The Regency Season Collection: Part Two. Кэрол Мортимер
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.
‘Get on with it, man,’ Lord Leckhampton, Virginia’s old friend and one time suitor urged querulously, ‘we haven’t time or inclination for an oration.’
‘I need to be on my way before night draws in, I suppose,’ Mr Poulson said with a frown that told them a master craftsman was being told to botch a job as if he was a mere day labourer.
‘Not at all, Poulson, you must stay,’ Lord Farenze said with a hard look at Chloe to order she confirm his hospitality.
‘Your bedchambers are prepared and we have a footman very happy to act as valet for the evening, gentlemen,’ she agreed, hoping Carrant hadn’t scorched their linen in his eagerness to take up a career as a gentleman’s gentleman.
‘You are very kind, Lord Farenze, ma’am,’ Mr Poulson said with a seated bow Chloe thought old fashioned and charming, even if Lord Leckhampton snorted as if heckling a fine performance. ‘But to proceed, since it is a complicated document and needs some explanation—Lady Virginia leaves the residue of her fortune to Miss Winterley, but her ladyship made a series of unusual bequests to all of you...’ He paused to gauge the effect of his words.
‘Don’t need a penny of her blessed money,’ Lord Leckhampton said.
‘Just as well, my lord. Her ladyship left you the contents of all the bins in her late husband’s inner wine cellar,’ the little lawyer