Typically, she was unimpressed with his flirting. “What a hideous thought.” She stopped on the periphery of the mess he had made and eyed it with curiosity, completely unaware that she stood basking in the light from the fire, which made those copper flecks in her hair crackle. “I came down to make myself some hot milk to see if that would make me drowsy.”
“If you had rung your bell, someone would have brought you some.”
She shrugged as if the concept never occurred to her. “Insomnia is depressing enough without inflicting it upon somebody else, and unlike some overprivileged folk”—she gave him a withering glance—“I am used to doing everything myself. Even after a year of being waited on, I doubt I shall ever get used to having servants.” She gestured behind in the direction of the kitchen with a flick of her head, which made her pert breasts jiggle a little, confirming she had indeed discarded her stays, and he almost groaned aloud. “Would you like some?”
“Yes.” Giles barely recognized the high-pitched squeak that had apparently replaced his deep, dulcet tones. “That would be lovely.” He would choke back a vat of hot milk happily if sending her to warm it gave him a few private moments to give his body a stern talking-to!
She swished away toward the quiet kitchen and Giles sagged against the desk.
What was all that about?
He had always found the minx attractive. He’d have to be blind and half dead not to, but the attraction had never knocked him sideways before. It had always been something he had acknowledged then put away in a neat box markedDO NOT TOUCHbecauseDiana was off limits for so many reasons. The main ones being she was the prickly sister-in-law of his best friend—that was number one—and she also wasn’t the sort he usually dallied with. The safe sort who enjoyed transient relations and came with no strings attached. That certainly wasn’t Diana. Just like her sister had been to Hugh, Diana was a forever kind of woman. The sort a man would need to spend eternity with because accepting anything less would be pure, unmitigated torture.
Bloody hell.
Bloody.
Hell.
Where the blazes had that dangerous thought come from?
After all the yearning he had done this past week, alongside the unmistakable utter joy at seeing her again, the rampant, insistent lust and errant thoughts of forever were a new and worrying development a man in his precarious predicament could not afford.
“How do you feel about tomorrow?” While he was still reeling, Diana had returned and was back to leaning on the doorframe. Thankfully, she assumed his widened eyes were to do with the milk she had set warming, so she rolled hers. “I’ve used a saucepan before, Giles, and I can see it from here so don’t panic. I won’t burn your lovely house down.”
He offered her what he hoped was a wry smile despite his suddenly racing heartbeat. “As well as can be expected, I suppose.”
“We’ll all be there beside you. Even me and Vee are breaking with tradition to stand shoulder to shoulder with you at the graveside in your hour of need, so you won’t be alone.” Yet the only person he cared was there was her, heaven help him, because clearlyall the stress of the last week had now sent him mad. Stark, staring mad if he was entertaining impossible thoughts like that!
“Even so, I cannot deny I shall be glad to get tomorrow over with.” Then, because his mind was so addled and before he was able to stop it, some of his real concerns leaked out. “It is distracting me from all the work that has to be done. Work I have desperately wanted to do for years…” He clamped his leaking jaw shut to stare at the chaos of the office, then realized a determined Hunter of the Truth like Diana wouldn’t leave it there. Nor did he want her to. Not tonight at least. Tonight he needed to unburden himself of some of it with someone who cared. He hoped that was her.
“The duke neglected this estate for years and left a bully in charge in his stead. It has been grossly mismanaged for the last decade and run entirely for profit—to the detriment of the tenants. I had been told about the evictions and warned about the state of the farms, but I had no idea how bad things had got until I was allowed back here yesterday.”
She frowned. “Yesterday?”
“It has been a while.” He shrugged to cover the grief of that cruel punishment. “I made the mistake of criticizing the duke’s flagrant neglect of his tenants the day I turned twenty-one. I offered—actually I demanded, and such forthrightness never went down well—to leave university and replace Bryant as the steward, because I knew I could manage it all better than that unsympathetic good-for-nothing. I grew up here. I knew the people and the land like the back of my hand and had spent all my formative years learning everything I could about estate management from the library, had so many plans to modernize and expand but…”
Giles ran an agitated hand through his hair at the sudden flash of pity in her expressive green eyes. “Typically, I got banished for opening my mouth. I regularly went behind their backs to visit the farms over the years, and tried to help where I could, but this is the first time I have been allowed to pass through the gates in a decade. It’s practically impossible to do anything meaningful with no access to the accounts or the power to change things.”
“The more I hear of your father, the more I dislike him. Did he have any decent qualities?”
“If he did, he kept them hidden from me.” An unexpected flash of grief hit him, again for all the things a father and son should be to each other rather than what they were. “I have been racking my brains all week trying to recall one single poignant memory for his eulogy and I’ve drawn a blank. The man hated me. Resented me, though heaven only knows what for, and as I refuse to perjure myself in church, what I have written is now very dry and quite impersonal. Perhaps I should hand it over to a nitpicking grammarian to pretty up?”
“I wouldn’t worry about prettying anything, Giles, as I am sure, no matter how dry it is, what you have written is fitting. More often than not, people get the funeral they deserve. At least yours will get a eulogy, a few mourners there on sufferance, a fancy family crypt to lie in, and his name carved in marble. Mine will probably get tossed into an unmarked pit in a prison somewhere. Don’t get me wrong, he deserves nothing less, but it makes one think about one’s own legacy doesn’t it?”
Legacy.Oh! How he loathed that word.
“How do you want to be remembered?” A more personal question than he usually asked her, but one that deviated from the ruttedpath of his tenuous legacy. “Let me guess—‘Here lies Diana, a troublesome wife to her poor nagged husband, devoted mother to her battalion of fearsome warrior daughters, and determined Hunter of the Truth till her final breath’?”
“I shall settle only for the latter as I have no desire for the former, thank you very much.”
“Whyever not?” She had said as much before to anyone who happened to mention it, but he suddenly needed to understand her reasons. Thinking of Diana spending a lifetime alone seemed so sad because she deserved everything. Almost as sad as the fact he had to spend his alone, too, when he didn’t deserve it either. He had always avoided serious monogamy out of necessity—not choice. “Don’t you want a family?”
“You met my father.” He had. Alfred Merriwell was an odious crook with no redeeming qualities whatsoever. A man who had abandoned his own daughters simply to avoid the responsibility of them before returning like a bad penny to try to blackmail his eldest. “He was enough to put me off men for life.”
A legacy she didn’t deserve, either. “It strikes me as grossly unfair to tar all men with the same filthy brush. We are not all like our fathers. I would certainly hope I am nothing like mine.” Now he sounded as though he was putting himself forward as a candidate. “Perhaps you might give one a try one day and they might surprise you?”
Whoever that lucky fellow was, Giles knew already he would despise him on principle.
