The Regency Season: Scandalous Awakening
If he was not to avoid Farenze Lodge as if he hated it for another decade she had to leave , but he must find a place where her skills were valued and her fine figure and spellbinding violet eyes ignored. Did convents have housekeepers? Luke forced his hands to unclench at the idea of her being leered at by her employer’s husband, or some gangling oaf of a son, and decided to keep a stern eye on Mrs Wheaton’s next household from afar.
Yes, he should have trusted his instincts, but curiosity, or something even more dangerous, led him to open that door. Once he had, he could no more bow coolly and leave than stop breathing. Even now the scent of her seemed to linger in the air. It was only the lavender in the big bowls Virginia always insisted on having about to sweeten the air in winter-closed rooms.
He suspected Chloe had lavender water used on the last rinse of her linen and that was why he couldn’t seem to get her out of his head. The rest of that exotic scent he associated with her was probably lingering aroma of a spicy moth bag or two, deployed to stop the industrious creatures chewing through her mourning attire. So it was a mix of simple strewing herbs, cinnamon, orris and perhaps cloves, but the memory fogged his senses, reminding him how tempted he’d been to kiss the fine creamy skin at the base of her elegant throat and find out if she tasted as exotically artless as she smelt.
Confound it, he hadn’t kissed her and could still savour the taste of her on his tongue. He ran it over his lips and the memory of her doing the same took fire and wrenched a tortured groan from him. After a decade of avoidance and abstinence he still wanted her, wanted her more than at first sight and now they were both mature adults and better designed for mischief.
The waif was a woman and he’d been wrong about the figure under that deplorable gown—Chloe the woman was nothing like the skinny girl she’d once been. She was slender, yes, probably too much so after forgetting to eat for grief and worry. What there was of her was sweetly curved, though, and her skin looked so silken and perfect he could imagine the feel of those full high breasts of hers against his palms. He held up his hands as if convicting them of a heinous crime for flexing on thin air as if they knew what they wanted better than the rest of him did. His other senses were betraying him, so why shouldn’t touch join the turncoat army?
Because somehow he had to resist what he and Chloe Wheaton might be to each other, he supposed with a heavy sigh. For a decade he’d done his best to stay away; he’d seen the desperation in her eyes; the hunger for the love Virginia had to offer a pair of homeless waifs. So he’d taken her rebuff to heart.
Easy enough to make a holiday of visits to Brighton so Virginia and Eve could enjoy one another’s company. He had even endured a few weeks in London each spring so they could eat ices at Gunter’s and visit Astley’s Amphitheatre and there was no more noble fatherly sacrifice when Darkmere was the finest place to be in the spring.
He suspected Virginia knew why he avoided the Lodge, but she didn’t say a word because she knew as well as he did that it was as impossible for Lord Farenze to do aught but ruin a housekeeper. The polite world would laugh at him and sneer at her if he tried to make anything of Chloe Wheaton but his mistress.
‘There you are,’ Tom Banburgh remarked from the doorway and he welcomed the interruption, didn’t he?
‘There’s no fooling you, is there?’
‘I can go away again until you’re in a better humour if you like, but I thought misery might like some company.’
‘Devil take it, I’m not miserable.’
‘Face like thunder.’
Luke stopped himself pacing up and down like a general before a crucial battle and took the filled glass Tom was holding out to him for the second time today. He took a sip of the finest cognac Virginia always kept for a favoured few and felt a little better after all.
‘I miss her so much, Tom,’ he finally admitted the lesser of two evils.
‘How could you not? I expect Virginia saved you from the tender mercies of your family when she could. She certainly rescued me from my unloving guardian when I was a scrubby boy nobody else cared enough to worry about.’
‘True, and she was always taking in waifs and strays. Seems a shame she couldn’t give Virgil children when she was born to be a mother.’
‘And this remark is coming from a man who would be a mere mister today if she had? You’re either a saint or a liar, my friend.’
‘I’m neither and you know as well as I do a title can’t change the beat of a man’s heart or make him any happier.’
‘I really wouldn’t know,’ Tom said indifferently and Luke reminded himself his friend had been a marquis since he was five years old.
‘Well, I do,’ he argued, ‘and mine hasn’t bought me any great joy.’
