My Reckless Surrender (25 page)

She looked beautiful.

The dog paused to nose without enthusiasm at a clump of
weeds. Then he lifted his head with a sudden tensing of his body. He whined softly and padded toward Ashcroft.

“Rex!” Diana called. “Rex, come back!”

She hitched up her skirts to chase the dog, providing a breathtaking flash of stocking-clad calves. She wore sensible half boots, and as she rushed ahead, her dark blue skirts swishing across the thick summer grass, he caught a flash of crisp white cotton petticoat. A demure sight to tantalize a rake, but it set desire raging like flames through a dry woodpile.

“Rex!”

The spaniel whined again, then barked sharply. He ran toward Ashcroft with surprising speed, given the rickety way he'd trailed his mistress.

Diana swore under her breath. With salty relish. No missish oaths for his woman, he was pleased to note. He'd always liked her earthiness. Especially when she devoted it to pleasuring him. She swerved off the path and pushed through the thick green growth.

Ashcroft lurched to his feet. He hadn't been nervous with a woman since he was a lad, but he was nervous now. He sought the rage that had fortified him through the last days. It was absent. Instead, a blazing tide of anticipation overwhelmed him.

The dog appeared first, rustling through the bushes to growl and glower at him with rheumy brown eyes. Just behind the dog, Diana burst into the small clearing, frowning, her concentration on her runaway pet, her hair starting to tumble. She was no better at securing her coiffure here than she'd been in Perry's gorgeous seraglio of a bedroom.

A thousand memories hit, hard as a hammer, soft as swan's down. Diana arching under him, crying out her pleasure. Diana naked and languid after love. Diana laughing. Diana arguing. Diana challenging him as no woman had.

Diana…

Words fled. A lump the size of Mount Snowdon lodged in his throat. His hands curled at his sides, and he thought his heart must burst, it thumped so crazily.

“Rex…” Then she looked up and saw Ashcroft.

She stopped on an audible breath, the pink seeping from her cheeks. A shaking hand rose to clench between her breasts.

Still trapped in silent stasis, he observed the expressions flash through her gray eyes. He read a radiant happiness that made his blood sing. Then dismay, then fear and unmistakable guilt. Finally, some complex, dark emotion he didn't understand.

“Ashcroft,” she whispered, as if the word were a curse.

 

Diana was trapped in a nightmare. Identical to the cruel dreams where Ashcroft appeared in Marsham and accused her of betrayal. Although the nightmares weren't as painful as her other dreams. Where she shuddered awake trembling, sweating, verging on climax, wondering why the phantom arms holding her didn't hold her in reality.

She'd missed Ashcroft so much. He'd latched such hooks into her heart, she'd never shake him free. Since returning home, she felt like she'd had a limb amputated.

She hadn't expected him to accept dismissal without a fight. It wasn't in his nature to give up on something he wanted. And she'd deceived him into wanting her, heaven forgive her.

A neighbor had mentioned a stranger asked after her the first Sunday morning she was back. She'd known immediately it was Ashcroft. What surprised her was that her father had managed to turn him away. Her father, who had barely spoken to her since her return, never alluded to the encounter.

The letters that arrived in handfuls last week hadn't surprised her either. She'd insisted she wouldn't read them. Of course she had. Over and over.

She'd insisted she wouldn't keep them. They currently re
sided under her pillow, creased and stained with tears she shed in the privacy of her chamber.

How stupid. How pointless. How adolescent.

Every night she pored over his increasingly agitated requests for her to come back. She knew the words by heart. No wonder Ashcroft haunted her. She was like a dedicated drunkard. Knowing liquor gave her a headache but unable to stop reaching for the sherry bottle.

Even so, she knew better than to answer his letters. When the correspondence ceased, she told herself it was inevitable. He'd found another woman to share his breathtaking passion. Diana was safe. He'd never trouble her again. In a few months, he probably wouldn't remember her name.

How she wished the idea made her a scrap happier.

Dreams still came at night to shatter her rest. She felt as if something essential to her existence was missing, and she must find it quickly before she stopped functioning altogether.

Which didn't prevent sick terror coiling in her belly when she caught him so close to Marsham, so close to Cranston Abbey, so close to Lord Burnley.

