Diana had the sense that she was the only woman in the history of Great Britain to back away from marriage to a future duke. She’d been so unenthusiastic after their first meeting that her mother had threatened to cut off her sister and nephew without a shilling if Diana did not wed North.
“My mother insisted that I dress as a duchess well before you made your interest clear,” Diana said, giving him a bright smile. “She was very pleased to discover that you were a model of elegance.”
“I wasn’t, until I noticed you,” he stated casually.
Diana frowned. When she met North, he had been wearing a pale blue coat with silver embroidery, and she thought he was the prettiest man she had ever seen. And the most terrifying.
“I met you at Lady Rulip’s ball,” he said, “but I actually caught sight of you at a ball a few weeks earlier, before I asked for an introduction. On that occasion, I was wearing a brown velvet coat. My stockings were white, without clocks. Unimaginative wig, minimal powder.”
“No patch?” she asked, fascinated.
He shook his head. “I asked who you were, and was told you were the most stylish young lady of the Season. Your cousin Lavinia said you were an expert in the art of dressing.”
“She didn’t know me very well,” Diana said, taken aback.
“By the time you met me in Lady Rulip’s ballroom,” he said, “I had hired Boodle. I was wearing powder and patches, heels, and a lavishly embroidered coat.”
Something about his face made her giggle. “You didn’t appreciate your own sartorial success?”
“Hated it,” he said calmly. “Loathed it. The worst was the lip salve. I tried that, and even for you, I couldn’t do it. It had a flavor of cod-liver oil.”
“Oil of roses doesn’t,” Diana observed.
He shrugged. “I hired Boodle the day after seeing you for the first time.” He threw back the rest of his drink. “I stayed away from the ton while Boodle wrought his magic.”
Diana stared at the strong column of his throat in disbelief. “I had no idea.”
“Why should you? Would you like another glass?”
Her second glass of sherry was gone. A blanket of warm courage now hung about her shoulders, a relief after the trembling anxiety of the day.
“Yes, please.” Watching North cross the room, Diana noticed for the first time that he wasn’t wearing a high wig, the sort he used to wear. Instead, he had on a plain wig, not unlike one her grandfather would have worn. Small, unobtrusive, inelegant.
Earlier, in the nursery, she hadn’t allowed herself to look at his body because, shameful though it was, Diana had been appalled by the idea of marrying North, but she had adored his body.
It was big and strong, like that of a man who labored in the fields. He had dressed like a fop, but he had never moved like one.
As a future duke, he had dressed in silk, often with sumptuous embroidery in gold thread.
Now?
He was wearing a black coat that fit his shoulders but wasn’t so tight that he’d have to wrestle it on. He hadn’t been willow slim before, but now he was strong and solid, as if he were a boxer.
“You look—” She stopped. Perhaps he had engaged in hand-to-hand combat in the war.
He came to a halt before her, a glass in each hand. “We have both changed, haven’t we?” He glanced at her. “A plain black dress. No emeralds. No wig. Those shoes.”
They were sturdy, black shoes, made for a baker’s wife. She had traded her last pair of satin slippers for the only shoes the cobbler had that fit her. She had disliked the showy, colorful clothing her mother made her wear—except for her shoes.
For some reason, she loved frivolous, brightly colored slippers, the more spangled and bejeweled, the better.
She didn’t care a fig for North’s opinion, but being pitied still hurt.
“They are long-wearing,” she said, around a lump in her throat. “And appropriate to my station.”
The sympathy left his face as if it had never been there. “We need to talk about that, don’t we?”
“Not yet.” She raised her glass and took a reckless gulp. She was beginning to feel tipsy. “I would like to pretend to be Miss Diana Belgrave for a short while longer.”
There was an arrested look in his eyes, but she ignored it. Whether he understood or not, she would never be Miss Belgrave again. Not merely because her mother had informed her she was no longer a member of the family, but because something inside her had changed when her sister died.
She no longer had the faintest inclination to follow society’s dictates. She was her grandfather’s child now, for all intents and purposes.
“What would happen if you met me now?” North asked suddenly. She was still seated by the window, but he had withdrawn, most properly, to a chair across from her.
Diana almost laughed. He would have strolled past her. It was absurd to imagine that a future duke would have noticed her without all the jewels, the duchess-worthy attire, the face paint. Moreover, she had red hair, and without clever use of lip rouge, her mouth was too wide. He wouldn’t have distinguished her from the wallpaper.
Or the wallflowers, more to the point.
“What do you mean?” she asked, stalling.
“What if we had not met during the Season? What if we had not met until this moment? Would you still run to the other side of the room every time I approached?”
Despite herself, a little puff of air escaped her lips.
“Did you think I didn’t notice?” He raised his glass to his lips again. “I put it down to virginal shyness, which is somewhat absurd under the circumstances.”
She had to tell him that Godfrey wasn’t her son, but that could wait five minutes. Perhaps ten. “I am not terribly shy,” she admitted.
“I seem to have been remarkably obtuse. At some point one of my brothers asked if you were an interesting woman, and I replied that I didn’t want an interesting wife.”
