The Regency Season Collection: Part Two. Кэрол Мортимер
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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.
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