Too Wilde to Wed (The Wildes of Lindow Castle, #2)(7)

“I’m so sorry,” she said again.

“You’ve made that point.”

“I feel like a condemned prisoner desperate to express remorse.”

“Do I feature as the executioner, or the judge? Will your head be chopped off with a sword, like one of King Henry VIII’s wives, or will you be sent to the gallows, like a thieving servant?”

“You have every right to play the executioner, North. I’ve treated you reprehensibly. Horribly.”





Chapter Two




If North had ever bothered to inventory the worst days of his life—he hadn’t—he would have ranked the day his older brother Horatius died at the very bottom. The battle of Stony Point and Diana’s flight from their betrothal party would have vied for second-last.

Those three awful events were bad enough.

But this day was likely to join their ranks. He had forced himself to stop thinking about Diana, and it gave him a sense of vertigo to see her now. When they’d first met, she’d reminded him of an exquisite porcelain statue of a French lady-in-waiting, her face whitened with rice powder, her lips tinted crimson, a patch worn high on one cheek.

Now she was wearing a muslin cap tilted to one side, and bundles of thick, dark red hair fell down her back. Red hair?

In view of her penchant for powdered wigs, he had had no idea her hair was red. Her eyelashes matched her hair, and her cheeks had a rosy glow. She looked messy and delicious, as if she had just climbed from bed.

The thought made him recoil.

More importantly than her hair color, he didn’t remember her saying much during their betrothal. She certainly hadn’t responded with more than murmured agreement to his attempts to ease her into the life of a future duchess. But now she couldn’t stop talking. She had a way of going at a subject sideways, but she was being very clear about her apologies.

He didn’t need or want them, but her earnestness was soothing. It had galled him that the woman he had chosen to be his duchess didn’t have the courtesy to inform him in person that she was breaking their engagement.

“It was very wrong of me to allow your family to believe that you fathered my child.” Diana was wringing her hands, and her cheeks had turned from rosy to red.

Indeed.

In his heart of hearts, he resented being jilted far more than discovering that his father had been supporting his supposed bastard.

“Where is the boy’s father?” he inquired.

“He’s dead,” she said, coloring even more. “But he—”

“I don’t want to know,” North stated. The boy had clearly been born before they met. It only made sense that the father had died. North could not imagine a man who had garnered Diana’s affections not keeping her.

The way she had concealed the child from him, from all society, bamboozling him into a proposal, sent a flare of anger down his spine—that instantly flickered and died. After his experiences in the war, who cared what she had done?

Not he.

She had probably done him a favor by drawing him into a scandal. It would hold off the marriage-minded mamas. He didn’t intend to seek a wife until the event was forced onto him by the need for an heir. He might even allow the title to descend through Alaric’s line.

“Does my stepmother know that Artemisia displays all the elegance of a grocer’s daughter?” he asked, deciding to lead the conversation toward the reality that Diana would have to leave the castle. He couldn’t have his former fiancée working in his father’s household. It wouldn’t do, as his own governess would have said.

“You must be very angry at me to refer to my grandfather,” Diana said, her eyes fixed on his. “You are one of very few people in polite society who never found reason to chide me for the audacity of having a grocer for a grandfather.”

“I apologize if you thought I was referring to your grandfather. I used the common phrase without thinking.”

“Why should the world consider a grocer more impolite than a cobbler?” she said with a rueful smile. “But so it is.”

North was rarely dumbfounded, but he found himself silenced by Diana’s smile, by her self-possession, by how different she was from the girl he’d pledged to marry. He couldn’t even remember what question he had asked her: Somehow they had ended up in a different place. Circuitous conversation was apparently a characteristic of hers.

“I am not ashamed of my grandfather.” Diana wrinkled her nose, a charming gesture. “Frankly, before I became a governess, I would have been appalled by Artie as well. That’s why children are confined to a nursery, you know. So that no one grasps how uncivilized they are. Or has to endure their company, more to the point.”

He did remember her smile. The first time he saw Diana, he had strolled into a ballroom and watched an unknown young lady say something that made the fellow she was talking to fall about laughing.

Diana had laughed along with him, the kind of unrestrained laughter that most ladies stifle before a sound passes their lips. North had registered that she was exquisite, with a heart-shaped face and a trim figure. But that wasn’t the important part. Her lips looked as if their natural curve was a smile.

From that moment, he had wanted her with a burning, intense focus that he had experienced only a few times. While trying to stay alive on a battlefield, for example.