Page 44 of A Duke for Diana
“So your father is a classicist, too?”
“In much the same way you are, I would imagine,” she said dryly.
At that moment, he realized he’d as much as said he’d imagined her without clothes. To which any gently bred woman would take offense.
That he had indeed imagined her without clothes wasn’t the point. He had to move this conversation into tamer waters. “Perhaps I should start over with a more gentlemanly approach. Lady Diana, you look very beautiful in that gown.”
“Thank you, kind sir,” she said with a curtsy. “And you look quite handsome, Duke. Somehow you even managed not to wrinkle your cravat. Beau Brummell would be proud.”
“Who’s that?” he asked.
“Doesn’t matter. You wouldn’t like him. I certainly don’t.”
“Sadly, I fear my hair is probably still ‘thrashed into wildness.’”
“True,” she said, approaching to smooth a lock here and a curl there. “Although the look of it is growing on me, actually.”
God, but she tempted him. If the door weren’t open and if his mother hadn’t sent her here, he might have given in to temptation and kissed her again. Her eyes meeting his told him she might actually want him to.
But when he did no such thing, she colored and turned for the door. “In any case, pay me no mind when it comes to fashionable hair. That’s Eliza’s purview. And speaking of Eliza, she would like to see you, your mother, and Rosy all together, to make sure your attire is harmonious.”
He followed her out of the study. “God forbid our attire not be harmonious.”
“All I can say is Eliza has some idea that families should have harmonious attire, especially for important occasions like this one. She says it leads to harmonious family relations. She’s convinced that the lack of it is what tore our family apart years ago.”
“And not the multiple mistresses, I take it?”
Diana shrugged. “I’ve been told my parents were on speaking terms once, long ago. So she might have the right of it. Who really knows?”
“Who really knows, indeed.”
Certainly he was no expert in how to hold a family together. Father had seemed to argue with Mother as often as he’d shown her affection. Grandfather and Mother were always at odds over Father. And lately he and Rosy . . .
No,thatrelationship was improving, thanks to Elegant Occasions. So he would watch her being launched into high society and applaud her all the way. Because getting her and Mother well-settled would at least set them on the path to harmonious family relations.
And take a hell of a large load off his mind.
Chapter Nine
Why had she insisted on touching him, not once but twice? It made no sense. Men didn’t usually have such a profound effect on her. Onlyhim. . . and his talk of undressed goddesses and the way he’d tried to make it better by starting over and the wit that surprised her every time. She knew no one like him.
That must be his appeal. He was different. A duke, but not really a duke. A gentleman, but not always a gentleman. How could shenotwant to touch him? His size alone made her feel safe from all the sneering nobles and their gossipy wives.
So she sought to put him from her mind . . . at least until she had time to ponder him further. For now, she had to make sure everyone followed the rules of precedence in seating, that Verity had remembered to arrange the little marzipan swans on the mirror to mimic them swimming on a pure mountain lake, and that someone had put an extra seat at the table for her. By some miracle, one of the ladies expected to be in attendance had bowed out due to an illness, so Diana could actually join the dinner without destroying the ratio of men to women.
Geoffrey didn’t look terribly happy to be seated between a widowed marchioness and the young daughter of a duke, but the rules of precedence had dictated that.
Dianahad dictated who was invited. Having heard that the aging marchioness’s eldest grandson was of an age to marry, Diana had hastened to add the widow. Meanwhile, the duke’s daughter had a favorite brother who was heir to her father. Short of marrying a duke or a marquess, Rosy could do no better than to marry the heir to one of those, and sadly, there weren’t many heirs to dukes and marquesses running around.
Still, Diana now regretted inviting the duke’s daughter, because the girl looked so adoringly at Geoffrey that Diana wished she could shove the chit’s face into her bowl of chilled Russian soup.
“Have you tried the duck?” her dinner companion to the right asked. “It’s better than I expected of a dinner thrown by a duke who is rumored to have no breeding whatsoever.”
A strangely fierce urge to defend Geoffrey seized her. “You do realize that in addition to his father’s prestigious line, His Grace is also descended from the Newcastle Stock-dons on his mother’s side? His breeding was forged at that old and very expensive school—Newcastle-upon-Tyne Academy. Her Majesty is considering sending one of her grandsons there.”
The fellow nodded as she spoke, as if she weren’t telling the most blatant lie of her life. She doubted he would ever know the truth anyway. And the ne’ er-do-well had sparked her temper, which was generally hard to do. He deserved to feel cut out of the general flow of gossip.
After a second such conversation with her dinner companion on the left, she was more than happy to see the dessert course arrive, a massive endeavor involving a sugar paste castle, marzipan swans on a mountain lake, and piles of nonpareil-covered chocolate drops for the snowy foothills surrounding the castle. On either end of the centerpiece were sugar paste bowls of marzipan fruit and assorted biscuits. From the way the other diners oohed and aahed, she wasn’t the only person impressed with Verity’s handiwork.
