Ashcroft wondered how they’d come to this. Hell, he shouldn’t care. After all, he’d had a right rollicking time with her. He usually asked no more of his affairs.
From the start, Diana was different.
Yes, the cunning strumpet duped you, his cynical side said snidely.
She said the words he’d already heard, but this time, the parting was final. “Good-bye, Tarquin. God keep you.”
She sounded genuine. But she’d sounded genuine when she quivered with pleasure in his arms. He now knew that wasn’t true.
Well, the pleasure was true. It was the friendship and the affection and the laughter that were lies. And those were the greatest betrayals. She could have used his body without doing this mortal harm. She’d touched his soul, and he’d never forgive her for that.
Even so, he couldn’t let her go like this. Not carrying his baby. Not when he still wanted her, curse her enduring allure.
He caught her wrist, feeling the wild race of her pulse. “No, Diana. Wait. You can’t mean to hand my child over to that cur.”
Burnley straightened and stepped toward them. “Have you no pride, man? She’s made an utter fool of you. Cut your losses and scuttle back to London.”
Ashcroft ignored him. “Diana?”
“I promised,” she said in a toneless voice. She refused to look at him.
“Break the promise.”
“I can’t.”
“Why? You don’t love him.”
Her head jerked up, and she stared at Ashcroft with wide, astonished eyes. For one explosive second, the unspoken question lay between them as to whether she loved Ashcroft.
She’d never said so. She was a lying trollop, but if she told him right now she loved him, he’d accept that was true.
The moment evaporated, and dull misery returned to her face. “Love isn’t the issue. If I marry Lord Burnley, I’ll have control of the estate until my child reaches his majority.”
How strange to realize that Ashcroft had always had an invincible rival for her. This house. Not the living husband he’d conjured up in his imagination. Not her beloved William. Not Burnley. “Only if it’s a boy.”
“It’s a boy.”
How could she be so certain? It was lunatic. Although he believed her. And damned her for her ambition and her cupidity. And for not throwing everything she wanted over the windmill to come back to him.
“In that case, I wish you joy, Mrs. Carrick,” he said with such coldness, she flinched.
He turned on his heel and bowed to Burnley with a sarcastic depth he knew the older man didn’t miss. “My felicitations, Papa.”
Without a backward glance, he stalked toward the gates. His heart brimmed with a foul brew of hatred and anger and pain. And longing. In spite of everything, the longing was paramount, so stabbing it almost crippled him.
He heard a sharp whistle behind him but scarcely paid attention. Until four brawny men in livery surrounded him.
“Ah, my audience grows,” he said dryly, lifting his stick with a show of bravado. “Perhaps Lord Burnley should consider selling tickets.”
He might be in turmoil, but not to such an extent he couldn’t read the threat these big, powerful brutes posed. Burnley must put a height requirement on his footmen. These fellows looked him straight in the eye, and very few men, even of his own class, did that.
Part of him, the part that itched to tear down the world and fling it into space just because Diana didn’t want him, welcomed the looming fight. Physical pain might distract him from the lancing emotional agony.
One heavily muscled fellow stepped forward. “His lordship wants us to escort you off the estate, Lord Ashcroft. Come quietly, and there won’t be any trouble.”
Ashcroft knew better. These men were tuned for violence. He could smell it in the air as sharp as smoke from a fire.
“Mrs. Carrick, let us return to the house.” Burnley’s voice, smooth, confident, powerful, flowed over Ashcroft like acid. “I want to discuss the drainage of the west marsh.”