Dangerous in Diamonds - Madeline Hunter [92]
She frowned. “This is a fine thing, Castleford. I finally allow you to catch me, and you decide to stop being bad today of all days. I do not know why everyone says women are the capricious ones.”
Damnation. It was a hell of a thing when a man had to defend acting with uncharacteristic decency, especially when all of his body and most of his mind argued to behave differently.
“I am more than willing to be bad, Daphne. I have a list of the ways I plan to be bad with you, the result of many hours of contemplating you and badness at the same time. But I’ll not be luring you into it, no matter how maddening this desire. I have wanted you since the first time I saw you. If you want me, my chamber is right next to yours tonight. You have only to open the door.”
He left her there at the bottom of the stairs to go above on her own. He went in search of some port. One glass only, however. He did not want her showing up in his chamber before he got there himself.
Chapter Twenty
What annoying nobility the duke had shown.
Daphne found it hard to absorb that he had left her to decide how the night went. It did not seem fair that he now expected her to make the next move in the long game that he had started.
She barely noticed the pleasant if rustic chamber she had been given in the inn. It probably was one of the best, she noted, as her mind continued to accommodate the events of the last hour. Very clean and bright, with whitewashed walls that helped the lamp’s light spread, it offered comfort and a place to settle her emotions.
She sat on the edge of the bed between two falls of the bed’s blue drapes, trying to reclaim herself. She really could not.
She would never be quite the same woman again. She had learned too much this last week and shared too much and risked too much. After concluding years ago that it was necessary to leave the past behind, she had turned around and embraced it. At least now, hopefully, she might not have the same regrets in the years to come that she had carried in the ones just past.
Her conversation with Castleford still made her eyes mist when she thought of it. He had been so angry when she told him about Latham, but not for the reasons she thought he would be.
She had assumed, wrongly, that he would take Becksbridge’s view and see the fault as all hers, or at least equally so. If he had not caught Latham with Margaret, would he have been so sure of her own story? Few people would be, she knew to her regret. Not with any story about a man and woman, but certainly not the one she told regarding the heir to a ducal coronet.
He had sat at Margaret’s table knowing most of it. All day he had kept that inside himself until they took that walk. Now the intimacy of their conversation still filled her. Moved her. He had been very kind, even as he demanded explanations that were not his by right.
I am going to kill him. That had not been a passionate outburst by a man enraged. He had said it too calmly. Too frankly. He hated Latham, and not only because of Margaret or even herself, she guessed. It was as if one fallen angel looked at another and, because of his own sins, saw the deeper wickedness that made for dangerous evil.
Calmer now, and more herself, she prepared to wash. She undressed to her chemise and poured the warm water into the basin. A fullness in her heart had not gone away, for all her deliberations.
It was not fear or indecision, she knew. Those existed as smaller concerns, shallow in comparison to this. Gratitude swelled her heart, and relief and an emotion so poignant that she did not know how to name it. A bit of regret stirred there too.
She dried herself and gazed in the looking glass. Should she open that door waiting for her tonight? It would be an ending even as it began something. It would be the first step to “afterwards.” And there would be an afterwards, of course. Not only because he was Castleford the man and Castleford the duke. Also because Mrs. Joyes had confided more than enough to him today, but not everything.
Her hands trembled while she tied her brushed