Yet that wasn’t exactly it. He didn’t feel let down. Exactly. He just felt…
He wanted more.
He wanted more than just Diana’s mouth on his cock, or eventually all of her body under, over or in any way entwined with his. He wanted to know what made her who she was, why she attracted him. Why she fascinated him, even beyond the obvious allure of her delicious flesh.
Chapter Eighteen
She found Earnestina still sitting at the card table, as if the whole episode had never happened, had been just the blink of an eye.
“What a relief,” Tina exclaimed, sending only the barest glance in Diana’s direction before she refocused on the game. “I’d heard you fainted.”
“Nothing to concern yourself over,” Diana assured her.
“Yes, that’s what I assumed when I heard it was your relative, Sir Jason, who was assisting you.” Tina winked. The other three ladies at the table snickered and Diana smiled as the situation demanded.
“He’s very handsome,” Mrs. Cooke said. “I heard he’s a widower.”
“And out of mourning,” said another lady, who Diana did not recognize.
“Pooh,” Earnestina exclaimed, flipping her cards down on the table. “I don’t think I wish to lose anymore this evening. Lady Blount? Shall we move on?”
Diana inclined her head in agreement. She followed her friend around the assembly rooms, stopping to chat with acquaintances, to make plans for the following days.
Finally, she realized what she was doing—looking for him, everywhere. It was ridiculous, that was what it was. Ridiculous to fixate on any one man, to crave one man’s touch.
And he had touched her. When she’d leaned over that table, he’d grasped her hips. He’d pulled her against him.
Stop! Diana berated herself. Really, she was too depraved. Perhaps Jason was right about that. Could she not think about anything but sex?
“I’m fatigued,” Tina complained. She did look tired, shadows beneath her eyes.
They returned home, but neither Tiptain nor Ash was there.
Diana rang for sherry.
“Do you mind?” Tina asked, pulling out the colonel’s opium kit. “I’m so terribly wound up from the evening.”
Diana sighed but waved her hand. It was hardly her place to curtail her friend’s choice of dissipation.
“So what did happen with your cousin?” Tina asked, after she’d taken a drag on the pipe.
Two weeks ago, Diana wouldn’t have hesitated to tell her friend that she was thinking of sleeping with him. In fact, she would have shared the idea enthusiastically. Now, however, Diana couldn’t bring herself to give anything more than a shrug.
Then Ash and Tiptain entered the salon.
“Started without us?” the colonel chided, taking the pipe from Earnestina. “Such wickedness deserves punishment.” He settled himself into a chair.
Diana watched the interplay. Perhaps Ash had spoken the truth and he and Tiptain were indulging Tina in her little fantasy.
She couldn’t help herself: she imagined the three of them naked, their bodies writhing, limbs intertwined, cocks thrusting. She shook her head. Really! Earnestina?
But then Tina and Ash had been indulging in opium for over a fortnight and it had clearly loosened their inhibitions.
Ash sat down, a shade too close to Diana. His wandering hand caressed her forearm.
“I’m thinking of making Sir Jason my lover,” Diana finally answered Tina’s question casually but deliberately, knowing Ash would hear her. Perhaps it would put him off the scent.
Later though, when the room was filled with smoke and Diana, coughing, stood up to go, Ash grabbed her arm and tugged her back down beside him.
“Don’t waste your time on that snail,” he urged, sliding one hand up around her ribs, close to the lower curve of her breast. Diana glanced over at Earnestina in alarm but her friend was lying back on the chase, her eyes closed. Colonel Tiptain, however, watched with lazy interest and an amused smile.
“Don’t mind me,” the colonel drawled. “I love a good show.”
I just bet you do, she thought in irritation. Then Ash’s hand closed over her breast, and despite herself for a moment she enjoyed the warm weight of his large hand through the layers of cloth.
“I’ll do whatever I wish to do, my friend.” She brushed his hand away, standing up quickly, before he could pull her back down.
Chapter Nineteen
Jason saw her the next day in the Steine, sitting at a shaded table on the edge of the large park with her friends taking lemonade. She attracted him like a magnet, as if he was the lodestone and she the north. Whichever way he turned, his gaze came back to her. Then when she finally saw him, met his eyes with her own, there was no escaping the pull. Not that he wished for anything as mundane as escape.
Even from twenty paces away, it was obvious that everything had changed. There would be no more fighting, no more scathing comments. Instead an odd sort of comfort existed, a knowledgeable intimacy.
Diana waved to him, so he brought Daniel and Lizzie over and introductions were made.
He recognized Lord and Lady Ashburton from Vauxhall, but there was also a Colonel Tiptain and Lord Bourke. Lord Bourke eyed them lazily through a quizzing glass while Lady Ashburton offered a wan smile. After a few moments of insipid pleasantries, Daniel pulled him aside.
“Lizzie and I are going to take a stroll along the beach.”
There was something in Daniel’s expression that let Jason know that his friends had grown bored of the company or at the very least uncomfortable.
Not surprising really. None of them had ever spent much time associating with the nobility. And Diana’s coterie was not the most friendly bunch.
