Читать книгу The Regency Season Collection: Part Two - Кэрол Мортимер, Кэрол Мортимер - Страница 19

Chapter Ten

‘Do you think that just once during our acquaintance you could be sensible and come here to get yourself properly warm, Mrs Wheaton?’ he barked in fine Lord Farenze style and set her rocking world back on an even keel. It felt so familiar, his lord-of-all-I-survey guise, that she came back to the present and found she liked it a lot better than the past that had haunted her for so long, despite not being able to be more to him in it than she already was.

‘I should give your coat back and leave,’ she managed with a weak smile for the man now glowering at her with such impatient concern he could break her heart.

‘Flim-flam,’ he asserted with a wave of his hand that dismissed convention and the rules of master and servant as if they didn’t exist. ‘The important thing is for me to know who you really are, so I can make your idiot of a father realise what he’s done and put it right. He should at least grant you an income so you may bring up your niece as the lady you truly are, instead of standing by with his hands in his pockets. Virginia may have relieved him of the need to provide for his grandchild, but he has a duty to his remaining daughter, whether he likes it or not.’

‘He proved my sister and I were dead to him when he sent us to the remotest place he could think of so she could have Verity alone and unseen. Anyway, I saw a notice of his death in the papers over a year ago, so even you can’t harry him to do his duty in his grave, Lord Farenze.’

‘Luke,’ he corrected impatiently and how she wished she could call him so. ‘If the rogue was alive, it would be, “Behave as a gentleman should or else”, and think himself lucky he was my senior so it was not, “Before I kill you with my bare hands,”’ he said, the gruff rumble of his voice coming to her as much by feeling as sound.

‘Thank you.’

She couldn’t help the wobble in her voice as she tried to find words to say how it felt to know he cared. She’d lost so much she could have had if fate was kinder, but told herself Verity outweighed it all. Chloe knew her youthful choices would not have been wise if she had made her début in society.

She would have scandalised the ton with her wild ways and headlong temper, but she was banished to a remote farm with her pregnant sister before either of them had been properly noticed by the polite world and saved them the task of disapproving of her. According to her father and the aunts, one twin could not be introduced to society without the absence of the other being remarked. She wondered how they accounted for the disappearance of both Thessaly twins, but doubted anyone recalled their existence now.

‘I don’t want pity,’ she made herself add.

‘Should I pity a slip of a girl who refused to turn away from a helpless infant because a killer told her to? Or be furious you were forced to renounce all you should have had before you could grasp it? If I heard this sorry tale at second hand I might pity you, I suppose, but as it is I can’t offer you aught but my respect for your courage, as well as my lack of surprise at finding out you’re as stubborn with everyone else as you have always been towards me.’

‘Thank you, I think. Your family and friends must be gathered in the drawing room by now, though, and wondering where you are, so I suggest we abandon this topic and get on with the business of the day. You have more pressing matters to deal with than a weary housekeeper with a sad past,’ she said as she did her best to renounce the fairytale of him admiring her.

‘Eve is my family and I only have one true friend staying here to concern myself with,’ he informed her dourly.

‘I have a ten-year-old daughter and my reputation to guard,’ she replied and it seemed to jar him out of his king-in-his-own-country frame of mind.

‘We both know that’s not true now,’ he said as he crossed the room to loom over her instead of walking away, as she told herself she wanted him to.

‘Verity is my niece and not my daughter in the strictest sense of the word, but you knowing the truth changes none of it.’

‘Does it not?’ he swung round and demanded, direct and passionate as she had always suspected he was under the icy self-control he tried to fool the world with. ‘Is that truly all the difference you make between the “us” of today and of yesterday, Mrs Wheaton? Today I know you have never loved a man so wildly you had to bear his child alone when you were barely out of the schoolroom; never gave yourself wholly and completely to another man’s passion and need and haste for complete possession of you, one lover to another. If you think that’s nothing, I’m as mistaken in you as I was ten years ago, or yesterday afternoon when I saw you sad-eyed and pale at the loss of my great-aunt and your home of ten years and wanted you so urgently across all that frost and stone I’ve burnt like hot iron for you from then to now.’

Chloe stood dumbstruck and searched her mind for some phrase that could turn them back to lord and upper servant and came up blank.

