The Regency Season: Scandalous Awakening

Chapter Eight

Chloe knew Lord Farenze would leave her alone if she breathed no or flinched away. Yet she couldn’t say it, or take that step back. His mouth on hers was gentle as a plea and she waited for him to remember he was kissing the housekeeper and retreat in horror. She had to breathe at last and he followed the winter air into her mouth as if he was starving for her. Heat flooded every inch of her body and mind as his lips and tongue explored her mouth in sensual wonder.

Needs she had fought for so long clamoured and fidgeted to let a decade of frustration and loneliness go. She swayed into his arms and opened her mouth even as sensible Chloe whispered she was a fool. Somehow the slight shake in his touch freed some last curb on her conscience and she felt him test her narrow waist, banding her closer to the difference and heat of him, narrow flanked and broad shouldered as he was against her curves and unable to conceal how badly he wanted, no, needed her.

Intrigued by such wild heat, despite the frigid January air and this saddest of days, she felt every pore and whisper come uniquely alive to him. Senses sharpened as if they’d slept since that last kiss so long ago. She wanted to strip off her tight tan gloves and feel this exceptional man under her naked touch. Doing her best to add the soft covering to her senses instead, she brushed a finger along his high cheekbone and wherever he felt the butterfly touch of fine leather on taut skin a flush of hard colour tracked her fingers. Shocked by her own boldness, she rose on tiptoe and rested her hands on his broad shoulders so she could watch him more closely, more intimately. For these few seconds outside time he was hers and she was his.

His coat was frost chilly where they’d had no contact, yet where their bodies strove to meld no cold could reach them. They had an antidote to winter and who would guess so much heat was pent up between gruff Lord Farenze and his coolly composed housekeeper?

He moved his hands up from her waist to cup a shamefully hot and responsive breast under her layers of winter disguise and the sweet novelty of his long-remembered touch, real again on her eager body, made her heart leap and her stomach fall into that familiar burning longing only he could stir in her. She gave a low moan as need ground at her insides like hot knives and heated her inner core with impossible promises.

Shocked by her own need of him, she pulled back far enough to watch him and hotly unanswerable questions flashed into his grey gaze and echoed her own. He’d focused too much formidable attention on her at last, given too much away to snatch it back and pretend they were nothing to each other, hadn’t he? This was the real Luke Winterley, the passionate man behind Lord Farenze’s cold exterior and reclusive reputation. She felt too much for that man and she was opening her mouth to ask questions neither of them wanted to know when the return of the riding party sounded on the clear air and let Chloe’s real life back in with a sickening thump and a deep breath of icy January air. She tugged free of Lord Farenze’s arms and faced him with all she shouldn’t feel in her eyes.

‘I can’t,’ she gasped. ‘Neither of us can,’ she told him sadly, then hurried off towards the stable yard and her beloved daughter before Luke could argue.

‘I quite agree, Mrs Wheaton,’ Luke muttered to the January air. ‘So what the devil have you done to me this time, my conundrum-in-petticoats?’

No point trying to sit and work on the letters of sympathy and solutions to estate matters now. All he’d see out of the window now was an image of himself, tangled so tight in kissing Virginia’s protégé he’d forgotten where, when and what they were. He couldn’t settle for the ordeal ahead and hardly knew how to live in his own skin without Chloe to remake him every time he set eyes on her.

The very thought of her as she was just now set his pulses jumping and his manhood rigid with need. Yet she was Virginia’s housekeeper-cum-companion; a lady already burned by the chilling harshness the world showed those who fell from grace; a woman who’d wed recklessly, then found herself alone with a babe to support when she should have been in the schoolroom herself.

Recalling her list of activities for crass males, Luke wished he could ask for a hack to be saddled and ride for hours to avoid longing for more unsuitable meetings with the Farenze Lodge housekeeper. No, there could be no more of those and it was high time he turned his mind to the sad and solemn occasion ahead of him.

