“Naturally,” Ashcroft snapped, then was ashamed of his sharp response.
She flushed and glanced toward the window. He had the feeling she didn’t see the sky outside, but some other, more personal image. An image that didn’t please her. “You don’t approve.”
“I’m hardly a pattern card of morality,” he said stiffly.
She dragged in a shaky breath. He was dismayed to realize she wasn’t far from tears. “If I consent, I’ll be marrying him for his money. That doesn’t mean I won’t be a good wife. He needs me. It’s not a one-way bargain.”
“Does he know you sneaked up to London for some…town bronze?”
He chose the innocuous term, although they both knew exactly why she was here. Ashcroft wasn’t particularly conceited. He’d always been aware of his failings. But even when she’d tried to treat him as a whore, he’d never before felt like one.
He did now. And he hated the sensation to his bones.
He caught the blossoming shame on her face. “I told you I required discretion.”
“Hurrah for you.” He bit back the outrage he had no right to fling at her head. She’d offered him her body, not her faith or her heart or her love.
He didn’t want those things. He never did from a lover.
The insistence rang hollow.
r /> Another silence crashed down, laden with cruel words that hovered unspoken. He forced himself to ask the question even though he didn’t want the answer. “Are you going to marry him?”
She didn’t meet his eyes. “I’m not sure.”
He could see she’d made her mind up.
Except still this story didn’t ring true. He wasn’t sure why. Just some finely tuned instinct hinted there was another layer, another set of complications.
A marriage that offered material comfort but no excitement. That perhaps explained a passionate woman’s chase after brief freedom before settling to dull respectability. Especially when she’d already suffered eight years of lonely widowhood.
Her story made perfect sense.
But somehow not for Diana.
It was a sign of his woeful state of infatuation that he’d rather she lied than married another man.
Perhaps she didn’t plan to marry another man. Perhaps she was already married. Yet again, he couldn’t dismiss the possibility of a living, present husband.
The tragedy was he’d convinced himself she contained a core of truth, and he touched it every time he made love to her.
When she lay in his arms, she didn’t lie.
While almost twenty years’ experience of the female sex taught him that that was when they lied the best.
Not Diana, his idiot heart cried.
“Do you despise me?” she whispered, still looking out the window.
The answer welled up out of the deepest part of him. “I could never despise you. Whatever you did.”
Unfortunately for his pride and for his future welfare, it was true. He lifted her hand to his lips and kissed it with a fervor lacking before.
When she turned to him, her eyes were cloudy with distress. “Remember that.”
Her slender throat moved as she swallowed. As if she fought back other, more dire confessions. He wanted to beg her to trust him, to insist he’d forgive her anything as long as she told him what troubled her. But the words choked into silence.
He watched her assume a brighter expression. Although her eyes remained glassy with unhappiness. “I need to go.”