“So when you found out about Jared’s transgressions, you didn’t set out to ruin him completely?”
Diana slammed the whisky glass on the table and rose to her feet with such swiftness she vibrated. “We both know that the one person responsible for Jared’s ruination is Jared. You’ve spent most of your life cleaning up after him. To what end?”
As Ian closed the distance between them, he caught the whisper of violets mixed with the scent of the soap Hepburn used to launder his shirt. It roused hot and forbidden imaginings of how else their scents and their bodies could combine.
“Why does it matter to you what I do?” he demanded.
She leaned closer, and his body followed, pulled by some outside unequal force toward her.
“You matter, Ian,” she said softly.
His heart soared for a brief, jubilant moment.
Before he realized she’d stopped short of saying he mattered toher.
Ian backed away and poured himself another drink. “I never thought you’d go through with marrying Jared. At first, it seemed like a dare. Or a threat. Because of what happened that night you made the promise to my father, and what I said after the attack.”
He swallowed. “I hurt you worse than those miscreants tried to. And it wouldn’t be far-fetched to believe you needed to hurt me back.”
An interval elapsed where the only sound in the room was an intermittent pop from the coals tumbling in the fireplace.
Eventually, Diana murmured, “That night… It wasn’t what you thought, what everyone thought.”
“A dying man made a last request for you to marry his son.”
Ian’s voice was icy and detached because he’d learned to become that way about his father. It was the only way to process his grief and frustration over the messhe’d left Ian to handle. “Father must have had some reason for believing you wanted to marry Jared.”
“He wanted to unite his business with Rives Shipping.”
“There are plenty of other ways to secure that without arranging a marriage.”
“Not when the businesses were so unequal in their financial holdings,” she argued. “The board of Rives Shipping would never have accepted a merger, and Jared would never concede to an acquisition.”
“Then why on earth did you agree to marry him!”
His voice was still reverberating in the room when she lifted her chin and said calmly, “My mother.”
It took Ian a moment to check his surprise. Diana’s mother had contracted a wasting disease when they were children. It happened three years after his own mother died from a terrible fever. Harry Rives had been so stricken with grief, they’d invited no one to the funeral.
And fifteen years later, no one talked about Diana’s mother, including Diana.
That she mentioned it now was weighty. He’d have to treat it delicately.
With care, he took her empty glass and refilled it.
She accepted the drink with a small huff of resignation. “When your father had the first episode with his heart, and then couldn’t leave his bed, Papa was so worried. Until then, I never appreciated how close the two of them were.”
Ian hadn’t either. But when his father’s health declined suddenly—and Jared had been unreachable doing God knew what on the Continent—Ian had left his studies at Cambridge to oversee Holt & Company. Harry Rives had generously advised him on more than a few matters. His father had left their business in a dire state. Ian spent months trying to dig out of years of mismanagement.
When Jared finally returned, his brother had forced him out of the boardroom. And he’d refused to pay Ian’s fees to finish Cambridge, claiming Ian had a duty to serve the business by overseeing the docks.
“It was easy to convince Papa that I should go to London and call on Mr. Holt. And you know my reasons for coming,” Diana continued. “Since your father wasfeeling well, I offered to read to him, hoping it would buy me time until you arrived. We were only a few pages into a Trollope novel when he stopped me. He said he was glad that I was the one who visited and not my father because he had something to show me.”
Her fingers tightened around the whisky glass. She’d barely taken a sip of it because she was a far smarter creature than he.
“I respected so many things about your father,” she said softly. “He knew he was dying, and he wanted to put his personal affairs in order. When he was sorting through some files, he’d found a letter that had never been unsealed. It was from my mother.”
Ian’s mouth parted. “I wager it wasn’t some unopened dinner invitation.”