Curse him. She'd left him. Why couldn't he stay left?

“What are you doing here?” The question vibrated with anger. Anger and distress, although she hoped he didn't guess how upset she was to see him. Rex whined.

Ashcroft's eyebrows arched in the familiar expression. “Surely that's obvious. You need to answer some questions. Let's start with what you were doing in London. Who paid for your house and clothes? Why did you seduce me?”

As if he hadn't spoken, she continued in that same quaking voice. “I don't want to see you.”

Even as her eyes devoured him as though he offered the only light in a long, dark winter.

Since they'd parted, she'd relived every hour they spent together. Yet now he was here, details pierced her like jagged shards of glass. The precise angle of his jaw. The lazy glint
in his green eyes. His height. He was still the only man who made her feel delicate and feminine. That alluring curl of his lip when he smiled, as if they shared a joke the rest of the world never quite got.

“That's unfortunate.” In contrast to hers, his voice was firm and decisive. “Because I want to see you.”

His stare reminded her of his focused attention when he wanted sex. She licked dry lips at the idea of his touching her. She wanted it so much, yet only disaster loomed. She must stay strong. And she had to get rid of him before he was discovered.

“Come on, Rex,” she said flatly. She turned on her heel and stalked away, the dog shuffling behind her.

“No, you don't,” Ashcroft said softly, lunging forward and hooking his hand around her upper arm. The contact stopped her in her tracks.

Rex growled. “Quiet, Rex,” she said. Then to Ashcroft, “Let me go.”

He ignored her. “Did you get my letters?”

She faced him down with stubborn defiance, even as her blood rushed with excitement at his nearness. “Yes.”

His hand tightened. “And?”

She tried to sound implacable. Instead, her response just emerged as sulky childishness. “And nothing. I tore them up and threw them in the fire.”

His beautifully shaped mouth quirked in wry amusement. “Harsh fate. Didn't you want to see what I said?”

Who could blame him for disbelieving her? The pile of letters stashed in her bedroom proved she lied. “No. How did you know I'd be here today?”

In a less-self-assured man, the expression that crossed his saturnine, intense face might be embarrassment. “I've waited for three days.”

She stared at him in shock. “I don't…”

He shrugged, still with that discomfited air. “You didn't answer my letters.”

Oh, Ashcroft…

She felt so sick with guilt and love, her heart cracked. She bit her lip, glanced away, and fought tears. This notorious rake had endured days braving the elements to talk to her. Without his saying so, she knew he'd never done such a thing for a woman before.

And she was achingly aware she wasn't worth a single moment of his time.

She had a sudden memory of the supercilious rakehell she'd encountered in his beautiful library. So far removed from this devastated, suffering man. Bile filled her mouth, and roiling self-disgust made her wish she'd never forced her way into his life.

Logic told her the anguish wouldn't always be this sharp. Her heart insisted otherwise.

She ignored her heart. She had a bleak premonition ignoring her heart would become a habit in the future. Rex whimpered and nudged her skirts, seeking reassurance. He'd been jumpy for days, sensing the discord in her father's house.

Abruptly, she drooped in Ashcroft's hold, the fight leaching from her. Her voice emerged as a low, choked murmur. “There's nothing for you here.”

“There's
everything
for me here.” He stepped closer, towering above her. If he took her in his arms, she'd shatter. His tone deepened into velvet seduction. She felt as much as heard it. Every hair on her skin rose in longing. “I don't care what you've done. Come back, Diana.”

She knew what it must cost him to say those words. How she wished she could obey the soft entreaty. It hurt to speak. “It's over.”

He released her and stepped back. Immediately, she missed his touch the way she'd missed him for ten miserable days. She lifted her hands to rub her arms, although it was a warm morning. The coldness lived inside and had nothing to do with the season. Rex crowded her in silent sympathy.

Ashcroft's jaw hardened. “Tell me why.”

If only she could. She braced herself to lie once more. With all this lying, it should become easier. She reached a stage where she'd gag if she had to force out another falsehood.

Just one more, she promised herself. Send Ashcroft away, then you'll never have to lie to him again.

But when she read the burning emotion in his face, she couldn't say the lacerating, insulting words. Instead, she shook her head with dull obstinacy and turned away. “I'm sorry, Ashcroft.”