‘That’s because you hadn’t much left in you when you acquired it, Luke,’ Tom said sagely.
Luke wondered if anyone else would get away with saying some of the things Mantaigne came out with so blithely without being called out. ‘And you have no memory of being without one, so are necessarily full of fun and laughter, I suppose?’
‘Going a bit far, but I never saw the point in being gloomy. I’ll go on trying to laugh at the world even now, because Virginia wouldn’t want long faces and a grand carry on over her departure from this vale of tears.’
‘True, and we both know she missed my great-uncle as if someone had lopped off an arm or a leg after Virgil died.’
‘Aye, and if there is a heaven at least they’re in it together again.’
‘Since it clearly wouldn’t be so for one without the other, you must be right.’
‘Makes you wonder though, don’t it?’ Tom said.
‘No, love is still a myth for the rest of us.’
Luke gave his friend a long hard look before deciding he was the one obsessed with love and lovers and in danger of tripping over his own tongue. Not that he felt anything like love for Chloe Wheaton.
‘Thing about myths is a lot of people believe them,’ Tom said with a long look at Luke that left him puzzled and fidgety.
Was he being warned not to lightly charm the object of his desires? He could imagine nobody less likely to fall in love with him than aloof and sceptical Mrs Chloe Wheaton. Then he recalled the sight of her disarmed by sleep and a hundred times more vulnerable and wondered all over again.
‘I don’t,’ he muttered half to himself.
‘You could have been cut straight out of the pages of a Gothic tale and pasted into a young girl’s scrapbook of fantasies you look so close to the little darlings’ ideal of a heroic villain.’
‘What nonsense have you been feeding yourself this afternoon, man—a three-decker novel from the yellow press, perhaps? Or are you already three parts cast away?’ Luke asked incredulously.
‘Neither, but you don’t have the faintest idea, do you?’
‘Faintest idea of what?’
‘That your long and dusky locks, brooding frowns and touch-me-not air are sure to drive the débutantes insane with longing at their first sight of you across a crowded ballroom. The moment you stand among a London rout glaring at any boy brave enough to dance with your Eve, the little darlings will start swooning by rote for the lack of space to do it all at once in comfort.’
Luke felt himself pale at the very idea, so no wonder Tom laughed. ‘Why?’ he asked hollowly. ‘I’ll be old enough to be their father.’
‘As are all those dark and brooding villains out of the Gothic novels they devour by the yard, I suppose. Who knows what flights of the imagination such silly chits are capable of dreaming up between them, but you’ll be a prime target for them and their ambitious mamas if you set foot in London without a viscountess at your side.’
‘I wasn’t going to worry about one of those until Eve is safely wed.’
‘Leave Eve to find her husband when she’s ready, man; you owe her that for enduring life with a hermit like you all these years.’
Luke shook his head, but was Mantaigne right? He couldn’t see much attraction in a beetle-browed countenance and raven’s wing black hair he only kept overlong because he had no patience with constant visits from a barber or his new valet’s fussing and primping. When it came to his features, he’d just been relieved Eve had escaped the Winterley Roman nose and put down the occasional appreciative feminine stare as a penchant for his acres and title. Marriage to Pamela Verdoyne had cured him of vanity and he wondered if she’d done him such a great favour if he was about to blunder into the ballrooms of the ton unprepared.
‘I won’t have Eve endure a stepmother like mine,’ he said with a shudder.
‘That’s in your hands,’ Tom said with a shrug.
‘What is this, some sort of conspiracy to marry me off?’
‘That takes more than one person, my lord, and I’m not a matchmaker.’
‘So Virginia, you and my own dear, sweet scheming Eve don’t make a set?’
‘Not through prior agreement, but all three of us can’t be wrong.’
‘Yes, you can—by Heaven you’re more wrong in triplicate than alone.’
Tom merely raised his eyebrows and looked sceptical before calmly helping himself to another glass of cognac.
‘Did Virginia put you up to this?’ Luke asked suspiciously.
‘Don’t you think I’ve a mind of my own and the sense to see what you won’t yourself? If she wasn’t dead, I could strangle that spoilt witch you wed so hastily, Luke; she married you for your expectations, then rejected you for so-called love, as if it was your fault she was born vain, empty-headed and contrary.’
