Except that wasn’t true. He’d been restless before she arrived, and their affair had lent his existence untold depth and richness. Good God, he couldn’t imagine himself prowling after any other woman like this.
In an attempt to divert himself from his brooding, he opened his book. The beginning of The Aeneid stared up in its neat lines of Latin verse. With a disgusted gesture, he closed the volume. Somehow, reading about a genuine hero made him feel even more like a starving mongrel dog.
At a distance, he heard a door snick shut.
With no great optimism, he lifted his head. Diana would be off to her work on the estate, and as usual, she’d have company.
Yes, it was Diana. For once on her own.
His ridiculous, yearning heart performed a crazy dance. No matter how he told himself he couldn’t trust the wench, nothing cured him of this immediate, primitive reaction. She bent briefly to speak to her father and clicked her fingers to the dog, who staggered to his feet and shook himself.
Sudden, preternatural excitement tightened Ashcroft’s every muscle. Perhaps at last, at last, he’d get her to himself. He refused to acknowledge the bursting elation as the joy it was. Just as since she’d left, he refused to acknowledge the echoing emptiness in his life as a symptom of how he missed her.
Expectation throbbing in his gut, he watched her with unwavering attention. She’d go back inside. She waited for someone. She’d stand talking to her father and never leave her garden, tormenting Ashcroft with her impossible nearness.
For all his anger, he burned to touch her.
The book slipped disregarded to the grass. His hands shifted against his thighs as if they cupped her breasts, stroked her satiny skin, tangled in her hair.
It was wrong that she wasn’t with him. A sin against nature like the sun setting in the east or two moons in the sky.
She didn’t retreat into the house or look up to greet one of the endless stream of tenants. Instead, she clicked her fingers again to the dog and set out across the lawn, the old hound tottering after her on arthritic legs. As if she knew Ashcroft waited, she headed directly for his hiding place.
He loved her free, hip-swinging walk. She ate up the ground with a countrywoman’s long paces, so foreign to the mincing prance most of the women he knew affected. She wore a dark blue pinafore over a brown dress. The sleeves were rolled up in silent declaration that here was a woman who worked, not one who lounged around eating bonbons and entertaining callers. Her luxuriant hair was confined in a crown of braids, plainer than the elaborate styles she’d sported in London. In the sunlight, the gold shone rich as ripe wheat.
Shock that his ramshackle plan might actually succeed pulsed through him. Waiting like a thief had never seemed a satisfactory tactic. Had proven less than satisfactory. If he’d the vaguest notion of an alternative method of ambushing Diana, he’d leap upon it.
Still she strode toward him. His heart missed a beat, set off on a wild gallop. Now she was close enough for him to see her expression. In spite of her confident progress, she looked pale and troubled.
She looked beautiful.
The dog paused to nose without enthusiasm at a clump of weeds. Then he lifted his head with a sudden tensing of his body. He whined softly and padded toward Ashcroft.
“Rex!” Diana called. “Rex, come back!”
She hitched up her skirts to chase the dog, providing a breathtaking flash of stocking-clad calves. She wore sensible half boots, and as she rushed ahead, her dark blue skirts swishing across the thick summer grass, he caught a flash of crisp white cotton petticoat. A demure sight to tantalize a rake, but it set desire raging like flames through a dry woodpile.
“Rex!”
The spaniel whined again, then barked sharply. He ran toward Ashcroft with surprising speed, given the rickety way he’d trailed his mistress.
Diana swore under her breath. With salty relish. No missish oaths for his woman, he was pleased to note. He’d always liked her earthiness. Especially when she devoted it to pleasuring him. She swerved off the path and pushed through the thick green growth.
Ashcroft lurched to his feet. He hadn’t been nervous with a woman since he was a lad, but he was nervous now. He sought the rage that had fortified him through the last days. It was absent. Instead, a blazing tide of anticipation overwhelmed him.
The dog appeared first, rustling through the bushes to growl and glower at him with rheumy brown eyes. Just behind the dog, Diana burst into the small clearing, frowning, her concentration on her runa
way pet, her hair starting to tumble. She was no better at securing her coiffure here than she’d been in Perry’s gorgeous seraglio of a bedroom.
A thousand memories hit, hard as a hammer, soft as swan’s down. Diana arching under him, crying out her pleasure. Diana naked and languid after love. Diana laughing. Diana arguing. Diana challenging him as no woman had.
Diana…
Words fled. A lump the size of Mount Snowdon lodged in his throat. His hands curled at his sides, and he thought his heart must burst, it thumped so crazily.
“Rex…” Then she looked up and saw Ashcroft.
She stopped on an audible breath, the pink seeping from her cheeks. A shaking hand rose to clench between her breasts.