She managed two steps, Rex sticking so close to her heels, he tangled in her skirts.

“Wait, Diana!” Ashcroft leaped after her.

Wildly, she swerved to evade him. “No, Tarquin.” His Christian name slipped out before she could stop it.

Rex yelped when she stepped on him, and she twisted to avoid trampling the spaniel. Ashcroft dived to catch her as she teetered.

She plastered both hands across her belly in an automatic gesture of protection.

A
shcroft froze as if struck by lightning.

He tried to speak. Nothing emerged. He cleared his throat. Tried again.

Gently but remorselessly, he shifted his hold on Diana's waist and turned her to face him. After brief resistance, she capitulated. Her mouth turned down in misery. She was ashen and trembling.

This time he managed to say the impossible words. “You're pregnant.”

He thought she was pale before, but the color bleached so drastically from her skin, even her lips turned white. He saw her consider denying the charge and recognized the moment she decided on honesty.

Odd he could read her so accurately, yet she managed to keep such a quantity of secrets.

“It's too early to say,” she said, even as that betraying hand cradled her belly where he already knew his child grew. The dog gave another soft whine and pressed against her as if to offer comfort.

“When did you last have your courses?” Ashcroft asked relentlessly, more to convince her than himself.

“That's none of your business,” she said sullenly, without meeting his eyes. All her vinegar had drained away.

He was every kind of lunatic. He should have known her Gypsy remedies were absolute nonsense. She was less experienced than a kitten, for all she'd been married. Now the two of them were stuck in this mess.

Hell, after all these years, he was snared. With a respectable woman at that.

It was a damned disaster.

He waited for horror to overtake him. For anger and denial and recriminations and suffocation.

He waited…

And felt a slow, shimmering joy.

Diana carried his child. She'd grow round and glowing, nurturing his son or daughter inside her glorious body. She'd give birth to a baby who, he prayed, would be the image of her.

“Say something, Ashcroft,” she said in a stark voice. She stared at him as if she beheld a volcano or a flooding river. Some unpredictable force of nature.

He tried to tell his heart that his joy was futile. That he wasn't fit to be a father. That he'd find some solution to this dilemma that left him free to resume his life of debauchery.

The fountain of happiness refused to be quenched.

He cleared his throat again. His voice kept deserting him. He had so much to say, sentences swarmed into his mouth, but only two words emerged. Two words he'd already spoken.

“You're pregnant.” He sounded like he'd been caught in a hurricane.

Diana looked wretched. Ashamed.

Foolish girl. Surely she'd soon feel the happiness he did.

She rushed to fill the silence. “Even if I am, don't worry. I promised I'd take care of any repercussions. I don't expect you to do the honorable thing. I'd never expect that.”

He brushed aside the insult. The wild song in his heart
rang too loudly for him to worry about her opinion of his old self.

Just as he'd waited for horror to descend at the discovery of her pregnancy, he waited for every nerve to protest at linking himself to one woman for life. He'd always avoided the parson's mousetrap the way a cat avoided water. For the same reason. It was a totally inappropriate environment for a louche roué like him.

Except marrying Diana promised paradise. With the full approval of Church and state, he'd have her in his bed. She'd never sneak away again. His days would be full of looking at Diana and talking to Diana and arguing with Diana and sleeping with Diana. Even at this euphoric instant, he recognized marriage was no heaven, but right now, it beckoned like heaven.

For the first time in his life, the universe was absolutely right. Whatever Diana's secrets, at this moment, he knew they didn't matter. What mattered was that he wanted her, and she carried his child.

He drew himself to his full height. He clasped her more firmly around the waist, a waist that would expand as his child thrived.

“Marry me, Diana.” To his surprise, he sounded utterly sure.

She stared at him aghast, her pupils dilating with the force of her feelings.

Fighting back the hurt that pricked his bubble of happiness, he hurried into persuasion. “I know you think I won't make an acceptable husband. I swear I've changed. It sounds asinine to say a good woman's been the saving of me, but these last weeks with you, I've…”

She placed a trembling hand over his mouth, and he fell silent. He stared into her gray eyes, flat and lightless as the sea under cloud, and this time, he read her emotions with complete accuracy.