‘Cat got your tongue?’ he mocked her silence.

She struggled against the weary impatience in his voice as he waited for her to produce a glib excuse. ‘No,’ she said quietly, ‘you leave me nothing to say.’

‘Not even, “No, never even look at me again with all this in our heads to remind us of what you just admitted?” Can’t you even bring yourself to deny it as you have since we first met and longed for each other as lovers?’

‘No, it’s as true for me as you say it is for you. From the first moment I set eyes on you and let myself regret for a second I must put Verity before my own wants and needs. Her existence makes sure I can’t be what we both want.’

‘My mistress?’ he insisted ruthlessly, as if he must get the words out of her to repay the weary frustration of a decade.

‘Yes,’ she admitted at last, as polite lying was impossible today.

‘I could have seduced you back then if I’d persisted, but I didn’t.’

‘Oh well done, Lord Farenze, how very noble of you,’ she forced herself to half-sneer and half-praise him, as if his chilly, and true, résumé didn’t hurt.

‘Luke,’ he corrected as if determined she should learn a name she could never use. She found him cruel for that and let her glare tell him so.

‘I didn’t seduce you because you were so young and vulnerable and it would lessen us both too much. You have no right to reproach me; we both know I would have ruined a virgin if I’d ignored my scruples. Back then I had a young daughter to raise on my own as well and I wanted her to respect her father when she was old enough to know what the world said. I couldn’t face her with you on my conscience when that day came,’ he insisted as if it was important she understand he had his own version of her impossible situation to struggle against.

‘Don’t you know half the world already thinks me an unnatural monster whose coldness drove his poor vulnerable little wife to ruin herself with every buck and roué in town?’ he went on as if finally willing to open himself up to someone and why did it have to be her, when she was still bound hand and foot by the decision she’d made on another cold and starry January night all those years ago?

‘That was before I somehow forced her to flee with half a dozen of them to the Continent in an attempt to avoid my terrible lack of wrath towards them for taking her away, of course,’ he said, as if mocking himself was his way of protecting the young man he had been from the humiliation his wife had heaped on him. ‘What would the rest of the world think of a rogue who seduced his great-aunt’s housekeeper when she was doing her best to bring up a child alone?’

‘I’m amazed you care a snap of your fingers for such fools,’ she said simply. What else was there to say about those who couldn’t see his wife must have been insane to whistle a husband such as Luke Winterley down the wind?

‘I try not to, but I do have a daughter to consider.’

‘Only introduce me to them and I’ll say it for you.’

‘I wouldn’t dare,’ he said as if he admired the wild spirit that had been raging for release for so long, rather than condemning it as unfeminine and graceless as her aunts had always done.

‘No, they would be sadly offended to be harangued by Mrs Wheaton or Lady Chloe...’ She stuttered to a halt as she realised where her unwary tongue was about to take her.

‘What a day for revelations this is almost proving to be,’ he said as smoothly as if he’d never raged and prodded and challenged her and had stumbled on this latest truth by pure accident.

‘You accused me of being a lady in disguise at the outset of this unsuitable conversation, if you recall?’ she reminded him crossly.

‘So I did. Maybe I have the instincts of a gentleman after all and we should be proud of them.’

‘And perhaps we should not,’ she returned, reluctantly unwrapping herself from the warmth of his coat and handing it back to him with a haughty look meant to put him in his place. If he wanted Lady Chloe to make a brief return to his world, who was she to deny him the dubious pleasure of her acquaintance?

He grinned like an unrepentant schoolboy as he shrugged back into it and made a show of appreciating the scent of her on it, as she had more secretly when he put it round her with the heat and spice of him still lingering on the fine cloth. ‘Have you never wanted to kick over the traces with me as dearly as you wanted your next breath then, Lady Chloe?’ he invited as if it was even a possibility, with ten years of not doing so between them.

‘Mrs Wheaton has no right to when she has a child to bring up and the kindness your great-aunt granted her when she needed it most to live up to.’

‘And yet she wants to?’

The lie formed in her mind, but somehow she couldn’t bring herself to say it. Instead she met his eyes with her pride and ten years of isolation hot in them. ‘Yet she still says No, to both of us,’ she said as coolly as she was able.

‘And I say, Not yet, but soon,’ he told her as if, because he willed it so, it would be in the end.

