“I know why you’re here,” Diana murmured. She gripped the fabric of his shirt and tugged at him, drawing him into her bedroom and kicking the door closed behind him.
It happened so quickly. The banging of the door echoed back down the hall, but it seemed not to matter in such a drafty, ancient house. The moonlight fled in through the open window, casting a glow across the earl’s handsome face.
She brought him deeper into her arms, sweeping her breasts across his flat stomach. Before she knew it, his lips were upon hers, warm and aching with desire. His tongue folded over hers, dominating it. Then, she dropped her head back, feeling his hand glide over the back of her head, cupping it.
Between little kisses, Ernest whispered to her, his words insistent. “I can’t stop thinking about you.” Each time, he tugged at her hair, showing her just how chaotic his inner mind was. “I think about you when I’m sleeping, when I’m awake. I sat in my study, wanting nothing more but to focus on my book, yet always, the image of your face appeared in my eyes. I can’t get rid of you—”
“Please, don’t get rid of me,” Diana murmured between her own wild kisses. She drew her hands across his shoulders, gripping his muscles. Her nipples tingled, now stone-tight at the tips of her breasts. One of his hands swept across, cupping her breast and fondling the thick end. A slow moan escaped her lips.
Ernest stretched back, allowing his hand to draw across her lower back. He huffed, his cheeks glowing red. It seemed as though his eyes wanted to swallow every inch of her.
“You’re the most beautiful woman I’ve seen in my life,” he murmured. His lips glistened.
Diana felt as though she might fall. Her knees were made of melting butter. She wanted to interrupt him, to tell him that this surely wasn’t true—that Grace Bragg glowed with a stunning, on-paper, delicious beauty; that there were countless women in society with a far better temperament, better hair, better laugh, than Diana Harrington.
But Ernest seemed to already guess what she wanted to say. He surged ahead, saying, “Perhaps you wish to interrupt me. But I’m telling you that your beauty comes from a far different place than the majority of other women. Rather, it’s your spirit that makes you so stunning.”
“My spirit?” Diana asked, nearly chuckling.
“Don’t belittle what I’m saying about you,” Ernest scolded, arching his brow. He drew his hand across her cheek, causing Diana’s eyes to close. “What I mean is this. You risked your life to save the life of your maid. Can you name another woman in the world who might have done that? I can’t. And another thing. You have curiosity. Playfulness. You’re wild and free and alive. You yearned to climb that tree out there—altogether forgetting what sort of wretched memory you have associated with it. You don’t allow yourself to live in the shadows of the past as much as I do. Me, with the death of my father lurking over my shoulder all the time…”
“There’s really so much you still don’t know about me, Ernest,” Diana reminded him.
“Perhaps. But there’s so much I still yearn to learn about you. I’ve known my fiancée for years, and yet have never had so much as a minor curiosity in what’s lurking behind her eyes. This is because she tells you precisely what’s on her mind—and usually, whatever that is, is steeped in anger and gossip and cruelty. Why on earth would I wish to spend the rest of my life with someone like that? I know that every morning, I will feel the aching grey of however she sees the world. Surely, it will break me.
“But you, Diana. You remained calm and certain and pure in front of Grace. You were polite, despite the evils that permeated her words. Nothing can break you, Diana. Not fire. Not death. Not outrageous people without any bits of empathy within them…”
The tension between them was thick, a heavy atmosphere Diana could have cut with a knife. She sighed deeply, wanting to draw her forehead across his chest, to stitch herself across him, to never let go. Her mind ached with knowing that Ernest had crafted a version of her that wasn’t entirely true; that she hadn’t half the sort of bravery he imagined, nor had she the politeness he assumed. This, she had forced herself to construct, especially after the conversation with Rose.
However, she loved glowing in the light of his admiration. She wanted nothing more than to exist before him, listening to the staggered nature of his breath, to hear him exalt her as the woman he yearned to love.
Finally, Diana heard herself speak.
“Please, Ernest,” she murmured. “Don’t marry her. It will destroy you…”
“I’ve told you already, Diana,” he replied. “There’s nothing I can do. I must uphold the honour of my father. He died before me, drifting away to some otherness that I cannot possibly understand, and left me with a final solution—to marry Grace Bragg…”
“Yes, but he couldn’t have possibly understood her wretchedness,” Diana blurted, feeling increasingly like a young girl, dizzy with her own desires. “If he’d known the entire story, there’s no possible way that he would have latched you into this reality. He thought only of the niceties of his best friend’s daughter marrying his son. What a lovely story it is, truly! And yet, it’s akin to painting over a bit of mould in the closet. The mould remains there beneath, ready to eat back through the paint…
“You’re your own man, Ernest,” Diana continued, hardly able to keep up with her own swirling tongue. “You’re all you need in this world. Whatever your father wanted for you, it doesn’t matter now…”
“But darling, I’m not my own man!” Ernest insisted. He brought his hand over hers and drew it toward his lips, tapping each of her fingers tenderly. “I belong to my subjects. My subjects look to me for propriety. And each and every one of them expect me to marry Grace Bragg within the month.