She looked as though her best friend had just died.

He frowned. Of all the responses he'd expected to his impulsive proposal, and in truth he had no idea what he expected, this turbulent sorrow seemed out of place. He was inexperienced offering marriage, but other men survived the deed. A speedy acceptance of the fellow's hand or, in fewer circumstances, a polite refusal were usual.

This biting, unspeaking grief was singular.

“Diana…” he began in bewilderment, but she slid her hand over his mouth. How strange to read tenderness in her touch when she was so appalled by his proposal.

To his shock, tears sparkled in her eyes. Since they'd first made love, he'd never seen her cry. Not even when her father caught her with her lover. Not even when she sent that lover away.

Although he wasn't sure what she wanted, he couldn't help lifting one hand to cup her face. She was so distressed. What had he said? The sight of her weeping made him want to cut his throat. Her pain was his.

She tried to pull away, but he didn't let her. “No…” she forced out in a strangled voice.

His heart plummeted to his gut. “No?”

He wanted to sound uncaring, but his voice cracked and betrayed his pain with mortifying clarity.

She tried again to escape before settling in his hold, panting like a frightened bird. He'd never viewed her in such a fragile light—to him, she'd always been a Valkyrie—but something about her now struck him as vulnerable and broken.

“Ashcroft, it's impossible,” she said, still in that constricted voice, as though she contained a storm of tears. “I'm sorry. Your proposal is kind and flattering.”

Kind and flattering?
What bloody rubbish was this? It didn't even sound like her. His Diana didn't rely on polite platitudes.

Dull-bladed anger mashed his heart. Every time he asked her for something, she said it was impossible.

He released her waist and grabbed the hand still pressed against his lips, drawing it away. Not before he brushed a phantom kiss across her fingertips. He'd gone over a week without touching her. Even through the turmoil, the contact of skin on skin quieted the devils howling in his soul.

“Diana, think before you reject me.” He went on before she phrased further objection. “I'll do my best to make you happy.”

She swallowed and forced out an answer that was no answer. “You don't understand, Tarquin.”

Pathetic creature that he was, he found solace in her use of his Christian name. “Then help me understand.”

All his life, he'd battered his head against doors that were perpetually closed. Not this time. She wasn't going to keep him out. No matter how she tried. He wasn't a helpless child anymore. She owed him more than this. She mightn't love him, but she cared. He wasn't stupid enough to think she didn't. He'd seen her eyes when he was so deep inside her, he'd touched her heart.

Diana stared at him with complete devastation. However she reacted to his proposal, he couldn't accuse her of taking his offer lightly.

He spoke urgently. “Why is it impossible? I'm free. You're free. We're both of age and in possession of our wits. Well, at least I used to think I was. We'll establish a family, a life together. Doesn't that tempt you?”

“Tarquin, it's not you…”

The line women always used to pacify a rejected suitor. Not that he'd heard it himself before now. He abandoned any pretense at pride. “I'm a man of good fortune, Diana. Houses. Gold. Land. You'll live in comfort. The child will want for nothing.”

Some unreadable emotion crossed her face, made her appear tired and drawn. He had a glimpse of how she'd look as an old woman if life presented only bitterness and disappointment.

Her voice vibrated with anguish. “Ashcroft, I beg you, say no more.”

“I will speak. What's to stop our marrying? I'll look after your father. Is that what worries you? Good God, I'm taking on a wife and a baby. I'm sure I'll find room in the mausoleum I live in for a grandfather.”

This time she managed to break away. He let her go, failure setting up a grim knell in his heart. Tears poured down her pale cheeks. She dashed at them with unsteady hands. “Don't ask me again. I can't marry you.”

“Why?”

Again that word.
Why.
It would be engraved on his tomb-stone. He drew in a shuddering breath and fought for a control that had moved out of reach long ago.

“Why, Diana? You're carrying my child. Surely that's reason to favor my suit. What's to become of you once the baby's existence becomes known? You can't hope to hide such news in a village the size of Marsham. At least let me give you the protection of my name.” Acid edged his voice. “You liked me well enough to crawl into my bed. Surely you like me well enough to allow me to offer honorable recompense.”

“There is no honor,” she said brokenly, swinging away and burying her face in her hands.

