My Reckless Surrender (13 page)

Regret gnawed at her. She knew what the admission cost him. “Lord Burnley is most insistent I stay with Lady Kelso for the summer, Papa. You know what we owe him.”

They did in fact owe Burnley more than she wanted to acknowledge. He'd allowed her father to continue in his position even while Diana took over the reins of the estate. Most employers would have pensioned her father off, but for some reason, Burnley showed a loyalty to his bailiff he'd shown nobody else in his self-indulgent life. And Burnley had given her a chance to prove her mettle when the majority of men would have dismissed her as a useless female.

Her father grumbled under his breath and fumbled for his stick. It was a sign of his distress that he missed it and knocked it clattering to the floor. Rex whined and struggled onto his arthritic legs, shuffling over to nose at his master's leg in canine comfort.

Swallowing more stinging tears, Diana bent to pick up the stick and pass it to her father. She wished to heaven she hadn't waited to see him. She'd thought their interview before she left was bad enough, but this was worse.

Perhaps because after what she'd done with Ashcroft yesterday, she could no longer claim to be his pure daughter. The woman he'd raised to be a credit to him. The realization of how she'd changed made her feel sick.

Her clarity of purpose sank into a mire of conflicting emotions.

Before she'd left for London, everything had seemed straightforward. She'd sleep with a man who would care only that she offered a willing body. She'd get pregnant. She'd take over Cranston Abbey as its custodian until her son reached his majority.

That tidy, inevitable progression of events now seemed almost laughably implausible. She hadn't considered the subtle influence of personalities. Hers. Burnley's. Her father's. Laura's. Above all, Ashcroft's.

You are such a naïve little fool, Diana.

She'd entered into Lord Burnley's plot too lightly, without considering final costs. Excitement at the promise of becoming mistress of Cranston Abbey had blinded her.

Surreptitiously, her hand flattened across her belly, knowing her father wouldn't see. Could a child be growing there? It still seemed unbelievable, but after yesterday she might indeed be pregnant. She hoped her baby grew up to be a better person than its mother.

When Burnley broached the scheme, six weeks playing another woman with another life had appeared easy. After experiencing Ashcroft's passion, she knew if she didn't bring this affair to a swift end, it would destroy her. Already she felt torn in two with what she did.

“So when will you be home?” her father asked sharply. “I don't like this. I don't like it at all.”

Clearly, her daily letters reporting completely mythical activities with Lady Kelso, Lord Burnley's cousin, hadn't soothed his displeasure. She laid her hand on top of the fist that clutched the head of his stick. “Papa, I told you, I may have to stay until September. If I change my mind now, I'll displease Lord Burnley.”

Her father's anger evaporated, but to her dismay, concern replaced it. “There's something you're not telling me, child. I fear you'll find yourself beyond your depth with people not of our class. I'd hate you to be hurt.”

She stiffened, then forced herself to relax before her father sensed her discomfort. Wildly, she cast about for something to allay his fears. “Papa, I do Lord Burnley's bidding.”

“While I'm always grateful for his favor, Lord Burnley's schemes are usually to the advantage of Lord Burnley, Diana.”

That was true, but this scheme worked not just to Burnley's advantage, but to hers too.

She tried to sound lighthearted even as remorse weighed down her heart. “Papa, I'm too smart to let anyone take advantage of me.”

Her father's lips twitched in reluctant amusement. “I know you think you are. You're far away and among strangers. I worry when I can't watch over you.”

She wondered if he realized the irony of what he said. “Papa, don't worry. Please. I'm enjoying the city and wearing nice clothes and sampling some high life.”

His smile sliced at her heart. “I don't want your head turned.”

“Don't worry, it's screwed on tight.” If only that were true. She'd felt ridiculously giddy when she made love to Ashcroft, and she wasn't sure her balance had returned yet.

Her father continued as if she hadn't spoken. “Perhaps you'll meet a nice young man. You bury yourself at Marsham, and you never see anyone new. You deserve a life of your own, not to spend your years chasing after your decrepit old father. Is that what this is about, Diana? Is that what you can't bear to tell me?”

Oh, Papa…

She leaned forward and hugged him with a mixture of guilt and love. “No, no, no. I told you—Lady Kelso needs someone to run her errands while her companion visits her sick mother in the north. I'm not husband hunting.”

No, she already had a husband lined up. A great catch indeed. At least in the world's eyes.

Her father wouldn't support the match. He wouldn't like his daughter stepping outside her class, however rich the bridegroom. Nor would he want her to marry an old, sick man for his fortune. Her father's principles were immovable, probably one of the reasons Lord Burnley kept him on despite the drawbacks.

Men of scrupulous honesty were rare. Her father, unlike his daughter, was incorruptible.

