The Earl Takes A Bride

Diane stared at him. “Fly to Europe? Talk about throwing away mon—”

He reached across the table and laid his hand on top of hers. The heat of his strong fingers closing over hers silenced her. “Stop thinking about money. I told you, it’s nothing. You sound like your sister.”

Diane couldn’t help smiling at that, just a little. “Our parents were very thrifty people. New Englanders generally are. Sorry.”

“Nothing wrong with being sensible,” Thomas allowed. “But there are times when cash spent is wisely parted with.”

She rolled her eyes. “I have a feeling this is going to cost Jacob more than the proverbial few pennies. Go on.”

“I have arranged everything. All you need to do…is agree,” Thomas said with almost painful slowness, as if this was a difficult part he’d rehearsed. “Before I came to your house this morning, I contacted your parents in Florida.” Barreling onward, he paid no attention to her gasp of outrage. “They would be thrilled to have the children join them for the rest of the summer. I’ve arranged for Jacob’s private jet to take us to Vienna tomorrow night. From there, his helicopter will carry us to Elbia. I felt you might need a day to prepare and pack.”

“Generous of you,” she commented, not bothering to hide her sarcasm. The nerve of the man! Taking her life into his hands as if he was planning one of Jacob’s diplomatic jaunts. “But I could never put my children on a plane and watch them fly off alone.”

“That’s been taken care of. Allison told me you often employ a young lady named Elly Shapiro, three doors down the street from you. I’ve spoken with her mother about the possibility of her taking the position of nanny for the summer. In return she’ll receive a generous stipend for her college fund.”

“And no doubt be thrilled with the chance to spend three months in Florida, away from her brothers and sisters,” Diane added. He seemed to have thought of everything. “And what am I supposed to do in Elbia for the whole summer?”

“You’ll have the luxury of time to do anything that appeals to you…other than work. No responsibilities. No budgeting, cooking or laundry. Just time to visit with Allison and your niece and nephew, tour whatever parts of Europe appeal to you, shop for new clothes in the best boutiques, read—”

“Eat!” Diane added, getting into the spirit of the moment, although she still had nagging reservations that she was doing the right thing. Maybe she would only be avoiding the inevitable by allowing Thomas to sweep her off to Europe. “I understand there are a few decent restaurants in Europe…perhaps even in Elbia.”

Thomas’s eyes twinkled with appreciation for her humor. “So I’ve been told. Prepare to put on a few pounds…or burn them off as Allison does by including a vigorous, hour’s walk in your daily routine.”

Admittedly, it did sound wonderful. Too wonderful?

Life just isn’t this easy, Diane reasoned sadly. Solutions to problems don’t simply fall from the sky in the form of wealth and palaces. Yet…wouldn’t she be foolish not to let her sister and brother-in-law lend a hand, just to give her breathing room? Thomas was right, in a way. If she took a short break from life, she might be able to function more efficiently and figure out what she was going to do with her future.

Besides, she mused, there was a secret part of her that had always yearned to break loose. To do something totally without consideration for what was proper or frugal. Sometimes she envisioned all the passion in her life stored up inside of her, waiting for a chance to gush forth like champagne from an uncorked bottle. Had she let Gary become the cork in her bottle? And now that he was gone…what sort of life would she live? A drab, uninteresting one? Or one that was adventurous and promised her new horizons? She imagined the next ten years flashing by as quickly and unremarkably as the first decade of her adult life.

“I…I don’t know,” she said softly, blinking away a hot, prickly sensation behind her eyelids.

“Don’t think about it,” Thomas growled impatiently. “Just say yes, and I’ll finalize the arrangements.” His hand found hers and closed over it, warm and reassuring. “You won’t regret it. I promise.”

She was trembling and she didn’t know why. Reluctance to be separated from her children for so long? She didn’t think so. She knew they would be safe with Elly as an escort and deliriously happy with their grandparents.

No, something else brought on the tremors. Something else terrified her. She met Thomas’s intense brown eyes and a shudder of realization raced through her. She wanted him to kiss her again. She wanted him to crush her in his massive arms and make her remember what it felt like to be a woman.

Was that what she feared? That he would do all these things and more if she flew away with him? Then the summer would end and she’d be left with mere memories…and a lonely life back in Connecticut where she’d started.

