Kathryn Jensen – The Earl Takes A Bride (страница 2)

She smiled up at him, unsurprised, as if people frequently dropped in on her at odd hours. “You’ve shaved off your beard.”

He chuckled. “Do I look very different?”

“Only for a moment,” she admitted. “At the window, in the dark. Not many men can make themselves look like James Bond just by shaving.”

He never went to films, but he was warmed by her comparison to a movie character she seemed to admire.

“Although,” she continued, “you’re probably head and shoulders taller than 007.”

He grinned, pleased. “Are the children still up?” he asked, knowing they weren’t.

“No.” She sighed. “They would have loved to see you again. Tommy took an immense liking to you. Maybe because you have the same name. He’s grown, you know. You’d be surprised how much, for a seven-year-old.”

Although she was smiling and chattering lightly, filling him in on accomplishments and changes in her three offspring—Tommy at seven, Annie, six and Gare, five—he could read an underlying tension in her nervous movements. Her fingers sought out unnecessary tasks—lining up the salt and pepper shakers on her table, straightening the kitchen towel hanging over the oven door handle. Another sign of anxiety revealed itself in the delicate lines around her pretty eyes and mouth.

He concentrated too long on her mouth, her elegantly shaped lips…and felt himself lean toward her.

She automatically fell back a step as if to make more space for him in the little room. “Do you have time for coffee? Or do you prefer tea?”

“Coffee would be great,” he said, although it hadn’t been at the top of his list of desires.

She spun around and busied herself with measuring grounds into the coffee maker, fetching milk from the refrigerator, digging two blue ceramic mugs from behind a collection of children’s plastic cups in the cupboard. She was offering him her best, though her mugs would have looked common beside the von Austerand’s fragile Sheffield bone china.

“May I help with—”

“No, no.” She cut him off with a wave of her hand as she transferred the sugar bowl and milk to the table. “Sit, sit. So, tell me how everyone is. Really,” she added breathlessly, sweeping damp brown tendrils out of her eyes. She looked suddenly very tired, holding herself together by threads as she swung back to the counter to watch coffee drip into the glass decanter. “Summer in Elbia…it must be lovely.”

“You’ve never been there, have you?” Thomas asked.

“To Elbia? To Europe?” She laughed. “Not likely. Do you realize the cost of foreign travel these da—” She caught herself, turned to blink at him and smile weakly. “Of course you don’t. Everything’s on the royal budget, isn’t it?”

“Most everything,” he admitted quietly.

“Must be nice,” she murmured, more to herself, he expected, than for his benefit. She sighed again. “Such an exotic world…far away…the stuff of dreams.”

The coffeemaker sputtered out its last drops of dark, fragrant liquid. A pungent aroma filled the kitchen, and Diane pulled herself out of her reverie to fill the mugs and bring them to the table. She sat down heavily, with a little inward sound that wasn’t quite a groan.

Thomas watched her as he lifted his steaming mug of black, unsweetened coffee to his lips. It was weak compared to the way he liked it. If they’d been together under different circumstances he’d have shown her how to make a strong European brew to his taste.

He hastily shook away the intimate thought as he watched her add two spoonfuls of sugar and a generous dollop of milk to her own mug. He reminded himself of his mission.

“You look well,” he said slowly.

Her eyes were fixed on her beverage. “Absolutely,” she said with a chipper lilt that didn’t come from the heart.

How to proceed? Thomas felt a little desperate. “I…we, that is, wondered…”

An arrow of suspicion shot through her eyes as they rose to meet his. “So that’s what this is.” She sounded hurt, and he kicked himself for not handling the situation more tactfully.

“Now, Diane—”

“You’ve come to spy on me,” she accused with a touch of dry humor.

“I’m sorry if I’m intruding,” Thomas whispered gruffly. “Jacob and Allison are worried about you and the children. They’ve received phone calls from Florida. Your parents believe you’re having problems of some sort but won’t tell them what it’s all about.”

The touch of anger in Diane’s eyes softened. She set her mug down a little too hard, and coffee sloshed over the lip onto the tabletop. “It’s nothing they can do anything about. I didn’t want to burden anyone unnecessarily.”

