Finally, she pulled up her skirts and relaxed, propping her crossed ankles on the rear seat. She watched the shifting green leaves and the twinkling bits of sunlight that filtered through, until slowly her jealousy and sorrow eased.
She didn’t like herself when she got mired in sadness.
North would be comforted by his family and have no need for toast and honey. That was an excellent thing, no matter how much her heart tried to say otherwise. She was happy to have been able to help him in any way, in view of the damage she’d done to his reputation. And perhaps, to his heart as well.
Twenty quiet minutes of thought told her that she would never be able to find another position as a governess. No respectable family would hire a governess with a bastard child, nephew or not. What elderly lady would want a companion who had a child?
Fear burned in her chest, but she pushed it away. She wasn’t destitute. She could ask Lady Knowe for help and receive it, with no questions asked.
Or North.
She could ask him for help. They had become friends, of a sort, in the last few days.
She was thinking that over when a thrashing noise broke the silence. Someone tugged on the rope. Hastily she sat up, curled her legs to the side, and made certain that her bare toes were covered.
“Leonidas!” she called. “I’m here.”
The boat broke free of the willow fountain, and Diana looked up with a smile on her face.
To be met with a scowl.
“Leonidas?”
“North!” she squeaked.
“You have an assignation with my brother?” North’s mouth was a furious, thin line.
“No,” Diana stated. “I do not have an assignation with your brother.”
“What in the bloody hell are you doing here, then? Shouldn’t you be in the nursery?”
“Of course.” That was the first time he made her feel like the governess. She snatched up her shoes and stockings and hopped onto the rear seat. She refused to meet his eyes as she jumped to shore.
She’d never done that before, flinging herself recklessly into the air. North moved smoothly sideways to catch her, his hands landing on her upper arms. “Let me go,” she ordered. She couldn’t back up, as she’d be in the lake, but she wriggled sideways.
For a moment she thought North might shake her. Had she ever wished to see his face angry? She refused to let him think her intimidated. “Let me go,” she stated again, head high, “so that I may return to the nursery. I can assure you that upper servants are allowed a break of several hours each day.”
His response was pithy and blasphemous.
“That’s enough!” she said fiercely. “Let me go, Lord Roland. You have no right to speak to me this way. You are not acting like a gentleman!”
“I’m not a bloody gentleman,” North growled. But he let her go.
She moved sideways, and then, because she was angry at him, curtsied. “Good afternoon, Lord Roland.” Her tone was scathing.
Large hands jerked her close to him. “Don’t ever call me that.”
Before she could respond, North’s mouth closed on hers. She was too startled to speak—but her body made a decision for her.
It wasn’t his open, rough kiss, as much as the way his arms went around her, as if they would protect her. As if she could stay in his embrace and he would keep away the world and its cruelties.
“Brawny” wasn’t a word that could be applied to nobility . . . but the arms that encircled her were thickly muscled. Even when they were betrothed and she didn’t want to be a duchess, she had secretly craved North’s touch.
Not that he’d ever touched her like this. They’d kissed once. But never like this.
His grip tightened until she melted into his arms. The force of his kiss tilted her head back; he devoured her mouth, desire and anger speaking to her as clearly as if he’d shouted at her.
For the first time, the very first time, she kissed him back, up on her toes, hands curling around broad shoulders. She lost her head and kissed him back, a raw sound coming from her throat as her fingers slid down and spread over his chest, loving the powerful muscles under her touch.
He was kissing her so hard that her mind blurred and she felt engulfed in his heat and strength. She had never imagined a kiss could be so raw. So real.
When they both needed to breathe, he nipped her lip, his gaze direct and smoldering. She closed her eyes and snuggled against him, which made him groan, a hungry sound that weakened her knees. Her eyelids swept closed as he captured her lips again, tongue exploring her mouth as if she was . . .
As if she was his. Holding her as if she was his.
Until he wasn’t.
Chapter Ten
“What were you doing in that boat?” North demanded, noticing the hoarse note in his own voice with incredulity.
He’d heard Diana call to his brother with that happy note of welcome and . . . Bloody hell. He’d lost his mind. He couldn’t remember when he’d gone so white-hot with anger. Not for years.
“You weren’t waiting for Leonidas,” he answered himself. “That was . . . I apologize.”
Diana was staring at him. She put her hands on her hips. “Your brother is a friend. Whenever your siblings are on leave from school, I spend a great deal of time with all of them, and that includes Leonidas.”
“He told you about the island,” North said, gathering the threads of his sanity together.
“What are you doing here?” Diana demanded. “You should be with your family.”
“They are bathing and such. As you pointed out, it can take a lady three hours to change clothing.”
She shook her head, slowly. “You are a terrible liar.”
“There are so many of them. They’re very loud.” His hands were clenched at his sides, because if he didn’t keep them in fists, he would reach out and pull her into his arms again. Kissing Diana, as it turned out, was like eating honey toast.
Curative, if not irresistible.
She surveyed him in a silence broken only by a cricket.