“It seems your friends have abandoned you,” Diana remarked, her voice carrying to him. He turned around to face her, to take in the flirtatious tilt of her head. “But have no fear, I shall make certain you are properly entertained.”
He smiled at that. He had no doubt she would. “I was planning to call on you this afternoon,” he said, taking the empty seat beside her.
“I fully expect that you still will. In fact, I will be heartbroken if you don’t.”
“Will you?”
“Of course she won’t be,” Lord Ashburton interrupted loudly. “Diana, dear, you shouldn’t be so cruel to your cousin, you know we won’t even be at home this afternoon.”
“That’s right,” Colonel Tiptain agreed. “We’re going boating.”
“What a delightful idea!” Lady Ashburton agreed.
“It is a lovely idea,” Diana agreed, although she didn’t look entirely pleased. “I do hope you’ll join us.”
Jason felt Lord Ashburton’s glare boring into him even as he nodded in agreement. If he wasn’t mistaken, the man had concocted the whole event in order to get rid of Jason. Of course he would go.
That afternoon, sitting with Diana in the little dinghy, he was very glad he was there.
Maybe a dozen yards away, Ashburton and his lady kept apace of them. He could hear the faint sound of their conversation and so he pitched his own voice low.
“Lady Ashburton was my first real friend in London,” Diana was saying. “We were of an age and both married. Well, she was newly married and I…She’s always been fun and light and my husband was willing to let me cultivate the acquaintance.”
“Your husband,” Jason repeated. “I never did meet him but my cousin sounds like an ass.”
She sighed, the amused, flirtatious expression slipping for just a moment and he wished he had said nothing. It really wasn’t his business what her married life had been like. In fact he didn’t want to think about her past. Far more delightful to think about the very near future, when he would have a chance to do everything he had said he would do. If he only could get her alone.
“He was,” Diana said abruptly, interrupting his thoughts. “At times, but he also gave me a life I could never have imagined.” She slanted him a po
inted glance. “I do like being wealthy.”
What about love? He almost asked the question before he remembered that they’d been here before, had this same conversation before. That time, she’d pointed out, very correctly, that he had not married for love either.
So why was he obsessed with the idea?
“Your honesty is admirable,” he said instead.
“It’s much easier, isn’t it?” Diana moved her leg so that the outside of her foot pressed against the inside of his. “I’ve never seen the point in lying, my one great secret aside.” Then, she winked.
Jason laughed despite himself, despite knowing that she referred to Harridan House, to that part of her life that she refused to give up.
“But as one who loves honesty as you do, wouldn’t it be easier to forgo a double life?”
For a moment she looked irritated, as she had every right to be. He really shouldn’t be inserting serious discussion in the middle of flirtation. They did have a truce after all.
“Yes,” she said finally. Then she pinned him with her gaze. “And what about you, Jason? Are you honest?”
He wasn’t. He knew it instantly. Oh, he tried to be now. But for so long he’d always done what came easiest, a white lie, a small excuse, to smooth the way to pleasure.
“Touché,” he said simply. And because it seemed like the right thing to say, because somewhere inside, he knew it was true, he added, “but I promise you, Diana, I will always be honest with you.”
She arched one of those beautifully formed eyebrows, an auburn wing over her creamy skin. “I think we shall get along rather well.”
Chapter Twenty
Over the next week, there was not another moment that they were alone together, out of sight of any of their friends. But she was happy to spend time with Jason’s friends rather than her own. There were more evenings than not that Earnestina and Ashburton retired to the house with friends to partake of the colonel’s pipe.
Diana found that not only was anticipation delicious, but there was so much more to Jason than her visceral attraction to him. He was not nearly as prudish as she had thought before.
But it was the morning he joined her for an early walk on the Steine that she realized that he was a man who knew what love was. At least, one sort of love.
He stopped, not far from the gaggle of nannies and their charges enjoying their morning perambulation.
“See there?” He pointed toward a small child in a white smock and straw bonnet, her fine silky curls falling to her back. “That is my daughter.” There was a distinct note of pride in his voice. Pride and tenderness, and it made her think of her own father, of her childhood—of carefree, innocent days.
“A very fine-looking girl,” she offered.
“She takes after her mother, of course.”
For a moment Diana thought they wouldn’t approach, that Jason would strive to keep her away from his daughter. But just then the girl turned and spotted them. She stared, one hand up as if she meant to wave but wasn’t quite certain it was her father in the distance. Then Jason bent down and waved, the nanny prodded her, and the girl came running across the paved walk.
“Papa, I touched the doggie!”
He gathered her up in his arms.
“Yes? What kind of doggie is that?”
“White.”
Jason turned his daughter to face Diana. She had a rounded little face, with cheeks as rosy as apples. She might look like her late mother, but she stared at Diana with big eyes that looked very much like Jason’s.
“So this is the lovely Miss Cassandra,” Diana said, reaching out to offer her hand. The little girl placed her own tiny hand in Diana’s solemnly, all traces of her early giggling gone.
“Say hello, sweetheart,” Jason prodded. “Tell Lady Blount how pleased you are to meet her.”
