Too Wilde to Wed (The Wildes of Lindow Castle, #2)(37)

“No, I didn’t!” she squealed. “You may not have been dressed like a dandy, but you were certainly wearing clothing!”

“Quel dommage.”

“Too bad?” she asked. And, at his nod, “I don’t speak French. My mother considers it a language spoken only by debauchers and lechers.”

“You’re the one dreaming about naked men,” he pointed out.

“As I said, you weren’t naked! You simply weren’t wearing silk pantaloons. Nor a wig, or jewels, or even a patch.”

“Boodle would have considered me naked,” he said. He waved another piece of toast at her, but when she shook her head, he made short work of it. After that he arranged a log on the hearth so that he could toast two more pieces and watch her at the same time.

“I should have kissed you more when we were betrothed,” he said, telling her what he was thinking.

“That would have been most improper!” Pink crept into her cheeks.

He was a little taken aback by the vehemence of her comment. “Why?” Then, frowning: “Because of your sister’s plight? I can assure you that I am capable of kissing a woman without losing control.” He managed to sound indignant, though he knew he would have trouble stopping at one kiss, if he ever managed to get Diana into his arms again.

But only Diana. No other woman. And only if she were willing.

“Those prints suggesting that you despoiled me are rubbish,” she said, leaning forward and wrapping warm fingers around his forearm. “No one who matters thought twice about them.”

North turned his two pieces of toast, thinking of Boodle’s assessment of who mattered. “Who matters?”

“Lady Knowe and your family,” she said without hesitation. “Leonidas has bought as many prints as he could find. Last Christmas he added devil horns in crimson ink and posted them all around the house. I’m told he did the same for Alaric’s prints before I joined the household.”

It was oddly comforting to remember that. “Did I get a tail as well? I remember that Alaric had extra bits top and bottom.”

“Bottom,” she said, chortling with laughter. “That’s quite naughty of you, Lord Roland!”

He turned back to her. “I can be far naughtier than that, Diana.” He knew his eyes were hungry and dark, and not for honey toast. For her.

Diana frowned, and he wasn’t sure whether she understood what he was thinking. Probably not. She was one of the bravest, most independent women he’d ever known, and at the same time, she was startlingly naive. She didn’t seem to recognize when a man was staring at her with stark lust. She didn’t think of scandal when she took employment in the nursery of her former fiancé’s home.

“Leonidas’s decorations had to be removed,” she said. “The younger girls began examining the Shakespeare print depicting you as the rapist leaping out of a trunk, which led to conversations about men who might ask you to store trunks of jewels in your bedchamber. Spartacus thought it would be funny to jump out the wardrobe in the nursery when Viola was asleep.”

North ate two more slices and another one while Diana’s voice washed over him like a benediction, sweet memories of family and home and people who loved each other and laughed together.

Apparently all the girls had screamed bloody murder. He hadn’t grown up with so many little sisters without learning what girls’ screams sounded like. Diana tried to describe the chaos, and he drank the mug of milk waiting on the hearth, even though he hadn’t drunk warm milk since he was a boy.

But Diana had put it out for him, so he drank it.

He put a couple more logs on the fire, and poked it until he thought it would keep burning until dawn or thereabouts. Diana was still wrapped in that blanket, and part of his mind made a forcible suggestion that he should unwrap her like a present.

It wouldn’t be the right thing to do.

She glanced up at him, startled, and he could tell that she hadn’t thought this far ahead. For Diana, she had been fairly organized. She had not only got a loaf of bread from the kitchen, but she had sliced it, and there had been the mug of milk as well.

But she hadn’t thought of the moment when a man would be staring down at her, unable to stop his lips from curving.

“You’re so large,” she said faintly.

Several responses came to mind and he discarded each. For the moment.

Instead he bent down and picked her up. She went still all over, eyes round, as he got the right grip on an impossibly soft and curvy body.

“No,” he said to her, answering the question he hoped she wasn’t thinking. “I am not going to hurl you onto the bed and have my evil way with you.”

“I didn’t think you were,” she said, dignified. “That is our past, not our present.”

Still holding her, he sat down in the seat she’d been in and nudged her head onto his shoulder, until his cheek could rest on silky hair. “During our engagement we were never near a bed, more’s the pity.”

“You know what I mean.” Diana was gazing at the fire, and he had the sense that she felt shy. Yet she wasn’t a shy woman.

“No, I don’t.”

“Romance is our past,” she explained, keeping her eyes fixed on the burning logs. “You know, when you . . . well, when you met my mother’s creation, and thought I would be good enough as a duchess.”