‘Only in your dreams, my lord,’ she argued, but how she longed to be his dream. No, it would be a nightmare if they succumbed to the sensual passion raw under the aloof politeness lord and housekeeper had tried to maintain.

‘Don’t promise more of those, Lady Chloe. You haunt mine and have done far too long,’ he warned her with a look that would have burned his way out of an ice house, if they were careless enough to get trapped in one.

‘I’m not Lady Chloe now and wish you good evening, Lord Farenze. Your dinner awaits and I regret I am unable to join you for a delightful evening of housekeeper-baiting tonight,’ she managed to tell him, before sailing out of the room as if her dignity and secrets were all intact.

She was amazed to find only half an hour had passed since she found him in the dark and nobody seemed to have noticed they’d been together far too long.

* * *

Luke stared at the space Lady Chloe Whoever-she-was had occupied and forced himself not to shout out a plea for her to stay. The revelations he’d drawn from her like a barber-surgeon pulling teeth left him feeling raw and furious on her behalf, but the essentials hadn’t changed. He’d always known she was gently born, but couldn’t help wondering now which nobleman had managed to mislay twin daughters without a scandal he would have heard about even at Darkmere.

Apparently he urgently wanted to bed a noble virgin and couldn’t do so with an iota of honour unless he actually married her. He wondered if he dared take such a wife without loving her with every fibre of his being. Chloe and her sister were left to grow up wild as ponies on a moor, so she wasn’t just a virgin, but pitchforked from schoolroom to motherhood without much pause, or any idea how her beauty and bravery could tear a man’s soul until he was a danger to himself and her.

Now her innocence loomed between them instead of the mythical Mr Wheaton, he ought to be glad he’d listened to his conscience years ago and walked away from the unfledged girl she’d really been back then.

Luke ran a distracted hand through his dark hair and went back to pacing like a restless wolf. He frowned at the bookshelf where a Peerage sat, tempting him to track down any earl or above with twin daughters. He doubted she was in a rational enough state when she told her sad tale to lie to him and who would expect a Lady Chloe to pose as an upper servant in order to save her baby niece from the poorhouse?

It astonished him two such beauties could disappear from any local society without a great many questions being asked. Either their father was a powerful man, or such a reprobate nobody expected good of him. Luke paced on, clenching his fists against a need to lash out at whoever should pay for the isolation and terror Chloe endured after refusing to abandon her dead sister’s child.

Unable to bring himself to smash Virginia’s personal treasures to relieve the frustration roiling in his gut, he snatched up his empty brandy glass and dashed it into the fireplace instead. Feeling not much better, he marvelled at himself for expecting he would. A day’s headlong ride on a half-broken stallion, or a long bout with one of the professional pugilists at Gentleman Jackson’s Boxing Saloon might take the edge off it, but a broken glass wasn’t going to lessen his urge to wrench a dead man from his grave and dance on his corpse.

Breathing deeply to calm himself, he reminded himself he’d lived through an appalling marriage and humiliating legal separation without breaking up furniture or violating graveyards. Then he’d thought Pamela had done everything she could to test his temper to the edge of insanity. Now he knew otherwise and what wrenched most was the fact Chloe thought it was her fault for some ridiculous reason.

Could she have stopped her perfidious twin sneaking out to meet a lover and getting pregnant in the first place? No—it was obvious to him Daphne expected to dance her way through life, laying blame for her sins on her sister’s shoulders before she flitted off to make more. The last one killed her and left Chloe more grief and worry than any young girl should carry alone. Even the pleasure of begetting a lover’s child was denied his Chloe and he cursed the unworthy curl of satisfaction in his gut at the thought no man had touched the woman he wanted so badly it was a chronic ache of need that never quite went away, however many miles he put between them.

With a wry twist of a smile it was as well he couldn’t see for the tenderness it might show, he decided he was in danger of making her a plaster saint. Nothing could be further from the truth of stubborn, defiant, contrary Lady Chloe—warrior and termagant.

If her life had been different she would be as famous, or notorious, by now as Virginia was before she wed her last husband. Luke recalled the portrait his Uncle Virgil had commissioned of his wife in all her splendour after their wedding and mentally put Chloe in silks and satins, let them drop from her glorious white shoulders so her firm high breasts were only half-covered and desire boiled at even the thought of her lounging on the sofa in the Blue Saloon, not quite wearing a scandalously revealing evening gown for his exclusive pleasure.

