“I have no plans to marry Willingham, thank you very much,” she said in as quelling a tone as she could manage. “And none of this has anything to do with the scene you so irritatingly interrupted.”

Penvale gave her an assessing look. “As your brother, I really should call him out.”

Diana was appalled. “For heaven’s sake, Penvale, I am a widow. Have you taken leave of your senses? Now kindly go away.”

Penvale split a dark look between her and Willingham. “I want the record to show that I approve of this not one whit. And, Jeremy, we will be discussing it later.”

“A discussion I will look forward to with great anticipation,” Willingham said in a bored tone. Diana simultaneously wished to laugh and to smack him across the face. These were not unusual sentiments where he was concerned, come to think of it.

Fortunately for her temper, her brother departed as quickly as he had arrived, with a parting shot of, “Do try to look less ravished before you rejoin us.” Gazing at Willingham’s tousled hair and askew collar, Diana wasn’t entirely certain whom her brother had been addressing.

A long silence fell in the wake of Penvale’s departure. Diana was torn between smoothing down her skirts and departing in the most dignified fashion she could manage and pressing Willingham back against a tree and picking up where they had left off.

Judging by the gleam in his eye as he gave her a thorough once-over, he was having similar thoughts.

Tempting as the prospect was, however, having an interlude disrupted by one’s brother did tend to put a bit of a damper on things, so Diana gave an internal sigh and reached up to try to repair some of the damage to her hair. Without a lady’s maid, or even a mirror, this was a difficult task, and she shuddered to think what the others would say when she returned in such a state.

“Here,” Willingham said, moving quickly to her side, “allow me.”

“An expert in women’s coiffures, are you?” Diana asked, arching an eyebrow.

“I have some experience with them, yes,” he said smugly.

And why, oh why, instead of feeling amused, did she suddenly feel ever so slightly… jealous?

“I wouldn’t look so pleased with myself, Willingham,” she said, seeking as ever to regain the upper hand. “You’ve yet to prove if your hands are similarly adept with other portions of the female anatomy.”

He leaned closer, an errant lock of golden hair falling across his brow. “Let’s find out this evening then, shall we?”

The rest of the afternoon was a blur, and Diana could not have said with any degree of certainty what she said to a single person. She knew that she and Willingham had rejoined the group, and had been the subject of several looks from their friends—ranging from curious (Emily) to suspicious (Audley)—but had been saved further questioning or ribbing by the general hustle and bustle of loading up their picnic, remounting their horses, and riding back to Elderwild. Diana had taken great care to ride nowhere near Willingham—or near her brother or Violet, either, as she had little doubt that both of them had plenty of things they wished to say to her.

Things that she had no particular interest in hearing.

Thirteen

Diana had as short a respite from her friends as she might have expected. She had retreated to her bedchamber and solicited Toogood’s assistance in removing herself from her riding habit and unlacing her corset before dismissing her maid. Clad only in her chemise, Diana wrapped herself in her most luxurious dressing gown—a delicious concoction of embroidered red velvet; she always felt like a courtesan in it, in the best possible sense—and sat down in her room’s window seat with a sketch pad.

The view out her window was stunning—a few clouds had appeared in the late-afternoon sky but the sun was doing its best to shine around them upon the rolling green lawns stretching out beyond the house, a corner of the formal gardens that lined the east side of the manor visible from her vantage point. She scarcely noticed said view, however, so occupied were her thoughts with the day’s events. She hardly thought mauling Willingham in a forest really suited their respective aims—his to bed a woman and solicit an honest review, hers to gain a bit of experience in the bedroom. When stated that way, the entire agreement sounded rather cold-blooded, and yet it felt anything but. Whenever she was so much as in the same room as Willingham, she found herself seized with an almost unbearable desire to touch him—to run her fingers through that beautiful golden hair of his; to press a kiss to the spot beneath his strong jaw that so tantalized her; to seize his surprisingly rough hand and move it on her own body, learning how she liked to be touched.

It was all thoroughly… distracting.

And Diana could not afford to be distracted—she had an affair to conduct and a wager to win. It was an awful lot on one lady’s plate. She needed to focus. But how could she focus, when she had become so inconveniently fixated on a certain marquess? She had spent much of her life trying to ensure that no one could have any sort of power over her, so how had she reached this state so quickly?

These unhelpful thoughts were interrupted by a knock on the door; she rose to open it, but Violet and Emily practically tumbled inside before she’d made it halfway across the room.

“I was going to let you in,” she said mildly, dropping her untouched sketch pad down on a side table and sinking into an overstuffed armchair instead. Violet and Emily, taking this as the invitation that it was, dropped down on the settee that Diana and Willingham had debauched the evening before.