“Darling, you must understand. I didn’t ask for this life. I wanted nothing more than to be free from societal expectation, and even the expectation of my father. I was born into this position and I must die with it, knowing that society will keep their eyes upon me until my own eyes close for good.”
“And then what, Ernest?” Diana murmured. She took a slight step forward, her breasts tipping themselves against his stomach once more. “Then, your own son—Grace Bragg’s son—will take the earldom?”
“I will ensure that he isn’t anything like her…” Ernest tried.
Diana offered him a half-smile. “If only it were so simple, hmm? Forcing a son to dive away from his own genetic predisposition…”
“I’ll teach him everything I know. Right from wrong…”
“An ability to see through the darkness of gossip…” Diana added, her words playful, yet charged.
“Diana!” Ernest cried. He dropped a hand across her shoulder, almost too hard, telling her that she’d gone far enough. She nearly toppled to the bed behind her.
His rage shook through her, stirring her. She couldn’t look anywhere but his burning black eyes.
“If I were free of these expectations…” Ernest sputtered, his voice low and animal-like. “If I was free from Grace, from society, from my father’s ghost, then I would take you right now, Diana. I would take you and not let you go. I would marry you directly in the morning, the moment the sunlight draped itself across the moors. And I would fill you with babies and watch you nurse them and care for them and bring them your own courage and curiosity. I would want nothing more.”
“You’re speaking now of a fictional future,” whispered Diana. “You’re filling your head with images of a world that can never be.”
The air between them shifted. Diana ached to say something proper, something that inflated their hearts with any level of hope. She bit her lower lip and blinked at him. “You truly are a good, principled man. I know this better than anyone. You speak endlessly about my courage, yet you were the one who raced into a burning building to find me, to bring me back to life. I dream about the fire now, feeling myself still a part of it. But these are just images of a reality that you eliminated. I stand here before you, healthy and well, be
cause you are good. You are everything I could want in a man.”
As Diana spoke, her heart fluttered in her throat. Ernest pressed his hand to the base of her back and tugged her closer to him. He seemed to be operating under a far different set of rules than the one he claimed he upheld over everything.
“And beyond that, you’ve taken in my entire estate,” Diana went on. “You’ve allowed our staff to continue on here, as though their lives haven’t been turned upside down. And you care for my father and my auntie as though they’re your own. My father already looks at you like a son—something I’ve never seen him do before in my life. Our door has been darkened with countless, horrendous situations—death and destruction. Yet you’re our knight in shining armour, Ernest. How could you see yourself as anything else? And beyond that, how could I ever begin to replay you for your kindness and generosity?”
Ernest’s cheeks grew red. It was a rare thing for Diana to find herself in the company of a man alone, and it stirred her, made her feel increasingly that this was a dream, something she’d manifested out of the back world of her own mind.
“I think that perhaps one kiss from you, now, might fulfil me for a lifetime,” Ernest murmured. “One final kiss, which I would then keep within me forever. One kiss to return to throughout the bad times—and the assured good times—all of which will lack the amount of emotion I have for you. Perhaps that’s all of life is walking away from things that fill you with such power, things that you know should sustain you for the rest of time. Perhaps, life is about holding back.”
“Just one kiss,” Diana echoed. Her heart felt stabbed through, yet she hadn’t the energy to argue with him a moment more. Whatever happened between them, it had to occur only in this bedroom, in the dead of night. No word of it could extend elsewhere.
Without shame, without thinking about the social impropriety of it all, Diana closed the space between them, drawing her lips over his. Her heart ached, knowing that the rest of the earl’s life, he wouldn’t be allowed the beauty of true love; and beyond that, she surged with sadness, sensing that this—this bigness was precisely the sort of thing her own life would lack. Due to the earl’s goodness, they would be left without one another forever.
It was one of the greater tragedies of Diana’s life.
But she ignored this thought as their lips grew more insistent, tightening and then opening, allowing their tongues to slip alongside one another again. She pressed her hardened nipples against him, feeling the space between her thighs grow hot and begin to pulse. She yearned for nothing more than for his fingers to slip down her belly, find that darkness, fall within her.
There was a beauty in how they fit together—as though they were two pieces of an impossible puzzle, something the world had been attempting to stitch together for decades. They clicked, their eyes closed, their hearts pumping. Ernest’s hands wound themselves down her back, his fingers dropping across her supple bottom. He lifted her into him, grinding the hardness of himself against her belly, near her own wet darkness.
