“I’m not talking about you,” she said in a muffled moan.
He frowned. This didn’t make sense. She was a respectable widow whose only sins, as far as he knew, related to her affair with the rakehell Earl of Ashcroft.
As so often when he pushed for answers, he had the feeling he missed pieces of the picture. Big, important pieces. Every time he thought he made sense of what happened, the picture changed.
A fence rose between him and what he wanted. He could see his goal across the barrier, but he couldn’t reach it.
“Tell me, Diana,” he said sharply, snatching her arm. He expected her to recoil, but she remained trembling in his grasp. “Why won’t you marry me?”
He watched her expression change, harden, become purposeful. She straightened like a soldier about to face a firing squad. “I can’t lie to you anymore, Tarquin,” she said in a low voice. “You’ll hate me, but I have to tell you the truth.”
Grim premonition struck him that after pushing for answers for so long, he wouldn’t like what he was about to hear. “The truth about what? Why won’t you let me give our child my name?”
“Because Mrs. Carrick is going to marry me. Her child will carry the proud name of Fanshawe, not the degraded label of Vale.”
At Lord Burnley’s intervention, Diana’s heart crashed to a halt, and her faltering confession died on her lips. Her belly clenched with the painful realization that she was sinfully late offering to tell Ashcroft everything. Instead, he’d now discover the worst, and in the cruelest possible light.
Curse her for all the evil she’d done him.
Slowly, she turned, and through a glaze of tears saw the marquess watching from the edge of the glade. Burnley’s face set in triumphant lines. Rex made a soft sound of distress and butted her leg.
Her desperate gaze switched to Ashcroft. Fleetingly, she saw the ardent lover. Then he became once again the man she’d first met in Mayfair. In charge of himself and his world. Proud. Superior. Impervious to feeling.
After the last weeks, she knew better, but she couldn’t criticize his need to present a strong façade to his enemy. She was shocked to the bone to realize Burnley and Ashcroft were indeed enemies. Not just rivals in politics. Not just men with nothing in common apart from the incendiary secret of Ashcroft’s parentage.
What quivered between these two powerful noblemen was hatred. Naked and dangerous as a drawn sword.
Ashcroft was the first to break the fraught silence. He let Diana go and straightened, his eyes never shifting from the older man. “Lord Burnley.”
Burnley’s thin lips twisted in a contemptuous smile that chilled Diana’s heart. He’d never expressed any warmth for his bastard son. In the years she’d known him, she’d never seen him express warmth toward anything. But his disgusted expression said he nurtured no fatherly feelings at all.
“Lord Ashcroft. As usual, you intrude where you’re not wanted,” he drawled.
Ashcroft’s curt bow was pure insolence. Diana’s hands formed claws in her skirts. How she wished she’d never started this greedy, vicious scheme.
She was going to be hurt. She’d recognized that long ago. What terrified her to the point of screaming was that Lord Ashcroft, who didn’t deserve to pay for her unjustified ambition, would suffer a killing blow in this verdant glade.
She didn’t mistake the gloating relish brightening Lord Burnley’s green eyes. He meant to use Diana as his weapon to crush Ashcroft to dust beneath his heel.
“Lord Ashcroft, please go,” she said in a thready voice, but both men ignored her.
Ashcroft shrugged with a nonchalance that would have fooled anyone who didn’t love him—or didn’t hate him with a virulence that poisoned the very air. He sounded casual, uncaring, in control. “Surely setting foot on your land to speak to a lady of my acquaintance doesn’t constitute trespass.”
“It does if the lady has no wish to speak to you,” Burnley returned smoothly.
Now she saw them face-to-face, Diana unwillingly found a stronger resemblance between the two men than she’d expected. She hadn’t seen it when Ashcroft was her lover, kind, witty, perceptive, generous. Here he acted the grand seigneur, and he looked startlingly like his father.
The likeness didn’t flatter him. He looked remote, his handsomeness glittering cold as a diamond. Hard to remember she’d held this man in her arms while he gasped his release. Hard to remember he’d been so frantic to see her, he’d pursued her into his enemy’s territory and begged her to marry him.
Once he discovered the truth, he wouldn’t want to marry her. That sweet leap her heart had given at his proposal would never recur.
She closed her eyes and summoned a prayer for Ashcroft. Her soul was too weighted with sin to form the words. She wasn’t such a hypocrite, she imagined God would pardon her and listen to her entreaties.
Not even the promise of Cranston Abbey compensated for the damage she’d done to herself, her father, and, most of all, Ashcroft.
“The lady can speak for herself,” Ashcroft snapped, as she opened her eyes.
“As her betrothed, I speak for her. Perhaps you didn’t hear me. Mrs. Carrick is the next Marchioness of Burnley, and she bears my heir.”