Читать книгу The Regency Season Collection: Part Two - Кэрол Мортимер, Кэрол Мортимер - Страница 15

Chapter Six

When the household was settled at last, Chloe made her weary way to Lady Farenze’s bedchamber ready to take over the night vigil from Culdrose. She braced herself to try to appear as awake and cheerful as any of them could be tonight. She couldn’t let the elderly maid know she felt tired to the bone, even after her ill-advised nap this afternoon.

Especially not after that; she shuddered at the very idea of what she might have given away in those unguarded moments while she gazed into Lord Farenze’s hot grey eyes like a besotted schoolgirl. At the time a strange sort of exhilaration had buoyed her up, as if a wicked part of her was whispering she should stop fighting and give in to fiery attraction. Except he was a lord and she an upper servant and in a few weeks they would part, never to meet again.

The notion of such heady freedom stretching ahead of her made it an effort to set one foot in front of the other. The notion of all those empty years to come without even the occasional sight of him pressed down on her like a ton weight. She stopped outside the door to put on a suitably serene expression before she met Cully’s shrewd gaze, then walked in.

‘Oh, there you are, my dear. There’s no need for you to stay with her ladyship tonight,’ the elderly maid said with a nod to the other side of the bed where the new master of the house sat. ‘Master Luke won’t hear of anyone else keeping vigil.’

‘No, I won’t,’ he said in a flatly emotionless voice that told her there was no point arguing.

‘Quite right too,’ Cully said with an approving nod. ‘You need a good night’s sleep and no argument, Mrs Wheaton. If you spend one more day trying to fit a month’s worth of work into twenty-four hours, you’ll collapse. Your little miss is home now and we don’t want her more upset than she is already.’

‘Aye, go to bed,’ Lord Farenze barked from the most heavily shadowed corner of the room.

‘Very well,’ she said, knowing she couldn’t argue in front of Culdrose and turned to go before the temptation to do it anyway overtook her.

‘See she drinks one of your noxious potions and really does sleep, Cully,’ she heard Lord Farenze say when she’d almost shut the door behind her. ‘I wouldn’t put it past the confounded woman to steal in here if I fall asleep to take your place, so she can boast she sat by her employer day and night when she applies for her next post.’

As if she would be so mercenary. Arrogant, unfeeling wretch—he would never believe she had loved wonderful, complicated Lady Virginia Winterley very deeply. He was always on the lookout for a base motive, a different sin to visit on her, as if she might have sprouted horns and a tail when he wasn’t looking.

‘Now then, Master Luke, you’re being unjust. That girl loved her ladyship and would have done almost anything for her.’

‘Except go away,’ he raised his voice just enough to grumble so she couldn’t fail to hear him.

Chloe flinched and wondered how he knew she couldn’t bring herself to leave when Lady Virginia breathed her last, before he got here. Bracing herself against the fact he wanted her gone, she made herself walk away noisily enough to let him know he could say whatever he liked and she didn’t care.

Back in her room, she wished it as many rooms as possible from where Lord Farenze was taking the last vigil at his great-aunt’s side. To be within call if her mistress needed her, Chloe was using an odd little bedchamber over the grand gallery that only unimportant guests were ever given, because the high ceiling of the room below meant the floor of this one was raised on a minor staircase with three other cramped chambers. It had been convenient to stay close to Lady Virginia’s lofty suite, until now. So why hadn’t she moved back to her modest room a floor up and at the back of the house as soon as Lord Farenze had set foot in Farenze Lodge? She hadn’t known Verity would be home then and marvelled at herself for being so foolish as to stay within shouting distance of the state rooms now.

It was too late to change even if Verity hadn’t arrived so much in need of a good night’s sleep, so she yawned and hoped for a dreamless sleep against the odds. She had more to disturb her than ever, but after a soft tap came on the door, Cully opened it a half-inch on her invitation to enter.

‘Are you decent, dear?’ she whispered.

‘Aye,’ Chloe admitted with a half-smile at herself in the dimly visible mirror that said it was as well nobody could see into her head. ‘Come in, Cully.’

