Diana’s hands shook with empathy and anger on his behalf. There was so much about the man she didn’t know, couldn’t understand because he locked her out of his life and his secrets. His body? Oh, that was hers. She had no doubt she could have his body any time she crooked her finger.
But his mind? His soul? His heart? His secrets?
Those were off limits.
“I suppose a mistressisthe best way I could be described,” she muttered. “Or what his mother called me: a whore.”
The idea stung, for when Lucas touched her she felt so much more than that between them. But she pushed that aside. She was here to help him. Right now he had to be hunched over a desk, his muscles getting tight and painful.
So she had to go to him. That was all there was to it. Not to ask him to share with her. She knew better than to do that. But just to…help. She just wanted to help.
She left the chamber and wove her way through the estate. Somehow she found the stairs, but she was soon lost in the twisting and turning hallways and doorways that seemed to lead to nowhere.
How in the world could anyone get accustomed to this life?
She had no answer to that, but didn’t need one, for as she turned yet another corner she discovered an open door ahead. She saw the flicker of firelight reflecting on the wood and sighed as she moved toward it.
What she found was a study. As she entered the room, she was hit with the scent of old cigars and long-burned fires. The room was pompous and stuffy andnothinglike the man who sat behind the huge mahogany desk in the back. Lucas was hunched over, scribbling a note with a massive feather pen that he dashed in and out of the ink beside him with little care to drips he dragged across the page.
“Lucas?” she said softly.
He jumped and jerked his head up to look at her. For the first time since she met him, he had been stripped of his boundaries, his walls, of all the training he’d received as a spy that kept him safe and separate from anything unpleasant around him. His pain was clear on every angle of his handsome face. It went deeper than mere physical injury and she understood it down to her very core.
It was the same as her own pain. Mirror images brought on by what she assumed were far different circumstances.
“I don’t want to talk about anything,” he said as he warmed a stick of wax over the candle beside him. He sealed his letter and quickly stamped it shut, then stood.
“No?” she asked, tracking his every restless move as he came around the desk, letter in hand, toward her. “That’s good. Neither do I.”
He drew in a few breaths and some of the energy went out of him. He slowly began to turn back to the man she’d known, the one she’d given herself to. Not the reluctant duke anymore, not the unwanted son. Just Lucas.
“Then what do you want?” he asked, and from his tone he knew full well the power and double meaning of those words.
She hesitated, for the idea of having him, making love to him, was tempting indeed. Especially since she had spent the previous night in her own bed, separated from him because she knew this thing between them was spiraling out of control.
But right now she wasn’t certain that sex was what he needed. At least not the only thing he needed.
“I want to walk,” she responded.
His face fell so quickly it was almost comical, and she had to hold back a giggle at the expression. “Diana,” he began.
She held up a hand. “On orders of your physician.”
She saw how he wanted to argue with her. How he wanted to refuse what she suggested. But then he just sighed and threw up his arms, almost in surrender. “Very well.”
She drew back. “That’s all? Very well? You aren’t going to give me some treatise on how that isn’t what you want to do?”
He shot her a look. “I’ve never given a treatise in my life.”
Now she couldn’t help but smile as she folded her arms. “Never?”
“Fine.” He shifted his weight. “Once or twice. But to argue with you? I’ve learned that is a fruitless endeavor. Let me ring for Jones and give him this to deliver, and then to the Willowby gardens we’ll go.”
She noted that he said “the Willowby gardens”, not his own, separating himself once more from the title he held. But she made no comment as he moved to the bell by the door. To her pleasure, he rang it not with his good arm, but with his injured one. And though she saw that he flexed his fingers and shook them out a little after he did so, his reaction was nothing like the pain he had exhibited just two weeks before when he first came into her care.
Part of her was happy for that fact, of course. To ease his pain even a fraction was a victory and one that she would savor for the rest of her life.
But the other part felt something darker and sharper and deeper. Part of her felt a great terror at seeing him function so well physically. Because soon she would have no reason to be by his side.
