Page 28 of A Lady's Wicked Revenge
“As you say,” Diana grumbled, unable to say anything else. Her imagination happily supplied a thousand invectives she could level at the man he was so eager to defend, but somehow she did not feel in the mood to utter any of them.What would be the point? His mind is clearly made up,she told herself, looking for an explanation for her own silence.
And on and on the silence stretched, the sun cutting a brilliant arc across the sky and stretching the shadows of the woods from one bank to the next. Diana shifted in place, idly wondering whether her pale blue dress, one of her favourites, would be stained with mud or merely dusty when they rose from this scenic if uncomfortable perch.
“I can scarcely remember my father.”
She looked askance at Colin. His face was stoic, his mask firmly in place, but the words hung between them in the warm summer air.
“My true father, I mean, who sired me. He died when I was still very young—not so young as that, really, seven years old. People remember plenty of things from that age, but I can recall very little before coming to this house.” Colin breathed out a heavy sigh, kicking his feet idly over the side of the log. “There are times when I feel I’ve done something terribly wrong by forgetting so much of him, as though I should have held more tightly onto those memories. But whatever the reason, there just isn’t much there.”
He closed his eyes, breathing deeply through his nose as he craned his head back. “I wish I could say that I miss him. I think that I do, from time to time. But I am haunted by my uncertainty about it.” Colin’s eyes fluttered open, and when he looked at Diana, they were red, pained, inhabited by something terrible.
“I would trade places with you in an instant,” Diana said, her gaze fixed on those piercing green eyes. She saw them narrow, uncertain about what he had just heard, and she saw everything turn misty as tears sprang to her eyes.
She continued in an even voice, still keeping her eyes locked on his. “I mean it, Colin. You are a very fortunate man not to miss your father.”
Colin looked away and snorted—a startlingly immature gesture from someone who had always been so thoroughly composed in her presence. “I cannot say I feel very fortunate.”
“You are, though. It is a terrible,awfulthing to miss somebody like this. There are times when I miss my parents so terribly, when the pain is so tremendous that I feel sure I will die. I wake up in the middle of the night from yet another nightmare of my parents’ death, and I feel my heart pounding so hard … I am so convinced that all I can do is wait for the Reaper to come for me any moment. I ready myself for this world, this pain to end. And it does, at some point, but never for very long.”
Diana stopped, her words turning to ash in her mouth. “I would give anything for them to be alive again—my own life, even. You don’t know how many nights I prayed for just that. But after weeks of praying for them, eventually, all I could do was begin to pray for myself. I pray I will stop missing them, selfish as it sounds. I pray I will stop feeling the way I do before it truly is the death of me. I pray that …”
Diana stopped, choking herself off before she could give voice to the words that had formed in her mind.Lord, what am I doing? I cannot confide in a man like this—in any man or woman in the world!
She felt something warm brush against her hand, looked up in surprise. Colin was resting his hand atop hers. His eyes sparkled with gentle encouragement, his mask completely absent. Diana sniffed and felt her lips speak the words.
“I pray I will never be loved by another,” she whispered. “Not by anyone. I pray that when my death comes, it will not do to anyone what my parents’ death has done to me. Because no one,no one, no matter how wicked, deserves to feel like this.”
She immediately regretted giving voice to this most private of fears. Diana closed her eyes, tensed her muscles in preparation for what was to come. Colin was sure to loose a biting remark or perhaps just laugh at her.Lord knows I am being ridiculously maudlin enough to warrant laughter. I just hope he does not push me into the stream before running back to the house to repeat everything I’ve just told him to his stepfather.
But that wasn’t what happened. Instead, something strange transpired: Colin’s hand wrapped around her own and squeezed, his fingers interlaced with hers. His hand felt so much larger than hers and so warm. Together their eyes fell back on the ceaselessly flowing stream, and they listened to the summer song.
Chapter 13
Unmistakable
Summer in London was always a surprise to Diana. For every year she could remember since she was very small, it always seemed that the fall came crashing in far sooner than she had expected. Just as she had persuaded her parents to let her indulge in some of summer’s pleasures—to take her to play in the Serpentine or out for a walk in the woods, or even to the seaside once—then overnight the weather was the cold and rainy gloom of autumn.
This was precisely what had transpired the night of the second Leeson dinner party: the guests had departed from their homes in other fashionable parts of London in their most fashionable thin summer garments, only to arrive at Sir James Leeson’s magnificent mansion shivering cold and sopping wet. Even those guests whose servants had had sufficient foresight to bring umbrellas were soaked by the time they had walked from their carriage to the front door; the wind was so violent and unpredictable.
From her vantage point at the first-storey window of her bedroom, Diana had ample opportunity to sit and reflect on how starkly things had changed of late. And for once, the change was a pleasant one: where every other surprise August burst of rainy weather had depressed her for days, even weeks, today she found her mind as sunny as the exterior was tempestuous.
Indeed, as the storm clouds had gathered over the previous hour, Diana had sung a little song to herself while getting dressed to go down to the dinner party. The rain had lashed against the window and Missus Fessler had toddled in to light the fire, full of complaints as usual, but Diana herself had greeted the maid sweetly and smiled at her reflection while brushing her hair.
As her eye landed on her carefree smile, though, Diana put down the hairbrush, stricken by a terrible thought.Feeling this happy means I am capable of being hurt again,she thought, swallowing hard.It means I have something that I do not wish to lose. Would fortune be cruel enough to give me happiness only so it could be taken away again?
However, today her prayers seemed to be answered, as her happy, light-hearted mood returned not long after this moment. What’s more, it followed her not only down the stairs but through a dozen greetings and half a dozen polite conversations.
Which is not to say that none of the storm clouds had managed to mar her horizon even within the walls of James Leeson’s house. There was the great knight himself. The tall, imposing man was all spit and bluster this evening, and the second he had caught sight of Diana coming down the stairs, he had lurched in her direction with his moustache already brimming with complaints and commands.
Fortunately, by now, Diana had become most practised at slipping away from Uncle James before he could unleash his wrath upon her, a task made considerably easier tonight by the dozen supplicants who swarmed the man at every step. She met his eyes and saw the daggers he stared in her direction, but she was able to scamper out of the salon into the corridor with only a victorious smirk in his direction.
Her next obstacle was nearly as irritating, if far less imposing: Gerard Dunn, his hair carefully if not artfully arranged on his too-big head, stood alone with a glass of wine in the corridor. Diana clapped eyes on him before he seemed to have noticed her, though she saw him looking around with great concern on his simple face.
Just as he turned to look at her, she spun to face a pair of old lords in idle conversation by the portrait of Sir James, excused herself loudly as though she had been speaking with them, and turned to walk away from Gerard as quickly as her feet would carry her.
Another reprieve,thought Diana as she breathed a sigh of relief.Though that’s most of the house barred to me for the moment. Surely there must be someone safe to whom I can turn for reasonable conversation. Colin must be around somewhere, or perhaps Mister and Missus Arnold were invited once more, or—
“Well,thereyou are!” Leah laughed, taking Diana by the hand and giving her a distant, polite embrace. “I thought you lived in this house, yet I could not seem to find you anywhere when Mother and I arrived. I met Sir James and that awful Gerard Dunn, but you were nowhere to be found.”