‘His lordship says you’re to drink this down and I’m to stay until you do,’ her old friend told her sternly.

Chloe sniffed the fumes coming from the steaming mug she held out and caught a hint of camomile, a waft of cinnamon and some honey to sweeten it all and decided there was nothing in it to worry her, even if such a mild concoction was unlikely to make her sleep soundly tonight.

‘Very well,’ she said with a resigned shrug. She knew that resolute expression of Cully’s of old and didn’t feel like a battle to resist her at the moment.

‘I’ll sit here until you’re finished then go to bed myself. My lady is in safe hands and would be the first to tell us to get to bed and show some sense.’

‘I know, but you’re the last person I need to tell how hard it is to be sensible at a time like this,’ Chloe said with a sigh as she paused her drinking and earned a frown. ‘If I drink any faster, I’ll choke,’ she excused herself.

‘I suppose so, but his lordship is right. You look as if a strong gust of wind could blow you into next week.’

‘Kind of him,’ Chloe retorted ruefully.

‘He is a kind man, child, if only you would see it. You two bring out the worst in each another, but Master Luke was a good-hearted, gallant lad before that silly girl nagged and flouted him until he hardly knew which way was up any more.’

‘He’s hardly a lad now, or very gallant.’

‘No, he’s a man nowadays and a fine-looking one at that.’

Chloe distrusted the sly glance her old friend was shooting her. Cully knew her a little too well, after ten years of service in the same house. So, if the elderly ladies’ maid knew she was deeply attracted to her gallant lad, who else might have their suspicions she wouldn’t leave Farenze Lodge as heart-whole as a sober and respectable housekeeper should?

Chloe shook her head and carefully ignored that truth as she swallowed the last of Cully’s brew. She felt as if she was back in the nursery herself when Cully unpinned her tightly bound locks and gently combed them out, but the deft touch soothed her as the potion hadn’t yet managed to.

‘There, is that better?’ Cully asked as she brushed Chloe’s heavy locks into a burnished red-gold mass.

‘Aye,’ Chloe admitted with a long sigh. ‘You’re very good at your job, Cully,’ she murmured when she felt the silken thickness gathered into the elderly maid’s hand and separated into three as Cully began a loose plait.

‘And you have beautiful hair, Mrs Chloe,’ the maid told her with a hint of sternness in her voice. ‘A good many ladies would give their eye-teeth for such a colour and it’s so fine and thick they would be green with envy if they ever saw it. You shouldn’t screw it into such a tight knot. It’s not good for it and small wonder if you have the headache after going about with all those pins skewered into it all day.’

‘If I don’t, it keeps trying to escape.’

‘And a very good thing if it succeeded, if you ask me,’ she thought she heard Cully mumble under her breath, but looking up she found the older woman was looking back at her in the mirror with such a look of bland innocence she told herself she must have been mistaken. ‘There you are, you’re all ready for bed and make sure you stay there till you’re rested in the morning. Martha Lange’s quite capable of getting breakfast cooked without you there to tell her how to coddle an egg and that head housemaid you set such store by can set the maids to work for once.’

‘Yes, Miss Culdrose, ma’am,’ Chloe said with a mock salute and was brusquely told not to be impudent before Cully wished her a dignified goodnight and went off to spend a full night in her own bed for the first time in weeks as well.

* * *

At first it was the most wonderful dream. Chloe shifted under the smooth linen sheets to murmur approval in her sleep. Luke was here, kissing her and doing all the things she had longed for him to do all these years. She had sent him away and told him she could imagine nothing more humiliating than being his mistress all those years ago, but she’d lied. In her unchecked fantasy he was indeed Luke and not Lord Farenze and he kissed her as if the next beat of his heart depended on her kissing him back.

She writhed against her hot pillow and keened a protest as a dash of reality beat in and she knew the hands running over her excited curves in the heat of the night were her own and not the firm, male touch her body truly longed for, as if it had found its ideal long ago and had no intention of letting the idea of him go, ever.

