Chapter 11
“Ilike when you call me ‘Diana,’” she said. “’Miss Diana’ makes me feel like someone I’m not supposed to be.”
He didn’t respond, and just as she had before, she sensed him fighting something inside himself.
“Do you have a name other than the Marquess of Greystone? Don’t tell me that as a baby, you were called ‘Lord Greystone.’ You cannot always have been ‘my lord,’” Diana prodded, fluttering her lashes at him.
Flirting with him.
“No one calls me by my name.”
“Have you forgotten it?”
She rather enjoyed the challenge of summoning a smile, if only a hint of one, from this irksomely somber gentleman.
Did he enjoy it as much as she did?
“Is it Harry? Richard? Peregrine?” He was shaking his head again, and the corner of his mouth twitched. But it was the spark of laughter lurking in the back of his eyes that encouraged her.
“Bartholomew?”
“You’ll be sorry if I tell you.”
He was going to make her work for it, but he would tell her his name even if it took her all afternoon to drag it out of him.
“I am Diana Winifred Jones. But I’ll tell you a secret. I would be devastated if I truly believed I belonged to such a dull name as ‘Jones,’ but it isn’t my mother’s, really. Her mother made it up! ButJones? What on earth was she thinking? And Diana isn’t much better. If I had the chance to name myself, I’d come up with something far more interesting. Like… ‘Consuela Bernadette Whitehope’… or ‘Valentina Rose Newhaven.’”
“You sound as though you’ve given this a good deal of thought.”
“Oh, but I have. Collette was given the most exciting name of the three of us. And Sarah’s isn’t much better thanDiana, but at least it suits her. She is younger than us, but almost of another world—in addition to being soft-spoken and accepting. My father declared she and I opposites.”
“Diana suits you perfectly,” he said.
She glanced over, surprised to hear an almost gravelly tone in his normally well-modulated voice.
“I don’t see how.”
“Must I remind you of the proper way to accept a compliment?” He eyed her with that teasing glint.
She lowered her lashes. “Why, thank you, my lord,” she parroted what he’d told her that afternoon in the ballroom. “But I don’t see how that is a compliment.”
“In Greek, the name Diana means Divine. She was known to be a Roman goddess of the moon and the forest. She was related to the greatest of all the gods, Zeus.”
Diana contemplated the description as he turned both of them to climb the gentle slope up the arching bridge. Divine? Goddess of the moon?
“Diana suits you perfectly.”
Did that mean he thought some aspect of her was divine?
“Diana is an elegant name,” he continued. “A very proper and noble one.” He turned both of them to stare down from the railing, resting his arms on it. And then he pointed. “You can see the fish better from here.”
Lord Greystone was not the cold and uncaring aristocrat she’d once believed him to be. He was a person, just like her. Did he realize that?
“I’m grateful to my brother for bringing us out to the ton,” she pondered her thoughts out loud. “And I realize that a good deal of them look down on me. Of course, they’ve been taught to look down on me, so I don’t really blame them. But I’m not sure I have any desire to becomeone of them.”
The fact that he wasn’t reprimanding her for her opinion convinced her that he wasn’t offended by it. And so she continued.
“I don’t want to feel that my every step is being watched and judged. Is that how you feel?”