Although he'd never lied to himself about his lack of virtue, her response cut him to the quick. “I know I'm the world's greatest rogue, but I swear there's honor in this proposal.”

“I'm not talking about you,” she said in a muffled moan.

He frowned. This didn't make sense. She was a respectable widow whose only sins, as far as he knew, related to her affair with the rakehell Earl of Ashcroft.

As so often when he pushed for answers, he had the feeling he missed pieces of the picture. Big, important pieces. Every time he thought he made sense of what happened, the picture changed.

A fence rose between him and what he wanted. He could see his goal across the barrier, but he couldn't reach it.

“Tell me, Diana,” he said sharply, snatching her arm. He expected her to recoil, but she remained trembling in his grasp. “Why won't you marry me?”

He watched her expression change, harden, become purposeful. She straightened like a soldier about to face a firing squad. “I can't lie to you anymore, Tarquin,” she said in a low voice. “You'll hate me, but I have to tell you the truth.”

Grim premonition struck him that after pushing for answers for so long, he wouldn't like what he was about to hear. “The truth about what? Why won't you let me give our child my name?”

“Because Mrs. Carrick is going to marry me. Her child will carry the proud name of Fanshawe, not the degraded label of Vale.”

 

At Lord Burnley's intervention, Diana's heart crashed to a halt, and her faltering confession died on her lips. Her belly clenched with the painful realization that she was sinfully late offering to tell Ashcroft everything. Instead, he'd now discover the worst, and in the cruelest possible light.

Curse her for all the evil she'd done him.

Slowly, she turned, and through a glaze of tears saw the marquess watching from the edge of the glade. Burnley's face set in triumphant lines. Rex made a soft sound of distress and butted her leg.

Her desperate gaze switched to Ashcroft. Fleetingly, she saw the ardent lover. Then he became once again the man she'd first met in Mayfair. In charge of himself and his world. Proud. Superior. Impervious to feeling.

After the last weeks, she knew better, but she couldn't criticize his need to present a strong façade to his enemy. She was shocked to the bone to realize Burnley and Ashcroft were indeed enemies. Not just rivals in politics. Not
just men with nothing in common apart from the incendiary secret of Ashcroft's parentage.

What quivered between these two powerful noblemen was hatred. Naked and dangerous as a drawn sword.

Ashcroft was the first to break the fraught silence. He let Diana go and straightened, his eyes never shifting from the older man. “Lord Burnley.”

Burnley's thin lips twisted in a contemptuous smile that chilled Diana's heart. He'd never expressed any warmth for his bastard son. In the years she'd known him, she'd never seen him express warmth toward anything. But his disgusted expression said he nurtured no fatherly feelings at all.

“Lord Ashcroft. As usual, you intrude where you're not wanted,” he drawled.

Ashcroft's curt bow was pure insolence. Diana's hands formed claws in her skirts. How she wished she'd never started this greedy, vicious scheme.

She was going to be hurt. She'd recognized that long ago. What terrified her to the point of screaming was that Lord Ashcroft, who didn't deserve to pay for her unjustified ambition, would suffer a killing blow in this verdant glade.

She didn't mistake the gloating relish brightening Lord Burnley's green eyes. He meant to use Diana as his weapon to crush Ashcroft to dust beneath his heel.

“Lord Ashcroft, please go,” she said in a thready voice, but both men ignored her.

Ashcroft shrugged with a nonchalance that would have fooled anyone who didn't love him—or didn't hate him with a virulence that poisoned the very air. He sounded casual, uncaring, in control. “Surely setting foot on your land to speak to a lady of my acquaintance doesn't constitute trespass.”

“It does if the lady has no wish to speak to you,” Burnley returned smoothly.

Now she saw them face-to-face, Diana unwillingly found a stronger resemblance between the two men than she'd
expected. She hadn't seen it when Ashcroft was her lover, kind, witty, perceptive, generous. Here he acted the grand seigneur, and he looked startlingly like his father.

The likeness didn't flatter him. He looked remote, his handsomeness glittering cold as a diamond. Hard to remember she'd held this man in her arms while he gasped his release. Hard to remember he'd been so frantic to see her, he'd pursued her into his enemy's territory and begged her to marry him.