‘I should never have agreed to marry her,’ Luke said with a shrug, recalling the long and bitter rows of his marriage with a shudder that sent him back to the brandy decanter for a second glass before he’d quite taken in the fact he’d drunk the first.
‘Your father and wicked stepmother should take the blame for pushing such a paltry marriage on an infatuated lad. You’re not a boy now, though, and you badly need a wife, my friend, at least you do if you’re to avoid being ruthlessly pursued through every ballroom in London by a pack of ninnies when Eve makes her début.’
‘Shouldn’t you be more concerned with securing your own succession, since you’re the last of the Banburghs and I have a younger brother?’
‘The Banburghs can go hang as far as I’m concerned, but it’s not good for James to be in limbo, never sure if he’s to be your heir or only the “what if tragedy struck?” spare Winterley male. He’s bored and restless and probably lonely and who knows what he gets up to when our backs are turned?’
‘You know very well he’d never confide in me,’ Luke said and let himself feel how much it hurt that his brother hated him, even if he had cause to hate him back.
‘Left to himself, he would have followed you about like a stray puppy when you were younger.’
Luke gave a snort of derision at the idea of elegant and sophisticated James Winterley following anyone slavishly, let alone his despised elder brother. ‘That particular apple never fell far from the tree,’ he said darkly, even as the laziness of the cliché made him wonder if he wasn’t guilty of prejudice himself.
‘And you think his lot so much better than your own?’ Tom persisted impatiently.
‘Whatever I think, let’s postpone feeling sorry for James because his mother loved him and hated me for another day, shall we?’
‘Don’t leave it too late to remedy,’ Tom warned with a steady look that made Luke wonder if he didn’t know more about James’s dark and tangled affairs than he was letting on. ‘I’m going off to bother my valet and idle away an hour until dinner. Who knows, maybe we’ll have a pleasant and peaceful evening against all the odds,’ his friend said before he sauntered from the room.
‘Slim enough chance of anything of the kind under this roof,’ Luke muttered grumpily and finished his brandy before going upstairs.
Chapter Five
The January twilight was already all but over when Luke stumped up the elegant staircase. He rang for the bath he needed as soon as he reached his bedchamber and heard hot water carried in within minutes, so there was no excuse to sack the housekeeper on the spot and end this torture. As he relaxed into the tub images of the dratted woman slid slyly into his head.
Why her? Why was it Chloe Wheaton he seemed doomed to want every time he set eyes on her? She was a fine-looking woman, despite the deplorable gowns and concealing cap, but he’d met other fine-looking women and some of them diamonds of the first water. No other woman on this fair earth could get him in a stew of frustrated yearning with one distrustful glance and how he wished it otherwise.
If only it was merely the thought of a fine female body in his bed that made him want her so badly. He ached with the frustration of not having her as his lover. There was something unique about her that even ten years of trying couldn’t expunge from his senses. He recalled a fateful day that summer when they first met; he’d come upon her playing with her little girl in the woods above the house and just stood and watched where neither could see him.
At last the heat of the day drained the child’s energy and Chloe had sung softly to calm her, then rocked little Verity to sleep in her arms. Luke recalled envy eating at him like acid as he wanted such love and tenderness for the babes they could bring into the world together, if only everything was different.
Instead it had been Wheaton who recklessly married a schoolgirl and got a baby on her, or so she had once told him. Luke felt his fists tighten at the thought of Wheaton exposing the woman he was supposed to love to such a hard, narrow life as she’d had to lead since.
He had been about to turn away when the June sunlight picked out the trail of tears on Chloe’s face as she gazed down at her sleeping babe. Even now he felt the jar of it as his heart thudded at the memory. Back then he had had to clamp down on the need to stride over to her and take her in his arms so hard he discovered afterwards he’d clenched his fists until the blood flowed.
He left the next day, all his wild schemes for somehow making it easier for her to be his mistress by getting her to act the quietly respectable wife, whose reclusive husband sailed the seven seas, then wanted no company but hers whenever he was home, shattered. He couldn’t do that to her, or little Verity or any other babies they might make between them. It was a half-life and he couldn’t offer her so little.