“Please to meet,” Cassandra squeaked before she hid her face against her father’s chest, wrinkling his cravat with the tight grip of her fists. Then she peeked back at Diana.
“She just started this shyness, and only with ladies, it appears,” Jason said, apologetically.
“And with men?” Diana raised a curious eyebrow. She hadn’t spent much time around children, certainly not since her days assisting her father with his patients.
“She’s taken a liking to Throckmorton.”
He put his daughter down, and the nanny grabbed the girl’s leading strings.
“Who wouldn’t?” Diana laughed. “He’s a sardonic fellow. Amusing.”
“But Lizzie, she still hasn’t quite warmed to yet.”
“Well, you know what to expect, then, when she’s old enough for a season,” Diana quipped.
“I can only expect that by then I will have remarried and her stepmother will guide her.”
The cream she had had in her morning coffee must have turned, Diana thought, to explain away the sudden nausea. Only that little brutal voice in her head would not let her pretend she was not disturbed by the thought of Jason married again, to another woman, off-limits to Diana. Not that she was entirely against sleeping with a married man, but she knew clearly, in the way that sometimes certain things were just known, that she would not wish to share Jason. Not now, and certainly not when they became lovers in truth.
As if to underscore her thoughts, the young and fashionably handsome Mr. Travistock greeted them. After he’d passed, Diana smiled ruefully at herself. Only a few scant months ago, she’d been considering taking the man as her lover. Now the entirety of her attention was focused on Jason.
A shout of childish laughter brought her attention back to Cassandra, who ran toward a flock of pigeons even as her nanny tried to pull her back.
Stepmother. It wouldn’t be her, of course, but for the briefest, almost infinitesimally small moment, so insignificant as to be negligible, Diana imagined what it would like to fill that role.
After all, whoever Cassie’s new stepmama was, she would spend each night in Jason’s bed.
Chapter Twenty-One
The following day, they made a party of it to the estate of one of Daniel’s old school friends, a Mr. Douglas Randall. Jason invited Diana along. He was happy to have her to himself.
Randall had the largest, flat portion of his lawn set up for a game of cricket, which normally Jason would have been eager to play. He was not the best bowler, but he was a particularly good batsman and runner and had been ever since his school days. Today, however, he wanted only to lounge in the shade at Diana’s side and study the hollows of her wrist and the way her nose turned ever so slightly down.
“You don’t mind slumming it, do you? Rand being so low in the instep…” he asked, once she’d settled herself in one of the wide, cushioned lawn chairs.
She laughed. “Is he? Then what is a baronet doing lowering himself so?”
“I do not keep such august company as earls and viscounts,” he returned.
“Don’t mind Ash. He thinks very highly of himself but he’s a good man.”
Jason didn’t respond to that. Ashburton did obviously think highly of himself and had, in many small ways, let Jason know his inferiority.
“You won’t find a quarrel with me,” Diana whispered.
“Is that what I was doing?”
“Yes.”
“It’s not what I wish to do.”
“I know.” She met his hot look with one of her own. “I think a stroll around the pond sounds lovely.”
“No you don’t!” Lizzie cried, who stood looking down at them and blocking their way. “You will not go off on your own to tryst among the trees when there is a cricket match to win!”
“Love, let them be,” Danny chided her, as usual a step behind, not really intending to stop his wife from doing whatever she wanted.
“I wish to win, love, and therefore Jason must be on our team. Are you any good at cricket, Lady Blount?”
“I don’t know,” Diana answered. “I’ve never tried. Do women play?”
“I play!” Lizzi
e returned with a huff.
Of course, that was that. Jason saw the lazy afternoon alone with Diana disappear. Instead he saw a side of her he never imagined he would see. A side that joined in the fun, swung the wooden bat, and breathlessly ran toward the wicket.
That was after he’d taught her how to swing. A most pleasurable instruction. He’d taken his time, his arms around hers, his body just centimeters away from hers so that he could feel her heat and breathe in the scent of roses as he positioned her hands.
When the bat made contact, and the ball moved several feet away, she looked back at him smiling.
“We make a good team.”
“Yes, but now you’d better run, or it will all have been for nothing.”
She ran. She looked like the healthy, young country miss she must have been when old Roger Blount found her and plucked her up. Very unlike the polished, sophisticated town flirt that she had become.
“A rather unusual game of cricket,” Daniel commented when Jason joined him on the sidelines. “I believe more women would play and more men would be happy to let them play if they witnessed that little display.”
“Always happy to forward the game,” Jason returned with a satisfied smirk.
“Of flirtation, perhaps, but certainly not cricket.”
Chapter Twenty-Two
It was dark—midnight dark—and he hadn’t stripped down to his naked skin and jumped into the sea in God knew how many years. Yet here he was, taking off his clothes, ready to jump in.
As long as the Charlies, holding their lanterns and calling out the hour, didn’t come and find him.
Drunk as he’d ever been.
Not because of the amount of cognac he’d downed that evening. Because of her. She made him drunk.
Daniel whooped and then shushed himself, bending down in the water as if he had to hide. Jason could still hear his friend’s repressed giggles even though, in the moonless night, he couldn’t see the man.
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