Too Wilde to Wed (The Wildes of Lindow Castle, #2)(30)

“I feel comfortable with you,” he said, taking another bite before he could say something stupid.

“I suppose it’s because we have a past.” Her voice was thoughtful. “You can trust me not to be chasing after you with ducal lust in my eyes.”

He finished the toast, knowing damned well that he’d like to see any kind of lust in her eyes.

“You’d better eat this as well,” she said, handing over her piece, minus a couple of bites. “I’m not hungry.”

The warm bread was in his stomach a moment later. “Whether or not Godfrey’s family knows he exists, they must pay for his care,” North said, pulling out a handkerchief and wiping his hands. He sank back in his chair feeling inexpressibly exhausted. “He’s blood of their blood. Their relative took advantage of a lady, the lady whom he should have treasured most in the world.”

“Do we have to discuss it?”

“Yes.”

He opened his eyes a slit, just enough so that he could see the way golden strands wove through her red hair. See her, curled in the other chair.

The silence lasted so long he nearly closed his eyes, but not to sleep. He rarely slept these days, and certainly not in a woman’s room. He hadn’t shared intimacies with a woman since . . . since he saw Diana for the first time.

Her expression was unreadable, the way it used to be when she was covered with face paint and powder. Without thinking, he scowled at her.

“What?” she asked, surprised.

“Your face took a turn into your mother’s idea of a perfect duchess,” he said, allowing more than a tinge of cynicism into his voice.

She hunched up one shoulder. “I suppose I can tell you about Rose and her fiancé. It’s not easy to have a grocer as a grandfather,” she said, coming at the subject from the side. Naturally.

Diana’s voice was like velvet, with nothing of a grocer audible. Her accent was the purest King’s English, her voice resonant with the inherent confidence that supposedly results from generations of aristocrats.

“He loved proverbs,” Diana said, working toward an answer in her own way. “He would say, ‘One volunteer is worth two pressed men.’ Have you ever heard that before?”

He had. He had refused to have any “pressed” men in his regiment—those boys snatched from the streets and forced into service. Lethargy was stealing through him. “Perhaps we should discuss it tomorrow,” he murmured. Lord knew how long it would take Diana to get from proverbs and pressed men back to her sister.

“I don’t want to discuss this ever again,” Diana stated, so he opened his eyes. “That proverb is just as relevant for ladies as it is for sailors. I was blackmailed into service, if that makes sense, but Rose was a volunteer.” A tight note in her voice filtered through his hazy exhaustion.

“I don’t understand. She fell in love?”

“Not initially. You see, I was supposed to marry him, but I didn’t want to. Rose volunteered. My mother was furious because Rose was truly beautiful. She would have won the highest in the land had she debuted in London, and my mother was acutely aware of Rose’s value.”

He was so absorbed by Diana’s casual depiction of a mother who assessed her daughters like horseflesh that he almost missed the implication that she wasn’t beautiful. Diana couldn’t have meant that.

“Of those men available to marry, I was the highest in the land during that Season,” he said flatly. “She couldn’t have won me, because you had already done so.”

Her laughter blended into the honeyed, quiet air. “That’s only because you never met Rose. She was not only lovely, but she had flawless manners.” Her voice was warm with affection and love.

North was damned sure he would have ignored Rose if Diana had been in the same ballroom.

“My mother refused, of course, but Rose took matters into her own hands. My proposed spouse and his father paid a second visit to our house, and Rose smiled at him.”

North squinted across the fire. Diana was curvy and soft, everything he’d dreamed of as a boy. Her hair shone like a river of fire and her mouth . . . well, poems had been written about lips like hers. Only half of them were appropriate in polite company. In fact, none of them were, because any man reading the poem would know—North cut himself off.

“I miss her so much,” she said.

“I miss my brother, but you would have hated him,” he observed. “You seem to think that I’m pokerfaced, but Horatius was fifty times more pompous than I am.”

“We’ve both lost a sibling,” Diana said in a surprised tone, not taking issue with his summary of her feelings about him.

Had he really been that pompous? Or that much of an ass?

Another wave of exhaustion hit him and he shut his eyes again. “So was it a love match?”

“Rose deliberately flirted with him to save me from a marriage that I didn’t want,” Diana said flatly. “She showed every sign of being affectionate toward him. For his part, he couldn’t believe his own good fortune.”

The story didn’t make sense to North but he was too tired to ask for an explanation. “His name?”

For once, she answered. “Archibald Ewing.”

The name sifted into his consciousness and floated there for a moment. He sat up straight. “Archie Ewing, as in the future Laird of Fennis?”