead?