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
