To Love and to Loathe (The Regency Vows #2)(85)

Diana, though, had never felt particularly like showing her paintings to a drawing room full of people. She had no ability to look at her own work objectively—though she believed her brother and friends when they told her she was very good—but she somehow thought that there was no chance that the feelings she kept bottled up within her did not spill onto the canvas somehow. And those feelings were certainly not the stuff of polite drawing room chatter. They were nothing that anyone else had any desire to see.

“I’m not in any state at all,” Diana said, realizing she’d allowed the silence between herself and Penvale to drag out slightly too long. “Unless you mean a state of smugness over my superior card skills. Perhaps it runs in the family,” she added, lifting her teacup in a toast.

Penvale clinked his tumbler gently against the delicate china of her cup. “Is this about Jeremy?”

Diana, who had just taken another sip of brandy-infused tea, choked. Penvale, like the loving, sensitive creature that he was, thumped her on the back so hard he nearly knocked her into the sideboard.

“Why would it be about Willingham?” Diana asked once she had recovered her composure and her balance.

Penvale gave her a withering look, and she sagged. “Did he say something?” she asked in an undertone, hating that she had become a person who would ask such a question—and of her brother, of all people. It was undoubtedly a low point.

“Not in so many words,” Penvale said, looking pained. “He seemed a bit distracted whilst we were out hunting today is all.”

“Perhaps he found pointing a gun at some fast-moving thing with antlers to offer insufficient intellectual stimulation,” Diana suggested sweetly.

Penvale gave her a speaking look. “Diana. This is Jeremy we’re discussing. He requires approximately as much intellectual stimulation as a field mouse.”

All at once, Diana was angry. She was not routinely angry with her infuriating brother, as was usual, but instead felt a surge of protective rage on the part of someone else that she’d never experienced before. Logically, some part of her knew that Penvale was Jeremy’s friend—one of his two dearest friends, and someone who had been close to Jeremy for far longer than she had, in fact—but that knowledge did not do much to suppress the entirely illogical, out-of-proportion feeling of fury coursing through her.

“Has it ever occurred to you, Penvale, that Jeremy might have intellectual depths that he has chosen not to share with you?” she asked icily. “Perhaps because he might expect just such a reaction, in fact? Or,” she added, really getting into the spirit of the thing now, “perhaps because he knows that your pea-size brain couldn’t possibly hope to keep up?”

Rather than looking offended, Penvale grinned at her. “It’s ‘Jeremy’ now, is it?”

Diana mentally cursed. She had stubbornly continued to address Jeremy by his title long after she might reasonably have ceased to do so; her use of his given name now gave her brother far more information about the status of her relationship with Jeremy than she was comfortable with Penvale having. Nevertheless, she resisted the urge to rise to his bait, as she learned to do the hard way, and many times over, throughout the course of their childhood.

“What it is or isn’t is none of your concern,” she said in the haughtiest tones that she reserved solely for her brother. She was naturally not about to inform him that she planned that very evening to lay her heart at Jeremy’s feet—possibly after enjoying a satisfying bout of amorous congress. She had no desire to have Penvale either warn her off or make the sort of threatening mutterings about his sister’s paramour that men seemed to believe was required of them in such situations.

“Just… be careful with him, Diana,” Penvale said quietly, and his tone was entirely serious.

“I can take care of myself,” Diana informed him.

“I know you can,” he said in that same low, grave voice. “I meant… take care with him. I’ve always been under the impression that he was rather carrying a torch for you all these years—I can’t think why else he would spend so much time provoking you.”

Diana simultaneously wanted to tell him that this was ridiculous and to admit that he was entirely right—for she knew, deep down, that she had always understood that there was something more to her relationship with Jeremy than mere antagonism. She had never allowed it, even to herself, of course. But she couldn’t say this. The words she held within her were for Jeremy, and no one else.

If this blasted evening would ever end and let her speak them, that is.



* * *




Jeremy, in some sense, hoped that the evening would never end—the longer it dragged on, the longer before he had to tell Diana of his plans to propose to Lady Helen.

He had spent a fair amount of time the past few hours in close proximity to the lady, and now that he knew her act for what it was—for an act it surely had to be—he was able to regard her performance appreciatively, like a theater-goer, rather than with the abject horror previously provoked by her fawning (and by her occasionally bold hands).

However, despite his newfound understanding that the lady was something more than the marriage-obsessed miss that she appeared, he did not look forward to the thought of informing Diana of his plan with any great enthusiasm. For the one, he hated being bested—particularly by her. And he was not eager to admit that he was surrendering in their wager. No, a smug Diana was not a prospect to be relished, even if a bet was worth losing if doing so earned him more nights in her bed.