Lord Fenmore's Wager by Alissa Baxter

Author:Alissa Baxter [Baxter, Alissa]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Regency Romance
Publisher: Belgrave House
Published: 2003-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter Thirteen

From that moment on, Diana’s evening seemed to deteriorate. Quite a few gentlemen asked her to dance with them as the evening progressed but the one man, whom she really wished would notice her, didn’t. She had hoped—foolishly she supposed—that the Earl would ask her to stand up with him, but he failed to approach her. And what made it infinitely worse was that he had asked his cousin Gertrude to dance! She knew that he was probably obligated to ask Gertrude to dance—it would seem odd to the assembled company if he ignored his cousin—however this reasoning did not succeed in suppressing the ache in her heart when she thought of the way in which the Earl had favoured his cousin, whom she knew he held in low esteem, over herself. It showed how little he must think of her.

What Diana didn’t realise, however, was that the Earl’s behaviour actually indicated how much he thought of her. When he had seen her dancing with the Vicar, he’d felt a strong desire to walk across the room, pull her into his arms, and declare to the world that she was his. He’d resisted the urge to do so, but had discerned uncomfortably—and grimly—that the strong emotion holding him in its grip was jealousy. And he had no desire to feel jealous. He had no desire to feel anything at all for Diana Hamilton, and the realisation, suddenly, that he did feel something for her—something rather more than physical attraction—disturbed him deeply. To the point that he decided that the best way for him to put her from his mind was to avoid her completely until she left Fenmore on Monday. Once she was no longer living in his home, it would be easier for him to forget his unfortunate infatuation with her. Because that was all it was, he was convinced. An infatuation. Not love—never love. Only fools believed in that deceptive emotion.

When she finally retired to bed that night, Diana looked back on the ball with mixed feelings. She had been delighted to talk to Sir Max again, and the knowledge that she would be seeing more of him in Bath was most welcome, but the Earl’s behaviour had put a damper on the evening, shattering her barely acknowledged hope that he might perhaps regard her in a warmer light. When she had encountered him in the Hall before the ball had begun, he had looked at her with such an intense expression on his face that it had stopped the breath in her chest. She remembered how her fingers had tingled when he had kissed her gloved hand, and the husky note in his voice when he told her that she looked beautiful—and then he had ignored her for the rest of the evening!

He was incomprehensible, unfathomable, baffling: He was a man, she thought resignedly. A man she didn’t understand, and as her experience of men was limited, she gave up trying to account for his strange behaviour.

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