She was a woman who could adapt quickly to a situation and formulate her advantage.
And just as successfully, design and execute something more deliberate. Something that might take months—oryears—to plan.
Like sabotaging her own wedding.
Diana ducked around him to head toward the carriage.
He caught her arm in a firm grip. He expected her to protest with a wriggle that might have progressed to a delicious tussle.
But she paused and stared at him calmly as he held her.
He was so stunned that he could only spit out one word.
“Why?”
The question was dangerously close to acknowledging everything they never spoke about. Her serene countenance made it impossible to detect if she’d expected it.
If she successfully manipulated an escape from a marriage no one suspected she truly wanted, there was no scenario where she would choose Ian instead.
He’d never let her. To do so would sign her death warrant.
“I’m going to have to make a choice about my future,” she murmured. “And I need to know what happened. Not your filtered version of it.”
Slowly, he released her arm. She acknowledged the surrender with a gracious tilt of her head before she darted inside the carriage.
Ian took several more breaths of the chilly autumn air while he tried and failed to find an excuse to keep her locked inside the house.
He leashed his anger and suspicion and climbed into the carriage.
Chapter Three
London,1869
Diana couldn’t endure Ian’s protracted silence on the walk home.
Evening fog clouded the pristine streets of Mayfair, making everything appear as ominous and insubstantial as what had transpired at his father’s bedside moments before they left the house.
Her mind was still reeling with it. She impatiently waited for Ian to say something first, so she wouldn’t have to. But he wasn’t cooperating.
When they approached her street, she finally blurted, “You stopped writing to me.”
His weekly letters had ceased four months before. She’d kept writing hers. She’d pretended his silence hadn’t impacted her a wit, while she racked her brain for what she could have done or said to offend him so greatly that after years of friendship, he’d given her the cut.
If he’d written her back, she could have confessed she was worried about her own father’s health. Or how, halfway into her debut season, everything about society exhausted her.
And she was anxious for his opinion about the mysterious missives she’d received from someone who only identified themselves as “Widow.”
Then again, if she told him about the letters, she feared he’d discourage her from giving them any credence, and that would put her in a quandary. She verymuch wanted to believe Widow represented a clandestine organization dedicated to saving women’s lives. And they’d chosen Diana to join them.
But mostly, if Ian had written her, she would have said that after the way he’d held her when they’d danced at her coming-out ball, she missed him more than she’d ever had in the fifteen years they’d known each other.
He kept walking, as if movement could conceal him from her interrogation.
“You stopped writing,” Diana repeated in a distinctly louder voice. “Don’t pretend you didn’t receive my letters.”
“I wouldn’t do that.”
When he refused to look at her, or slow his pace, she halted abruptly on the footpath. “I came to London to find out for myself if you were still alive.”