If he’d had his way they would celebrate Virginia’s long life and the fact she was reunited with her beloved Virgil, instead of mourning the passing she had begun to long for of late. Instead, he was chief mourner at a solemn funeral and must hide his grief as best he could for the sake of those who looked to him as head of the family and master of the house and estate.

His great-uncle’s will left his wife only a lifetime tenure on the house they had built so lovingly between them with ultimate ownership going to Luke. He’d been too wound up in baby Eve and playing down the chaos Pamela had raised on the Continent when Virgil died to take much notice, but lately he’d tried to discuss the future of Farenze Lodge with Virginia and got nowhere even faster than usual.

‘Virgil left you this house and estate to save me having people constantly badgering me to leave it elsewhere,’ Virginia told him.

‘But why me?’ he asked. ‘James might change if he had an estate of his own. You have told me he needs to be his own man.’

‘Let me worry about James,’ she said mysteriously, ‘you’re the only man we wanted living here after us, Luke. You love and understand it as we did, so enjoy it as a holiday from that grim barrack you live in most of the year. You can retreat here when the rigours of Darkmere become too great for your wife.’

‘I don’t have a wife, nor shall I until Eve is wed,’ he replied, meeting her level gaze steadily to show her he meant it and there was no point scheming to pair him off with some hopeful young lady she might have handy before then.

‘One day you’ll have to take that armour off and learn to be happy,’ she had replied with a knowing smile he didn’t want to question, so he shrugged and accepted their decision, since he could hardly do otherwise now the deed was done.

And now the whole world seemed to be conspiring against his long-held plan to find a convenient wife once Eve was old enough to marry. Virginia, Eve and even Tom Banburgh seemed to think he ought to wed for something warmer than mere convenience and surely they were all wrong?

‘There you are, m’lord,’ Josiah Birtkin’s bass voice rumbled at him from the doorway leading from the gardens to the stableyard and Luke swore at himself for getting distracted from all he had to cope with today.

‘So it would seem,’ he replied mildly enough.

‘Thought you should know,’ Josiah went on as if words had a tax on them.

‘Know what?’

‘Cross said they was followed back from the gallops just now.’

‘Why on earth would anyone follow a schoolgirl?’ Luke mused.

‘Don’t know, m’lord.’

‘Have you any idea who it was?’

‘No, he stayed well back. Cross thought it was his fancy to start with.’

Luke frowned even more darkly at the thought of Chloe’s daughter as quarry. ‘It makes no sense,’ he muttered and Josiah shrugged as if nothing his fellow humans did made much of that. ‘Where is he now?’ Luke asked, resolving to confront the rogue and demand what he was about.

‘Rode off when they got back to the paddocks, and, since he managed to look as if he was on his way somewhere else, nobody thought to challenge him.’

‘And you saw him close up, I hope?’

‘No, he was some way off by the time Cross mentioned him and had his hat pulled down over his eyes and a scarf over his mouth.’

‘It’s a cold day and a traveller might cover up against it, I suppose.’

And why trail a schoolgirl back to Farenze Lodge when a few casual questions would reveal her mother was only housekeeper here? And why would Verity Wheaton’s location matter to anyone but her mother, after all the years when nobody outside the household took any notice of either of them?

‘His beast had some Arab in him though, m’lord, and if the man wasn’t dressed like a farmer I’d have to call him a gentleman.’

‘Keep a lookout for him and I’ll have the watch doubled at night. If Miss Wheaton or my daughter ride out again, please make sure you or Seth stay with them and go armed, Josh, just in case,’ Luke ordered with a frown. ‘Be discreet about it; the fewer people who know the better since I don’t want panic breaking out, or the man scared off before we find out what he’s up to.’

‘Trust me not to blab,’ Josiah said, looking offended anyone might think he could, let alone Luke who’d known him since he was set on his first pony at Darkmere while still in short coats.