A discreet knock announced Mr. Brown's return. “Lord Burnley's carriage is outside, Mrs. Carrick.”

Her father frowned, his displeasure reviving. “This visit hardly merits the name, Diana.”

How she wished Burnley had left her in London, trusted her to follow her own strategy. This short conversation would do nothing to allay her father's fears for her in the big, bad city.

She hugged him again, wretched to feel how stiffly he accepted her embrace. She was distinctly out of favor. As she deserved to be.

Would this plot drive a permanent wedge between her and her father? Dear heaven, pray not. She loved her father more than anyone else. She couldn't bear if he turned away. Worse, she couldn't bear to hurt him.

Everything hinged on falling pregnant quickly.

“I'm sorry, Papa. It's only for a few weeks.” The words were as much for her reassurance as his. Her sight glazed with distress, she drew away and turned for the door. “Don't come out. I know you're busy.”

“Of course I'll see you off and wish you Godspeed,” he snapped.

She took his arm although he knew the house so well, he was unlikely to have difficulty. The contact was for her benefit. She wanted to confirm the love that had sustained them for so many years.

He was tense under her hand, indication he was still annoyed with her. She hated knowing that nothing she said, apart from an immediate and impossible agreement to return, would content him.

Hot air blasted her as soon as she stepped out of the house. London would be sweltering. She should be grateful for the uncomfortably close weather. It meant the capital was emptier than usual at this time of year. But she couldn't help wishing circumstances wouldn't conspire to further her affair with Ashcroft. Like a coward, she'd dearly love an excuse to come home.

She climbed into the coach and, when Fredericks shut the door, she leaned out the window to catch a last glimpse of her father. He looked unhappy and irritated and bewildered.
She could hardly blame him. His daughter ran wild, and even if he didn't know what she did, he knew she acted to her detriment.

He stepped forward and patted the wood until he found her hand. He squeezed hard and with a love she felt to her bones. Again her heart lurched with guilt and pain for what she did. “Take care, Diana. And remember, whatever happens, I'm your father and I love you.”

As the coach rolled out of the neat little village, Diana subsided trembling against the upholstery. Her father's blind eyes always saw more than she realized.

O
ne hundred and fifteen hours.

So long since Ashcroft had seen the mysterious Diana. He loathed that he counted the time like a moony adolescent. Every second passed like an hour. The days were perpetual torment.

Had she finished with him? After what they'd shared?

It didn't make sense. But as day followed day, and the promised message didn't arrive, he couldn't avoid the inevitable conclusion she'd sampled what he had to offer and decided she wanted no more.

For a man of his sophistication and experience, it shouldn't smart. But it did. It smarted like hell.

He had no idea where she lived. He had no idea of her last name. Tracking her down would prove nigh impossible. Hell, she'd kept him completely at a distance. He, blockhead that he was, had let her.

He'd heard her leave Perry's house, but some vestige of pride prevented his protesting. Since that afternoon, he'd consigned his pride to the deepest circle of hell. He'd been reduced to asking the servants if they noticed where she'd gone. According to Robert, she'd left by the back gate and taken a hackney cab at the corner. Now Ashcroft's only
chance of finding his elusive mistress was endlessly walking the streets of London.

By now he was just desperate enough to consider the crack-brained idea.

He told himself there were plenty of other candidates for his attentions. He'd trawled his usual haunts last night to prove that any woman would scratch his itch.

He'd trudged home an hour later, aware that for once, only one woman would do. And that woman had disappeared into thin air.

It was bloody frustrating.

His mood wasn't improved by the niggling awareness that it was usually he who treated his lovers in this casual fashion. It was usually he who played elusive, who refused to make firm arrangements.

His mind plagued by the wench, he glanced around the empty British Museum. Empty of all but fusty Egyptian relics and his annoying Aunt Mary and his even more annoying cousin Charlotte. The museum generally swarmed with people, but the sweltering summer chased the patrons as it chased people from London as a whole.

He wished to God it would shift his relatives, who hadn't yet returned home. His aunt was still set on using his house for Charlotte's ball, and it seemed she wasn't abandoning the capital until she gained his agreement.

Which was a pity, both for him and for her, because he had no intention of granting her request.

“Tarquin, I don't know how you can look at those horrid dusty things,” she complained, when he paused before a mummy in a glass case.

As if to prove his aunt right about the dust, Charlotte released a violent sneeze. His cousin suffered a virulent summer cold. “They're old and dirty,” the girl said in a whiny voice not improved by blocked sinuses. “I want to go home.”

“We'll go home soon, Charlotte,” his aunt said reprovingly.

“I mean home to Roselands,” she said sulkily, tugging at her handkerchief. “Nobody comes to Town at this time of year.”

