Too Wilde to Wed (The Wildes of Lindow Castle, #2)(24)

“You went to the Foundling Hospital?” North asked hollowly. No wonder he had been unable to find her. She had ventured into one of the worst areas of London, with nothing but a hatbox.

“First I went to Christ’s Hospital, but they take infants only if they are legitimate. It took me another two days, but I found my way to Bloomsbury Fields and the Foundling Hospital there.”

He felt sick.

And even sicker, once she told him about giving the hospital her other emerald in order to buy her nephew back. Taking the baby to her home, only to find her mother in hysterics after North’s visit. “It was unnervingly like being in a bad play,” she said, trying to smile and failing.

North fought his own stuttering breath, unable to find words. It was deeply ironic that the only woman who had no interest in his estate or title was the one he felt a deep, visceral urge to protect.

He had failed her.

“I hadn’t been thinking properly since my sister died.” Diana’s fingers twisted together. “I tend to leap before I look, and my flight to London was one of my more idiotic moments in a life filled with lunacy.”

He crossed the distance between them in a single stride, put his hands on her shoulders, and pulled her into his arms. “You did what you could to keep your nephew safe,” he bit out. “There is nothing idiotic about that.” She gazed up at him, her eyes wide, her eyelashes spangled in the moonlight. “When your mother threw you out, where did you go?”

“I took the post to my old nanny’s home, but she had passed away.”

Curses rose to his lips, but he cut them off. “I cannot believe that your mother threw you and her only grandson out the door without money.”

“She gave me five pounds,” Diana said. “She was livid about the emeralds, and Godfrey, and my sister’s death, though she wouldn’t admit it. My mother never approved of me so much as when you courted me. I let her down dreadfully.”

North saw no point in expressing his violent feelings toward Mrs. Belgrave. “My turn to apologize,” he said, putting her away from him, because in another moment he would bend his mouth to hers.

“For what?”

“For wooing you so ineptly that you couldn’t tell me about your sister’s death. Lecturing you about being a duchess. For God’s sake, Diana, why didn’t you just tell me to shut up?”

“You were enjoying yourself,” she said, her mouth quirking up in the teasing grin that he never saw when they were betrothed.

Because he was too busy being an ass.

“I didn’t notice you were grieving, because I was trying to make you into a duchess.” His voice rasped.

“I would have made a wretched duchess,” she said, with obvious conviction. She touched his arm. “Are you well, North? I thought you’d be asleep hours ago. You seem dreadfully tired.”

“It’s not easy coming back to England after being at war,” he said, surprising himself. “The castle is so quiet.”

“I think it’s loud.” She wrinkled her nose at him. “I would have thought stone was silent, but the floors creak.”

“The ghosts make noises too,” he said, enthralled by the playfulness he’d never seen when they were betrothed.

Her eyes grew bigger. “Ghosts?”

“Has no one told you about the castle ghosts?”

“In here?” Her gaze skittered around the kitchen.

“There’s supposedly a priest up on the ramparts who carries his head under his arm, but I never heard of him straying into the kitchens,” he told her, adding, “My brothers and I made up more ghosts; unfortunately there was no evidence for their existence.”

“Well, thank goodness for that,” she said tartly. She turned to go.

A gentleman would escort her through those dark corridors to the nursery. But her wrapper had eased open and her nightgown was made of a flimsy cotton.

Diana had beautiful breasts, the kind that made a man’s gut twist and yearn. Better he stay here, and let her go.

She hesitated, and left.

The space where she’d been assumed the shape of the ghost of the duchess he might have had.

The duchess he would never have.





Chapter Six





The following night



Months before, North had hoped that untroubled sleep would return to him during the interminable voyage back to England. If not then, once he’d returned to his boyhood bedchamber in the castle.

But no.

He had lost the gift of sleep at the battle where he’d lost most of his regiment. It didn’t matter how often a man told himself that he had sworn a vow to follow orders, no matter how idiotic.

By buying a commission, North had put himself in charge of more than two hundred men. In making the vow to serve, he had put all two hundred lives at risk.

In following that vow, he had sacrificed a number of them. He pushed the thought out of his head and fixed on another reason for sleeplessness: Diana.

Her story had a number of gaps in it. Her sister had given birth to an illegitimate baby, and died shortly before the betrothal party. He could understand that Diana believed care for Godfrey was incompatible with a lady’s life.

She was wrong; Godfrey could have been established in a warm and loving home. Or, if Diana insisted on having him under her eye, North knew several examples of noble ladies raising their own or their husbands’ bastards.