‘Aye, of course I do,’ Luke said with a wry grin and sent him back to the stables with orders to keep an eye on those who came and went on what would be a busy day for them all.

Luke intended to catch the man haunting Verity Wheaton and challenge him, so why was a prickle of apprehension sliding down his spine like ice water? He didn’t know the girl, had only set eyes on her a few times since she was a baby. Yet Eve had taken to her instantly and Chloe adored her, so how could he not be furious at any man who might try to harm or bother the child?

He would feel so about any girl, he reassured himself, and it was probably true, given the appalling hazards that could stalk a child as distinctive as Verity Wheaton. She had her own version of the striking colouring he found so irresistible in her mother. Her hair was closer to blonde and her eyes a paler blue than her mother’s stormy ones, but they shared the same fine-boned build and heart-shaped faces; the same fierce intelligence as well, he suspected, and some of the mother’s stubborn will and pride had been passed on to her child, if Verity’s determination to be with her mother at this sad time was any indication.

Luke frowned and decided he must make time to ask Chloe about Verity’s father sooner than he wanted to. Until then he’d trust Josiah’s sharp eyes and Eve’s company as well as his own vigilance to keep the child safe while her mother was managing his house and seemed barely to have time to eat, let alone sleep soundly.

* * *

A few hours later Chloe and the maids stopped work and wrapped themselves up in shawls and mittens before going out on the balustrade roof to watch the funeral cortège wind its way towards the church where the fifth Viscount Farenze was buried. The sombre procession went in and out of sight as it crossed the park and Chloe wished she could attend the service. As she was a female and a housekeeper with a house to prepare for cold and sorry mourners to return to, she bowed her head and recited the Twenty-Third Psalm and the Lord’s Prayer in memory of their beloved mistress and silently wished her ladyship Godspeed with all her heart.

When that was done they watched with tears in their eyes when the horses were taken out of their harness so the male servants and estate workers could drag the sombre rig the last stretch to the church instead. Chloe nearly sobbed as unguardedly as the maids at the sight of such love and devotion to a wonderful woman. She took a deep breath instead and handed out snowy squares of soft cotton and salvaged linen to those who had forgotten their handkerchiefs and hugged Verity close as they said a private goodbye to Lady Virginia.

They stayed in the chilly winter sunshine until a crush of nobility and gentry left the tiny church while the tomb was opened inside and Virginia’s closest family and friends saw her laid beside her beloved Virgil. Only then did Chloe order the staff downstairs to get Farenze Lodge ready for the mourners’ return and all the rituals of this solemn winter day.

Bran’s militant look at her former charge told Chloe she wanted her ewe lamb out of the frigid January air as urgently as she did Verity, but at that moment a robin began to sing as if its life depended on it from the top of an old holly tree nearby. Neither of them could bring themselves to scold the girls for avoiding the ladies who were gathered about the fire in the grand drawing room sighing and reading their prayerbooks after that. They went downstairs with the echo of that joyful song in their ears, a last serenade to a woman who had always lived life so richly and loved so well.

* * *

‘I’m glad Lady Virginia made it clear she didn’t want a grand formal fuss when she died. Miss Eve will miss her too much to want to play hostess to half the county as if she’d only lost her pet canary, with her being as close to her ladyship as she always was,’ Bran observed to Chloe over tea in the housekeeper’s room several hours later.

‘She did it very well, but she’s too young to endure much more formality today and Lady Virginia’s real friends know it. By leaving as soon as they decently could they took the rest with them by sheer force of will, which is why they were Lady Virginia’s friends in the first place, I suppose,’ Chloe replied as she eased her aching feet on to the footstool and blessed the comfort of a fire of her own. The demands of the last few hours seemed to crowd in all over again and she wondered if she’d forgotten some small but vital detail. ‘I thought Lady Bunting and the Squire and his wife would never leave, though.’

‘And I wondered if that dratted Mrs Winterley would ever stop eating,’ Bran said with a grimace.

