She looked back into his blue eyes, only inches from her own. "No," she said.
"Why not?"He looked down at her lips.
"Because it's not enough," she said. "You would merely be proving your power over yet another woman—or your own worthlessness to yourself, perhaps. I would merely be satisfying a physical craving. It's not enough. There has to be something else. And there is nothing else between you and me."
He gazed back into her eyes, his own without their customary mockery again. "Isn't there?" he said before kissing her softly and lingeringly on the lips.
He looked quite his old self when he lifted his head again. "Well, Mrs. Ingram," he said, getting to his feet and reaching down a hand to her, "I think this has been a satisfactory morning, don't you? The countess will be ecstatic when she knows we left the group to come here. She will imagine that we have kissed and cuddled, and she will not be wrong. And Ernie and Lester and a few of the others will be convinced that our embrace was not nearly as chaste as the countess imagines, and they will be right too. My reputation will be intact."
"And that is the most important thing to you, is it not?" she said.
"But of course." He smiled down at her. "It has been hard-won. Such a reputation does not come overnight, you know—if you will pardon my choice of words. But we must be on our way. Luncheon awaits us. And a certain upstairs chambermaid awaits me perhaps. And did you know that Serena is to ride over tomorrow?With or without her husband?I begin to like life in the country more and more.''
He raised his eyebrow, and his eyes laughed at her. Diana turned away in order to resist the temptation to slap him. There had been such amity between them—tenderness almost —just a few minutes before. And now, even before she could remind herself of what he was, he was doing it for her.
"I have the feeling," he said as they came up to their horses, "that I would be inviting a painful smack if I were to take you by the waist to lift you into the saddle, Diana. Though it is a very enticing waist, I would have you know. Set your boot on my hands, then, and I will toss you up."
He grinned at her when she was in the sidesaddle and arranging her skirt about her.
"Of course," he said, "your ankles are also very enticing, Diana.As I remembered from a previous occasion."
She took up the reins in some annoyance and gave her horse the signal to start even before the marquess had mounted his own horse. She had never in her life known anyone so very deliberately exasperating. Did he want her to hate him? He was doing very well if that were his aim. She could be his friend. She had felt very much his friend as they had sat and talked in the courtyard. But he did not want her as a friend.Of course.He wanted her as a temporary mistress.
"You're quite adorable when you're angry, Diana," the Marquess of Kenwood said in his bedroom voice from close beside her.
* * *
The next time Lord Kenwood showed the upstairs maid from his room, it was Bridget he encountered, not Diana. It was the morning after the visit to the castle, and he was in rather a hurry to change his coat and disappear from the house before Serena Huntingdon arrived. He had already taken the stairs two at a time from the breakfast parlor.
The maid was making up his bed. Carter, of course, was nowhere in sight, having already turned his master out for the morning an hour before.
"Good morning, my sweet," he said absently and disappeared into his dressing room. For some reason it seemed very important to him to get himself outside and possibly down by the river among the trees before any visitors put in an appearance.
"Did your lordship call?" the girl asked a minute later from the doorway.
The marquess looked at her reflection in the mirror and wondered if the girl had an original thought in her head.Probably not.
"I did not," he said, "but I seem to be having much the same problem as on another occasion. You may hold my coat for me if you wish."
She did so and again seemed to find it necessary afterward to circle around in front of him and pat his lapels into place.
"However would I have managed without you?" he said, cupping her chin with one hand and smiling down at her. The girl blushed and lowered her lashes. "Now, are you as ready to leave here as I am? I am in the devil of a hurry, more's the pity."
"Your room is all tidy, your lordship," she said, bobbing a curtsy and preceding him to the door.
He reached around her to open it and prepared to follow her out into the corridor. But she turned back to him.
"If there is anything else you want, your, lordship," she said, peering up at him through her lashes, "you have only to ring.At any time."
"I think you have given me good enough service for this morning, my sweet," he said, leaning down by pure reflex to kiss her on the lips. He felt almost as if someone had laid a cold palm against his neck. He had promised himself that he would not do that again in so public a place. It would be just his ill fortune if Diana were coming down the corridor.
She was not, he saw in one surreptitious glance ahead and over his shoulder. But her maid had just come out of her room and stood with one hand still on the doorknob, blushing scarlet.
Devil takeit, would he never learn?
"Bridget," he said, smiling his most charming smile and sauntering toward her, "I haven't seen you in an age. Have you been in any carriages on any muddy roads lately?"
She was flustered and red, and looked as if she would have liked the floor to open up and swallow her. "We haven't had any rain, your lordship," she said. "And I haven't been innocarriages on account of my lady staying here."