Curse it; he wouldn’t let passion waft him along as if he had no free will now either. Yet when he conjured a picture of his late wife ranting at him that he was a stern, unlovable stick to correct his obsession, the fantasy of his great-aunt’s housekeeper naked and eager in the great bed next door blotted her out. Luke felt heat roar through him at the very idea and the physical evidence of his arousal with nothing between him and civilisation made him a fool.
Chloe only had to be in the same county for him to want her and from the moment he saw her at Virginia’s window today he’d barely been able to conceal his ridiculous state from the world. Idiot body! Hadn’t marriage taught it anything at all?
His response to Pamela’s challenge to his manhood when she refused to let him bed her again after they returned from their bride trip slotted into his memory and reminded him how easy it was to need a woman without liking her. He relived his distaste at himself and his wife when she enjoyed his furious promise to seduce her into taking him until she screamed for more as she never had during his gentle lovemaking. The fulfilment of that vow excited her and left him at odds with himself.
Their marriage limped on for six months, Pamela blowing hot and cold as Luke grew sick of her and himself. How typical that she announced her pregnancy the day she finally left him. Her letter from her sister’s London address saying she’d been brought to bed of a daughter and he’d better come and get her arrived on his twentieth birthday. To this day Luke couldn’t recall the journey and it took Eve to blast through his rage as the real innocent in the whole wretched business.
‘You’re welcome to the squalling brat,’ his wife had shouted when he dodged past her to reach the attic where, the butler informed him, his daughter had been banished for crying a little too loudly. Pamela scurried after him; ‘Pushing it out nigh killed me and I never want to see it again.’
‘Don’t you feel the need to raise a heroine in your own tawdry image?’
‘Not one of your get, not that I’m sure she is yours. You’re not the only Winterley ready to rut like a hog,’ she said smugly.
His bellow of fury woke the baby and made her furious nurse run out of the bare attic bedroom he wouldn’t wish on a foundling to upbraid them.
‘If you two ’ave a mite of pity in your black hearts, you’ll be quiet,’ she barked in a hoarse voice that sounded as if its skinny owner spent most of her years on this earth bellowing to be heard and had worn it out in the process.
A smile replaced Luke’s frown as he recalled his shock at being addressed so sharply by a tiny female who looked as if she’d dashed in off the street to feed his child out of the kindness of her weary heart. She hardly reached his elbow and her face had the wizened yet somehow ageless look of one used to hardship since birth.
‘Whose get is she then?’ he’d asked his wife more quietly, as the furious girl-woman was still barring his way like a flea-bitten terrier confronting an angry bear.
‘Oh, she’s a Winterley all right; which is probably why I can’t endure to have her near me.’
‘Then she’s mine.’
‘There are other vultures crouched in the branches of your family tree, hoping their seed will carry off the family honours under your long nose, Luke Winterley.’
It wasn’t the unlikely idea of his already ailing father laying hands on his wife that made Luke feel as if the finest Toledo blade had sliced into his heart. A terrible possibility dawned as he stood there and mentally crossed all his male relatives off the list but one. His stepmother resented the fact he was heir to the Farenze titles and always had done her best to make the half-brothers hate each other. Luke thought a gruff affection bound him and James even so, until that moment.
Would even Pamela stoop to seduce a seventeen-year-old boy? Yes, he’d decided with bitter sickness threatening to choke him. To take a twisted revenge on Luke for marrying her without adoring her slavishly she would, and enjoy every moment of her betrayal. Young enough to hurt to his very soul, he felt as if sharing a city with her a moment longer would surely suffocate him.
‘Bring the child, we’re leaving,’ he’d snapped at the street urchin wet-nurse.
‘Not ’til I’m sure she’s better off with you than the ragman,’ she said, appearing at the nursery door with Eve wrapped in a worn shawl that had to be her own since Pamela wouldn’t even give it to her maid.
‘Why didn’t I think of that?’ Pamela said spitefully.
‘How can you say such terrible things, dearest?’ her sister, Alexandra, Lady Derneley, protested faintly from behind her. ‘She’s your own dear baby.’
