“Damnation!”
Now was his chance to play the hero, and he proved weak as a kitten. He needed to be strong. He needed to be powerful. In spite of how far they’d come, they weren’t free yet. He still hadn’t won the lady.
With a choked gasp of distress, she swiftly swung forward to catch him. As her arms closed tight around him, her voice broke with remorse. “Oh, Ashcroft, how can you even bear to look at me?”
“How can I bear not to?” At last he touched her. Her warmth seeped into him like balm, filled every cold, empty corner. For one blessed moment, he stood silent in her embrace, his cheek resting on her hair. She felt like heaven. She smelled like fresh green apples.
With a long, jagged sigh, she buried her face in his neck. Her voice was hoarse and muffled against his skin. “I don’t know how you’ve mustered the generosity to forgive me, but I can only be thankful that you have. I’m yours. I’ll stay as long as you want me.”
As long as he wanted her?
What the hell was this? He drew away just far enough to look down at her. “What in blazes do you mean?”
“Oh, devil take these tears.” She lifted shaking hands to her face, but nothing dammed the endless flow. “Do you have a handkerchief?”
“Of course.” He fumbled in his coat and handed her his handkerchief, still puzzling over what she’d said.
“Thank you.” Roughly, she wiped her face. “I never cry.”
This sounded more like the woman who had seduced him against his better judgment. And to his endless delight.
“I can see that.” Still, he couldn’t let her strange statement go unchallenged. “Diana?”
Her gaze was unflinching as she crumpled the white square of material in her hand. “I mean I’ll be your mistress.”
He frowned. She wasn’t making a scrap of sense. “I don’t want you to be my mistress.”
She paled, and he caught a flash of piercing hurt in her eyes. She stepped back, and he felt the distan
ce between him like a blow. Her voice shook. “But in the church, you asked me to come with you.”
Ashcroft growled deep in his throat and grabbed her arms with adamant hands. “As my wife.”
Under his grasp, she trembled like a leaf in a high wind. “You never said.”
“I asked you to marry me after you left London.”
Her mouth parted in astonishment. “That was two months ago. When you didn’t know what I’d done.”
“I know now. I still want to marry you,” he said impatiently. He struggled against kissing her. If he kissed her, he wouldn’t stop, and he reluctantly acknowledged that they needed to put the past behind them. “It’s taken me thirty-two years to propose to the woman I want. It will take more than two months to change my mind.”
Her gray eyes widened with stunned disbelief. “But you can’t want to marry me. You…shouldn’t.”
He dragged her against him, curling his arms hard around her as if he feared she might try to escape. “I can and I should,” he said firmly.
“Tarquin…”
For a moment, she stood unyielding in his hold. He braced for protest, argument. Then it was as if something snapped inside her. With a strangled cry, she subsided onto his chest and began to sob with a heartbroken fierceness that made him want to smash something.
“Diana, don’t cry. Please, for God’s sake, don’t cry.”
Automatically, his arms tightened around her. She’d been hovering on the edge of control since he’d found her near the graves. But the fury of her breakdown filled him with savage anguish. Feeling completely at a loss, he stood speechless under the torrent of weeping and incoherent apologies.
All the time his brain worked feverishly at what she’d just revealed.
When he’d claimed her in the church, she’d believed he offered her only a temporary liaison. Yet still she’d unhesitatingly chosen an uncertain future with him over a life of luxury and security as the Marchioness of Burnley.
For months he’d wrestled with what she’d done. He hadn’t lied when he told her he’d come to terms with the past. He’d thought his forgiveness was complete. He’d thought he trusted her unconditionally.