To Love and to Loathe (The Regency Vows #2)(95)
“Ah,” she said, in a tone of great smugness.
“What is that supposed to mean?” Jeremy asked grumpily, tearing his eyes from Diana with great difficulty to focus once more on the dowager marchioness, who was regarding him with a mixture of exasperation, amusement, and what he very much feared was pity.
“Why don’t you go after her?” she asked.
“I’m fairly certain my company wouldn’t be welcome at present,” Jeremy said, his mind once again returning to the evening before. God, how he’d bungled things.
“Well, you can’t hope to remedy things without speaking to her, can you?” his grandmother asked practically. “And you do wish to do so, I take it?”
Jeremy opened his mouth to deny this—to offer some carefree, blatantly untrue remark about it not much mattering to him one way or the other. To insist that Diana was simply a woman he enjoyed bantering with, flirting with, and nothing more—but all at once, he didn’t have the energy. What was the point in lying any longer? He wanted her quite desperately, and just yesterday had been prepared to go to somewhat alarming lengths to keep her. Why bother denying that fact?
“I do,” he acknowledged, and his grandmother’s face lit up with glee. He frowned at her, something niggling at his mind. “I thought you wanted me to marry Lady Helen, though.” His frown deepened. “You mentioned her as a marriage prospect more than once.” He didn’t know why he ever bothered to attempt to keep pace with the motivations of women; doing so seemed to be a nearly impossible task.
His grandmother snorted. “Of course I didn’t. What sort of a fool do you take me for? But if that horrid creature’s attempts to seduce you made you realize Lady Templeton was right there under your nose, well, who was I to resist suggesting the idea to you? Though,” she added, her gaze flicking across the room to where Lady Helen was in conversation with Rothsmere, “I must say, she’s barely looked your way all night. I’m beginning to wonder if she won’t be at all heartbroken if she finds out your affections are otherwise engaged.”
“I believe you are entirely correct,” Jeremy said, deciding it wisest to leave it at that. He glanced over his grandmother’s shoulder and saw that Diana had vanished. He had to make things more right between them, even if she wouldn’t forgive him for the night before. He had to at least try.
“I must ask you to excuse me,” he said shortly, and his grandmother waved him off cheerfully, not displaying the slightest hint of surprise at his unusual behavior. He gave a short bow and crossed the room to slip out the door. He looked left and right down the hallway; seeing the train of Diana’s dress vanishing around a corner to the left, he set off in pursuit. Rounding the corner, he saw Diana pause as she walked past an open doorway, then duck inside.
Jeremy paused in the doorway, watching her. Of course she’d stop in this room. It was the portrait gallery.
She moved slowly from painting to painting, standing very close to each one, only a few inches separating the tip of her nose from the brushstrokes on the canvas. After scrutinizing a work at close proximity, she stepped back, taking in the whole scene, then moved back farther still, as if to see what impression it made from a distance.
He stood there watching her for a couple of minutes before the sudden stiffening of her shoulders indicated her awareness of his presence. She did not turn to look at him, but he pushed himself upright from where he’d been leaning with one shoulder propped in the doorway and walked slowly toward her. She kept her gaze firmly fixed on the painting before her—a Rubens, if he wasn’t mistaken—and remained silent even as he drew up alongside her.
“I want my paintings to make people feel the way this makes me feel,” she said at last, her gaze still fixed on the canvas, which depicted a hunt scene, bold strokes of white and gray creating an overcast sky through which an eerie light filtered down on the scene below. Though Diana spoke quietly, the room was silent around them and every word was crisp and clear.
“And how does it make you feel?”
“Alive,” she said without hesitation. “The way he’s made the sky balance out the landscape below—the use of light—it feels so vivid and real. I want everything I paint to feel like this.” She inhaled sharply and turned to him. She opened her mouth to speak, but her gaze caught and fixed on something behind him and she moved past him, drawing up before a small painting on the opposite wall. Most of the paintings in this room were either works by masters—like the Rubens she’d been admiring—that spoke to the Overingtons’ power and wealth in possessing them, or stiff, formal portraits of family members of various generations.
The painting Diana was examining with great interest was a portrait, but there was nothing stiff or formal about it. It depicted two young boys sitting side by side atop a blanket in the grass. Sunshine beat down upon them, making their identical mops of golden hair gleam in the light. One boy appeared to be about seven or eight, the other a couple of years younger; the elder boy had his arm slung casually around the younger boy’s shoulders, and they wore the bright, happy smiles of childhood.
“You and David,” Diana said softly; it wasn’t a question.
“Painted by my mother,” he said, moving to stand next to her. “The summer before she died.”
“I’d forgotten how much the two of you resembled each other,” she said, her eyes still fixed on the artwork before her.