This could never remain chaste, sweet. This was an urgent desire, an offering from another realm.
“I simply can’t stop,” Ernest muttered, his voice raspy and animal-wild. “I want to feel you. I want to taste you…”
Suddenly, Ernest dropped his lips from hers and brought his lips to her neck. The touch was so severe, Diana felt his teeth nuzzle against the softness of her skin. Her hand stretched across his head, although she hadn’t any ability to control him. He’d given fully to his animal desires.
His lips stretched down the softness of her neck before drawing themselves over her breasts, tearing away at her through the softness of her nightgown. Frequently, Ernest moved his head back up to her, kissing her on her supple lips, before returning to her breasts, then her stomach. He drew her to him over and over again, assuring her that the girth of him was thick, throbbing beneath. She brought her hand over it, feeling at the soft veins just beneath the fabric, yearning to see it in its fullness, feeling the adrenaline surging through her imagination. This wasn’t enough—it could never be enough.
They kissed until they were breathless, until the moon crept lower in the sky and time seemed to blink toward evidence of a tomorrow neither of them had reckoned for. Ernest held himself back, his lips wet and his eyes still hungry for her. But it seemed that both of them understood: time had run out.
Ernest dropped his hands to either side and stepped back. A wrinkle formed between his eyebrows. Diana yearned to step forward, to reach for his cheeks, to pull him into her bed—the bed at which he’d sat every day throughout her coma.
There wasn’t space for words. Ernest held her hand for a long moment, then pressed his lips into the back of it, before turning toward the hallway. Within just a moment, he disappeared into the darkness of the hall. Diana remained frozen, listening to the creaks of the stairs as he returned to wherever it was he’d come from.
She suspected that he wouldn’t have the strength to return to any sort of slumber after this. Like hers, she assumed that his mind was awash with chaos, his emotions like a boat on a stormy ocean.
Diana fell back onto the edge of the bed. She blinked down at her gown, noting that, in the frenzy of their kisses, Ernest had actually caused some of the fabric to tear. She sniffed, folding her fingers over these minor imperfections, genuinely shocked that she—Diana Harrington!—had ever been the object of such desire.
Finally, Diana stretched herself over the top of the comforter, crossing her arms over her breasts. She blinked toward the grey ceiling, feeling—for the first time in ages—like she wanted to speak with her sister. This was something she’d done frequently in the months after Margery’s death, yet had grown increasingly frightened of, as it drudged up old emotions in a way that felt almost detrimental to Diana’s ability to move on.
Now, Diana was awash with frenetic feelings, unable to control anything about herself.
“Are you there, Margery?” she whispered, her voice cracking.
Outside, a spring wind rushed itself against the windowpanes. Was this her?
“It’s just, things haven’t been going precisely to plan, Margery,” Diana continued, smashing her palm across her cheek. She shivered with the drama of the moment, of knowing that no one was truly listening back. “I love him more than I can possibly know how to love anyone. It’s happened so suddenly, like a punch in the stomach. It feels a bit like when you awake in the middle of the night and you’re not certain where you are, but perhaps you’re young, and you turn over and you find that mother is in bed with you. There’s a warmth there that calms you, that allows you to rest. Knowing that the earl exists, that he could possibly offer me that level of warmth—it’s almost too much to bear. After losing you and Mother, I didn’t imagine feeling anything like that again.”
Diana felt as though she’d spoken too much, despite there being no one there to echo back her words, nor even hear them. She fell back deep into the pillows and forced herself to breathe, feeling as though the act of it was foreign and strange.
She knew that slumber wouldn’t reach her, so she remained there, laid back and waiting for something to happen. She wasn’t entirely sure what she yearned for, in the midst of this waiting. Did she want Ernest to return, to hold her until she fell into sleep? Or did she want her sister to appear to her—in some sort of ghostly form—to tell her it would all be all right?
Neither answer came, just as she suspected.
Chapter 13
Ernest paced his study into the early morning. The fatigue made lines grow deep on his face, his cheeks sag. Yet he hadn’t the ability to sit. He knew it would only add to his inner panic, make his thoughts catch up to him and remind him of the severity of what he’d done.
He’d acted outside the bounds of his engagement. He’d actively cheated on Grace Bragg—a woman more wretched, in his eyes, with each passing day. But it didn’t matter what his opinion of her was. It was precisely as he’d told Diana: the
only thing that mattered, now, was how his subjects viewed him. And in their eyes, his marriage to Grace was meant to be honoured. It was something pure, beautiful. There was no way he would ever allow them to see behind closed doors.
A Seductive Lady Rescued From Flames (Historical Regency Romance) Page 11