“Absolutely not!”
“But it’s big enough for two and I am freezing!”
Diana clutched the shawl tighter. “I am not sharing a shawl with you under any circumstances, Giles Sinclair! That really wouldn’t be proper!” Crouching next to him was playing havoc with all her senses. Sharing her shawl with him was almost as intimate as sharing a kiss with him and would undoubtedly be just as distracting.
“Because this is proper?” He glanced around the tangled branches they were crouched behind, dumbstruck. “Much longer out here and I will likely catch a chill!” He tugged at the shawl again. “Do you want my death from exposure on your conscience?”
Diana stared down her nose at him. “I never asked you to follow me.”
“Au contraire, madam!” He did the best impression of her feminine tone in a hushed whisper while mimicking all her exaggerated hand gestures that had got them here. “Weneed to keepan eye on them, Giles!Weneed to be close else we won’t hear anything useful!Weneed to know when to step in! What was all that if not clear and concise instructions for me to follow?”
“Will you stop sayingI told you so!” She huffed a cloud of frustrated, misty air into the night. “I didn’t realizewewould be stuck out here for the duration.”
“Well, we are—thanks entirely to you—and I’m freezing, so stop being so stingy and inhumane and share your ugly shawl, witch, or my chattering teeth will give us away and you’ll be ruined anyway.”
A weak and wayward part of her instantly welcomed that prospect…
Pamela did not give her the opportunity to contemplate that unwelcome, errant thought for long, though, because she suddenly peeled herself from her man with a squeal.
“Somebody is there, Rory!” Through the veil of leaves they watched Lady Pamela gesture in their general direction. Like the fierce soldier he was, Rory started toward the lawn, ready to defend his lady’s honor. “I heard something. I know I did. What if it’s Lord Stifford? Come to claim me? Or my father?” Pamela was crying again because apparently she did that a great deal and at the slightest provocation. Diana was seriously tempted to go shake the girl by the shoulders and tell her not to be such a pathetic victim all the time.
“Who’s there?”
For Giles, surrender seemed the most prudent option, but before he rose and waved the white flag for them both without her consent, Diana grabbed his hand and dragged him around the back of the shrubbery a split second before Rory came into view.
“There is nobody here, my darling.” With their bodies pressed side by side and their backs pressed into the leaves, Giles and Diana stood as still as statues holding their breath. “Perhaps you heard a fox or a badger.” Rory’s voice receded. “But let us not tempt fate. If we leave now, it will be hours before anyone realizes we are gone, and we could be well on our way down the Great North Road by then and married before they can stop us.”
Together they exhaled as they watched the couple scurry hand in hand back down the garden.
“That was close.” Giles’s sentiment echoed her own.
“I hope they make it. I wouldn’t wish Stifford on my worst enemy.”
“Because you are a rescuer to your core.” Giles slanted her an amused glance. “But I am sure they’ll make it. Love is supposed to conquer all, isn’t it? At least in fairy tales.” He began to unfold his limbs only to still again when he heard another feminine giggle approaching from the other side of the garden. One glance at Giles’s annoyed face confirmed she wasn’t imagining it before two pairs of new feet crunched down the path in their direction. “Good grief, this garden is like Piccadilly Circus!”
Diana simultaneously shushed him and rolled her eyes, then hunkered back down in her shawl. As he crouched beside her she unraveled some of it and draped it around his shoulders, making no secret that she was sharing it only under duress. He burrowed into the warmth, and as she had predicted she instantly regretted her charitable gesture because it felt too intimate. Just the heat from his annoying long body gave hers ideas.
“We shall have to be quick, Alec…” Of all the people for Fate to send Diana next, it had to be Lady Sewell and her fake Russiancount. Two people most definitely outside for a tryst. “Before we are missed.” Their feet came closer then disappeared inside the pergola right next to Giles and Diana’s hiding place.
A male voice laced with broad cockney came out in a silky murmur. “Nobody will find us here, Gertrude. This is the perfect dark place to do dark deeds.”
Dark deeds!
Oh no!
There was the ominous squeak of metal as they lowered themselves onto the seat inside and then a giggle laced with innuendo, which was smothered by a noisy kiss.
Beside her Giles groaned in despair. Moments later, Diana did, too, for it turned out Lady Sewell was every bit the game old girl she had always suspected: She was only too happy to immerse herself in those dark deeds with rampant enthusiasm.
“Oh, how I have missed you, my darling. How I have missed your kisses…”
Diana winced at Lady Sewell’s lusty moan, her toes cringing inside her slippers that she had to hear it beside Giles of all people, while her vivid imagination decided to analyze it against her will.
What on earth was the fake count doing to make the woman lose her head so?
Giles obviously knew because he was wincing, too—but at her in an apologetic way as if he expected the sounds from the pergola to get much worse before they got better. Thanks to his nearness, she did not need to see his expression to know what he was thinking; she could feel it the tension in his muscles. So close she could feel the alluring heat from his skin beneath all the layers of his clothes. So close every nerve ending she possessed fizzed at theintimacy of the situation, and with mortifying curiosity, too. As if they suddenly were eager to know if they might work in the same way as Lady Sewell’s with the right encouragement. The sort of encouragement who was currently sniggering beside her and whose seductive kisses had woken her stupid nerve endings in the first place!
Annoyed, she nudged Giles hard in the ribs to shut him up. That only made the wretch laugh more.
