FINALLY ALONE WITH HER THOUGHTS, Diana considered what Caroline had revealed. Although she knew the duchess to be jealous and vindictive, Caroline seemed to know far too much about the circumstances surrounding Reggie’s death. Diana tried to dismiss her words, but the facts remained. Reggie had gambled everything away. DeVere held the deed to Palmerston Hall, yet had failed to tell her when she came to him for help. Why had he kept this knowledge from her? It was both galling and disconcerting.
Diana had looked to the race to solve her problems but now found them only compounded. With Reggie’s death, she no longer had any claim to the estate. It would either remain in DeVere’s hands or devolve onto Reggie’s nearest male relative if he was able to redeem it, or it would end up in the Court of Chancery. In either case, Diana would be homeless, and without the race winnings, near penniless with only her meager jointure to subsist by.
Even more alarming was the fact that after threatening DeVere, Reggie was dead. The duchess was right. Reggie would never have assaulted Johnson under any circumstances. Someone didn’t want the horse to run. Did Reggie perchance come upon the groom and his assailant? Is that why he was murdered? Or was the race just meant to deflect attention from the murderer’s true motive, which was not related to the race at all? Who but DeVere would have reason to do such a thing?
She recalled what Edward had revealed about his best friend, namely that he followed his own code and suffered neither fools nor blackguards. Reggie was surely a composite of both. And then the duchess had pointed to the alarming enigma surrounding the conditions of Ludovic’s DeVere’s own inheritance, that he had ruthlessly usurped the title by locking his own father away.
Diana feared all paths pointed to DeVere. How could she have indiscriminately placed her trust in such a man? Her mind tried reason, yet her emotions would have no part of it. She still wanted him. He had made her feel alive and beautiful and desired for the first time in her life, and now she craved him like a drug. Diana looked to the laudanum-laced tea to numb that same craving.
After having initially balked, she drank a few sips, knowing her racing thoughts would never otherwise allow her any peace. Still, she anticipated a restless night invaded by the kind of dreams she feared would send her sleepwalking and fevered with lust to DeVere’s bedchamber. With that unsettling thought, she drank the rest of the cup just for good measure.
***
He appeared to her in the darkest hours, his warm lips murmuring against her skin. “You did not come to me.”
“I couldn’t. It would not have been decent,” she whispered.
His wicked mouth trailed over her neck, her breasts. “Then will you turn me away?” His gaze was hypnotic, a flickering blue flame.
“You know I cannot,” she answered, opening her arms to him, welcoming the only cure for the ceaseless ache.
He peeled back her night rail, giving his hot tongue access to the valley between her breasts. “It was torture thinking of you in bed alone and wanting, no, needing the feel of your body beneath mine, engulfing myself in you as your sweet passage sheaths my cock. I thought I would go mad.”
Diana thought she would also if he didn’t take her into his mouth. Now. With her fingers clenched in his silky hair, she urged him to a swollen nipple. Yet the sultry heat of his mouth only stoked the flames and made her burn all the hotter. She arched into him, craving the abrasive feel of his flesh against her own. His hands found her gown. One fierce jerk rent the offending garment, freeing her bounty for his full ministration. He feasted on her lush mounds as if he were ravenous, kissing, biting, laving until she writhed beneath him in desperate need. “Kiss me, Ludovic,” she cried.
He took her mouth with slow deliberation, their hot breaths mingling, and tongues tangling, stroking, and sucking in mimicry of sex. The pungent scent of her own desire permeated her senses, feeding the hunger. She explored his body with her hands, clutching his head, his shoulders, his taut buttocks, reveling in the masculine texture, the solid feel of him. The throbbing in her belly intensified. Her passage clenched, and her damp thighs trembled as he parted her nether lips and stroked a finger through her wetness.
She reached for his erection, craving the paradoxical velvety hard feel of it. “Please, Ludovic. I want you,” she moaned.
“How?” he asked. “Tell me how you want me.”
She answered in a voice that was strangely thick. “I want you in my hands. In my mouth. In my sex.”
***