Diana gave a start. Ashcroft’s name crashed through her haze, shattering it. Before she reminded herself it revealed her vulnerability, she bit her lip to stifle a whimper of misery.
Blindly, she stared at the beautiful house. The house that had brought her to this pass. Although she recognized the fault lay with her greed and arrogance. Cranston Abbey was bricks and mortar. She was flesh and blood. She possessed a heart and soul, and her sins had crushed both.
“I don’t mean to cause distress,” Lord Burnley said in the kindest voice she’d ever heard him use.
Diana was tensed tighter than a thread on a bobbin. She strove to speak evenly. “No, Lord Ashcroft hasn’t contacted me.”
“What about your future, Diana?” Burnley still sounded concerned.
She didn’t trust this new version of her employer, but his question was fair. She stared down at where her hands twined in her lap. Her wedding ring hung loose on her left hand. She’d lost weight since she’d returned to Marsham.
“I haven’t decided,” she said softly.
Burnley released an impatient sigh. That was much more like the man she knew. “You have more than yourself to think of,” he said in a critical tone.
Was that a threat? She was surprised he hadn’t already used her family against her to gain her compliance. “There’s my father and Laura, I know.”
“And the child.”
Chapter Twenty-seven
Burnley’s words struck Diana silent as if he produced an ax and brandished it before her.
The child. The child who made her sick every morning. The child who grew relentlessly in her womb. The child resulting from lies and treachery. And breathtaking joy.
Without thinking, she stroked her belly with one hand as if she communicated with the baby. Her father didn’t know about her pregnancy. Laura must—the signs were unmistakable if you lived as closely as she did with the other woman—but she hadn’t said anything.
Diana hadn’t spoken a word about her pregnancy since Ashcroft made that preternatural leap of intuition in the woods. Burnley had avoided the subject when he’d asked her to set a date for the wedding.
Stupid. Stupid. Stupid. She thought if she didn’t talk about the baby, the baby wasn’t real. When of course the baby was.
Wake up, Diana.
The baby’s existence meant she couldn’t continue to drift in this dumb, suffering trance, as passive to her future as a steer on its way to slaughter. Soon her future would batter on her door and scream for decisions. Lord Burnley’s presence now meant she had to act, had to decide, had to choose some path.
“Yes, there’s the child,” she said tonelessly, the admission a defeat.
The old man appeared relaxed, approachable, in a way she’d never seen. Her gaze fastened on the hand that held his stick. He might sound at ease, but his grip was painfully tight. His hand was thin and clawlike, nearly transparent. Like something that already belonged to death, not life.
“You believe I did you a great wrong,” he said heavily, when she didn’t continue.
Questions of good and evil weren’t the usual topic between her and the marquess. She cast him a startled glance, but he stared at the magnificent house, just as she had.
Whatever the state of his soul, hers was too black to endure another lie. “No, I did the wrong myself.”
Through the sleepless nights, she’d had ample opportunity to assign blame. Some essential honesty made her recognize that her own weakness had brought her to this pass. Lord Burnley could never have coaxed her into bartering her virtue if she hadn’t been flawed to begin with.
“You imagine yourself in love with that worthless blackguard.” Burnley sounded irritated, as if she’d let him down by falling prey to emotion. She supposed she had. “I should have considered the possibility, but you’ve always been a woman of remarkable good sense.”
“Good sense hasn’t marked my actions recently, my lord,” she said dryly. She had no intention of acknowledging her feelings to Burnley.
“He’s an eminently forgettable fellow.”
Oh, how wrong he was to dismiss Tarquin Vale. The awful irony was Burnley couldn’t see he’d produced a son to be proud of. Handsome, strong, intelligent, and with a surprisingly firm grasp on principle for someone universally touted as a conscienceless rake. Ashcroft had always been so much more than she bargained for.
Not that she deluded herself that Ashcroft was any plaster saint. He was used to getting his own way, he was spoiled, he was stubborn, and he certainly hadn’t stinted his sensual explorations.
Faults certainly. Not irredeemable ones.