She cracked a wry smile at that. “I have certainly proved fascinating to the gossips. But I’m not interesting in the right ways. Your brother’s implied judgment was correct.”
“I don’t think Alaric was implying anything, as you had scarcely met. What are ‘the right ways’?”
“For a noblewoman to be interesting? Your duchess should be someone like Lord Alaric’s wife. Willa is intelligent, and thoughtful, and never puts a foot wrong.”
“So you do put a foot wrong?”
She widened her eyes comically. “The only way I succeeded during the Season was by keeping silent. I was terrified of misspeaking every time we conversed. It was easier to avoid you.”
He flinched, just a small movement, but she saw it.
“The grand duke-to-be,” she said, rushing into speech, waving her hands as she found herself doing whenever she had confessed something embarrassing that she would have preferred to have kept to herself. “Graceful and stylish, perfect in every way. I had been hoping for a baronet. A kind man with a coach and four and a comfortable house, who would overlook the grocer in my family.”
“So it was disappointing when a gentleman who owned more than a coach and four made his interest known?” he asked dryly.
“My mother was not disappointed.” She grinned at him, because she liked the unpretentious flash of humor he was showing now. She’d certainly never seen any sign of it when they were courting. “I knew you were too grand for me, but she felt rightly that your interest was confirmation of her brilliance.”
“‘Her brilliance’?”
“Remember, my mother is a grocer’s daughter, for all she married a lord,” Diana explained. “My mother put months into making me fit to marry a duke. The woman whom you courted was her creation, and she rightly took the credit.”
She thought North’s gaze was cold before, but now it was icy. Yet she refused to allow him to believe a lie any longer. “You weren’t betrothed to me,” she said flatly. “Your bride-to-be was a docile girl shaped by my mother to your s
pecific requirements.”
He scowled at that.
“Everyone knew that you were considering matrimony,” she told him. “My mother studied Lindow Castle and your family. She thought about tossing me at Lord Alaric’s feet, but at that point we had no idea when he would return to England, and besides, your brother will never be a duke.”
His shoulders moved sharply, as if he’d like to do something violent.
“She set a trap,” Diana said.
“You were not a trap,” he said. Stubborn man. He would never admit that he was foxed.
“I was not the trap, but the bait. I had the tallest wig in the room. Your sister-in-law, Willa, compared it to the roost in a barn. You couldn’t help but notice me.” She sighed. “At any rate, I thought that if my husband belonged to the gentry, rather than the peerage, he would be more likely to forgive me, once he found out who I really was.”
“Who you really were,” North said slowly. “Do enlighten me, Diana. Who are you?”
“You know what I mean.”
“No, I truly don’t.”
“I’m not decorous or graceful. Remember how you told me, the last time I saw you, that I would be a wonderful duchess?” She smiled ruefully. “My sister would have made an excellent Duchess of Lindow, but my mother was forced to work with me instead. I make missteps all the time. I let slip the wrong things.”
“I don’t remember meeting your sister.”
North was clearly annoyed, but he didn’t seem angry to learn that he had proposed marriage to a mirage. His eyes were fatigued and she didn’t like the smudges under them, but he had smiled twice and almost chuckled—she thought—once.
“I’ll give you an image of what your life would have been like,” she said, ignoring his comment about Rose. “Just imagine that your duchess is on your arm, and you’re greeting Lord Hucklesburry.”
“Who is he?” North inquired.
“I made him up. Lord Hucklesburry and his wife are not happy together.” In the back of her mind she registered that North smelled good, like honey and spice and a clean man.
“What a shame.”
He crossed his legs, leading Diana to notice his thighs. She’d always noticed North’s thighs. She rushed into speech. “You and your wife know all the ignominious details of His Lordship’s passionate love for one of the downstairs maids.”
“No one tells me ignominious details,” North observed.
“They always tell me,” Diana countered, “and I will have related them to you. Now the thing you have to remember is that Lady Hucklesburry was not a virgin upon marriage, so her father added five hundred pounds to her dowry.”
North was perturbed to find that he was on the verge of smiling at the absurd tale Diana was telling. She was so earnest, and so very pretty.
No, she was beautiful. How could he ever have thought she was attractive wearing a wig? This evening she had bundled all that copper hair of hers into a simple chignon, and soft curls were starting to escape and wave around her forehead.
“Yes?” he said, because she seemed to be waiting expectantly.
“Your duchess—the most important lady in the parish—says just the wrong thing.”
“What would that be?” North inquired.
“A reference to the five hundred pounds.”
“I can see that would be inadvisable.”
“Back when Lord Hucklesburry discovered his bride had entertained a lover before they met, he insisted on renegotiating her dowry. So now that he has taken a mistress—downstairs maid or not—he owes his wife five hundred pounds.”
North found his mouth reluctantly curling up. “That’s absurd.”
“Only because you’re a man and not used to treating ladies as equal in value to their husbands.”
“Are you adept at driving a bargain?” he asked, with reluctant fascination.
Her face fell. “I’m terrible with money,” she confided. “You know Mr. Calico, the peddler, don’t you?”
“Certainly.” The visits of Mr. Calico and his bright green wagon had been high points of North’s childhood.
