The Regency Season Collection: Part Two. Кэрол Мортимер
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.’
That was it then; the frustrated desire of ten years finally said and in the open. Luke waited for Chloe’s reply, resigned to the fact she mattered to him more than either of them wanted to admit—except he just had.
‘I’ve had nightmares night after night since Virginia died,’ she admitted as if living with them was better than feeling something unique for him.
‘Why?’
The story behind her arrival must be even more painful than he’d thought. Luke willed his hands not to fist when he thought of the rogue who got a child on her, then left her to cope alone. Back then he’d told himself it was best not to know her story when he felt so damned guilty she was trying to build a respectable life and he wanted to ruin her more thoroughly than the rake who found her first.
‘Do you think you’re the only one to see love as a disaster?’ she demanded, but he knew a diversionary tactic when he heard one.
‘I thought you adored your reckless, headlong husband and regretted every minute of your life you must live without him? That’s what you told me when you whistled my dishonourable proposals down the wind.’
‘And you believed me?’
‘You were very convincing.’
‘Of course I was; it was a dishonourable proposal.’
‘Surely you didn’t expect me to offer marriage?’ he demanded unwarily.
She stiffened as if about to jump up and glare at him with her usual armed disapproval. ‘No,’ she admitted with a sigh instead. She must be too comfortable or too much in need of human comfort to push him away, but she sat up in his arms and stared into the fire instead. ‘I learnt not to expect much of anyone the day Verity was born. There was nobody left to care what became of us.’
‘Then she was truly a posthumous child?’ he asked gently, wanting to know about the man who left her with child, but feeling he was intruding on girlish dreams that might feel very private even if they’d rapidly turned into nightmares.
‘Yes, Verity only had me.’
The admission was bleak and he bit back his frustration at having to prise information out of her like a miner hewing coal. ‘Could neither family help you?’
‘No,’ she denied as if it hurt even now.
Luke felt she had a storm of emotions behind the calm she was forcing herself to hold as if her life depended on it. They seemed so much nearer the surface now he wanted to take the heavy weight off her shoulders, then put her world right. He wanted to protect her so badly, yet she insisted on shutting him out. This contrary, complicated woman was making him a stranger to himself.
‘Did you ask them?’
‘Not then,’ she bit out and somehow he managed to stifle a curse that she still wouldn’t let him into her true past or trust him with her real self.
‘Had they refused earlier?’
‘It was a runaway match,’ she said so blankly he suspected she was telling him a well-rehearsed version of what might be the truth, but didn’t feel like it.
‘They might be glad to meet their grandchild now.’
‘I’d walk barefoot across Britain or beg in the streets before I let them near her.’
It sounded as if unforgivable things had been said or done when she was so painfully young, alone and vulnerable. Fury burnt in his gut that anyone could treat a young girl so harshly that she never wanted to see them again. Conscience whispered he’d treated her pretty appallingly himself by offering carte blanche to such a youthful widow with a tiny child to consider.
Shame joined fury then; it wasn’t Chloe’s fault his wife smashed a young man’s dreams to powder, or that he was too wrapped up in not hurting to risk having any more. The revelation that he truly cared for this woman as he never had for Pamela, even before they married and hurt each other so much, overtook him with the force of a natural disaster. It felt as if the real Luke Winterley had woken from hibernation. He flexed powerful muscles against an almost physical ache and wished he’d go back to sleep.
‘I’m not saying you should,’ he managed to say as he gathered up the threads of their not-quite conversation and reminded himself he was rated a very fine whip by the sporting