Diana shook her head. Those words sounded lovely, but she knew they were likely untrue. Ladies could be cruel to one another. “I don’t know,” she whispered as she looked down at herself in her plain, serviceable gown. “She cannot like me.”
“If she does not like you, I will give you a hundred pounds,” Lucas laughed. “That is not Meg.”
She paced away, still uncertain. Still emotional thanks to the difficulties of the past few days, thanks to the anniversary about to come, the one she kept trying to push away, though she couldn’t fully do it.
“You are certain I should not just go…go home?” she suggested. “I could come back in a few days and give you privacy with your friends.”
He moved to her, turning her gently before he took both her hands. “I would like you to be here,” he said, holding her gaze. “Please stay with me.”
It was the “please” that hit her in the gut, made all her arguments vanish on the wind. She slowly nodded. “Very well. If that is what you need, it would hardly do to withhold my presence.”
He cupped her cheek. “Excellent. Now…” He drew her closer, molding her body to his as his arms folded around her. Her heart began to race, as it always did with him. “There is something else I require. And I think you require it too. Will you come upstairs with me?”
She hesitated for a moment, not because she didn’t want what he was asking for, but because she did so very much. She had become addicted to him. To his touch, his taste, his comfort. And she knew how dangerous that was.
Yet she didn’t resist him. She just pushed away her fear and her heart and let him take her upstairs where she knew she would feel nothing but pleasure once more.
Chapter Sixteen
Diana stood before Lucas the next morning, staring in astonishment over what he had just requested. She blinked.
“Cut your hair,” she repeated. “And shave you.”
He nodded slowly. “Yes. I cannot quite meet my friends looking like a pirate, can I?”
She reached out, swirling one of his curly locks around her fingertip. “I’d rather miss the pirate, I admit.”
A grin flashed over his features, and her knees went a bit weak. “A pirate is made up by deeds, lass,” he said with a wink. “I promise I will never stop…plundering…”
She shook her head at the lewd tone of his voice and how her body reacted with both desire and a comfortable connection. Damn the man for making everything so…easy.
“You’re a cad,” she said with a chuckle, then swept up the scissors from the table where the servants had set them and began to examine his locks. She’d cut her father’s hair over the years, so she was not unaccustomed to the act, but her father’s hair had never been a fall of coarse curls.
“You can’t be angry at me if I make a muck of it,” she said, then snipped the scissors for the first cut.
He caught the lock as it fell and held it up. “A trophy, my lady.”
She laughed as she took the piece of hair and shoved it into her pelisse pocket. Then she focused her attention on the job at hand. With a deep breath, she began to cut. At first, it was all businesslike, but as his hair grew shorter, she slid her hands against his scalp to shape it.
“Mmm,” he said, nuzzling her forearm as she moved around him. “I would have asked you to do this ages ago if I’d known.”
“You are distracting me and shall end up all lopsided if you keep that up,” she said, but her breath was short.
“It might be worth it,” he said, pressing a kiss to her arm and then winking up at her.
She tried to ignore him and at last stood back and stared at her handiwork.
“Mirror?” he asked.
She shook her head. “No, not until we’re finished.” She picked up a towel from the steaming hot bowl of water that had also been brought in. She squeezed some of the liquid out and gently wrapped his face. As they waited for his whiskers to soften and his pores to open, she examined the man before her.
She was transforming him back to the man he was before. Perhaps back to the life he had abandoned all those years ago. A man couldn’t be a spy forever, especially when he had a dukedom to attend to. And with his injuries, a life in the field might never be possible again.
So he would go back to being His Grace. He would, eventually, take up those responsibilities. One of them would be to marry a lady of breeding, one who came from wealth and a titled family. He would create a family with her.
She blinked at the wayward path of her thoughts. None of those things were her concern, of course. She and Lucas had been clear from the beginning that an affair was all this could ever be. That he was not thinking of a future with her. That she could not think of one with him.
“Ready?” she asked, her tone falsely bright as she unwrapped the steaming cloth and set it aside.
