The Regency Season: Scandalous Awakening

Chapter Nine

‘I am tired,’ Luke Winterley admitted with a sigh, as if it was a weakness he was rightly ashamed of, and tenderness for his manly conviction she had no right to feel threatened to undermine her aloofness.

‘Despite your attempts to prove otherwise, you are only human, my lord. You need a proper night’s sleep after your hard and hasty journey, last night’s vigil and all you have had to endure today,’ Chloe replied.

‘I haven’t enjoyed one of those under this roof from the first day I set eyes on you,’ he snapped, as if she was an idiot to suggest he might now.

She’d offered him the only warmth and understanding she decently could and he’d thrown it back at her as if it revolted him, drat the man, but he could stand apart from the rest of humanity with her blessing. ‘I will get back to my duties,’ she said, snatching back the hand she hadn’t known she’d stretched out as if he’d scalded it.

‘Before God, woman, I could shake you until your teeth rattle,’ he gritted between what sounded like clenched teeth.

‘Because I speak sense and keep a cool head? If so, you’re a fool.’

‘Then let’s see how idiotic I can be, shall we? Then maybe next time you will take a warning in the spirit it is meant,’ he said in a husky voice and sounded so brusque her mouth twisted in a wobbly smile.

He was my Lord Farenze at his most bearlike and made her feel emotions no other man had ever stirred. Her fingers itched to test his athlete’s body and fallen-angel features; to curl themselves into that overlong raven mane of his and tug him down to meet her mouth with his kiss; to discover anew he was as addictive to the touch as to the rest of her senses.

Temptation made her senses flex, stretch and luxuriate in the promise of him. How familiar and seductive and dangerous it was. To be part of something with him was almost as irresistible as the physical fact of him and his ill humour at not being able to freeze her out of his life as he clearly wanted to. Heat flashed through her like sheet lightning; her breathing went shallow as her heartbeat raced and she leaned towards him to...

No! Her body was as wrong now as it was ten years ago. She’d felt such yearning need to be passionately loved back then it was little wonder bitter, guarded, dashingly handsome Lord Farenze unleashed wild dreams in her that ought to be dead and done with. He still could, simply by being here, but her world could never be well lost for love. She had a daughter who must come before him, and her, and everything else in Chloe’s life.

Anything that smirched Chloe’s reputation would make Verity less in the eyes of the world. Yet every time she fought this battle it was harder, as if this darling bear of a man was wound so tight into her senses she would never be free of the feel and look and touch of him, that faint scent of masculine cologne and Luke Winterley. All of him, gruff and smooth, tender and sharp, was caught into her heart so securely that she only had to scent that cologne to be aware of him as a lover until her dying day.

No, she must win her battle one last time and then she would be free of temptation for ever. The thought of never seeing him again made tears sting her eyes. How could she not pity herself all the long years with not even the sight of him ahead? A voice whispered, Giving in to what you both need won’t hurt this once, but it lied.

Never to see him again, never to feel him and his mighty body respond to her after they threw caution to the four winds and indulged in the unimaginable luxury of loving for one short night? Verity had been enough to make her step back and say no before and must keep being so, because one night would never be enough.

‘No, my lord, we could make a fine pair of fools of each other together, but I’ve worked hard to be the respectable woman I am now, despite the gossip and doubts you and so many others had when I came here with a babe in my arms. I can’t give in to improper advances from so-called gentlemen like you and waste all that effort now,’ she said with a careless smile meant to lessen the tension.

‘Do you think me such a rake I might take what isn’t freely given?’ he demanded, refusing to let her joke them out of something that really wasn’t funny. ‘I have never chased the maids or tried to sneak kisses from a poor governess who can’t fight back and I never will,’ he snapped and marched over to glare at the glowing fire as if he couldn’t endure being so close any longer.

‘I’m sure you’re all that’s noble, but you’re the one who has always insisted I’m in danger of causing gossip and scandal by staying here.’

‘You’re not a servant,’ he snapped.

‘Try telling that to your guests, or indeed to the other servants.’

‘We both know you’ve been masquerading as a companion, or a housekeeper, or whatever act you and Virginia settled on to fool the world with. If you were truly born to be even an upper servant, I wouldn’t have come near you other than as your employer, but you make it open season for me to hunt down the truth and force you to face it. No, wait and hear me out, woman, I must know who you truly are, before someone else finds you out and we must marry to right your good name.’

‘I’d never ask such a sacrifice and stop sorting through my life to divert yourself from your grief. Or is that too much for a housekeeper to ask of a lord?’

