Regency Rogues: A Winter's Night: The Winterley Scandal / The Governess Heiress. Elizabeth Beacon

       Chapter Eleven

      A whisper of movement on the edge of his senses and Colm saw Miss Winterley pause in the doorway of what looked like a family sitting room to glare at him. For a moment he thought she was going to rip up at him for letting her believe Mr Carter was a real man. He was a real man, Colm decided, in a hot daze at the sight of her so passionately angry he wondered candles didn’t light spontaneously in their sconces all around her. Very real, he discovered, as all the enchantment he’d been trying to argue himself out of for so many miles flooded back. He wanted to step forward and greet her very personally, ask if she’d thought of him as constantly as he did about her and please excuse all his deceptions. They were not alone, though, and she didn’t look in any mood to listen even if they were.

      ‘Good day, your Grace, welcome to Darkmere,’ she said with genuine warmth. She let it drain away when she turned her unique blue-green eyes on Colm. ‘I suppose you must be Mr Hancourt. How do you do, sir?’ she said, so icily indifferent that the hand he hadn’t even known he was holding out to her fell to his side.

      This was the guarded and coldly aloof young woman he had spied from a distance that first night at Derneley House and he wondered if he would ever crack the ice he could almost see forming in the air between them again. Unlikely—she didn’t hate him that night and she certainly looked as if she did now. She might sound cold and look it, but the fury in her eyes was hot and hasty—if there was a vat of boiling oil handy he’d be very warm indeed right now.

      ‘Miss Winterley,’ he returned with an elegant bow he didn’t know he had in him. Something tender and tentative shrivelled under that Ice Queen stare and he was her parents’ guest after all, even if her father had put stern limits on his hospitality back in London.

      ‘I hope you had a comfortable journey, your Grace?’ she asked his uncle with a sweet smile.

      Colm had to admire her acting, even if the fierce guard she put on her fury made him wonder if he would ever know the real Eve Winterley. Why did he want to? She was Pamela’s daughter and that divided them efficiently as a wall. He had to control his unfortunate sense of the ridiculous as he imagined Miss Winterley building it herself, setting stones and hurrying the masons along lest the barbarian invader come back. It wasn’t funny being her enemy, though, and he saw hurt as well as fury in her turquoise gaze. Nothing could have sobered him more surely, not even Lord Farenze’s hard gaze reminding him of that promise he had made to keep infuriating Miss Winterley. Right now she looked as if she would like him to leave before he’d hardly got over the threshold, so at least his host should be happy.

      ‘Very comfortable, thank you, my dear,’ his uncle said genially.

      ‘I’m so glad the Duchess has found something worth painting already,’ she went on greeting his uncle as if Colm didn’t exist. ‘After seeing some of her paintings when I was in London I thought she would enjoy our magnificent scenery.’

      Colm wondered if he was invisible and decided Miss Winterley had even better ways of humbling an errant gentleman than that icy glare she treated him to just now. Why had he ever worried about her among the less scrupulous rakes of the ton? She could wither the worst of them with a pointed stare and that air of charmed ignorance that he even existed as she chatted about the landscape.

      ‘You must be a fine diplomat to have persuaded my wife to let you see her work when you were last in London, Miss Winterley,’ Uncle Horace said absently and Colm followed his gaze to the open door of the library and wondered if he might wander off to inspect it much as his wife vanished into the castle grounds. Serve the infernal woman right if she was left stranded by his bookish uncle before she could trot out her next platitude, he decided disagreeably.

      ‘My father will tell you I rarely give up until I get what I want, your Grace, but I hope you will ignore him,’ Miss Winterley joked with a fond look at her father and no sign that the Duke and Duchess were unwelcome, so it was probably only him she wished a hundred miles away.

      ‘Can’t do that, m’dear. Your father might not let me have the run of his library if I’m rude to him,’ the Duke said with the wry smile that made him endearing, despite his limitations as a duke and guest who hated being lionised.

      ‘So, how does it feel to be yourself again, Mr Hancourt?’ Miss Winterley’s coolly ironic murmur came as they followed her parents and guest of honour upstairs to the rooms the Duke and Duchess had been allotted, before Uncle Horace could plunge into my lord’s library.

      ‘Very odd, Miss Winterley,’ he answered honestly. ‘I was Carter so long I almost forgot about myself.’

      Her sidelong glare told him he’d better not think that was an excuse for deceiving her. ‘Why did you invent him in the first place?’ she asked distantly.

      ‘Grandsons of dukes don’t serve in the 95th Rifles, Miss Winterley. I would have been out of place.’

      ‘And the scandal would follow you?’ she challenged as if he was a coward to hide behind that alias so long.

      ‘Yes, of course. You know as well as I do that it goes everywhere with me,’ he said bleakly.

      ‘Which is why you clung to Mr Carter after the war was over and he could be safely pensioned off, I suppose?’

      She sounded so indifferent they might have been discussing a stranger. Colm hoped the Viscount was listening and approving of the void that now gaped between his least wanted guest and the daughter of the house. Or did he know how much of a challenge that icy façade of hers was to a red-blooded male? Colm was torn between a longing to drag her into the nearest empty room and kiss her until she forgot all about Carter and his sins and everything else and this thorn in his pride that argued he should limp back downstairs and ride away from a place where a man of his birth would never be truly welcome.

      ‘Not entirely. My uncle wanted me to bring his new purchases safe back from Derneley House and I could hardly go there as my true self, could I?’

      ‘I doubt it would have been very comfortable, considering who you really are, but Lord Derneley is hardly in a position to argue with your uncle, is he?’

      It would have been damned uncomfortable to live under that particular roof as himself, Colm reflected, but he couldn’t argue with the daughter of the house when he was only supposed to have met her minutes ago. So he gritted his teeth and supposed it was another way for her to punish him for being who he was.

      ‘The view from here is reckoned to be one of the finest in the Borders,’ she pointed out helpfully as he paused on the half-landing to rest his knee before limping up the rest. She knew he was struggling and had given him a chance to pause even though she still looked furious with him. It seemed that Miss Winterley was an enemy in a million and how he wanted to be disarmed by her, but he didn’t think she would accept if he threw his rifle at her feet and her father might even shoot him with it.