To Love and to Loathe (The Regency Vows #2)(90)
“Jeremy, it’s not a shortcoming!” she said, her tone sliding from tenderness to exasperation in a split second. “You’re allowed to be angry at your brother—it doesn’t mean you love him any less. It doesn’t make you any less worthy of a man. But if you can’t see yourself as you truly are, then I don’t want to waste my time trying to convince you otherwise.”
“Perhaps I’d better go, then,” he snapped angrily, “and you can summon me back to your bed once you’ve worked out what, precisely, it is that you want from me.”
“I thought I’d spent the past five minutes explaining just that,” she said coldly, her voice gone deadly quiet. He would have been less alarmed had she been shouting. “You just don’t seem to be listening.” Out of the corner of his eye, he saw her flexing her hand at her side, as though she were positively itching to slap him. He couldn’t say he blamed her—he had just announced his intent to propose to someone else—and yet he could not control the anger that coursed through him at the moment. He was following the rules, and she had changed them.
“You should be thanking me,” he said, gripped by that relentless desire to have the last word in every argument they’d ever shared. “If I marry Lady Helen, you’ll win our bloody wager.” He sketched an ironic bow. “Isn’t that what you wanted? I’m always happy to assist.”
“You think you’re fooling everyone when you use that tone,” she said, crossing her arms—regrettably—over her chest. “But just so you know, you’re not fooling me. You’re more than a charming rake, Jeremy, and you’ll realize soon enough that you’re not fooling yourself, either. But don’t expect me to wait around for that moment to arrive.
“Now,” she added quietly, her eyes never leaving his, “get out.”
He clenched his jaw, let himself out of the room, and just barely resisted the urge to slam the door behind him.
Twenty-Three
The weather the next morning suited Jeremy’s mood perfectly. He awoke after tossing and turning for much of the night to find the sky full of heavy gray clouds, a halfhearted drizzle spitting against the windows already, with no end in sight to the gloomy weather. He was torn between the desire to remain in bed indefinitely, burying his head beneath the pillows and blocking out everything and everyone in the world around him, and jumping on his horse and riding like hell until he collapsed from exhaustion.
Unfortunately, the presence of a number of houseguests and the inclement weather made both of these fantasies unworkable and, as little as he wished to speak to anyone at the moment, he more or less had no choice in the matter. He should, he knew, ring for his valet and dress and make his way downstairs—a glance at the clock on the wall confirmed that there were likely already guests at the breakfast table—but he delayed, hoping to put off the moment he’d have to see Diana for as long as possible.
Instead, he rose from bed, ignoring the slight chill in the room that bit into his naked skin. He stood at the window, watching the clouds roll in, his thoughts full of the angry words he and Diana had exchanged the night before.
You’re not fooling yourself, either.
It was that parting shot that dug deeper than all of her other verbal barbs combined. Because wasn’t that precisely what he had been attempting to do—not just for the past fortnight, but for the past six years? He had been trying to fool everyone around him, yes—convince them that the Marquess of Willingham was no one to be listened to, no one to take seriously, nothing but a pale imitation of the brother who had rightfully held the title before him. No one to pin any hopes or expectations on. But, more important, he’d been trying to fool himself, too—to convince himself that the fact that David was dead didn’t matter, that he was standing here in his brother’s house, wearing his brother’s title, was fine, when of course it wasn’t. It would never be fine. Restoring the family fortunes hadn’t made it fine—sleeping with half of the women of the ton, drinking his body weight in brandy every night for years hadn’t made it fine, either. And it hadn’t made the barely suppressed anger—that anger which he’d never dared admit to, and yet which Diana had spotted so easily, from the first moment he’d discussed David with her—vanish, either.
Leave it to Diana to make him excruciatingly, clearly aware of these facts.
And now he’d cocked things up so royally that he was unlikely to ever hear anything from her ever again, other than his name paired with a curse—and then only if he was lucky.
On the bright side, he would not be losing one hundred pounds to Diana today—or, likely, any day. Because not only was he not going to propose to Lady Helen—what was the point, if he’d lost Diana anyway?—he found it difficult to imagine himself proposing to anyone. Ever. He would continue with his string of conquests with no strings attached, and he would never again risk feeling as he did right now: like he had been punched repeatedly in the chest.
He should have known, of course. He should have known that he could not be trusted around her, that any sort of arrangement with Diana would become complicated entirely too quickly. He’d been fascinated by her for years—their verbal sparring matches had been his favorite part of every social event he’d ever attended—and he should have known that an affair with her would only lead to trouble.