“Say yes,” he said, so low the words were a barely audible rumble across her kitchen.

Diane looked up at the man who seemed to fill a good half of the room. His eyes were glistening obsidian, hard with determination. The muscles in his face had turned rigid. Taut ridges ran down the sides of his neck, into the starched, white collar of his shirt. He was an incredibly strong man. She had felt the muscles of his chest and arms when he’d held her. She imagined he would have a wealth of thick, richly textured hair across his chest that would be delightful to play with.

Why in Heaven’s name was she thinking about a man’s body when she should be concentrating on her future!

Diane drew herself up in her chair. Now or never…now or never, a persistent voice whispered through her mind. Take a chance. Grab the ring. Risk your heart. For once in your life, do what feels good!

She couldn’t make her voice work for a full two minutes. “All right,” she said at last. “I’ll go.”

Three

There was more to packing Diane’s children off to their grandparents than Thomas had anticipated. All three had minds of their own, and each had specific ideas as to which clothing was “cool,” which favorite stuffed animals or toys they simply could not leave behind. In the end the three suitcases Diane had planned expanded to six. One each for clothing and a smaller one for beloved teddy bears, pillows and playthings.

Elly arrived the morning of the trip flushed with excitement, her blond ponytail swinging like a metronome in time to the music playing through the earphones of her portable tape player. As lively as she was, she was a responsible girl, and Diane trusted her implicitly.

“They are definitely going to exhaust my parents,” she said, laughing, as she waved all four of them through the boarding gate later that morning.

“I expect so,” Thomas agreed, although he hadn’t had much experience with youngsters.

In his view, children were a loud, frequently sticky, inexperienced tribe that interfered with an ordered adult life. You couldn’t discuss politics with them without their eyes glazing over. You couldn’t brawl with them the way you could with your mates on a football field. You couldn’t talk about sex or Verdi or high-caliber weapons in their presence without generating scowls from other adults in the room. Children didn’t seem of much use to him.

Yet Thomas had grown surprisingly fond of Jacob and Allison’s babies. Cray was now three years old and called him Toms. The child just couldn’t seem to get his mouth around that second syllable. Kristina was a delicate, squirming creature of six months. Thomas had been terrified of her at first. He was convinced that touching her with his big, awkward hands would instantly crush the child. But one day Allison simply plopped the baby in his arms as she took off across the garden after a runaway Cray. And there they’d been—the two of them. Thomas and Kristina. Staring at each other.

Thomas had instantly lost his heart to the blue-eyed mistress of the nursery.

Now he found excuses to hold her, to spend a few minutes of every day in the nursery soaking up the smell of talc and baby sweetness. He was convinced that little Kristina saved one special gurgle that sounded like ta-ta just for him. And she did something special for him whenever he held her. She relieved some of the torment he felt every time he looked in a mirror and saw his mother’s face looking back at him. His mother, who had deserted him. He had always been convinced they were alike in ways other than physical, that he was as incapable of strong attachments as his mother had proved to be. But when he held little Kristina, he believed he might be a gentler, kinder, better person. For just those few minutes…the doubts and agonizing guilt went away.

But surely, these two royal children were different from all others. Diane’s boisterous threesome were small strangers to him and likely to remain so. He told himself he was just doing what was necessary to help the prince’s sister-in-law out of a jam. That was all.

No, he thought with sudden, grim clarity as he walked beside Diane through the terminal. There’s more to it than that.

There was this maddening attraction that even now plagued him with prickly urgency to touch her as they walked through the terminal crowded with travelers. He remembered their kiss. He ached to repeat it. The thought of his lips on hers brought a sudden rush of heat to the nether regions of his body, and now a needy groan escaped his lips before he could stop it.

“Anything wrong?” Diane asked placidly, looking around at the busy airport shops with interest. Her eyes were a vivid, excited emerald today, full of anticipation of the adventure ahead. She seemed totally unaware of his torment.

“No. Nothing,” he grumbled. He wistfully eyed a crowded bar to their right called Port of Call. A double scotch would take the edge off. But he was driving and couldn’t indulge himself.