Ashcroft quashed a sigh and tried to concentrate on his relatives rather than on where the hell Diana had run off to. “Your mother believes you'll benefit from educational excursions.”

Her mother was misguided, Ashcroft suspected. Charlotte was a bloodless nonentity, interested only in escaping notice. Not that he blamed her. He knew from harsh experience how smothering the countess's personality was. The prospect of his aunt taking over his house for the Season made him break out in a cold sweat.

“Charlotte, stop fidgeting,” the countess snapped. “You have no consideration for my nerves.”

Charlotte ignored the command. Instead, she spoke to Ashcroft with a rare show of spirit. “Cousin, I believe Bond Street is educational.”

Ashcroft gave a short laugh. “It is at that.”

“Don't encourage the child.” Aunt Mary still treated him as though he were twelve. It was a sign of her remarkable stupidity that she didn't register how, these days, the power was all his.

“She's not interested in Ancient Egypt, Aunt,” he said wearily. At this rate, soon he wouldn't be either.

He owned a famous collection of antiquities, mostly amassed when he was young and eager to escape England. He'd returned home to the realization that no exotic setting altered his essential solitude. The travel he'd done since only confirmed that bleak fact.

“Very well. Let us pass by these foul cadavers,” his aunt said in a voice that would shred leather. “There must be heathen jewelry somewhere.”

“What about Lord Elgin's marbles?” Charlotte asked with sudden interest, then sneezed again.

Ashcroft smothered another sardonic laugh as his aunt reddened. “Absolutely not, Charlotte Jane Alice Goudge.”

The girl sighed with disappointment and subsided into her usual obedience. “Yes, Mama.”

The two women drifted off, his aunt still haranguing his unfortunate cousin. Ashcroft hung back until they entered the next room.

His male relations had decamped to Kent for a wrestling match. Stultifying as the masculine half of his family was, he heartily wished he'd gone with them instead of agreeing to escort his aunt and cousin.

For the thousandth time, he told himself he should break with the Vales. All were leeches and parasites. Or ciphers like Charlotte. Not one would have a feather to fly with if he hadn't taken control of the family finances upon his majority. That was after he'd discovered what chaos his uncle, the Earl of Birchgrove, had made of the Ashcroft fortune while he'd been guardian both of the estates and the heir.

So many times Ashcroft had been on the verge of cutting ties with his unappealing family. He didn't pretend the link continued because of affection. They'd resented being saddled with him when he was a child—even though the money they'd wrung from his estate had kept them afloat. Now they resented his hold on the purse strings and the way he curtailed their worst excesses.

If only he could shake the irritating but persistent tug of obligation.

He stopped to admire a basalt carving of a First Dynasty official, briefly dismissing his family from his mind. His thoughts returned immediately to Diana and how to locate her. He tried to focus on the fine sculpture, noting the monumentality and the way the artist conveyed character. As with everything since Diana had left—since he'd met her in fact—he couldn't concentrate. Her face intruded between him and all else.

Out of the corner of his eye, he noticed two modishly dressed women wander into the room. He hardly paid them any attention. Only one woman interested him.

He paused.

Something indefinable sizzled in the air.

He raised his head from his contemplation of the statue and looked more closely at the women. His skin tightened, and his pulses started to race.

He was going mad. He saw Diana everywhere.

Their backs to him, the women stopped beside the mummy. Both wore bonnets that concealed their hair. Their quiet murmur was a low, melodious hum in his ears.

Nothing distinguished these women from a thousand others. He swiftly dismissed the one on the right as a stranger. The one on the left, taller, bending over the glass case, she, she seemed familiar.

Could it be?

His heart set up a frenetic pounding. His hands clenched at his sides.

Hell, he wasn't even sure it was Diana.

Except he knew to his bones it was.

Turn to me.

As if he'd said the words aloud, the woman stiffened and straightened, although her attention remained fixed on the mummy.

Turn to me.

Slowly, almost reluctantly, but inevitably, as if drawn by forces stronger than herself, she turned.

Diana…

He watched gray eyes widen and darken to the color of a stormy sky. He watched the pink seep from her cheeks. He watched her lips part as they did when she waited in breathless suspense for his kiss.

His chest constricted. He'd taken a pace toward her before he realized this was neither time nor place to seize her.

“Tarquin, what is keeping you?”

His aunt's braying voice harked from a different world. As if waking from a dream, he ripped his gaze from Diana and focused on the countess's stout figure in the doorway.

“Tarquin!” she barked impatiently. “Charlotte wishes to go to Gunter's for ices. There's nothing here of interest.”

He caught the fleeting amusement that replaced the dazed shock in Diana's face and found himself smiling back at her. How like Mary Goudge to dismiss the treasures of thousands of years as completely below her notice.

