Page 14 of To Love and to Loathe
“Yes,” Emily agreed, and smiled at Willingham. “Thank you for the invitation, my lord. I know that eligible misses are not traditionally counted among the numbers at your house parties.”
“We seem to be bucking that tradition this year,” Willingham said darkly.
“Yes,” the dowager marchioness said, “I have been given the charge of chaperoning Lady Helen Courtenay—her mother can be fiendishly determined, when she wants something.” She cast a quick glance around the room. “Sparing us her presence this evening, though, is she?” It did not seem to give her even a moment’s pause that she had only now noted the absence of the lady whose virtue she was supposed to be so carefully guarding.
“Lady Helen professed to be fatigued by the journey and has requested a tray in her room,” Willingham said in tones of thinly veiled relief.
“Hmph,” snorted the dowager marchioness, in a way that suggested that was all that needed to be said about such deviant behavior. “She’s an odd one, that Lady Helen.”
“What do you mean?” Diana asked, turning back to her.
“She’s developed rather a reputation as the most desperate, marriage-minded girl of theton—men are terrified to dance more than once with her, as I understand it.”
“Yes,” Diana said. “But what about that is odd?”
“I knew the girl when she was growing up, and she was nothing like that at all,” the dowager marchioness finished thoughtfully. “She seems so different a creature these days as to be entirely unrecognizable.”
“It just goes to show how dreadful the marriage mart is,” Violet said sternly, her gaze softening as her eyes fixed momentarily on her husband across the room.
“Which is why marriage is an institution I’ve no intention of entering into,” Willingham said smugly.
“That’s whatyouthink, my boy,” his grandmother said, swatting him on the arm. “That’s what you think.”
Diana grinned at this—it seemed the dowager marchioness had well and truly taken Diana’s casual mention of her wager with Willingham to heart. She was rather looking forward to the next couple of weeks—if it was going to involve the dowager marchioness flinging Willingham at every unmarried lady of quality who crossed his path, she thought this might make for the most entertaining country house party she’d attended in years.
Watching Willingham suffer was always an experience to savor, after all.
Dinner quickly taught Diana that she had been overly hasty in her glee. It began as soon as they were seated, whereupon the dowager marchioness made rather a production out of her concern for Emily’sbare arms, claiming that her seat—directly to Willingham’s right—was in the line of a mysterious draft that would naturally cause one with such a delicate, fragile constitution (Emily, in fact, was rarely ill) to take a chill.
“Lady Templeton, why don’t you trade places with her?” the dowager marchioness asked, in a tone of voice that made it perfectly clear that this wasn’t really a question at all. “You’re much sturdier and heartier than Lady Emily, I’m certain you won’t be at risk.”
“Thank you, Lady Willingham,” Diana said sweetly, rising to follow orders. “I’ve never heard myself described quite so similarly to a horse.”
A few seats down, Penvale made a sort of aborted neighing sound—aborted, Diana was fairly certain, because Violet had elbowed him in the stomach. On her other side, Audley looked as though he was trying hard not to laugh. Under different circumstances, Diana would have been pleased to see him looking so cheerful—the past few weeks of marital bliss had turned him nearly unrecognizable from the overly serious man she had known for so long—but at the moment she was not feeling terribly charitable.
With this promising start, Diana took Emily’s abandoned seat next to Willingham and the meal commenced.
Things naturally only got worse. Over the soup course, the dowager marchioness—ignoring all dinner table etiquette as to her conversation partner—subjected Diana to a lengthy inquiry about her childhood, marriage, and whether she preferred cats or dogs. Over fish, she regaled the table with anecdotes from Willingham’s misspent youth, casting a rosy, sentimental sheen upon the conclusion of each story that Diana was certain was wildly out of step with the reality of the events.
Over dessert, she mercifully subsided, allowing herself to bedrawn into conversation by West, who had been sitting to her left and tolerantly observing this show over the course of the past hour, exchanging an occasional raised eyebrow across the table with Sophie, who was seated directly opposite him. This respite was not as relaxing as Diana might have hoped, however, given that she could still feel the dowager marchioness watching her out of the corner of her eye even as she gave the appearance of being entirely distracted by whatever West was saying.
Were she a religious sort of person, Diana might have thought that a divine power was punishing her for years of misbehavior; not being terribly pious, however, she merely decided that this was a cautionary tale about grandmothers.
She had been perfectly delighted at the prospect of Willingham’s grandmother devoting all of her considerable energy toward seeing him married to some insipid virgin; it was quite another thing entirely to realize that the prospective wife the dowager marchioness had set her sights on for her grandson was Diana herself.
“I would have thought your grandmother more subtle,” Diana said under her breath to Willingham, raising a bite of blackberry tart to her mouth.
“Indeed,” Willingham agreed, gazing down the table at his grandmother with narrowed eyes. “Perhaps she is growing desperate in her dotage.”
Diana suppressed a snort with great difficulty. While the dowager marchioness was certainly getting on in years, she was as sharp and wily as ever. “Or,” she suggested, “perhaps she thought that we would require only the merest push to fall into each other’s arms.” She batted her eyelashes at him, adopting a look of lovesick adoration.
Willingham leaned closer. “She’s not entirely wrong on that front.”Diana fought the impulse to shut her eyes at his proximity—this close, she could feel the heat of his body, see the faint traces of evening stubble shadowing his jaw. “I’m looking forward to my visit this evening. To discussing… conditions.”
He leaned back then, leaving Diana embarrassingly breathless. The wordconditionshad never sounded lewd to her before. The house party was only hours old, and it was already proving highly educational.
Seven
Jeremy was nervous. It waslate; his guests had retired to their rooms more than an hour before, and the hallway outside his bedroom door had grown quiet, no longer full of the footsteps of servants rushing back and forth. He himself had dismissed his valet, Snuffgrove, and now stood barefoot in breeches and a loose shirt beneath his favorite blue banyan, a glass of wine in hand. He had imbibed less than usual this evening, not having joined the other gentlemen in their after-dinner port or in their brandies in the drawing room once they rejoined the ladies. Now, however, the weight of the glass in his hand was a comfort as he contemplated the evening ahead.