She wanted him, wanted him here and now and in her bed, in her. Even in her deepest sleep, her cheeks flushed with even more heat at the very thought of such emphatic possession as she knew his would be. Then the part of her that longed for him all the time she was trying to forget took over and wrenched that spectre lover back into her bed. He followed her impatient hands with kisses, tracked merciless trails of slick heat over her sensitised skin, pressed questing fingertips into the places she most wanted them to explore and she gasped in pleasure, at last.

In her dreams he was hers as surely as she was his, so why wake up to cold reality? Her unconscious self conspired with her inner wanton to revel in their heat and closeness and her body tingled and writhed and strove for something more against the heavy bedclothes and the depths of the long night. He’s here! The words seemed to have been whispered, as if he truly was with her in every way there was between lovers. Doubt invaded even her imaginary idyll as soon as she felt they were not alone in this dream of fulfilment she had given herself, though.

Even as her phantom lover reared over her to feast his hungry mouth on her waiting lips and sink his mighty, roused body blissfully into her longing depths to complete them as lovers, she heard a voice from beyond the grave whisper, ‘No, no, don’t let him love you like that. Never love a man, Chloe. Look where love got me. Push him out of your heart, keep him out of your body and never, ever let yourself love him,’ it ended on a wail, as pain took a deeper hold and the pale ghost sliced a dead and icy hand down on dream Luke’s warm neck and he vanished like smoke on the wind.

Chloe’s dreams landed her back into a cold, windswept wreck of a house high on the moors where nobody went unless they had to and even then they came away crossing themselves as if they’d met the devil at the back door. She writhed against the cooling sheets in terrified protest as images flashed through her sleep like the torn black of mourning weeds, weathered to faded shreds of their midnight prime.

There was blood, so much blood, and Chloe began to whimper in her sleep. The unending awfulness of the time and tragedy of that forsaken place bit into her. However hard she tried to clean the gore up she couldn’t wash it away and into her terrifying dream flashed images of a fragile young woman laid out pale and cold on the narrow, mean bed as love leeched out of that wretched house and grief rolled in to replace it like the dense cloud hanging over the wintry moor.

Then she was back to the following December day, winds beating savage and remorseless on the tiny windows until even the stout shutters shivered and shifted against the threat of it as if they might break open. The younger Chloe wept and over the roar of the wind came the relentless slash of rain, beating on the narrow windows as if it wanted to drown every last breath of life in this place where only wind and rain should rule and people didn’t belong.

Now she desperately needed Luke and he wasn’t there. He faded and forsook her when she drifted back to a time when there was no Luke to tempt and tantalise her, only a howling and an empty stretch of pain inside that seemed to go on for ever. Then the storm softened and grew less with every breath and instead of tempest outside there was one within determined to give her no peace. A howl rose high and demanding as the child she’d done her best to forget refused to be comforted, or to sleep when there was no solace to be had here. The baby’s enraged cries beat louder and louder on her poor ears until they filled her whole world. Young Chloe wanted it to die, too, if that would make it stop. The woman she became wanted to shake the girl so she forgot her selfish woe and got on with the life that came out of all that pain.

‘No, don’t take her with you!’ she woke screaming and shot upright in the bed, trembling and sobbing. The coils of that terrible dream still wrapped round her, she began to rock as she tried to fight her way back to now and tell herself it wasn’t true.

‘Whatever is it? Who frightened you?’ a gruff demand came out of the night as the door creaked open and she hadn’t breath enough to reassure anyone she was perfectly all right, let alone him. ‘What the devil is it?’ Lord Farenze barked.

He pushed the door to behind himself and set his candle in the nightstick to peer more closely at the tousled wreckage of her once neat bed and the shivering wild woman staring back at him with all the terrors of the night in her eyes.

Some detached part of her knew she was behaving like a ninny, but she couldn’t wave away the terror that still made her heartbeat race and her breath gasp between parched lips as if she had just finished running a mile in her dreams.

