Diana’s heart drummed hard as she stood before him in her long, white nightdress, with the handful of dried flowers still hanging from her fingers. He was still wearing his trousers and a partially unbuttoned white shirt but had discarded the rest of his clothes. From the candle burning on his nightstand and book on his pillow, he had presumably been reading before bed.
“Diana,” he breathed again, looking from the flowers in her hand up to her face with mingled pleasure, confusion, and concern. “You shouldn’t be here. Percy is asleep in the next room.”
“I came to tell you that I want you, Edmund,” she said. “But I know I can’t have you. I need to give this back to you, and then maybe I’ll be able to think clearly and find a way out.”
“I don’t understand,” Edmund said. “What do you mean?”
“I can’t marry Cousin Andrew, but Percy and Aunt Henrietta are determined, and I don’t know how to stop them. I don’t know what to do. Then, when I try to work it out, I just keep thinking of you and can’t focus on anything else.”
“If you don’t want to marry the man, you don’t marry him, Diana,” Edmund said, and she thought she detected a slight irritation in his voice. “In this country, at least, marriage is a matter of consent by both people.”
“You say that like it’s something so simple!” she protested.
“It is simple. It’s not easy for you, I’ll grant you that. But it’s very, very simple, and it’s the only honourable way out you have.”
“I thought of running away…”
“Don’t be so foolish and cowardly!” Edmund hissed. “Leave that to Percy. There’s more than one way that Lord Birks could ruin your life, and having you run away from your family is certainly amongst them.”
“I didn’t say I would do it,” she clarified crossly. “I only thought about it and all the reasons it wouldn’t work. You talk to me as if you’d already decided that I was a fool and a coward.”
Edmund took a deep breath and then exhaled.
“I’m sorry, Diana. I’m angry at your brother for not defending you from that man at nuncheon and then doing nothing after what happened in the gardens. His behavior is inexcusable. If someone treated my sisters in such a manner, they would quickly regret it. But that is Percy’s fault, not yours.”
“I’m sorry too, Edmund. I’m making my problems yours. That’s another reason for me to try to put you out of my mind. This isn’t fair to you. You have your own life and your own concerns.”
Edmund shook his head in wonder, and there was a glow in his green eyes that reawakened the twin sensations of excitement and security that had so overwhelmed her in the wood.
He came close to her and gently lifted the hand holding the flowers with his own.
“So, you thought that you could just come here and give those flowers back to me and somehow we’d both be free of anything we’d ever thought or felt or imagined?”
“Yes,” Diana admitted. His proximity and the feelings his mere presence sparked in her body made her begin to recognize the enormity of such an undertaking and how absurd her attempt had been.
“You are so young…” Edmund murmured, caressing her face, his touch delighting her as much as Andrew’s had repelled her. “What you tried to do would be impossible, you know.”
“I know that now,” she whispered, wondering if her longing was evident on her face in the candlelight.
“And is it really what you want? To stop thinking about me and forget that we ever touched?” he asked. “In the library, in the woods, here tonight?”
“No!” Diana said fiercely, and in response, Edmund lowered his head to press his lips against hers, first gently and then with more hunger.
“I never want you to forget me, Diana. Never!”
He kissed her passionately now, and Diana felt herself melting against him, Edmund’s body seeming perfectly shaped to hold her close against him.
“I want you so much, Edmund,” she murmured, stroking the faintly rough line of his jaw with fascination and desire.
Catching her up in his arms and lifting her off her feet, Edmund carried Diana over to his bed and laid her down, the now-crushed dried flowers falling from her hand across the linen, like blossoms on snow. She drew his head eagerly back to hers as he lay down beside her.
“Oh, Diana…” he breathed, and she felt his hands roaming over her body through the fabric of her nightdress, which was the only barrier now separating her skin from his. Their embrace felt so entirely right that the only real sin seemed to lie in stopping.
Diana pressed up to his touch with undisguised enjoyment and then buried her face hotly in the place where his neck and shoulder met as one of his hands skimmed beneath her gown and began to lightly discover the naked curves of her body.
Her own touch on her body had never aroused feelings of this pitch and intensity, and it was hard to process what was happening. She knew that Edmund was kissing her deeply while fondling her naked breasts and that his touch was close to ecstasy. The throbbing at the apex of her thighs grew to become something almost unbearable.
“Oh, I want, I want…” she pleaded breathlessly.