Despising herself for the wobble in her voice, Chloe felt a terrible weariness weigh her down. Resolving to resist him until she rode down the drive for the last time on the carrier’s cart with all her luggage was sapping her strength, as even the disturbed nights and dark days they’d suffered here of late had not been able to do. It felt as if a cloud of feathers were falling on her as his concerned voice came and went over the beat of her suddenly thundering heart.

‘I’m not sure, but sit down before you fall over,’ he barked as he dashed over to scoop her up before she could do exactly that.

After last night she knew how seductive it felt to let someone care for her, to feel his gentle touch on her forehead and lean into his powerful masculine body while she regained her own strength after the weary days while Virginia lay dying. She was tempted to let go and simply allow him to hold the world at bay for her for once.

‘I’m quite all right,’ she murmured, willing away the faint that would make her weak with the very last man in the world she should be weak with.

‘Of course, you’re so well you snatch sleep in half-hour parcels and nearly faint from grief and whatever else you’re worrying about rather than confide in me. I can see how robust you are, Mrs Wheaton. Rude health is written all over your ashen face and painted under your shadowed eyes.’

‘Why not make me feel worse and tell me how haggish I look?’ she asked, as if her appearance mattered when her whole world was falling apart once more.

Somehow it did though, when he was the one looking at her. Chloe enjoyed the luxury of meeting his gaze, once he was satisfied she could sit up without his help and he crouched down in front of her so she didn’t have to crane her neck. It felt as intimate as when he held her in his arms and did his best to scout her demons last night.

‘Can’t you see that I need to help you?’ he ground out as if it hurt to admit it. ‘Whatever we can or can’t be to one another, I can’t let you wander off into the wide world alone, as if it doesn’t matter a jot to me what happens after you leave here.’

‘I won’t be alone,’ she protested, his gruff sincerity tugging at her resolution.

‘Virginia told me she has set aside a sum to cover your daughter’s education and a small income to fall back on if she ever needs it. She wouldn’t leave you to worry yourself to flinders by keeping that secret, so will you be returning to your family now you don’t need to support your daughter?’

‘There’s nobody to go back to,’ she admitted.

‘Then you have no family?’

‘None who cares what becomes of me or Verity,’ she said wearily.

‘Someone is damnably curious about your daughter then. Birtkin thought the coach was followed back from Bath,’ he said.

Chloe frowned at the idea, then dismissed it as foolish. Her father was dead and her brothers wouldn’t bother to track her down, let alone Verity.

‘My family would take no interest in us, even if they knew where we were,’ she said.

‘Tell me who they are and I’ll make them take one,’ he said with such arrogant determination she only just managed to stop herself reaching up to kiss him.

‘They are as dead to me as I am to them,’ she said, finding she couldn’t sit and let him confuse her secrets out of her any longer. Her turn to march up and down the room now, her faintness forgotten. ‘And I will never go where my daughter is not welcome,’ she told him when her circuit brought them close again.

‘Then she is a love child?’ he asked with surprising gentleness, and no judgement in his voice, as he stopped her by standing in front of her and making it impossible to go on without brushing against his muscular strength in the shadows.

Chloe ached to avoid his question by taking that step, but Verity and all the reasons why not forbade it. She hugged herself defensively instead, not sure if she was keeping hurt out or the pain of denying them in. ‘I don’t know,’ she said unwarily, so agitated by the hurt of forever denying them each other that the truth slipped out unguarded. ‘No, that’s wrong, of course I know. I know only too well,’ she said too loudly.

‘She’s not yours, is she?’ he said with all the implications of that fact dawning in his now furious gaze. ‘Is she?’ he demanded harshly, as if lying to him was a bigger sin than bearing Verity out of wedlock, as he’d always half-suspected she had done, would have been.

‘Yes,’ she insisted and it was true. ‘Verity is my daughter.’

‘And I’m the Archbishop of Canterbury,’ he scoffed.

She shrugged and turned to stare sightlessly out of the window, looking from almost darkness into even more of it, as she tried to ignore the furious male presence at her back. Instead of all-too-real Lucius Winterley, she saw a dark mirror image of him in the shining panes in front of her.

Even the small amount of light in the room made a sharp contrast to the darkness outside and their reflection showed her a plain and pale female of very little account and the mighty man she could have had in her life, if she didn’t have a child to put before everyone else. He was brooding and intense and utterly unforgettable; the shadow image of the man she didn’t want to love. Nobody would ever need to search their memory to remind themselves if Lord Farenze was at a certain event; he was someone you couldn’t ignore even when you wanted to.

‘I don’t care who you are, Verity’s my daughter,’ she lied.