His brain clicked into working order. He struggled to convince himself that his breathless wonder when he saw Diana was perfectly natural. Although his heightened awareness of colors and light and textures indicated the world had miraculously transformed in the last few seconds.

He'd found her.

With an aplomb beyond him seconds ago, he strolled up to the woman who had troubled his every moment since she'd disappeared. He swept off his hat and bowed.

“I'll introduce you to my aunt,” he said under his breath.

At her side, her companion, for whom he'd hardly spared a glance, gasped with shock and drew away. His concentration remained fixed on the tall woman in the striking dark blue ensemble.

He expected her to become less mysterious, now she eschewed her veils. But the contradictions seemed even more marked. The clear-cut bone structure, the character and will in her face with its strong jaw and straight nose. The mouth that promised sensual paradise. The eyes that surrendered and resisted.

She was as much an enigma as ever.

Trembling, Diana retreated against the glass case. “Don't be absurd, Ashcroft,” she whispered. “I'm your…mistress.”

The last word was so low, he had to lean close to hear. He caught a whiff of scent, sweet, erotic, unforgettable. Apples. Diana. For one forbidden second, he drew the evocative fragrance deep into his lungs.

“What's your last name?”

“Tarquin! What are you doing?” Aunt Mary bellowed from the doorway. “Didn't you hear me?”

“What's your last name?” he repeated in a murmur.

“You can't do this. I won't let you,” Diana muttered through tight lips. The vulnerable expression faded, and he recognized a return of defiance. His smile broadened. He loved that she stood up to him.

“How will you stop me? Give me your last name.”

Her eyes narrowed. “I could lie.”

“Then lie.”

He grabbed her slender arm, his heart leaping at even such innocent contact, and hauled her toward his aunt. He expected Diana to resist, although she must know he was prepared to use strength if he must. To his surprise, though, she yielded without a fight. Under his fingers, he felt her quaking anger. He glanced across to where her friend watched from the far side of the room. Her eyes were sharp with interest.

“Carrick,” Diana said on a snap.

Carrick.

She'd never escape him so easily again. Immediately, he accepted that it was her real name although he couldn't say why. Perhaps the way she spat the two syllables. As if daring him to do his worst. Satisfaction coiled in his belly, along with the hunger that had been his constant companion since she'd left.

For five days he'd been utterly miserable. A misery intensified because he refused to search his heart and admit what a blow Diana dealt when she absconded. Now bright enjoyment burgeoned. He felt alive for the first time since she'd deserted him.

“Aunt Mary, allow me to introduce a lady of my acquaintance, Mrs. Carrick.” He turned to Diana, who studiously refused to look at him. “Mrs. Carrick, may I present my aunt, Lady Birchgrove?”

“Mrs. Carrick,” his aunt said with a distinct lack of enthusiasm, nodding at Diana.

“Your ladyship.” Diana curtsied, as etiquette dictated, waiting for the countess to indicate whether she desired conversation.

Yet again, he found himself puzzling over exactly where his paramour fitted into society. Once she'd accepted that an introduction was inevitable, her manners were impeccable. One would assume she met countesses every day.

“Are you a Londoner, Mrs. Carrick?” his aunt asked, when it became clear Ashcroft had no intention of removing Diana.

Diana shot him an annoyed glance under her lashes, but her voice remained steady. “I'm from a village in Surrey, your ladyship. I'm sure you wouldn't know it.”

Briefly, Ashcroft imagined his investigations would be easy. He'd find out everything he wanted to know without exercising further guile. His aunt would inquire, and Diana would answer.

Clearly he'd been mistaken.

The countess arched her thick eyebrows. “I know Surrey well. I've visited a number of houses in the county.”

“It's a very beautiful part of England,” Diana said neutrally.

Charlotte chose that moment to return from whatever exhibit occupied her. A cavalcade of sneezes accompanied her arrival. “Mama, I just saw Susannah Meredith in Greek vases. She says there's a…” She paused and stared at Diana through watery eyes. “Oh, my, that's a beautiful dress.”

“Charlotte, you haven't been introduced to this lady. I swear you are the most rag-mannered hoyden. Goodness knows how we'll get vouchers for Almack's if you don't mend your ways.”

“Your pardon, Mama.” Charlotte bowed her head, her brief vivacity draining away.

Diana sent the crestfallen, obviously ill girl a smile. Ashcroft's heart set off on its wayward gallop again. She really was the most beautiful woman. Now his dizzying relief that he'd found her receded, he noticed her gown was indeed extremely becoming. A rich blue with gold trimming the bodice. A bodice up to the throat. He couldn't help approving that she hid herself from every scoundrel who wished to ogle her bosom.

He was the only scoundrel allowed to ogle Diana Carrick.