If posterity wanted an image of his viscountess to envy him by, it would have to make do with one of Chloe sternly buttoned to the neck. No hot-eyed young artist was going to glimpse his lady in such a state of sensual abandon, ever. He gasped at the place his imagination had taken him to then froze as every cell in his body locked on that revolutionary idea. His mind might want to scream a panicked negative, but the rest of him was very happy with the notion of spending the rest of its life with an extraordinary woman.

He couldn’t ask her to marry him simply because she was Lady Chloe and not humble Mrs Wheaton. Whatever his eager senses had to say, he’d promised himself never to marry for what Pamela called ‘love’ and why else would he wed Verity Wheaton’s supposed mama? Yet he couldn’t ask her to live in a quietly scandalous neighbourhood in London either; forever on the wrong side of every town and village he chose to inhabit for the rest of his life. The idea of never seeing her again, of living life as if he’d never met and wanted her so achingly hurt like hell.

Left with the conclusion he couldn’t let her walk away, or be his mistress even if she would consent, that left marriage or the madhouse.

‘What a confounded tangle,’ he grumbled aloud, a frown pleating his dark brows until he knew he must look the very picture of forbidding Lord Winter he knew the wags of the ton had christened him last time he glowered at them across a London ballroom in Virginia’s wake.

He cursed fluently as he marched up and down the library as if he might find an answer in a shadowy corner. If he was reckless enough to ask the woman to wed him, she’d lead him a dog’s life. Passion driven and beguiled by her enchantress’s body, fiery hair and the infinite mystery in her blue-violet eyes, he might forget himself in idiocy for a while, but what use was such a besotted idiot to his daughter and all the others who depended on him?

For a moment he nearly fell into the fantasy, but it was too much like Pamela’s constant pursuit of ‘love’ for him to stay there long. He shuddered at the idea of need turning to hatred as it had between him and Pamela when their youthful delight in each other wore off, when the honeymoon was over and he couldn’t spend every waking moment pandering to his new wife’s whims any longer. He should restore Lady Chloe to her family, then find that convenient viscountess he’d promised himself as soon as Eve was ready to find her own path through life.

Fool, he told himself, then bent to coax the dying fire back to life, your life will be cold and dark as this room if you let her go. He shuddered at the very idea and a faint waft of Chloe’s unique scent beguiled him anew as he savoured the knowledge she’d shared his jacket as if it was one intimacy she couldn’t resist. Dash it, he didn’t want to live without her and he needed a wife. Somehow he’d persuade her to marry him and they’d live every day as it came. Each of them would feel as bleak as the January night closing in outside without her, so what did he have to lose?

* * *

‘Now the preliminary part of Lady Virginia’s will has been read, we can get to the main business,’ Mr Poulson, senior partner of Poulson, Scott, Poulson and Peters informed his audience with the flair of a masterly performer the following afternoon.

Chloe pictured him putting on matinee performances of the wise family lawyer in libraries up and down the land and wondered why she was still here when the rest of the servants had been dismissed after hearing their late mistress had not forgotten them.

She eyed the assembled gentlemen and wondered what they thought of Virginia’s housekeeper being included in such an exclusive gathering. Mr James Winterley, the Marquis of Mantaigne, Lords Farenze and Leckhampton had every right to be here, so she exchanged glances with the only other misfit, a seemingly nondescript young man she judged to be in his late twenties.

The stranger looked a modest professional man of middling rank, until his cool gaze made you to take a second look. He was a shrewd gentleman, she concluded, wondering why Mr Poulson needed his junior partner here to assist with Virginia’s estate even so. Mr Peters smiled faintly to admit his senior was pacing his speech for dramatic effect and Chloe wondered why she’d thought him nondescript.

She gave a faint nod to admit they were the outsiders and felt Lord Farenze’s glare as if it might burn her through the pristine white-lace bonnet she’d put on this morning, now Virginia was no longer here to forbid it. Never mind respecting her late employer’s wish she should dress as befitted a valued companion; she needed all the camouflage she could get after admitting too much about herself to him last night.