Page 41 of To Love and to Loathe
“Indeed,” Audley agreed. “But she wasn’t the lady I was referring to.”
Unable to help himself, Jeremy let his eyes drift to Diana. She was speaking animatedly to Violet and Lady Emily, gesturing with one hand. Like all of her movements, the motion seemed calculated to be neither too fast and frenetic nor too lethargic. It was just lazy enough to put one in mind of other slow, languorous activities.
“You continue to prove my point,” Audley murmured. With great difficulty, Jeremy tore his eyes from Diana to glare at his friend.
“You must be mad.”
“You only say that because you can’t see the look on your own face,” Audley said with a grin. “It’s practically indecent.”
“That is my normal facial expression,” Jeremy said.
“No,” Audley said firmly. “If it were, you’d never be invited out in polite society. It’s positively lecherous.”
Jeremy, sensing an unproductive line of debate, redirected the conversation. “Never mind all that. I’ve no intention of marrying Lady Templeton—or anyone else,” he added hastily.
“If you say so,” Audley agreed—except that he agreed in a fashion that somehow made it sound as though he was doing just the opposite, but Jeremy couldn’t work out how to call him out on this without sounding like a madman.
“I do say so,” was the response he settled on, which even to his own ears sounded a bit feeble. “Even were I the marrying type—perish thethought—Lady Templeton is hardly the lady I’d set my sights upon. In case you haven’t noticed, she and I don’t get on. Never have.”
Audley’s mouth flattened into a line as he gave Jeremy a long, surveying sort of look that Jeremy didn’t like one bit. “I don’t know if that’s exactly how I’d describe it,” he said after a moment. “You two have been at each other’s throats for years—since she made her debut, at least—but I’ve always gotten the impression that you rather enjoyed it.”
Jeremy opened his mouth to reply, then shut it again. He thought back on the long years of his acquaintance with Diana, which dated back to his days at Eton; back then, the five years’ difference in their ages had stretched between them like an uncrossable void. For years, he hadn’t given her much thought—she was Penvale’s annoying little sister, who laughed a bit too loudly and spoke a bit too boldly for her own good. However, as they’d grown older, their interactions had taken on an edge. She had begun to mock him mercilessly, and he, a young buck with a hot head, had given as good as he received.
It was in her debut Season, however, watching the calculating light in her eyes as she surveyed the gentlemen at a ball or during an outing to the theater, that the first hints of something… different had begun to make themselves known in his feelings for her. And how had he handled this? He, who took nothing seriously, who tried his damnedest to treat everything in his life as a joke? He’d proposed to her, half in jest—and she had shot him down, as he’d surely deserved.
And they’d barely been able to hold a polite conversation since. And yet… wasn’t Audley right, much as it pained him to admit it? Wasn’t needling Diana all part of the fun?
He realized that, as he’d been occupied by his own thoughts,Audley had stood there in silence, awaiting his reply, a maddeningly superior expression upon his face.
“I don’t know that I’d go that far,” Jeremy hedged.
“I would,” Audley said smugly. “You bicker with each other because you’re too much alike. You see too much of yourselves in each other, which is why you can’t carry on a conversation for more than ten seconds without trying to get a rise out of one another.”
Jeremy sputtered. “That’s ridiculous.”
“Of course,” Audley agreed solemnly.
“I grant you, there are some passing similarities, but I can hardly help it if she’s the best-looking woman of my acquaintance, and I myself am obviously a fine specimen of masculine glory”—at this, Audley rolled his eyes so hard that Jeremy was surprised they didn’t roll out of his head entirely—“and so it is only natural that you find us superficially similar.”
Audley shrugged, clearly regretting having begun this conversation, and made to move past him toward the ladies. “Whatever you say, Jeremy. Do try to keep your hands off of her when Penvale’s about, though—I’m not sure he’ll react so benignly if he catches you in flagrante again.”
Before Jeremy could object—to multiple parts of this accusation, in fact—Audley was striding toward his wife, leaning over her to murmur in her ear. Whatever he said made her color slightly, and she cast a flirtatious look up at him through her lashes. She mouthed something at him and he planted a completely inappropriate kiss upon her neck before retreating. Violet, Jeremy noticed, watched him go, and there was something about this entire exchange that caused a pang within him that was as foreign as it was unexpected. It was clearly a sign that he needed a good romp in bed—something he hadbeen tantalizingly close to achieving the day before, until he was so rudely interrupted.
Truth be told, when he had asked Diana to… well, to reassure him, he’d envisioned one evening of passion, after which she’d fall into raptures at his feet, declaring him to be God’s gift to womankind. The fact that this scenario was not remotely consistent with anything of the real flesh-and-blood Diana was immaterial. A man had to have his dreams.
However, after his discussion with her yesterday, he was beginning to have his doubts. Because, in truth, the assessment of him she had offered was not entirely off the mark. Hewasa marquess, after all, and before he’d become that, he’d been a marquess’s son. While he made a point of not taking advantage of desperate women—nor ones who relied on him for employment—the fact still remained that there was not a woman of his acquaintance that he did not enjoy an advantage over. Even a duchess only held her title by virtue of her marriage—it was nothing she possessed in her own right.
And, without making any pretense at false modesty, Jeremy knew that he was something of a catch. It had, at some point, become a challenge to himself over the years—what had started as youthful lust and exuberance had become something more. No sooner had he finished with a woman than he’d set his eyes on the next conquest—whom could he tempt next? A duchess? A Russian princess? The latest star of the stage?
Yes, yes, and yes, for the record.
And while he made certain that the ladies fully understood their arrangement before he so much as laid a finger on them—while he compensated them handsomely for their company (even the ones who had no need for his funds were the recipients of lavish gifts)—the fact still remained that he was one of the most powerful men in England. And they, regardless of their status, wealth, or beauty, were women.
And it was possible—just oh so slightly possible—that Diana might have a point. That he might not have been the recipient of any sort of honest opinion from the women he’d been with in the past. And while that stung his pride rather more than he wanted to admit, he would have been a fool twice over to ignore this chance to correct course.
With this thought in mind, he was half a second away from luring Diana out of the room on some invented pretext when she glanced up and, in a display of surprise that was so wide-eyed Jeremy was certain it had to be false, said in a simper, “Lady Helen! There you are!”
With a sinking feeling in the pit of his stomach that told him nothing good could come of this development, Jeremy turned. Lady Helen was indeed standing in the doorway of the drawing room, accompanied by—God preserve him—his grandmother. The dowager marchioness, unsurprisingly, had a vaguely pained expression on her face that Jeremy would have found amusing had he not been so certain that his life was going to decrease in quality quite drastically over the next thirty seconds.