“I see.”

She gave him a look that could only have come from deep sorrow. Whatever had happened must have been pretty awful.

He set down his own mug firmly, hiked himself up even straighter in his chair and spread his huge hands over hers on the table in front of him. “If it’s that serious, Mrs. Fields, your family should be told.”

“It’s nothing that I can’t— It’s just that—” Something seemed to catch in her throat. A watery glaze covered her eyes, and she looked away from him.

Was she going to cry? He would never have thought it possible. Diane the fighter. Diane the veritable tigress when it came to chasing off the press in the days just after her sister’s marriage to Jacob, when no one in either family could go anywhere without a trail of reporters yapping like hyenas at their heels. He’d seen her run off a journalist and his photographer with a broom when the pair had tried to corner her children with questions in their own backyard.

And here she was, an emotional disaster, on the verge—unless he was mistaken—of breaking down entirely. He didn’t have a clue what to do.

“Diane, let them help.”

She pulled herself up and stood to face him as he rose from the table. The top of her head only reached the shoulder of his suit jacket. “I’m just tired. Days are pretty long around here. I should go to bed now.”

“Tell me what has happened,” he said, emphasizing each word.

She looked up at him, a spark of proud fire momentarily brightening her sad eyes. “Please go.”

“You are not leaving this room, and I’m not leaving this house until you tell me what’s going on.”

“Why does it matter?” Her eyes narrowed suspiciously. “It’s the possibility of scandal, isn’t it? If the press hears the king of Elbia’s sister-in-law is bereft of a husband and can’t pay her electric bill, they’ll have a field day. Won’t they?”

Thomas’s heart stopped. So that was it. “Gary’s…left you and the children?” he asked hesitantly.

“Gone…flown the coop…absconded with a floozy from the office…good riddance.” She fluttered a hand carelessly in the air, but the gesture didn’t fool him a bit.

“Dear girl, I’m so sorry,” he muttered, trying to recover from his shock and think of something…anything appropriate to say.

“Well, I’m not,” Diane said in a quiet voice just short of cracking. “It’s been a long time coming. I should have insisted years ago…didn’t…couldn’t find a way to—”

The last ounce of strength drained from her. She turned with a choking sob and rushed toward the doorway into the living room.

Thomas cut her off with one enormous stride. She ran smack into his chest with her bowed head. His big arms immediately wrapped around her, pinning her there. She struggled for exactly half of one second, then went limp in his bear hug of an embrace.

Neither of them said a thing. But now that Thomas had her in his arms, her trembling body flush against his, he wasn’t sure what to do with her.

She didn’t push or squirm or indicate she needed space, oxygen or even words of solace from him. She seemed content just to remain where she was.

It was at that moment he became aware of an embarrassing development. Down below his belt. He felt himself move, extend, become…firm.

Thomas squeezed his eyes shut and willed himself to remember he was duty bound to Jacob to protect, defend and honor the members of his family. Desire wasn’t supposed to enter the equation. That meant not responding to Diane as if she were a beautiful, soft, desperately overworked woman who might welcome a man. That meant switching off his hormones for one bloody hour, finding out what he needed to know, mending whatever was broken the best he could…and getting the hell out.

If he played his cards right and there were no technical delays at the airport, he could be on the royal jet and headed back toward Europe in a matter of hours.

But at the moment a woman was weeping on his chest. Probably ruining his new suit jacket, he thought regretfully. He had paid an exclusive tailor in Florence to make it for him, at the cost of more lire than his recent week on the Riviera with a sultry French actress. In retrospect, the suit had seemed the better deal.

Diane made no sound, moved not a muscle. Nevertheless he knew she was crying by the bucketful.

“Mrs. Fields,” he said, “I’m good at fixing things. Let me help.” Although he’d meant to be gentle, even paternal, his words came out clipped, tense, businesslike.

If she hadn’t been moving before, now she was suddenly as still as granite, hardly breathing, taut from her tiny bare feet to the top of her shampoo-fresh head. “Help?” she whispered hoarsely. She looked up at him with incredible sadness. “You silly man, this isn’t a matter of diplomacy or rescuing Jacob from a mob of overenthusiastic paparazzi.”