Then, to his utter shock, instead of answering, she took a step forward and tucked her head under his chin. He didn’t move, as frozen as if the cricket had landed on his palm. Diana wrapped her arms around his middle and relaxed against him.
Uncurling his fists, North slipped his arms around her, resting his cheek against her head. Her hair had the sweet, elusive scent of sunshine and under that, lake water. Something wound very tight in his chest relaxed.
“It’s going to be all right,” Diana said against his chest, her voice so low that he hardly heard her over the lapping of water at their feet.
He kissed her hair, and kissed the one ear he could see. Then he put his cheek back down on her hair and they stood in the late afternoon sunshine and listened to silvery-green willow spears rustling in the breeze. The cricket went to sleep or forgot its own tune.
After a while he stepped back. “Do you really need to return to the nursery immediately?”
He’d always thought Diana’s eyes were a clear gray, ringed in midnight blue. But with the lake behind her, they turned misty blue. She shook her head. “Artie is with your mother. Leonidas almost certainly took Godfrey to the stables; they have a tradition of greeting every horse when he comes home.”
North digested that. Godfrey had become a member of the family; no wonder his aunt hadn’t told Diana that Godfrey would be a laird. The situation was something akin to when the second duchess took Joan to London, perhaps planning to abscond with the baby to the continent.
One of their own was in danger of being stolen away. Lady Knowe, let alone the duke, would never allow it.
Accepting that thought, North decided that he would like to take Godfrey for visits to the stables. The thought of a little boy on his shoulders felt right. He and Diana had to talk about that. They had to talk about many things, but not at the moment.
“You weren’t punting to the island?” he asked.
She shook he
r head. “I don’t know how to maneuver the pole. I came here with Lavinia once during the betrothal party. We just pushed the boat away from shore until it drifted under the willow tree, where all the branches dip below the surface. I escape here sometimes.”
“I don’t suppose there’s much privacy when you are living with very small children.”
“No,” Diana said with a wry smile. “As you know, Godfrey ends up in my bed. Sometimes they both find their way there.”
North looked down, and she curled her bare toes in embarrassment. “I’ve seen your feet,” he pointed out. “Under your night robe, which is a good deal more improper than this.”
She had dropped her ugly black shoes on the grass. She was looking at him—at his mouth?—so he stretched out one foot and gently kicked one of her shoes right over the bank and into the lake.
Diana gasped. “Those are my only pair of shoes!”
He gave the other shoe a harder kick, and it flew off the bank and into the water with a splash, like an ugly clod of dirt.
“How dare you,” Diana cried, narrowing her eyes and placing her hands back on her hips, the drowsy-eyed temptress replaced by an eagle-eyed governess.
North tried to kick one of the serviceable black stockings next, but it didn’t go far, and Diana grabbed it. “You’re out of your mind,” she gasped, clutching the stocking to her breast.
For some reason, the idea didn’t bother him, the way it had for months. Instead the corners of his mouth curled up and he tugged at the stocking she held. “This is too practical to be worn by you.”
He didn’t want anything like that on her body. Near her.
“I have only two pairs of stockings,” Diana said, obviously marshaling her patience. “I’m no good at darning. These are my best pair. What am I going to do without shoes?”
She didn’t ask the question to him, but to herself. The words had a quiet desolation to them that chilled North to his core. He wrapped his arms around her and pulled her against his chest. “I am going to buy you shoes, the kind you used to wear.”
“No, you are not.” She didn’t bother to shake her head, but North could feel rejection of that idea through her whole body.
“One of my sisters will give you a pair.”
She pulled herself free. “I shall borrow Mabel’s second-best slippers until I can acquire another pair. Do you understand what you’ve done, North?”
He shook his head.
“Those shoes were my possession, and I have very few possessions. Just because you can afford to allow your valet to steal your breeches doesn’t mean the rest of the world can be as cavalier. A pair of slippers, like those in your sisters’ wardrobes, costs far more than I can afford.”
“I want to buy you shoes. I knocked your shoes in the lake, so I will replace them.” He hesitated and then told her the truth. “Please. It will make me feel better.”
North had the unnerving sense that Diana knew exactly how pared to the bone he felt. The panic that blanketed him when his loving, exuberant family flooded into the drawing room and made that enormous room seem like a narrow cavern with towering stone cliffs.
She sighed. “Kicking my shoes into the lake ought to make you ashamed. It’s something Artie would do in a temper.”
He couldn’t stop himself and kissed her again until she let the stocking fall to the grass and wrapped her arms around him.
“Stop worrying,” she said sometime later, eyes intent on his.
“Because all will be well?” He couldn’t muster a smile.
“It will pass.” She turned away without giving him a sympathetic smile, which he would have hated, and pulled on the rope; the boat had drifted from shore again.
He leaned over her and gave one tug that beached the boat on the bank.
“I never get the boat to come onto the shore so I have to jump.” She nimbly climbed back into the boat. “I wish I were as strong as you are.”
