sleepy seriousness. ‘I shall always miss Lady Virginia, but you’re my mother and I won’t let you leave me,’ she said so seriously Chloe knew she was feeling the loss of her best and oldest friend in this world even more deeply than a mother had to hope she would.
‘I can’t imagine anything nicer than being with you as long as you need me and becoming a sad charge on you when I am old and grey and a little bit disgraceful, love,’ she said with a deliberately comical grimace. ‘For now it’s time you went to sleep and I made sure all is ready when the family and guests retire as well.’
‘Goodnight then, Mama,’ Verity murmured sleepily as Chloe pulled the covers up and checked the nightlight was safe.
‘Goodnight, my darling,’ Chloe said softly and Verity fell fast asleep as soon as her head hit the pillow.
Taking the tray and her own candle, Chloe allowed herself a long look at her sleeping child before returning to her duties. This was what her life was truly about. Verity’s arrival was a timely reminder why she was housekeeper at Farenze Lodge and would be one somewhere else for as long as Verity needed her to be. She refused to consider the day her daughter left school to a world where a young lady with a mother who worked for a living might find her a liability. By then she might be able to afford the cottage by the sea she’d promised herself when even housekeepers with daughters to raise alone needed dreams to distract them from harsh reality.
* * *
‘I wished to thank you, Lord Farenze,’ the cool voice he’d been doing his best not to hear in his head all evening informed Luke when he sought a few moments’ peace and quiet in the library after dinner.
‘Did you? I doubt it,’ he replied dourly.
‘You believe me so ill mannered I wouldn’t say a simple “thank you” that you ordered my daughter to be fetched from school tonight?’ Chloe Wheaton asked and surely that wasn’t hurt in her necessarily soft tones as they murmured in the corridor where anyone might overhear them?
‘I wasn’t casting aspersions on your manners, but on your pride, madam,’ he said shortly, secretly shocked he was being so disagreeable yet not quite able to stop himself being so somehow.
‘You believe housekeepers are not entitled to that commodity, my lord?’
‘I believe you have a superfluity of it, entitled or not.’
‘How revolutionary of me,’ she said blandly and turned to go, presumably before she said something she regretted.
‘Stop, I’m sorry. That was ill-mannered of me and now I owe you another apology,’ he said and grasped her hand to stop her leaving then felt as if he’d been struck down by lightning from the mere feel of her bare wrist under his hand.
‘You owe me nothing,’ she said stiffly and glared at him before wrenching her hand away then stalking off as if she could imagine nothing more repulsive.
He entered the study he still considered the domain of his predecessor and glared moodily into the fire. Just when he had been feeling calmer and altogether more able to resist the charms of women who clearly didn’t like him, she loomed out of the semi-darkness to throw him into turmoil. It wasn’t as if it cost him anything to order Virginia’s coachman to fetch the housekeeper’s daughter. Her manners were better than his today and he only just muffled an impatient groan when someone else loomed out of the shadows to disturb his evening.
‘What is it, man?’ he demanded as he met his own coachman’s sharp gaze.
‘Just thought you ought to know, m’lord,’ the man said stoically.
‘Know what?’
‘I drove the carriage to Bath and back.’
Luke cursed as he would never dream of doing in front of a lady and felt no better. ‘What the devil for? I ordered Binns out, as you drove here from Northumberland.’
‘He don’t see well in the dark,’ Josiah admitted uncomfortably and Luke wondered if the old coachman could see much at all. Josiah wasn’t a man to betray any man’s secrets lightly, though, and Luke sensed there was more to come.
‘It’s high time I pensioned him off, he must be nigh seventy,’ he said anyway.
‘Likely a bit more if you ask me, but that ain’t what I came to tell you.’
‘What was it then? That you’re a disobedient ruffian who should be abed rather than dashing about the countryside? The head groom could have gone, man, he’s no top sawyer, but even he could keep Lady Virginia’s ancient team up to their bridles.’
‘I knew it would be black dark long before they could stumble home, so I ordered the bays harnessed instead. I couldn’t have Miss Verity careering about the country with a whipster holding the reins.’
Luke struggled to be fair. Chloe would hate him if her precious child was involved in a carriage accident because he had an urge to please her and he deserved censure for not thinking his impulsive scheme out better, not Josiah.
‘You did the right thing,’ he conceded reluctantly. ‘I should have told you to wait until morning for all the difference it will make.’
‘The little wench was that happy to know she wasn’t forgotten I’d go twice as far in the dark to see her face light up when she realised I was there to fetch her home.’
Since he was about to evict her from that home, Luke felt the goad of his own weakness bite. ‘Then what did you want to say?’ he asked brusquely.
‘That we was followed back,’ Josiah told him with a straight look that told his master there was no point saying he might have imagined it.
‘Who by and why the devil would anyone trail you home?’
‘Don’t know, m’lord, all I cared about was if he had a gun and if we was about to be held up.’
‘Why didn’t you inform the authorities in Bath?’
‘Because he wasn’t nowhere in sight when I got there. Nearly caught us up about a mile this side of Bath, then stayed on our tail all the way back.’
‘Why didn’t you challenge him then?’
‘Because he never got close enough to answer me, nor take a clean shot. I drove as fast as I dared and Miss Verity thought it was a great lark to go like the devil was on our tail.’
‘She’s well plucked?’
‘Game for any lark going if you ask me,’ Josiah agreed with a grin that told Luke to be glad Eve was five or six years older than Verity Wheaton, or they might set the countryside by the ears with misdeeds.
‘Do your best to keep an eye on her over the next few days for me then, Josh. I don’t like the idea of anyone wasting time in such a fashion and he’s more likely to have a grudge against me than a child from a Bath seminary, but it won’t hurt to make sure the girl’s kept safe. We’ve trouble enough without the girl tumbling into more.’
‘You think she’s like Miss Eve was at her age, m’lord?’
‘Very like from the sound