“It’s too bad the flights couldn’t have been closer together,” she mused, stopping to finger a pretty Irish wool shawl at an import shop. “We might have been able to leave directly after putting the children on their plane instead of having to drive back to Nanticoke.”

“I had thought about that,” he admitted. “But there was a delay in completing the maintenance check, then new flight plans had to be filed. Your passport won’t be delivered until later this afternoon. Seven hours’ wait in an airport would be a bore.” On the other hand, even an hour alone with Diane at the little Cape Cod wasn’t likely to be relaxing. He felt wound tighter than Big Ben’s spring.

“I suppose.” She sighed. “It’s just as well. I still have some cleaning to do before I can lock up the house for the summer.” She fell silent for the remainder of the hike to the short-term parking garage.

He wished he knew what she was thinking. Could she possibly guess how alert his body was to every move she made? The subtle sway of her full hips was enough to send sweat trickling down his spine under his clean white dress shirt. The purposeful tilt of her chin made his heart hammer. She seemed driven by a fresh supply of energy today—and he could think of dozens of ways to help her expend it.

Until now the children’s presence and obstreperous enthusiasm for the trip had made it impossible for any real sense of intimacy to develop between them. Diane had been busy with laundry and packing, and he’d needed to verify the children’s travel arrangements, then secure a car and driver to whisk the foursome directly from the arrival gate in Orlando to the grandparents’ home.

The night before they were all to leave, ten o’clock had rolled around before Diane had been able to get all three children settled in their beds. This admittedly had been an awkward time for him. Thomas had felt a restlessness growing inside as he’d contemplated their being alone at last. He hadn’t realized how much he’d longed for a chance to have Diane to himself.

But before he’d been able to decide how best to handle the situation, Diane had announced she was “totally done in” and would be calling it a night. She’d handed Thomas a pillow and blanket, then nodded toward the couch. Disappointed, he’d stretched out on the lumpy cushions. Minutes passed. He’d thought about Diane lying in her bed in the other room. Tried to ignore the insistent cravings of his body. It had seemed impossible to find a comfortable position for his long body on the too-short sofa. He’d listened to the softly seductive sounds of Diane turning restlessly between her sheets, to her sighs as she drifted off to sleep…to his own heart racing in his chest. He hadn’t slept at all.

But now an empty house awaited them. Thomas didn’t know how he was going to keep his hands off Diane. If he’d been a religious man, he’d have prayed all the way from Long Island to Nanticoke. Instead, he concentrated on driving.

The traffic on I-95 was relatively heavy for a Sunday morning. He expected that was due to the season. During the summer, vacationers would be on the road and locals on their way to the beaches. Whatever the reason, he felt deeply grateful for the distraction the weaving cars and speeding RVs provided. He didn’t have time to dwell on the hunger building inside his body.

As soon as he pulled the sedan into her driveway, before his hands even left the steering wheel, Diane threw open the passenger door and bounded toward the house like an Olympic sprinter. He followed her inside, wondering why she was in such a rush. When he walked through the kitchen door, she was already on the telephone, speaking in regretful tones to the only child’s mother she hadn’t been able to reach the day before.

Thomas pressed the heels of his hands down on the back of a kitchen chair and waited until she finished giving the woman the name of two other day-care providers in town and hung up. “Was she giving you a hard time about leaving for the summer?”

Diane jumped as if she hadn’t realized he was in the room. “Oh…not really. It’s unsettling for a parent to have to alter child-care arrangements on short notice. The problem is, she may be so happy with one of the women I’ve recommended, I might not get her back in the fall.”

“Perhaps you’ll decide to choose another kind of job by the time you return.”

“I know. I’ve been thinking a lot about alternatives.”

Thomas couldn’t seem to drag his eyes away from that expressive mouth of hers as she bubbled on about careers she’d once dreamed of having—a translator for the U.N., liaison for a diplomatic mission, member of a negotiating team on assignment in a foreign country. He didn’t for a moment doubt she’d be good at any of them. But since she’d never had a job outside of her home, he feared she would need some time to work herself up the governmental ladder. Her lips twitched with emotion when she spoke, settled into a firm line of determination, pouted, trembled subtly, then lifted on a strand of hope. They were constantly moving. He longed to press his mouth over them, quiet them. Force them to respond to his own lips.

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