To Love and to Loathe (The Regency Vows #2)(8)

She stiffened and withdrew her hand from his grip. “My experience?” she asked coldly, inching herself away from him as much as was possible on the tiny settee.

Willingham seemed not to realize that he was treading on dangerous ground. “Well, yes,” he said blithely, shooting a flattering smile at her. It was an attractive smile, there was no doubt, but at the moment it left Diana entirely cold. “You’re a widow, with a certain reputation…” He trailed off, clearly intelligent enough to realize that he would gain no favor by further elaborating upon that point.

Ah, yes. Her reputation. Diana was no fool, and was, of course, aware of the whispers about her among the ton. She had, in truth, done much to cultivate such rumors—she had flirted and batted her eyelashes and worn revealing gowns because she liked the feeling of power it gave her. She was a woman in a society that thought women were helpless and weak, and she had spent her entire life subject to the whims of men. Now, at last, she was subject to no one’s whims but her own—she was a widow with a title and a healthy bank account, and she was young and beautiful and she knew it. Why shouldn’t she flirt—and more?

But it was the “and more” that was the sticking point. Because, in truth, her reputation was entirely founded on rumors rather than action. She had married, at eighteen, a man old enough to be her father, who had consummated their marriage for legality’s sake and then taken little interest in matters of the bedchamber from that point on. He had also, rather expediently, made her a widow.

And so here Diana was, young, full of certain… urges, with a reputation that preceded her and, in truth, no idea how to seduce a man. Or, rather, she thought she could seduce him quite easily, but she’d not much of an idea of precisely what to do with him once she’d lured him to her bedchamber. She had experience with the act in its most basic iteration, of course, and had a fair understanding of what brought her pleasure, but she lacked… finesse. And, as she was not a person who liked to admit to weakness, this bothered her.

With Willingham, at the moment, it seemed that little effort would have to be expended in the seduction. He was directing his charm at her so forcefully that she was surprised her legs hadn’t fallen open of their own accord. However, her momentary return to sanity had been enough to allow her to reclaim her naturally suspicious nature, and it was a wary glance she now leveled at the man beside her on the settee. Willingham was charming and flirtatious, it was true, but he was laying it on too thick.

She smelled a rat.

“Do remove yourself from my settee, Willingham,” she said briskly, proceeding to rearrange her skirts with such gusto that the man had no choice but to retreat to an armchair to avoid the risk of suffocation by muslin. “And tell me what your true plan is here. I’ve been out of mourning for positively ages and you’ve never so much as quirked a brow in my direction until now.”

Willingham sank into the armchair and crossed one leg elegantly over the opposite knee, his fingers drumming against the arms. All traces of flirtation had vanished as quickly as they had arrived, though Diana was distressed to note that she found him all the more appealing for their absence. He sighed heavily. “I should have known better than to try my usual tricks with you.”

“Yes, you should have,” Diana said severely. “Now explain.”

“I recently had a somewhat traumatizing experience.” Willingham’s eyes turned round and soulful. Diana, unmoved, waved her hand for him to continue. “I was in a… shall we say, private situation with a lady of my acquaintance, and at the end of the proceedings, I felt obliged to tell her that I thought it time our liaison came to an end.”

Diana raised a hand to stop him. “Just to be clear, do you mean to tell me that you rejected your lover after you bedded her?”

Willingham blinked. “Well… yes,” he said, as though this should be obvious. “It would have rather spoiled the mood if I’d done so beforehand.”

“But you could have just told her and then left!”

“But I wanted to have one last time with her to remember,” Willingham said, his eyes misting nostalgically.

“But the time prior to that would have been the last time for you to remember.”

“But I didn’t know then that it would be the last time. I hadn’t quite made my mind up, you see,” Willingham said, as though attempting to force a toddler to see reason. “But by the evening in question, I had decided, and so I wanted one last memory before it was all spoiled.”

Diana stared at him in disbelief. “But don’t you think it would all have been a bit less spoiled if you’d ended things in a gentlemanly fashion?”

Willingham sighed. “Well, as it turns out, you may be correct in this case. She was… somewhat perturbed, let us say, when I told her. I had to dress in rather a hurry to make it out of there before she woke the whole house with the insults she was flinging at me.”

“You told her whilst you were still in bed?” Diana had never considered herself to be someone with an overly strong moral compass—anyone who, at eighteen, forms a mental list of eligible mates and sets about seducing one with cold-blooded calculation cannot reasonably claim such an honor—but even she, it seemed, had her limits. “Willingham, I daresay you deserved every insult she threw at you, and quite a few she didn’t.”