* * *

Luke was glad he had sense left to listen for the sound of anyone else stirring, not sure if he was glad or sorry when he didn’t hear it. His daughter and Bran were too weary from their journey to wake easily and nobody else was within earshot.

‘A dream,’ she finally managed to gasp as if even that cost her dear.

‘I never heard one like it then, even in Eve’s wildest nightmares,’ he said and did what he’d wanted the moment she looked up at him with terror in her eyes; took her in his arms and dared the devil to do his worst.

‘Cry it out,’ he encouraged, feeling helpless against the fear still ruling her.

Eve was about six years old when some fool told her the truth about her mother’s death, dashed to oblivion at the bottom of a mountain road after a wild race to some would-be poet’s latest party only a fool would embark on in winter. He spared a moment from the feel of Chloe shivering in his arms to be glad Eve was over her night horrors and now slept soundly of a night.

For a long moment Chloe felt stiff and resistant in his arms then, with a great heartfelt sigh, she squirmed closer with a ragged sob she tried to stifle against his shoulder, as if she wasn’t allowed the luxury of tears. No storm of feminine hysterics could disarm him more. He could feel the shudders that still racked her body and the hand he rubbed across her slender back was meant to comfort. She stilled as if remembering who he was, then seemed unable to fight the security of another being close enough to push away her nightmares. Giving in to her need for human contact for once, she moulded herself against him so intimately her head rested on his shoulder and he felt the impact of her closeness through several layers of fine tailoring.

Feminine heat cindered all the distance he’d tried to put between them. The scent of warm, frightened woman teased his nose along with stray wisps of fiery gold hair that escaped the heavy plait down her back. She shivered and he reassembled the sense to recall it was January. Wrapping her in the bedcover, he murmured a promise not to leave her as he crossed to the fireplace and set his candle to the fire laid there. He must have words with her in the morning about why, when every other chamber on this floor had a fire to warm it, hers was as cold as charity.

Once flames were licking about the pine cones and sea coal, he went to the bed and picked her up, bedcover and all. It said much for her emotional state that she let him and still seemed to be staring sightlessly into some dire fate with horror in her wide eyes. He carried her to an old-fashioned chair banished from a more important bedchamber. You might as well sleep in a lumber room, Luke silently chided the shivering woman, then sat down with her in his arms, covering and all.

Despite a half-hearted shake of her head she clearly didn’t want him to go. She tucked a slender foot into his side to warm it when the bedcover slipped and it felt more intimate than a week of passionate lovemaking in another woman’s bed. Steady, he ordered his inner fool; she doesn’t see you as a rampant male, but a source of comfort. You could be anyone.

‘If you refuse to cry it out, at least tell me what frightened you,’ he urged and felt her squirm in protest at the thought of giving so much of her inner life away. He fought his predictable male response to the slide of supple feminine curves against his over-eager body and hoped she was too deep in shock to notice. ‘No? Then I’ll puzzle it out for myself, shall I?’ he suggested softly against the ear she hadn’t snuggled into his shoulder and felt her flinch.

She shook her head a fraction in denial and he heard her breath hitch, as if she wanted to scold him for bad-mannered prying into her private life, but couldn’t quite manage it, so she wriggled even closer instead.

‘I presume my arrival roused a fine nest of vipers in your clever, contrary head to upset you so deeply,’ he murmured into that tempting ear and thought she managed a muffled ‘no’ to deny it. ‘I don’t think I’m unduly vain to suspect I’m the reason you dreamt so vividly,’ he persisted.

‘No,’ she protested more distinctly, so he knew he was right.

Although they had sworn never to kiss or long for each other again on a night of almost love they had shared a decade ago, this unwanted; ill-starred connection between them refused to die.

‘Yes, madam, you did,’ he persisted, ‘you very likely cause yourself to dream even more vividly by denying this feeling between us so fervently when you’re awake. So that explains why you dreamt, but not what. Not even the way we don’t want to feel about each other explains why you scream out in your sleep, then look as if all the devils of hell are on your heels the moment you wake.’