“Meet me here at midnight.”
“I hardly think that would be proper…” Like a coward she had tried to stall, even though she knew her excuse was a pathetic one in view of the hours they had spent all alone in his steward’s office the previous night.
“Propriety be damned, Diana! You have never cared one jot about it before.” Even as his soft murmur sent ripples of unwanted awareness down her spine, she heard his anger loud and clear. “We either talk down here or I come to your bedchamber. You choose.”
The last thing she wanted was Giles in her bedchamber, so she agreed. Facing him on the back foot, her secret hovering in the air above her head like an ax waiting to fall, in a room she had dreamed about him in again last night would be unsettling in the extreme.
So the drawing room it was.
She sucked in a calming breath before she pushed the door open, wishing that same breath didn’t catch in her throat the second she saw him basked in the firelight, on the exact spot on the sofa where they had sat too close earlier. The swirling emotion in his stormy eyes like liquid amber as he stared at her wordlessly over his shoulder. In deference to the late hour, the servants hadturned all the lamps down low, casting most of the room and the perfect angles of his face in shadows.
The overall effect of his presence and blatant intimacy of the setting unnerved her more than she had bargained for, so she used the excuse of quietly closing the door to compose herself before she turned back, feigning bravado as she walked toward him.
“Should I stand for your blistering lecture or would you prefer us to swap positions while you loom over me wagging your finger.”
“What good would either of those things do? I am not your lord and master, Diana, and you are a grown woman who will do as she pleases irrespective of what I have to say on the subject.”
He patted the seat beside him. The same seat where the seductive timbre of his deep voice had sent tingles ricocheting to each nerve ending mere hours ago. “But I should still like to have the discussion in order to know how to proceed with the burdensome new knowledge I wish, with every fiber of my being, that I did not possess.”
Closer, she could see myriad other emotions in his irises beneath the obvious anger. Frustration. Indecision.
Concern.
That one shone brightest and left her off kilter as she perched on the edge of the cushion next to him. She didn’t want him to care, had never wanted any man to care about her nor care about him in return, but now that she knew he did, it ran riot with her emotions. More guilt layered thick—because he really did not need this now, too—while her silly heart basked in the revelation that he did care. A lot.
“What the hell were you thinking?”
She stared at her hands as she smoothed her skirts, trying notto feel wretched about something she had absolutely nothing to feel guilty about. “About what specifically?”
“You know exactly what, Diana!” He threw his hands up in the air. “Let us not play games when I know you are the Sentinel and you have been playing fast and loose with your own safety for months!” He blew out a ragged breath. “Have you any idea what danger you’ve put yourself in?”
“I am in no danger whatsoever.” She kept her own tone reasonable even though such diplomacy went against the grain. She needed to keep Giles on her side if she was going to keep her most closely guarded secret intact. “Believe me, I have always been exceedingly careful and discreet. I never do anything to put myself in harm’s way. That is why, after all this time, nobody apart from the newspaper proprietor, and now you, knows the Sentinel’s true identity. And to be fair, if you had been a gentleman earlier and not stolen my private property in such a childish way, you would still be none the wiser.”
“But I am wiser and now I am worried sick!”
“While your concern is lovely, Giles”—really lovely for some inexplicable reason—“I can assure you it is entirely unnecessary. I have been careful to cover my tracks and I am quite capable of looking after myself. In fact, I have been doing so for many years.”
“Really?” He looked her up and down. “You think a slip of thing, like you, is a match for a burly brute baying for blood?”
She had bested more than one burly brute in her time and all before she wrote for the newspaper, but she wouldn’t tell him that. “Nobody is after my blood, Giles.”
“Yet! But it is only a matter of time.”
“Only if my identity gets revealed—which hopefully it won’t.”She stared straight at him, hoping he would see sense and praying she could be diplomatic enough to make him see it. “There are three people on the planet who know I am the Sentinel. Not even my own sisters have worked it out, and they know me better than anyone.” She gazed deep into his eyes unflinching, trying to ignore the odd effect his had on hers and failing miserably. “I should very much like to keep it that way.”
“Hugh is my best friend, Diana. I cannot, in all conscience, keep it from him. You are now the most feared columnist in the capital. What if something were to happen to you? How would I explain away my silence? He would never forgive me and, frankly, I wouldn’t blame him as I would never forgive myself, either.”
“Giles…” She leaned closer and stroked his arm, touched by his obvious concern, then wished she hadn’t when her wayward palms begged to go wandering up his biceps and over his broad shoulders. In case they did, she sat back and fastened her hands together in her lap like a nun.
“Why on earth would anything happen to me? For who would ever believe the most feared columnist in the capital was a woman? And such an unimportant one at that? You have to concede, being me is the perfect disguise for that endeavor. Most people in society do not even know my name, and if they do they look down on me. To all intents and purposes, at best I exist on the periphery. A fish out of water. Too educated to be common and too common to be one of them. The Earl of Fareham’s sister-in-law, a charity case with the most dubious connections and no money whatsoever. Unremarkable, unimpressive, and so inconsequential, I blend into the paneling.”
He frowned at that. “Have you never looked in a mirror, Diana?Because believe me, you are far too beautiful to blend into anything.” Despite being backhanded, his unexpected compliment excited her. He flapped his hand in the vicinity of her body, looking uncomfortable to be talking about it. “One cannot blend in if one is cursed with being temptation incarnate.”
Did that mean he was tempted by her, too? And why did that possibility make her pulse quicken with anticipation instead of revulsion?
Before she allowed her mind to meander down that unfamiliar and unsettling path, Diana forced a laugh that said he was being ridiculous and his compliments were water off a jaded duck’s back. “If I am, Giles, that is surely all the more reason why I will be forever underestimated. Men only ever see the face and the figure—especially of a woman of no consequence—never the canny woman beneath. Even if somebody came sniffing around the newspaper looking for the Sentinel, I have worked there as an overlooked nitpicking grammarian for three years. I was correcting the shocking spelling of my peers long before the Sentinel came along and usurped them, and they all still think I am so desperate to become one of them, even my contributions to the gossip column are shrouded in the utmost secrecy. Apart from Charlie, all the men I work with see me as a joke. A silly girl trying to compete in a man’s world.”
“You are the least silly girl I have ever met.” An even better compliment than being called beautiful but not quite as thrilling as being described as temptation incarnate. “And only a blithering idiot wouldn’t see that.”