‘But, Bran, “in a well-regulated household there would be more sugar in the plum cake and less salt in the cheese scones”,’ Chloe parodied the lady wickedly. ‘That didn’t prevent Mrs Winterley eating vast quantities of both while telling anyone who would listen how prostrated she was by grief.’

‘Fat old hypocrite,’ Bran said as she lay back in her chair and closed her eyes.

‘I can’t argue, although I know I should,’ Chloe replied as the warmth of the room and her own deep weariness tugged at her conviction she still had a deal to do before she dared try to sleep again. ‘You’re a bad influence on me, Bran,’ she said drowsily.

‘Someone needed to be,’ her new friend declared and opened her shrewd eyes as if she’d only been pretending to be half-asleep. ‘It’s high time you learnt to live again, young woman,’ she said, as if she could see into Chloe’s heart and all the bitter memories she didn’t want to face.

‘I could say the same about you.’

‘I did all the living and loving I ever shall with a man before Miss Eve was born. My Joe is buried at sea on the other side of the world and I’ll have no other, but you deserve better than life seems to have handed you so far.’

‘No, I don’t,’ Chloe said shortly, even as a picture of Luke Winterley flitted into her mind, laughing and at ease as nature intended him to be and murmured, But aren’t I better than you imagined in your wildest dreams before you met me?

‘Then perhaps he does,’ Bran said.

Chloe’s heartbeat had accelerated at the thought of him and the way all the longings she wished she could kill shivered through her body whenever the wretched man was in the same room. It must have shown in her eyes.

‘He needs more than I can give,’ Chloe said and closed her eyes again in the hope it might put paid to such a painful topic of conversation. All her normal defences felt so weak it was as if her emotions were about to spill over in a disastrous flood. ‘More tea?’ she asked with a brightness they both knew was false and Bran nodded obligingly and let the painful topic of Mrs Wheaton’s feelings for her noble master drop, with a look that said this wasn’t the time for an argument, but her new friend would have to confront those feelings sooner or later.

* * *

Chloe was glad Mrs Winterley and the other ladies favoured the state rooms as the early January dusk began to darken the skies outside and most of the gentlemen congregated in the billiard room. They couldn’t divert themselves with a game on such a day ,but seemed comforted by the idea that Virginia would have told them to forget such flummery and get on with it and most of them were avoiding the drawing room and the low-voiced gossip that was all the ladies could indulge in as dusk came down on this solemn day.

It seemed a good time to place the little vase of snowdrops someone had snatched a moment to gather earlier and she had only now found time to arrange with a few sprigs of wintersweet. The gardeners always forced as many spring flowers as they could to bloom early, since Virginia delighted in the bravest of the spring ones to remind them winter wouldn’t last for ever.

Sooner or later she would have to stop behaving as if Virginia might walk into a room and exclaim at such a simple luxury and ask about a gardener’s elderly mother, or perhaps his wife being close to her time, when one of them came to hand the flowers over. Chloe thought it a shame to kill off Virginia’s routine and make her loss even harder to bear. She did her best not to make things worse than they must already feel when the speechless, grief-stricken head gardener came to the door with this tribute to his employer and old friend and simply nodded her sincere thanks and told him how beautiful and hopeful they seemed in the depths of winter.

‘Oh, heavens! I didn’t see you there, my lord, but why on earth are you sitting in the dark?’ she gasped now, shocked when he rose from the chair by the window where Virginia often sat to catch the best light for her book.

‘Because I enjoy sitting in the dark?’ he replied wryly, but she heard the flat weariness in his voice and somehow couldn’t make herself walk away.

‘I doubt it,’ she said as her eyes grew accustomed to the gloom and instinct warned her to plunk the vase down and leave.

‘You’re right,’ he said gruffly and she wondered if he didn’t want her to see tears in his supposedly steely gaze when he turned his head away.

‘How gratifying for me; good evening, my lord.’

‘No, stay,’ he asked, again in that rough voice as if he couldn’t find the energy to smooth it into any sort of gentlemanly restraint right now.