“He scolded me when he was last here because I tried to give him back more than my original guinea in change. I got nervous and confused the coins. It was frightfully humiliating.”
North took another swallow of sherry. He hadn’t known his fiancée from Adam and it was beginning to sink in.
She caught the realization in his face. “Now you understand why I couldn’t have been a duchess—”
He raised his head and cut off another list of her various shortcomings. “Are you telling me that you would have instigated a discussion of betrothal customs with the Hucklesburrys?” North put down his glass. “Or are you really saying that your mother would have added five hundred pounds had I asked her for it?”
He said it gently, because he didn’t mean it to chide. He liked the new Diana, but her secret child was galling. It was one thing to put on fine feathers and play a docile role. That was no worse than when he put on powder and patches in a fruitless attempt to win a fair lady’s heart.
It was another thing to have a child hidden in the country.
“Oh,” she said. The pleasure drained from her face and her smile faltered. “That is not exactly what happened.”
North glanced toward the door, but his aunt was nowhere to be seen. “Perhaps we should have that talk now.”
Her fingers wound together anxiously. He liked it better when she laughed, her fingers fluttering in the air.
“Let’s begin with how you ended up in a cottage. I understand from my aunt that your mother disowned you. I presume you and Mrs. Belgrave are still estranged, since she has not rescued you from your employment.”
Diana felt as if her stomach had shriveled into a small, hard lump. Some errant, prideful part of her didn’t want North to know how little respect her mother had for her.
Even after Rose had been summarily cast out of their life for the crime of carrying a child out of wedlock, Diana had kept making excuses, kept trying to love her mother, until she was sent off to a betrothal party in brightly colored silks and satins, while Mrs. Belgrave remained in London to plaster over a vexing setback.
Rose’s death.
“My mother will never relent,” Diana said, allowing the familiar grief to resonate silently through her bones. “She thinks very poorly of me.”
“Why didn’t you turn to the child’s family?” North asked.
“Godfrey’s father and grandfather passed away in a carriage accident, and his grandmother died years before.”
“You are Lavinia Gray’s cousin,” North continued, his eyes steady on hers. “You cannot tell me that Lavinia would not invite you to live with her. Even if her mother refused, she would share her pin money.”
Diana managed a wry smile. “Lavinia and Lady Gray moved to France directly after our betrothal party. I tried to write to her, but I didn’t have her address. I’m sure she wrote to me, but my mother would have destroyed the letter. I doubt Lavinia has any idea what happened after I jilted you, unless those terrible prints depicting us are circulating outside of England.”
“Bloody hell.” North reached up as if to run his hands through his hair, only to encounter his wig. Without pausing, he tossed it onto a nearby chair.
His hair was black and short. Without the white wig, his eyes appeared darker and his cheekbones sharper. He had always been beautiful, but now—now he looked potent. Masculine.
Diana could at last imagine him on the battlefield. It had been impossible to picture the man she had known mincing around a battlefield in a tall wig and high heels.
But this man? He was a warrior, from his heavily muscled shoulders to his—to everything.
“Did you know that they are saying that I raped you?” He sounded as if he were gritting his teeth.
Diana almost apologized again, but she had the feeling he would snarl at her. “I have seen the print depicting us as characters in Shakespeare’s Cymbel
ine. Could you dismiss them as an artistic flight of fancy?”
“No matter how fanciful, I dislike being depicted as a rapist.”
“The print doesn’t pretend to be accurate,” she pointed out. “You are caught in the act of emerging from a little trunk, which seems to be crammed with jewels as well as you. And you are not a small man.”
She let herself enjoy his broad chest from beneath lowered lashes.
His mouth had turned to an uncompromising line. “I don’t find it amusing, no matter the size of the trunk.”
“Well, you must change your attitude,” she said firmly, ignoring his curt tone. “The print is as absurd as those depicting Lord Alaric slicing off the head of a giant sea monster.”
“Absurd they may be, but I feature as the villain instead of the hero.”
Diana made a face at him. “You aren’t a villain; we’ve already discussed the fact that our comedy of errors has a villainess, and I am she. I shall find some way to make the ton understand that you had nothing to do with Godfrey, nor with my employment. I promise you that.”
“You needn’t bother,” he said flatly. “I don’t give a damn.”
“You can’t have it both ways,” she pointed out. “Either you are unamused by your depiction in a Shakespeare play, or you don’t give a damn, in which case, the fact you extract yourself from a trunk half your size is as entertaining as your brother’s subjugated sea monster.”
Miraculously, his eyes went from frigid to amused. “Subjugated sea monster?”
She grinned, happy to see that glimmer of laughter. “Subdued squid? Licked leviathan?”
“In the midst of my lecturing, did I mention that the perfect duchess never points out when her spouse has ceased to be logical?”
“I’m sure you would have got around to it, given time,” Diana said.
His eyes were at half mast, glittering at her with an expression in them that she hadn’t seen before. It wasn’t longing, or affection—
And it was gone.
“So that’s the tale of how I ended up in the cottage where Lady Knowe found me,” Diana said, circling back to his question. “There’s no one to blame, I assure you.”