‘As Eve is Bran’s daughter in every way but fact, I know Verity is yours,’ he said with that new gentleness in his voice. ‘You took on even more than Bran when you accepted Verity as your own, for whatever reason you felt you must.’

‘There was no choice. She is my child.’

‘Don’t take me for a flat any longer. I’ve been one for the ten years I stayed away from you for her benefit as well as your own. Now I see why there was such fury in your eyes when you first told me to take my dishonourable intentions straight to hell all those years ago, such a steely need in you to keep you and your child safe at whatever cost. I suppose going back home would mean admitting you’d failed.’

‘No, there is no going back. Verity would have been left on the doorstep of the nearest foundling hospital on a bitter night like this one if I let them get their hands on her. If I even wanted to go back now, they would find a way to rid themselves of her the moment I took my eyes off them,’ she told him, the defiance, hurt and grief she’d felt after their reception of the fact Verity had survived her rough birth sounding harsh in her voice at that terrible truth.

‘I doubt they would have brought themselves to carry out such an inhuman scheme, whatever threats were made in the heat of the moment,’ he said as if she had taken Verity and stolen away on some childish whim.

‘Exposing unwanted babies to the elements, given even the slim chance they might be found and raised to some sort of life by the parish, is an everyday sin in a world that despises tiny children for the mistakes of their parents,’ she said bitterly. ‘So, yes, they refuted her as coldly as an unwanted kitten and would have dealt with her as lightly if I had let them,’ she said, refusing to spare him when she had all the details of Verity’s terrible beginning etched on her memory, to live with for the rest of her life as best she could.

‘Why did her mother sit by and let you take her babe?’ he prompted so gently she let the information past her numb lips before her mind could leap in and argue he should not know so much about them.

‘Her mother was my twin sister and she died in childbed,’ she told him, the sorrow of it heavy in her heart, memory so vivid it could have happened yesterday.

He knew so much she hadn’t wanted anyone to know now, at least until Verity was old enough to hear the truth. She wondered if that day would ever come when all it could bring her was sadness at the fact Daphne refused to name the father of her child, even as she lay dying.

‘The other half of you,’ Luke said, as if he knew the bond of twins was tighter than that between ordinary siblings.

‘We weren’t identical,’ she said with a wobbly smile as she recalled the many differences between herself and Daphne, despite that shared birthday. ‘I can’t tell you how shocked everyone was when it was the quiet and angelic twin who threatened to disgrace the family name, not the one they always predicted would come to a bad end. From the day we were born Daphne was the sweet little angel to my devil, although she was as capable of mischief as I was. We argued and fought like cat and dog at times in private and she sometimes let me take the blame for our sins because I looked as if I deserved it. I supposed one of us might as well be punished as both.’

‘And yet you truly shared your sins about equally?’

‘More or less,’ she admitted cautiously.

‘You were the dog with the bad name being hanged for it, were you not?’ he asked as if he already knew she’d taken curses and blows for her sister more often than for herself, because somehow she needed the good opinion of others far less than her sister had done.

‘What if I was? We had each other and precious little attention from anyone but our nurse after our mother died. Daphne made it up to me by bringing food and books when they were forbidden me, or thinking up a new adventure to distract us from my latest punishment. I wasn’t a saint and we were both heedless and unruly. I expect the aunts were right to say we were a sad burden to them and our brothers are much older than us. They blamed us for our mother’s death, although Mama didn’t die until we were five, so that’s about as logical as blaming Verity for whatever sins Daphne committed. Oh, don’t look at me like that, I’m not so innocent I don’t know she had a lover, but I never caught her out in an assignation, saw a love note passed to her, or overheard a furtive greeting to give me a clue who he was.’

Hearing herself saying far too much again, Chloe forced her mind back into the present and glared at him for luring her into a past she still found it hard to revisit.

‘What of your father?’ he asked blandly, as if they were engaged in polite conversation instead of talking about the upending of her young life.

‘What of him?’ she said, wondering how different hers and Daphne’s lives might have been if their father loved them half as much as Luke did his daughter.

‘Where was he in all this?’

‘Away. He used to claim he couldn’t abide the sight of us because we were such a painful reminder of our mother, but I found out later he’d installed a mistress in his town house before she was even cold in her grave. Whatever the truth, he spent his time in London or Brighton, or at his main seat in Northamptonshire where his daughters were not permitted to join him. Until we threatened to bring such disgrace on him even he couldn’t ignore us, we rarely saw him from one year to the next.’

‘What did he do when he recalled the twin daughters he’d left to raise themselves as best they could?’

Oh, but he was good at this, Chloe decided, even as she heard herself answer as if nothing stood between her ears and her tongue. ‘He came back,’ she said with a shudder. She hugged herself 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.

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