“Shall we?” Gilbert said, with his boots moving towards the door.
The two men hurried out of the room, this time carrying all the candles with them, leaving Diana in complete darkness. She chose not to move, not yet, just in case any sound she made could call her husband back to the library, and she would be discovered. Instead, she turned her head and laid flat on the floor, breathing deeply as she laid her hands to her chest.
I must be mistaken, surely!
The thought took hold of her.
The smartest thing to do would be to ask Gilbert what this is about. It must be some legitimate business that is poorly recorded, and as for the matter of driving people off land …
No, it did sound dodgy indeed, but asking Gilbert about it would certainly not be possible. He had asked for her obedience, and she didn’t doubt he would be furious to know she had been snooping through his paperwork.
Once the men had been gone for long enough, she crept out from her hiding place. Using nothing but the light seeping in through the windows that was bouncing off the snow, she tracked her way back to the desk and collected what she had come for in the first place. She took an inkwell, a quill, and after a little more searching, she eventually found some paper.
As she crept out of the room, she tiptoed past the drawing room, feeling rather like one of the characters she loved to read about when she was little, tiptoeing through great mansions and trying to escape demons. She could have been Isabella, trying to escape the terrifying clutches of Manfred inThe Castle of Otranto.
Once she had climbed the stairs and was safely back in her room, she felt the horrors of the evening upyield themselves completely on her. She was struck with not only the possibility that her husband was involved in something dodgy indeed, but her one true friend in this house had rejected her company.
“Life seems very dark indeed,” she whispered into the air and moved to the window. A thought struck her, and she acted on it. Sat in the window seat, leaning her parchment on the back ofThe Castle of Otranto,she began to write a story that came to her mind, with the words flowing out of her, unrestrained.
She supposed if she couldn’t escape the darkness of this house in reality, then at the very least, she could escape it with her mind and travel somewhere new within her written pages.
Chapter 7
Owen was struggling to sleep. Each time he closed his eyes, he had another dream; each one concerned the duchess and just how she had looked when he had told her he couldn’t spend another evening with her. That sad appearance, the despondency, and the reach for the port glass.
For a while, he abandoned sleep completely and rolled over in the bed, tracing a sketch he had placed by his bed. He had drawn it earlier that evening, using charcoal from fireplaces as he could no longer get his hands on paints he had as a child.
He had sketched the duchess as a fairy, with her wings broken and torn behind her, and that same sad look in her expression as she had downed the small port glass he had given her.
Even in that sketch, she was beautiful, but the mere sight of it was agonizing. As soon as he had resigned himself to the idea of no sleep at all that night, it began to take hold, and he was drawn back into another dream.
The duchess bore that same saddened look, though there were no torn fairy wings behind her, and she was not in the drawing room. Owen had pushed open the door of his tiny, cupboard-like chamber, with a single bed in one corner, a washbasin in another, and a wardrobe with a single chair beside it, to find that the duchess was standing in the middle, staring at him with the saddened look.
“You cannot be here, Diana,” he whispered to her, closing the door behind him. He had shed her title, but it had felt right, as though he weren’t making any kind of discretion at all.
“No one knows I am here, Owen,” she said, shedding his own formal address. She walked towards him, her saddened look breaking into the smallest of smiles. There was something in that look – it broke him. He didn’t want to resist her anymore.
He glanced back at the door, feeling as if there was darkness behind it, as if some awful monster walked the corridors, a demon of lust and control that wanted Diana.
“I will not let him take you,” Owen muttered and grabbed the chair from his room, pushing it against the door and jamming it shut with the chair.
He turned back to Diana, not giving her time to answer before he closed his lips over hers. The kiss was a gentle one, but it was passionate, full of need and desperation. She moved her lips against his own, responding to each touch with equal fervour until her hands curled around his lapels, pulling him towards the single bed.
When she tried to push the jacket off his shoulders, he went to help her, flinging it off his hands and across the room. They worked on his own clothes first, taking each garment off with care as they peppered each other with kisses. Each item of clothing thrown away seemed to increase Diana’s fervour until she broke their kiss and looked up to him with pleading eyes.
“Please, Owen,” she whispered, pulling him down to the bed with her hands across his bare shoulders so that he was clambering over her. He knew what she wanted, even without her saying the words.
He pulled at the skirt of her gown, lifting it upwards until it was bundled around her hips, revealing legs he knew were slender, alabaster white, even in the darkness of the night. He settled himself between her legs, loving the way she pulled at his arms and shoulders, drawing him down towards her.
She kissed him again, tangling their tongues together in a dance that stole his breath. When he reached between the two of them, teasing her with soft touches to the tops of her thigh, her grasp on his shoulder tightened, and she deepened the kiss even more.
When he slid his hand towards her centre, he was careful to be gentle, ensuring the first touch she knew from him was a soft one. She broke the kiss at the touch and let out a breathy moan. He kept the two of them close together, feeling her breaths across his lips as he began to explore her, at all times staying outside of her, pleasuring her.
“Owen …” she moaned his name.
Owen opened his eyes, finding the dream still lingering with him. He shifted in the bed, but his body movement beneath the slim sheets simply reminded him of what he had been dreaming of.
He threw them off his body, needing to be free of the heat that thoughts of Diana had caused him, despite the chill of the air. He sat forward, planting his bare feet on the floorboards and looking around the room that was still pitch black.