North pulled off his boots and threw his stockings on the bank next to hers. “Strength is not something I think about very often,” he said, climbing after her. She had seated herself on the forward seat. He sat down facing her. “It’s a family trait. In one of my earliest memories of my father, he was taming a horse. In my mind it was the size of an elephant.”
“I have no memory of my father,” Diana said wistfully. “Now poke the shore with the oar, pushing us in that direction.” She nodded toward the thick waterfall of leaves.
The prow of the punt slid into the green wall. Leaves closed around them as the boat reached the end of the rope, coming to a halt in the midst of a sea-green cave, as if they’d slid underwater and entered a mermaid’s parlor.
North slid down and sat in the generous well between the two seats. Stuffing one of the pillows behind him, against the rear seat, he waved the other pillow at Diana.
“This is so improper,” she observed.
“Less so than your chamber last night.” He put his feet on the seat beside her, giving her a nudge with his bare ankle. “Off the footstool, my lady.”
Diana slid to the bottom of the boat opposite him, taking the cushion he handed her and putting it at her back. Then she carefully arranged her skirts so that they draped over her toes.
“I like your feet,” North said thoughtfully. His eyes narrowed. “Did you take off your shoes when Leonidas showed you the island?”
“Oh, for goodness’ sake,” Diana said. She threw her head back and looked up at the maze of willow branches over them.
He had felt trapped by bed curtains and military tents, but this living tent felt right.
“Yes, I’m jealous,” he confirmed.
“I am not yours,” Diana said, keeping her eyes far above them.
He admired the long smooth line of her throat. Some of her hair had fallen from its bun and a strand or two trailed over the wooden seat, forcing him to imagine locks of her hair falling over his chest, winding around his arms, brushing . . .
Well.
“You’re my friend,” he said gruffly. “Alaric’s abroad, and Parth is in London. I trust you.”
She lowered her chin and leveled her gaze at him. “That says little for your intelligence, don’t you think? Has anyone other than myself told lies about you?”
“Probably not.” He reached over his head and stretched, enjoying his lack of a coat. “Except for those engravers who depicted me as a ravisher emerging from a trunk.”
“Would you mind if I put my feet on the seat beside your shoulder?”
He grinned at her. “The way I have done, without asking permission?”
There was a thread of erotic tension between them that grew hotter and tighter every time their eyes met. And when she stretched out long, slender legs and put her feet beside him?
The sight of Diana’s ankles jumbled his thoughts so much that all the blood in his body headed downward. He had to be careful and not frighten her. Though if that kiss hadn’t frightened her . . .
She slid farther down, so her head rested against the cushion. Her cheeks were pink and her lips had the curve, the laughing curve, that he remembered from when he first saw her.
How could he not have realized that she was grieving during their betrothal party? How blind had he been? In the last three days he had learned every curve of her face. If she felt miserable now, he would know.
“You have freckles,” he observed, because if they didn’t talk, he was going to pull her into his lap and probably capsize the boat.
“Yes, I do.”
There was a heaviness in her voice that he didn’t like. “I would like to kiss every one.”
Diana rolled her eyes. “You’re a terrible liar, as I told you earlier.”
“I’m not lying.”
She snorted. “Tell me five things about yourself, and I promise I can identify each one for truth or falsehood. Do you know, when we were betrothed, I was never quite sure what you were thinking? Now I know that the trick is to watch your eyes.”
Tha
t was a delighted smile on her face. North took a careful breath, exerted control over the lower half of his body again, and said, “A gentleman does not fling about his emotions, treating everyone in the room to a display.”
“Why not?”
It was a simple question, and once he thought about it, perplexing to answer. “Perhaps,” he said after a minute, “because so little that we do is private. Ophelia told me once that if she sneezed at the opera the gossip columns would report that she was dying of consumption.”
“The burden of being a duchess,” Diana said, looking delighted at having avoided that fate. Did she truly believe that a coronet wasn’t in her future? Looking into her clear eyes, he knew the answer to that.
Yes. Yes, she did.
Diana believed herself to be his friend. She enjoyed their kiss. She instinctively knew how to make him feel better.
But she did not consider them to be still betrothed, or betrothed again.
It was a pretty tangle, but he had time to work it out. “I’ll tell you five things about myself,” he said, “and you may guess whether they are true or false. From the expression in my eyes.” He grimaced.
“You can’t try to fox me,” Diana said instantly.
“Of course I can! What’s the point otherwise? What do I get if I trounce you?”
“What do I get? You might as well give up now!”
“You get a new pair of slippers,” he said, nudging her bare feet with his shoulder. “And I get a kiss.”
“A kiss is not equal to a pair of shoes.”
“To me it is,” he said. “A kiss is better than shoes.”
She wrinkled her nose. “I don’t mean to be rude, North, but you say that because you’ve never earned a wage.”
“I was paid for my service.” His voice was raw.
Diana didn’t say anything, but what she did was better than words. She turned a little to the side and wrapped a hand around one of his ankles. He had the sudden feeling he’d had the night before: She was tethering him to the ground.