The Regency Season Collection: Part Two. Кэрол Мортимер
even tighter to ward off the terrible day of his return.
‘I suppose he would have to, once your sister was with child.’
She rounded on him to rage at his insensitivity, but he bewildered her before the words could leave her mouth by stripping off his viscount-warmed superfine coat and wrapping her in the heat of his body by proxy.
‘You’ll be cold,’ she protested even as she snuggled into the seductive smoothness of the silk lining and warmth of him and breathed in the unique scent of clean man and lemon water and sandalwood.
‘I’m a tough northerner, don’t forget,’ he argued with a wry smile.
How could she not want him when he stood there, so completely masculine and would-be cynical, and made her heart turn over with wanting this unique man in her life? In his shirtsleeves it was impossible to ignore the width of his shoulders and the lean strength of his mature body. She could imagine him at twenty, the young husband of a silly little débutante without the sense to see what a fine man she’d wed, and wondered how they would have gone on if they had met when she was young and impulsive and silly and married each other instead.
Impossible, Chloe; he’s almost nine years older than you are and was a father and a widower before you left the schoolroom, she chided herself, yet she couldn’t get the idea out of her head that, if he’d only waited for her to grow up, everything could be so different for them now. At six and twenty to her seventeen and steady as the rock his northern eyrie stood upon, he would have been steadfast as granite when Daphne’s loneliness and need for love and approval brought the world tumbling down on the Thessaly twins. A pipe dream, she dismissed that fantasy of love and marriage with him, and did her best to see them as others would. She shivered again at the thought of the sneers and jeers that would greet the revelation they’d been closeted in this room so long and only talked of past sins, not committed a whole pack of new ones.
‘Come closer to the fire,’ he urged gently at the sight of her apparently still feeling as cold as charity.
He couldn’t know it was the temptation of him that made her seek occupation for her hands, lest they reached for him. In his pristine white linen shirt, with that simply elegant black-silk waistcoat outlining his narrow waist so emphatically by the glow of the fire he had stirred into stronger life for her, he was temptation incarnate.
How she longed to wrap her arms about him and be held until the pain and grief abated. She told herself it was nothing more than the concern he would feel for any girl left so alone that was softening his hawk-like features. He had a young daughter and felt for her plight when she faced such a stark choice between her old life and Verity’s death.
More than likely he would have opted to rescue Daphne if he’d met them in their hour of need. She was appalled by the jealousy that blazed through her at the idea of him in thrall to her sister’s angelic blonde looks and easy smiles. Apparently there was something that could make her hate her sister for being so lovely and needy after all, or rather someone.
Chloe felt ashamed that Luke Winterley meant more to her than her twin had done. Until she met Verity’s furious gaze the first time and became a mother, despite the facts, this man could have meant more to her than any man should to a girl of such notoriously rackety lineage as hers.
‘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