To Love and to Loathe (The Regency Vows #2)(79)

“Willingham and I made a wager about him being married within a year,” Diana said, feeling a bit sheepish.

Lady Helen frowned. “But surely you couldn’t have thought Lord Willingham would want to marry a lady like me? Or rather, the Lady Helen Courtenay he thinks he knows?”

“No,” Diana admitted, “but I was hopeful that if I flung him together with you enough, it would make him reconsider some of the other ladies of his acquaintance—might make them appear more appealing prospects by comparison.”

“So you were essentially using me to scare him into matrimony?” Lady Helen asked, arching a brow.

Diana was beginning to feel rather ashamed of herself. “Well… yes, I suppose that is the most succinct way to put it.”

Lady Helen burst out laughing, her real laugh, happy and unguarded, a far cry from the shrill giggles Diana had previously heard her emit. It had a transformative effect—her entire face softened, the cool, haughty look that she usually wore having completely vanished. “I really should thank you,” she said after a moment, still giggling. “If ever I needed confirmation that my efforts are working, you have just given it to me. Not only have I made myself an unappealing matrimonial prospect, I have in fact become so dreadful that the mere specter of marriage to me can be used to scare gentlemen into marrying others.”

“When you put it like that, I feel rather ashamed of myself,” Diana confessed. “I should offer you an apology.”

Lady Helen waved a hand dismissively. “Don’t bother with all that. What I’d like to know, however, is why it is that you are trying to get Lord Willingham married to someone else when it is obvious that you’re in love with him.”

Diana felt the blood drain from her face. “I’m certain I don’t know what you mean,” she said stiffly—and, she feared, entirely unconvincingly.

“Oh, come now, I thought we were being honest with each other,” Lady Helen said, fixing her with a beady-eyed stare. “It might not be obvious to everyone, but to me, at least—well, it’s quite the experience to have another lady conspiring to get you alone with a certain gentleman at every possible opportunity, and yet also glaring every time she succeeded.”

Diana sighed. “Willingham and I have a bit of an… arrangement, at the moment,” she said carefully. “However, it is entirely temporary, and I’ve no wish for another loveless marriage of convenience.”

“Love can exist without marriage, just as much as the opposite is true. I promise you, I’m quite certainly in love with Sutton, and we’ll never be married,” Lady Helen said. “It seems to me that there is a fair amount of feeling between you and Lord Willingham, even if you never marry.”

“I didn’t…” Diana hesitated, floundering. “Willingham and I have a casual arrangement.”

Lady Helen snorted, the sound yet another reminder—if Diana needed one—that the lady before her bore little resemblance to the one Diana had thought she’d known. “It doesn’t seem all that casual to me, judging by the way you look at each other.”

Diana opened her mouth to object—her natural response to any insinuation of deeper sentiment on her part, about anyone at all, but most particularly Jeremy—but then closed it again. And, for perhaps the first time, paused to ask herself: did she love Jeremy?

She had spent so much time insisting—to Jeremy, to Violet and Emily, to herself—that their arrangement was based on nothing more than mutual attraction and convenience, and brutally suppressing every hint of true feeling the moment it attempted to emerge, that she had not taken even a moment to ask herself this simple question.

She thought of Jeremy—of the man she’d thought she’d known so well, and of the one he was revealing himself to be bit by bit, conversation by conversation. She thought of the laugh lines at the corners of his blue eyes, and of the particular quirk to one side of his mouth when he was bickering with her, waiting to see if she’d rise to the bait. She thought of the intensity of his gaze on her when they were naked in bed, her hand moving with his to find the rhythm she wanted. Most of all, she thought of the thrill she felt every time he walked into a room, every time she scored a point in one of their never-ending arguments, every time his face lit up with amusement at whatever set-down she’d just delivered him.

And she realized that of course she loved him.

Now what on earth was she to do about it?

Lady Helen, of course, had been privy to none of these thoughts, but she’d been watching Diana carefully and seemed to guess at some of what had crossed her mind.

“Not so casual, then?” she asked. “I thought not,” she added, not even waiting for a reply.

“You needn’t sound so smug,” Diana grumbled.

“I rather think I’m entitled to it,” Lady Helen said airily, which, Diana reflected, was true. Lady Helen had successfully enacted an elaborate, yearslong ruse that had fooled the entire ton, while Diana couldn’t even carry on a discreet affair without falling in love in painfully obvious fashion.

“I’d appreciate your keeping this to yourself,” she said briskly. “I’ve no intention of risking looking ridiculous by declaring myself to Willingham, so this need go no further than the two of us.”

“Whatever you wish,” Lady Helen said, waving an idle hand. “You might consider that some things are worth the risk, though.”