‘You know I can’t,’ she murmured as she sank on to the chair closest to his and folded her hands to stop them reaching to him as if by right.

‘Don’t speak of “can’t” today.’

‘I have to,’ she argued, gripping her fingers more tightly together to stop them soothing his lean cheek, or ruffling the stern discipline he’d imposed on his unruly raven locks in his great-aunt’s honour.

‘Virginia wasn’t a great one for rules and conventions,’ he replied with tension in his voice that said he wanted human contact, too, even if he hadn’t moved since she sat down.

‘I imagine she was as determined not to be confined by them as a young woman as she was when I knew her.’

‘She was a rogue, or so her sisters said before she outlived them all,’ he said with such pride and love for his late great-aunt by marriage in his voice Chloe felt herself melting from the inside out.

‘So many people loved her for it that it makes you wonder if being correct and ever ready to criticise, as I remember her sisters being when I first came here, is the way to live a good life after all. They used to visit and sniff and carp at her for simply having me and Verity in the house, let alone employing me as her companion-housekeeper.’

Chloe shifted uncomfortably in her seat as she recalled he’d been almost as critical once he found out about that act of kindness himself, but perhaps he’d decided this wasn’t the day to have too good a memory.

‘I think when she and Virgil wed, Virginia gave up scandalising society one way, so she was determined to find as many ways of confounding its prejudices in other ones as she could.’

‘You think of me as one of her rebellions, then?’

‘Perhaps at first—later even I could see that you and your daughter were more to her than a whim to infuriate her sisters and any stuffy neighbours she wanted to annoy. She needed you almost as much as you did her. She would have been an excellent mother and would have doted on any grandchildren who followed in her children’s footsteps.’

‘Instead she was a wonderful friend and mentor to me and so many others society would like to turn its collective nose up at and ignore.’

‘You were not a charity cases, but a good and dear friend to her; allow me that much insight today, even if we must pretend to be enemies again tomorrow.’

‘I know, I am sorry,’ she said softly.

He smiled at her unguarded apology and they sat in companionable silence for a few wonderful moments, as if they understood each other too well to need words.

‘Virginia was the product of another age,’ he finally said with a sigh, ‘but even she wouldn’t have been quite so eager to break the rules if she knew it would reflect back on her progeny.’

‘No, I suppose she didn’t have a daughter of her own to make those rules real for her. It colours everything when your own reputation affects another’s whole life so drastically,’ Chloe agreed with a hearty sigh of her own.

‘As those girls of ours both changed our lives?’

‘Yes.’

‘Sooner or later we must talk about it,’ he warned.

‘No, your daughter is your business; mine is hers and mine alone. We have nothing to discuss, my lord.’

‘Yet we must talk about it all the same,’ he said as implacably as he could, when he sounded as if grief and weariness were weighing him down too heavily to face a confrontation now.

‘Not if I can help it we won’t,’ she muttered under her breath, but he heard her in the intimate gloom of the dark room. Only a glow from the banked-down fire was left to show them their thoughts and feelings now the light had faded, but when he wanted to he could read her like a book.

‘Do you remember the day we first met?’ he asked sneakily.

All of a sudden the gloom of a January dusk was gone and they were bathed in summer heat again, her most disreputable bonnet was hanging down her back and his bright, curious gaze sharpened on this new phenomenon tramping her way up his great-aunt’s drive.

She had just paid a visit to her little daughter at the wet-nurse’s neat cottage on the Farenze Lodge Estate and she was buoyed up by the hope Verity was finally going to be big enough to come home with her next week. The world seemed a light and happy place that fateful summer day, then she had looked up and met a pair of complicated masculine grey eyes and a fluttery feeling of excitement joined the hope that was rekindling in her after a long winter.

‘Where are you going to, my pretty maid?’ he’d asked as lightly as if he hadn’t a care in the world, for once in his too-responsible life, either.