‘I’d prefer to house a ferret or a weasel than that squalling brat. Has James visited me once while I was fat and lumbering like a cow because of a girl they got on me between them? You know he hasn’t, Lexie; he promised undying devotion when he seduced me behind his brother’s back and look how long it lasted. I’d hate her for ruining my figure, then chasing dear Blasedon away with her wailing and whining, even if she wasn’t a Winterley. I’ll be happy never to set eyes on the whelp again as long as I live, she can go to hell along with him and the sooner the better.’
Lady Derneley turned chalk white as her little sister’s true nature hit home and fainted to avoid it.
‘To hell with you, you unnatural bitch,’ Luke roared.
‘To ’ell with both of you,’ the street urchin’s voice somehow rose above the uproar. ‘This poor babe ain’t ’ad time to do wrong, whatever the rest of you ’ave been up to and you be quiet,’ she ordered Pamela, who gaped at her open-mouthed. ‘If you’ve a spot of pity use it on an ’elpless mite who din’t ask to come into this world instead of yourself for once. Mister, you can take us both away from ’ere afore the poor little thing dies of cold and ’unger, or missus ’ere murders ’er while I’m asleep, never mind if you’re ’er pa or no.’
It was then Luke made the life-transforming error of looking at the tiny little being in the girl’s bony arms and realised she was right. Almost as frightened by the quiet as by the shouting, the baby screwed her tiny face up to wail her woes to the world. He put out a finger, more by instinct than in hope his touch would soothe her. Eve paused, opened her eyes wide and seemed to focus on him as if she’d been waiting for him to come since the day she was born. She made him her father, whatever the facts, by latching on to his finger and refusing to let go.
Somehow he managed to hide that fact while convincing Pamela he would stop her allowance and sue for divorce, instead of legal separation, if word got out Eve might not be his. The journey to Darkmere with Eve and Brandy Brown in tow was a nightmare he shuddered to think of now, but they all survived it somehow and Eve grew up free of a mother who hated her for being a Winterley.
Luke made himself ignore news of Pamela cavorting round any bits of the Continent free of revolutionary wars with a succession of lovers. He didn’t care if the generous allowance he paid her kept her and her latest love in luxury and when news of his wife’s death reached Darkmere three years later he hadn’t enough hypocrisy left to mourn.
Now Lord Farenze might seem harsh and indifferent as the moors in sight of his castle towards the wider world, but he truly loved his daughter. A sneaky voice whispered it was safe to love Eve. If remembering his wife kept Chloe Wheaton and the danger of feeling more than he ought to for her at arm’s length, then he would dwell on the last time he let a woman walk into his life and rearrange it for however long it took to put him off the idea.
Resolved to do so often over the next few days, he was dressed before he found out dinner had been put back an hour. Eve had been informed, however, and was discussing which black gown was better suited to the occasion with Chloe and Bran. He could see little difference and left the room as if the devil was on his tail as soon as he saw the housekeeper lurking in the darkest corner of the room. Feeling thoroughly out of sorts with the world, Luke went downstairs like a guest arriving too early for a party.
* * *
Chloe was consulting Cook about the number of entrées Mrs Winterley thought fashionable to serve at dinner and agreeing this wasn’t the time for excess, even if they could find half-a-dozen more dishes at the drop of a hat, when the sound of a late arrival surprised them all. The terse announcement she was needed outside made her scurry in the head groom’s wake to the stable yard.
‘Verity, oh, my love!’ she cried as she saw her daughter blink against the flare of the stable lads’ lanterns when she stepped down from the coach.
‘Oh, Mama, I’m so glad to see you,’ Verity said with a wobbly smile that made Chloe want to cry, instead she hugged her as if they’d been parted for months.
‘But how did this come about?’ Chloe asked as Lord Farenze’s coachman nodded tersely at her and she could only marvel at his endurance.
‘His lordship ordered it soon as he heard little miss here was waiting to come home,’ Birtkin said as if he drove all the way to Bath and back after enduring the long drive here from Northumberland at least once a week.
‘I’m very grateful to you,’ she replied with a warm smile of gratitude.
‘Not my doing, ma’am, you should thank his lordship,’ Birtkin mumbled as if trying to reclaim his dour reputation.
‘You and your men were the ones who drove through twilight, then darkness, on Verity’s behalf, so I’m grateful to you, whether you like it or not.’